2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth by Prefers to remain anonymous, Giles Foden Read Free Book Online

Africa would have taken this to an unprecedented level. There was even the spectre of a great army of askaris marching up through Egypt.
    As the Llanstephen Castle left Tilbury a message arrived at the Admiralty from Winston Churchill’s old enemy Bonar Law, now at the Colonial Office: When would operations on Lake Tanganyika start? Can they be speeded up? Von Lettow had been moving troops up and down the lake in steamers, attacking British and Belgian positions at will from his base in Kigoma, the lake’s main port. One minute he seemed to be in Burundi, the next in Rhodesia. How was he moving about so quickly?
    No one seemed able to answer this question, though the reason would emerge soon enough. The Belgians were more concerned about potential friction between their officers on the lake and Spicer than with giving the British the full picture. Through Bonar Law, they insisted the following phrase be inserted in Spicer’s orders: ‘You will work in harmony with the Belgian Military Authorities, giving them such aid as may be in your power.’ However, by that time Spicer was well away, entertaining Dr Hanschell in the bar.
    As the liner approached the sea, the tug prepared to cast off. Watching through a porthole as he sipped his drink, Dr Hanschell noticed a motor-launch come alongside. A petty officer climbed up the ship’s ladder and one of the crew began hauling up bundles of half-tied cardboard boxes in a net. The doctor realised they were his medical supplies and went outside to sign for them. The petty officer handed him an invoice, then climbed back down and sped off in his launch.
    A relieved Dr Hanschell returned to the bar with this news. Only later, when he opened the packages with Eastwood to check them against the invoice, did he realise that most of the medicines and other equipment he had ordered were missing. He retired to bed feeling rather bitter. There weren’t even any splints…
    At 17 miles an hour, with Mimi and Toutou safely tied to its deck, the Llanstephen Castle steamed south. Spicer’s men were allowed a brief respite from their duties as they mingled with other passengers and settled into the pattern of life at sea on a liner. This was beautifully described by Winston Churchill, who had made the same trip to Cape Town just over a decade before, on another ship of the Castle line:
Monotony is the characteristic of a modern voyage, and who shall describe it? The lover of realism might suggest that writing the same paragraph over and over again would enable the reader to experience its weariness, if he were truly desirous of so doing. But I hesitate to take such a course, and trust that some of these lines even once repeated may convey some inkling of the dullness of the days. Monotony of view—for we live at the centre of a complete circle of sea and sky; monotony of food—for all things taste the same on board ship; monotony of existence—for each day is but a barren repetition of the last; all fall to the lot of the passenger on great waters.
    However, Churchill also admits that ‘even monotony is not without its secret joy’:
For a time we drop out of the larger world, with its interests and its obligations, and become the independent citizens of a tiny state—a Utopian State where few toil and none go hungry—bounded on all sides by the sea and vassal only to the wind and waves. Here during a period which is too long while it lasts, too short when it is over, we may placidly reflect on the busy world that lies behind and the tumult that is before us.↓
    ≡ Winston Churchill, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (Longman, 1900).
    If the Utopia of the Llanstephen Castle had a king, it was Spicer. Every evening in the bar, he would hold forth on his skill in hunting big game. Dr Hanschell, who had cheered up on discovering a beautiful brass microscope among his supplies, remembered one night in particular. It is a scene worth picturing…
    Before his usual audience of cooing widows