Cupid in Africa

by Percival Christopher Wren

On the mosaic of box-sides that formed the undulating, uneven, and fissured table-top, the Mess servant places tin plates containing a thin and nasty soup, tasting, Bertram thought, of cooking-pot, dish-cloth, wood-smoke, tin plate and the thumb of the gentleman who had borne it from the cook-house, or rather the cook-hole-in-the-ground, to the Mess hut. The flourish with which Ali placed it before his “beloved ole marstah” as he ejaculated “Soop, sah, thick an’ clear thank-you please” went some way to make it interesting, but failed to make it palatable.

Although sick and faint for want of food, Bertram was not hungry or in a condition to appreciate disgraceful cooking disgustingly served.

As he sat awaiting the next course, after rejecting the thick-an’-clear “soup,” Bertram took stock of the gentlemen whom, in his heart, he proudly, if shyly, called his brother-officers.

At the head of the table sat the Colonel, looking gloomy and distrait. Bertram wondered if he were thinking of the friends and comrades-in-arms he had left in the vile jungle round Tanga—his second-in-command and half a dozen more of his officers—and a third of his men. Was he thinking of his School—and Sandhurst—and life-long friend and trusted colleague, Major Brett-Boyce, slain by the German askaris as he lay wounded, propped against a tree by the brave and faithful dresser of the subordinate medical service, who was murdered with him in the very midst of his noble work, by those savage and brutal disciples of a more savage and brutal kultur?

Behind him stood his servant, a tall Mussulman in fairly clean white garments, and a big white turban round which was fastened a broad ribbon of the regimental colours adorned with the regimental crest in silver.

“Tell the cook that he and I will have a quiet chat in the morning, if he’ll be good enough to come to my tent after breakfast—and then the provost-marshal shall show him a new game, perhaps,” said the Colonel to this man as he finished his soup.

With the ghost of a smile the servant bowed, removed the Colonel’s plate and departed to gloat over the cook, who, as a Goanese, despised “natives” heartily and without concealment, albeit himself as black as a negro.

Returning, the Colonel’s servant bore a huge metal dish on which reposed a mound of most repulsive-looking meat in lumps, rags, shreds, strings, tendrils and fibres, surrounded by a brownish clear water. This was a seven-pound tin of bully-beef heated and turned out in all its native ugliness, naked and unadorned, on to the dish. Like everyone else, Bertram took a portion on his plate, and, like everyone else, left it on his plate, and, like everyone else, left it after tasting a morsel—or attempting to taste, for bully-beef under such conditions has no taste whatever. To chew it is merely as though one dipped a ball of rag and string into dirty water, warmed it, put it in one’s mouth, and attempted to masticate it. To swallow it is moreover to attain the same results—nutrient, metabolic and sensational—as would follow upon the swallowing of the said ball of rags and string.

The morsel of bully-beef that Bertram put in his mouth abode with him. Though of the West it was like the unchanging East, for it changed not. He chewed and chewed, rested from his labours, and chewed again, in an honest and earnest endeavour to take nourishment and work out his own insalivation, but was at last forced to acknowledge himself defeated by the stout and tough resistance of the indomitable lump. It did not know when it was beaten and it did not know when it was eaten; nor, had he been able to swallow it, would the “juices” of his interior have succeeded where those of his mouth, aided by his excellent teeth, had failed. In course of time it became a problem—another of those small but numerous and worrying problems that were fast bringing wrinkles to his forehead, hollows to his cheeks, a look of care and anxiety to his eyes, and nightmares to his sleep. He could not reduce it, he could not swallow it, he could not publicly reject it. What could he do? . . . A bright idea. . . . Tactics. . . . He dropped his handkerchief—and when he arose from stooping to retrieve it, he was a free man again. A few minutes later a lump of bully-beef undiminished, unaffected and unfrayed, travelled across the mud floor of the hut in the mandibles of an army of big black ants, to provide them also with a disappointment and a problem, and, perchance, with a bombproof shelter for their young in a subterranean dug-out of the ant-hill. . . .

Bertram again looked around at his fellow-officers. Not one of them appeared to have reduced the evil-looking mass of fibrous tissue and gristle that lay upon his plate—nor, indeed, did Bertram, throughout the campaign, ever see anyone actually eat and swallow the disgusting and repulsive muck served out to the officers and European units of the Expeditionary Force—hungry as they often were.