Bought this ancient paperback years back and finally have read it and totally enjoyed it. It is based around the lives of people who got involved in the East African campaign during the First World War. German East Africa against British East Africa: Tanzania and Kenya today.
The characters are great. They are well described down to the way they walk, their revolting attributes and attitudes, their strange sexual habits and their total ineptitudes and weaknesses. Occasionally someone does something pleasant and these little actions of kindness really shine out in this deeply darkly humorous and rather twisted book.
It's the madness of the war that really becomes the main subject of this book. INnocent people killed for no reason and the blind belief that what they are doing is correct. The war is horrific, total savagery in a beautiful yet hostile environment with what looks like a total lack of guidance. Nobody is respected and the lack of communication between people on all sides becomes apparent.
This book is a sweep of a story and really is based on how the life of a posh lazy teenager, who just wants to study and lounge about at Oxford, is pulled into the whirlwind of this war. It was interesting to read how the colleges at Oxford all turned into garrisons and guys did military manoeuvres on Port Meadow. By the end of the book his life had been turned upside down by this war. This guy is not a hero, he is a nobody, but this is his story and really highlights how everyone: men, women and children are all affected by the ripple affect of war.
This quote from near the end of the book sums it up really.
He realised that he'd been a soldier now for nearly two and a half years, since July 2016, and he had never fired a shot in anger. What kind of war was it where this kind of absurdity could occur? And yet he'd been sick, half starved, insanely bored, had seen his brother hideously murdered, shared a house with a syphilitic Portuguese who spoke no English and been almost killed by a bomb fired by his own side.
Totally mad and kind of funny if you knew it wasn't probably all true. This book pulls no punches, this war is a colonial war and the locals are treated universally like dogs. Infact the lack of insight about the local people, lack of care, lack of interest in how the locals might know more about the lie of the land than they do, and the lack of a role which local people play within this book, highlights their total disregard.One of their local slaves is called 'Human' WTF? The British total disdain for South African and Indian troups is highlighted well too with the botched landing at Tanga in German East Africa. Where through polite protocol the English telegraph the Germans to let them know where they will be landing. WTF? Thousands die because of this lunacy.
To top it all off the British gallivant around Portuguese East Africa trying to kill the last few remaining Germans and they are not told until a few days later on about November 14th 1918, that the war is finally over.
Obviously having been to some of the Tanzanian places in this book I could picture everything really well. Infact the sense of place is really well described by Boyd. He's a great writer.
The horrors of what happened on the beaches at Tanga are barely known to us. Kind of forgotten maybe because the majority of the dead were Indians and South African and we botched up! but I'm happy that I can now put a picture and a history to the war graves which I visited whilst in Tanga.
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