Cupid in Africa

by Percival Christopher Wren

To his foolish civilian mind it seemed that if the money which this foul filth cost (for even bully-beef costs money—ask the contractors) had been spent on a half or a quarter or a tithe of the quantity of edible meat—such as tinned ox-tongue—sick and weary soldiers labouring and suffering for their country in a terrible climate, might have had a sufficiency of food which they could have eaten with pleasure and digested with benefit, without costing their grateful country a penny more. . . . Which is an absurd and ridiculous notion expressed in a long and involved sentence. . . .

Next, to the Colonel, eyeing his plate of bully-beef through his monocle and with patent disgust, sat Major Manton, a tall, aristocratic person who looked extraordinarily smart and dapper. Hair, moustache, finger-nails and hands showed signs of obvious care, and he wore tunic, tie and, in fact, complete uniform, in an assembly wherein open shirts, bare arms, white tennis shoes, slacks, shorts, and even flannel trousers were not unknown. Evidently the Major put correctness before comfort—or, perhaps, found his chief comfort in being correct. He spoke to no one, but replied suavely when addressed. He looked to Bertram like a man who loathed a rough and rude environment having the honour or pleasure or satisfaction of knowing that he noticed its existence, much less that he troubled to loathe it. Bertram imagined that in the rough and tumble of hand-to-hand fighting, the Major’s weapon would be the revolver, his aim quick and clean, his demeanour unhurried and unflurried, the expression of his face cold and unemotional.

Beside him sat a Captain Tollward in strong contrast, a great burly man with the physiognomy and bull-neck of a prize-fighter, the hands and arms of a navvy, and the figure of a brewer’s dray-man. Frankly, he looked rather a brute, and Bertram pictured him in a fight—using a fixed bayonet or clubbed rifle with tremendous vigour and effect. He would be purple of face and wild of eye, would grunt like a bull with every blow, roar to his men like a charging lion, and swear like a bargee between whiles. . . . “Thank God for all England’s Captain Tollwards this day,” thought Bertram as he watched the powerful-looking man, and thought of the gladiators of ancient Rome.

Stanner was keeping him in roars of Homeric laughter with his jests and stories, no word of any one of which brought the shadow of a smile to the expressionless strong face of Major Manton, who could hear every one of the jokes that convulsed Tollward and threatened him with apoplexy. Next to Stanner sat Hall, who gave Bertram, his left-hand neighbour, such information and advice as he could, anent his taking of the convoy to Butindi, should such be his fate.

“You’ll see some fighting up there, if you ever get there,” said he. “They’re always having little ‘affairs of out-posts’ and patrol scraps. You may be cut up on the way, of course. . . . If the Germans lay for you they’re bound to get you, s’ far as I can see. . . . How can you defend a convoy of a thousand porters going in single file through impenetrable jungle along a narrow path that it’s practically impossible to leave? . . . You can have an advance-guard and a rear-guard, of course, and much good may they do you when your safari covers anything from a couple of miles to three or four. . . . What are you going to do if it’s attacked in the middle, a mile or so away from where you are yourself? . . . What are you going to do if they ambush your advance-guard and mop the lot up, as they perfectly easily could do, at any point on the track, if they know you’re coming—as of course they will do, as soon as we know it ourselves. . . .”

“You fill me with despondency and alarm,” said Bertram, with a lightness that he was far from feeling, and a sinking sensation that was not wholly due to emptiness of stomach.

Suddenly he was aware that a new stench was contending with the familiar one of decaying vegetation, rotting shell-fish, and the slime that was neither land nor water, but seemed a foul grease formed by the decomposition of leaves, grasses, trees, fish, molluscs and animals in an inky, oily fluid that the tides but churned up for the freer exhalation of poisonous miasma, and had not washed away since the rest of the world arose out of chaos and darkness, that man might breathe and thrive. . . . The new smell was akin to the old one but more penetrating, more subtly vile, more vulgar, than that ancient essence of decay and death and dissolution, and—awaking from a brown study in which he saw visions of himself writhing beneath the bayonets of a dozen gigantic savages, as he fell at the head of his convoy—he perceived that the new and conquering odour proceeded from the cheese. On a piece of tin, that had been the lid of a box, it lay and defied competition, while, with the unfaltering step of a strong man doing right, because it is his duty, Ali Suleiman bore it from bwana to bwana with the booming murmur: “Cheese, please God, sah, thank you.” To the observant and thoughtful Bertram its reception by each member of the Mess was interesting and instructive, as indicative of his character, breeding, and personality.

The Colonel eyed it with a cold smile.

“Yes. Please God it is only cheese,” he remarked, “but take it away—quick.”

Major Manton glanced at it and heaved a very gentle sigh. “No, thank you, Boy,” he said.