objected to what was happening to their land, they were shot. The Lunatic Line cost British taxpayers £5.5 million. (The total government expenditure for 1899 was £133 million.) The eastern segment of the track ran within fifty miles of German East Africa—territory to the south of Kenya that was to become Tanganyika and then Tanzania—a proximity that would have a profound influence on that little-known epic of guerrilla action, the Great War in East Africa.
Meanwhile, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, white men had been leading caravans through Kamba and Maasai country, establishing depots on the main trading routes. In 1893, the Reverend Stuart Watt, his wife, and their five children walked fifty miles through the Taru Desert to set up home at Fort Smith, the first brick fort on the continent. One of the children was a three-month-old baby. Like Geoffrey Buxton, the Watts marveled at the limitless pasturelands and the superb hunting. Life was not as hard as it was for the settlers beating the Canadian wilderness into submission, as there was no native labor in Canada. But it was hard enough, and there were problems with manpower, too. At Limuru, not far from Nairobi, a pair of pioneering brothers setting up a sawmill faced the challenge of shifting hundreds of tons of earth without mechanical assistance. They imported a consignment of wheelbarrows, but when they inspected the works they found laborers filling the barrows and carrying them to the dumping grounds on their heads. This was interpreted as behavior of unfathomable stupidity. But it illustrated the gulf between two ways of thinking.
BACK AT ETON, at the end of the first week of June 1902, Ronnie Knox, a brilliant boy who went on to become a famously elitist Catholic priest, was soaping himself in the bath when he heard a commotion below. Rushing down clasping a towel around his milky waist, he cried, “Is it peace?” It was. Someone hung a Boer flag from a window at Mr. Broadbent’s house and seven panes of glass were smashed in the mêlée. But beyond the schoolroom the stories that had been emerging from Africa since the glories of Mafeking dampened the mood of the country. Twenty thousand women and children were among Boer casualties, many of them victims of the disease endemic in Kitchener’s camps. Tens of thousands of British men had perished from cholera and enteric fever. The British had burned farms, starved families into submission, and destroyed the livelihood of entire communities as they followed orders to “sweep the veldt clean.” Nobody even knew how many Africans had died. No war is heroic on the ground, but this one was less heroic than most. The teenage Denys, caught up in school celebrations, could not have foreseen that in the next war—one in which so many of his capering Eton peers would be killed—he would be commanded by one of the Boers now languishing in defeat.
A year later, the school itself was literally consumed by fresh tragedy. In the early hours of June 1, 1903, a fire broke out at Mr. Kindersley’s house, a two-hundred-year-old structure of wood, lath, and plaster adjacent to the chapel. Most of the forty boys escaped through the windows of their rooms by climbing down the friendly wisteria. (Among them was Hugh Dalton, the future chancellor of the exchequer, who singed his hair.) But two boys had bars at their windows, and, as the others huddled in the courtyard below, they watched a pair of small white faces caged behind the glass. Kindersley climbed a ladder and struggled with a crowbar, but both boys burned to death. The head panted to the scene in a gray dressing gown and shortly after, standing in his private quarters, dictated a telegram to the boys’ parents as tears slid down his cheeks: “Very grave news. Come at Once.” One of the fathers traveled down from the north of Scotland, and when he changed trains in London he read the news in an evening paper.
BY THE TIME DENYS was sixteen,
Meanwhile, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, white men had been leading caravans through Kamba and Maasai country, establishing depots on the main trading routes. In 1893, the Reverend Stuart Watt, his wife, and their five children walked fifty miles through the Taru Desert to set up home at Fort Smith, the first brick fort on the continent. One of the children was a three-month-old baby. Like Geoffrey Buxton, the Watts marveled at the limitless pasturelands and the superb hunting. Life was not as hard as it was for the settlers beating the Canadian wilderness into submission, as there was no native labor in Canada. But it was hard enough, and there were problems with manpower, too. At Limuru, not far from Nairobi, a pair of pioneering brothers setting up a sawmill faced the challenge of shifting hundreds of tons of earth without mechanical assistance. They imported a consignment of wheelbarrows, but when they inspected the works they found laborers filling the barrows and carrying them to the dumping grounds on their heads. This was interpreted as behavior of unfathomable stupidity. But it illustrated the gulf between two ways of thinking.
BACK AT ETON, at the end of the first week of June 1902, Ronnie Knox, a brilliant boy who went on to become a famously elitist Catholic priest, was soaping himself in the bath when he heard a commotion below. Rushing down clasping a towel around his milky waist, he cried, “Is it peace?” It was. Someone hung a Boer flag from a window at Mr. Broadbent’s house and seven panes of glass were smashed in the mêlée. But beyond the schoolroom the stories that had been emerging from Africa since the glories of Mafeking dampened the mood of the country. Twenty thousand women and children were among Boer casualties, many of them victims of the disease endemic in Kitchener’s camps. Tens of thousands of British men had perished from cholera and enteric fever. The British had burned farms, starved families into submission, and destroyed the livelihood of entire communities as they followed orders to “sweep the veldt clean.” Nobody even knew how many Africans had died. No war is heroic on the ground, but this one was less heroic than most. The teenage Denys, caught up in school celebrations, could not have foreseen that in the next war—one in which so many of his capering Eton peers would be killed—he would be commanded by one of the Boers now languishing in defeat.
A year later, the school itself was literally consumed by fresh tragedy. In the early hours of June 1, 1903, a fire broke out at Mr. Kindersley’s house, a two-hundred-year-old structure of wood, lath, and plaster adjacent to the chapel. Most of the forty boys escaped through the windows of their rooms by climbing down the friendly wisteria. (Among them was Hugh Dalton, the future chancellor of the exchequer, who singed his hair.) But two boys had bars at their windows, and, as the others huddled in the courtyard below, they watched a pair of small white faces caged behind the glass. Kindersley climbed a ladder and struggled with a crowbar, but both boys burned to death. The head panted to the scene in a gray dressing gown and shortly after, standing in his private quarters, dictated a telegram to the boys’ parents as tears slid down his cheeks: “Very grave news. Come at Once.” One of the fathers traveled down from the north of Scotland, and when he changed trains in London he read the news in an evening paper.
BY THE TIME DENYS was sixteen,
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