William Boyd
An Ice-Cream War
PROLOGUE
A letter from Francis Harold Burgess, East African Railway Volunteer Force, to his sister, Mrs Arthur Lamont Nairobi, B. E. A. 10 October 1914:
Dear Cecily,
…We are all safe here in the present awful turmoil. Of course when war was declared we might have been caught napping if the ‘squareheads’ in German East Africa had weighed in at once.
I may as well give you the ‘orrid secret as by the time this reaches you the news will be stale, but we are going to take over German East Africa. Eight battalions are coming from India besides artillery and will probably go in at Voi.
One cannot help smiling that while all the nations of Europe are fighting at each other’s throats we are quietly snaffling the colonies belonging to the common foe. One gets horribly bloodthirsty at these times and wishes that the whole German nation could be wiped out, but a few individuals saved, something after the Sodom and Gomorrah type. I do wish the British fleet could get in amongst the German fleet and put them all to ‘Davie Jones’.
As long as I remember there is another Burgess in the country (confound him). He is a Lieut in one of the Indian Reg, 29th Punjabis I think. It is a nuisance as I am pestered with his letters as although they are addressed to Lieut Burgess they come to me. Military titles here at present are as common as leaves in autumn. Even the ‘donkey doctor’ Stordy is a Lt Colonel and struts about in a staff uniform but is an awful sort all the same. Lt Col. Stordy says the war here will only last two months. It is far too hot for sustained fighting, he says, we will all melt like ice-cream in the sun!
Ever your affect, brother,
F. H.
Burgess
PS. I forgot to let you know that I am quite well thank you. Also that you will find a very useful map of B. E. A. in the Annual Report of the Uganda Railway, a copy of which I left in the library.
PART ONE: Before the WarBefore the War
German East Africa, showing route taken by German forces.
1: 6 June 1914, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa
“What do you think would happen,” Colonel Theodore Roosevelt asked his son Kermit, “if I shot an elephant in the balls?”
“Father,” Kermit said, keeping a straight face, “I think it would hurt a great deal. ”
The colonel roared with laughter.
Temple Smith smiled at this exchange as he supervised the unloading of the horses and equipment. The colonel and his son were sitting on the bench above the cowcatcher at the very front of the train. Temple couldn’t see them, yet he heard their conversation as clearly as if they were standing alongside. It must be, he reflected, some trick of the atmosphere, the stillness and dryness of the air.
The train had stopped in the middle of an enormous African plain. A tall sky, a few dawdling clouds. High blond grass, badged with occasional thorn trees and outcrops of rock, stretched away to a horizon of purple-blue hills. Mr Loring, the naturalist, thought he had seen a male oryx of a species which the hunting party had not yet bagged, and so a halt had been ordered.
