2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (26 page)

But as Listowel observes: ‘As the applause died away into the African night, it probably did not occur to either the English officers or to the German general that they belonged to a passing age. To an age in which men were proud to have waged a gentleman’s war.’

This is, perhaps, where Spicer erred. His conduct was not that of a true gentleman, which is probably why he has been forgotten.↓

≡ Not entirely. A Spicer-Simson tin-soldier model, complete with skirt, has been available for some years to devotees of colonial war games. This would have amused Dr Hanschell no end. Hanschell himself became director of the Venereal Diseases Clinic of the Seamen’s Hospital in London’s Royal Albert Dock after the War, retiring in 1950. In 1931 he published an article in the
Lancet
on the efficacious use of acriflavine for treatment of 2,500 men with gonorrhoea, giving each of them a daily dose for five months. He died in 1968, the year Shankland’s book was published.

Yet so has the theatre in which he fought for pre-eminence. Even today, the East African campaign is regarded as a relatively unimportant part of the First World War. Extensive histories of the conflict did not emerge until many years after it ended, in such books as Byron Farwell’s
The Great War in Africa
and Ross Anderson’s
The Forgotten Front
. The most significant intervention has been Hew Strachan’s
The First World War. A Call to Arms
(2001), the first book to put the East African campaign in its full context. He describes Spicer as ‘one of the Royal Navy’s less distinguished officers’. But the story of the Naval Africa Expedition has had a life outside the history books. In
The Forgotten Front
, Anderson notes in passing how ‘Humphrey Bogart’s famous film,
The African Queen
, inspired by an episode of the campaign, often provides its only lasting image’.

That episode was, in fact, this very story.

‘There is an elation in victory, even when wounded men have to be borne very carefully along the jetty to the hospital tent; even when a telegraphic report has to be composed and sent to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty; even when a lieutenant-commander of no linguistic ability has to put together another report in French for the Belgian governor. He could at least congratulate himself on having won a naval victory as decisive as the Falklands or Tsu-Shima, and he could look forward to receiving the DSO and the Belgian Order of the Crown and a step in promotion which would help to make him an Admiral some day.’

He never made it to Admiral, but in some ways Spicer-Simson accrued the glory he craved. He lived to see part of his story immortalised in a fine novel,
The African Queen
(1935) by C. S. Forester (of Horatio Hornblower fame), from which the passage above is taken. We do not know if Spicer ever read it, but if he did, he no doubt bridled at not playing the lead role. What Forester did with the facts—and what the film director John Huston did with Forester’s novel 20-odd years later—offers us a fascinating case-study of what happens when history, fiction and film collide.

Forester’s novel tells the story of two mismatched companions: hard-drinking riverboat captain Charlie Allnutt and holier-than-thou Rose Sayer. She lives in a German colony in Africa with her missionary brother, Samuel. When German soldiers pillage the area at the start of the First World War, the missionary’s flock is driven away. Samuel dies. Rose is abandoned and her desire for vengeance on the Germans seems like mere fantasy: ‘Here she was alone in the Central African forest, alone with a dead man. There was no possible chance of her achieving anything.’

At this moment, fortuitously, Charlie Allnutt appears, making his usual supply run for a Belgian mine in a steam launch called the
African Queen
. The pair escape downriver in the dilapidated boat. If Charlie, a Cockney rough diamond, is at the helm at the start of the journey, Rose is very much in charge by the end, having shed her prim ways and somehow become a feisty fighter, hungering for satisfaction of every type: ‘a new surge of feeling overcame the weakness. She thought of the
Konigin Luise
flaunting her Iron Cross flag on the Lake where never a white ensign could come to challenge her, and of the Empire needing help, and of her brother’s death to avenge. And, womanlike, she remembered the rudenesses and insults to which Samuel had patiently submitted from the officialdom of the colony; they had to be avenged, too.’

In the course of a desperate journey of several hundred miles, in which Charlie is beset by drunkenness and hangovers, Rose develops a plan to attack a German warship on a lake at the end of the river, using homemade torpedoes and detonators attached to the front of the boat. After many quarrels and tribulations—they shoot some rapids, endure leeches and malaria, and keep having to improvise machinery when it breaks down—the couple reach the lake, having fallen in love along the way.

