if that was the case, it most likely meant that that German was still alive …
McQuade sat there, thoughts cramming his head. Then he slowly returned the telephone to its cradle.
But surely it was unlikely that the voice was referring to the submarine. And the voice had doubtless delivered The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. So it was highly likely that the call was from somebody who was at the Schmidt ranch. Highly likely. But he wasn’t going to take the chance of reporting to the police since he certainly did not want them to know what he had been doing since then.
McQuade rubbed his chin. He considered telephoning the Stormtrooper, telling her to call off her bloody bully-boys. ‘Stay healthy.’ Christ, how juvenile. No. He got up. He felt silly doing it, but he went to the front door and made sure it was locked. He switched off the living-room light, then pulled back the curtains. All he saw was the silent, empty sand-street and the railway yards.
He went to the kitchen, got a beer, then walked through to the bathroom. He turned on the taps.
He went back to his office and got the topmost book off the pile. German Rule in Africa, by Evans Lewin. He took it back to the bathroom.
He hesitated; and then locked the bathroom door. He had never done that before in this house.
Here again coincidence came into play. If he hadn’t received that threatening telephone call he wouldn’t have read Roger Wentland’s books all night; and, had he not done so, it is doubtful whether he would have persevered in the long chance of trying to trace the man who landed on this coast forty years ago from a sunken German submarine. In the books he learnt about political battles of not so long ago, history of which he was sure most educated people of his generation had little idea; recent history with a relevance to the present to make his blood run cold.
That night was unreal. A fog came rolling in off the Atlantic, so dense that a man would have been invisible five paces away, and the town was completely silent: it would have been a perfect night for villainy. McQuade sat in a yellow-grey pool of light, the mist rolling in his open window, jerking every time he imagined a sound, growing hourly more appalled by Germany’s colonial history. He read speeches by parliamentarians in the Reichstag denouncing their own government for maintaining German rule by the terror of the whip, calling their African territories ‘The Colonies of the Twenty-five’, referring to the twenty-five vicious lashes that were meted out for the most trivial offences – for failing to salute a white man, for failing to raise a hat, for collapsing when carrying heavy loads, for not being punctual with the master’s dinner. ‘The insensibility to the feelings of others, the disregard of native rights and the elementary principles of justice, the brutal callousness … and the total inability to conceive any system of administration that is not upheld by cruelty and by designed intimidation … stamps German administrators as on a par with the most brutal of the old Arab slave hunters’. He read a report about District Judge Rotberg in Togoland, who ‘was making a journey when one of the porters, overcome by his burden, fell to the ground. The representative of German justice knelt upon him, pummelled him in the face, and then had him flogged. The poor fellow fell again. He was again thrashed – this time with fatal effects.’ He read the verbatim report of a German judge, protesting in the Reichstag in 1906 in these words:
The native, after being completely stripped, is strapped across a block of wood or barrel, so that he cannot move, and then … the strongest amongst the black soldiers has to wield a plaited rope, or a correspondingly thick stick, with both hands and with all his strength, and with such violence that each blow must whistle in the air. It has happened that if the blow does not whistle it has to be repeated, and, moreover, if it does not do so the soldier gets it himself.
And he read about forced labour as a substitute for taxes, about blacks being caught ‘like so much game’ and being driven by soldiers in chained gangs to work on the road-making and railway-building and on the colonists’ farms, about women being taken as hostages if the men ran away when the soldiers came to seize them. He read:
Removal from their primitive homes to new conditions, where the food has frequently been different from what they were accustomed to, kept at strenuous labour from early morning till late at night; herded together in insanitary surroundings; goaded by the brutalities of their taskmasters; flogged for the slightest offence: the unfortunate natives frequently have died after a few months …
On certain plantations in the Cameroons and Tanganyika the death rate was admitted to being between fifty and seventy per cent within six months. There was an eye-witness account by a South African, describing the harbour-building at Lüderitz:
I have seen women and children … at Lüderitz dying of starvation and overwork, nothing but skin and bone, getting flogged every time they fell under their heavy loads. I have seen them picking up bits of bread and refuse thrown away outside our tents and being flogged when caught.
Another witness, writing in the Cape Argus newspaper in 1905, described seeing a woman, carrying an infant on her back, and a sack of grain on her head, when ‘she fell … The corporal sjamboked her certainly for five minutes and the baby as well.’ And the result of all this was depopulation, the harvests could not be reaped, or even sown, because the men had been dragooned away for forced labour and there was famine in many places. And the overall consequence of all this brutality was rebellion and thirty years of bloody warfare, punitive expedition after punitive expedition, warfare moreover that seemed to be regarded as a kind of sport. He read a verbatim report by a German soldier writing in a Strasbourg newspaper describing a battle in Tanganyika:
… we surprised the rebels as they were attempting to cross the river. There was a long narrow bridge, which they had to cross, so that we could pop them off comfortably. There were seventy-six dead, besides those torn to pieces by crocodiles … In the middle of the river was a sandbank where they wanted to rest, but here too our shots caught them. That was a sight! I stood by the river behind a felled tree and shot 120 rounds. The prisoners were always hanged!
And in the Cameroons there was a Captain Dominck who permitted his soldiers to drown fifty-two children who were survivors of a massacre of a village. The children were put into baskets and hurled into the river for sport. But the most ruthless of all was the war of extermination against the Hereros of South West Africa, when General von Trotha issued this infamous proclamation in 1904:
I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero nation … The Herero nation must now leave the country. If the people do not do it, I will compel them with the big tube. Within the German frontier, every Herero, with or without a rifle … will be shot. I will not take any more women or children, but I will either drive them back to your people or have them fired on. These are my words to the nation of the Hereros.
There was no mercy: the wounded were killed, women and children were shot and hanged. There was a quotation from a book written by a German pastor who witnessed the dreadful campaign:
We found some old water holes and near them hundreds of new ones dug by the enemy the day before … It was now reported that there was still a last water place about five hours further on and that great numbers of the enemy were there. It was decided that we must drive them away; and we wanted to, for if we hunted them out of that place nothing remained to them but the wilderness. From a hill we saw two mighty clouds of dust moving towards the north and north-east, towards death from thirst … (Later) I saw people sitting in crowds, shoulder against shoulder, quite motionless. The heads of some drooped on their breasts and their arms hung down, as if they were asleep. Others sat leaning against a bush or neighbour, breathing fast and hard, their mouths open; they regarded us with stupid eyes …
Punitive expedition after punitive expedition, rule by the whip and the gun and the noose, to the point where a parliamentarian called Bebel cried out in the Reichstag:
‘Gentlemen, you do not come as deliverers and educators but as conquerors, as oppressors, as exploiters … to rob the natives with brute power of their properties! You make helots of them, force them into strange service, into villainage for strange purposes! That is your colonial policy!’
McQuade read through