A German ship, the
Konigin Luise
, appears (Charlie calls it the
Louisa
). He and Rose prepare to attack that night. But then the
African Queen
is wrecked in a storm and they are captured by the Germans. Suddenly two British motor boats appear, HMS
Amelia
and HMS
Matilda
. Rose and Charlie are surrendered to a British Lieutenant-Commander at ‘Port Albert’: the same Albertville, now Kalemie, where the Naval Africa Expedition had its camp, and where
Mimi
and
Toutou
were stored.

This is clearly where Spicer comes in, although the British navy officer who appears in Forester’s novel does not wear a skirt. He orders an attack on the German ship. ‘The next day the
Konigin Luise
as she steamed in solemn dignity over the lake she had ruled so long saw two long grey shapes come hurtling over the water towards her, half-screened in a smother of spray.’ The boats shoot off their guns and the three-pound shells tear into the bowels of the
Konigin Luise
.

The name of the German ship in
The African Queen
comes from a once notorious incident at the start of the War. A former Hamburg–Holland holiday ferry called the
Konigin Luise
was converted to an auxiliary minelayer in expectation of conflict. An hour before midnight on the day war was declared (4 August 1914), painted in false colours resembling those of steamers of the Great Eastern Company, the
Konigin Luise
crept into the Thames Estuary and deposited her deadly cargo. She was later sunk—then one of the mines she had laid sank the Royal Navy vessel that had downed her.↓

≡ The tale bears relating. At dawn the captain of a British fishing vessel reported that he had seen an unknown ship ‘throwing things over the side’ in the Heligoland Bight (part of the North Sea). Sighting the rogue steamer through a squall of rain at about 10.30
AM
, Captain Cecil Fox of HMS
Amphion
gave chase. Hit numerous times, at 12.22
PM
the
Konigin Luise
rolled over on her side and sank. But the ship which had inflicted Germany’s first naval loss would also become Britain’s: at 6.45
AM
the next morning, HMS
Amphion
struck one of the
Konigin Luise
’s mines and sank.

The actual
Konigin Luise
happened to look rather like the
Götzen
, but the story into which Forester introduces her departs radically from the reality of Spicer’s expedition. Until the ending, Forester has disguised his source and (quite legitimately) altered the historical record. There has also been a certain amount of geographical jiggery-pokery as the novelist transforms his raw material. The Congo⁄Lualaba River that Spicer and his men travelled up becomes the Ulanga River in the novel, and later the Bora River. It too is blocked by rapids—or ‘rocks an’ cataracts an’ gorges’, as Allnutt calls them—and is full of snags and sandbanks. Yet the Ulanga-Bora seems to debouch into the eastern shore of the lake, rather than the western, which is where Spicer landed. For a long time unnamed in the novel, Lake Tanganyika appears as Lake Wittelsbach later in the story.

German East Africa is restyled German Central Africa and although the semiotic territory of the novel is sometimes a little dazzling, it seems as if Charlie and Rose must have sailed into it from what is now the middle of Tanzania. It is possible Forester had the Malagarasi River in mind (at the mouth of which, near Kigoma, the
Götzen
was scuttled), though it is more probable he just had a rough idea of the area, changed names here and there and let the tale go where it would.

For all that, many details of the original story—which Forester presumably took from newspapers—creep in, especially the scene in which ‘Spicer’ is introduced:

The post of Senior Naval Officer, Port Albert, Belgian Congo, was of very new creation. It was only the night before that it had come into being. It was a chance of war that the senior naval officer in a Belgian port should be an English lieutenant-commander. He was standing pacing along the jetty inspecting the preparation for sea of the squadron under his command. Seeing that it comprised only two small motor boats, it seemed a dignified name for it. But those motor boats had cost in blood and sweat and treasure more than destroyers might have done, for they had been sent out from England, and had been brought with incredible effort overland through jungles, by rail and by river, to the harbour in which they lay.

Other fragments of history can be found in Charlie Allnutt’s estimation of the ‘strategical situation’—how the ‘sweating generals’ of Britain’s East African forces would attack German Central Africa:

One thing’s sure, anyway, miss. They won’t come up from the Congo side. Not even if the Belgians want to. There’s only one way to come that way, and that’s across the Lake. And nothing won’t cross the Lake while the
Louisa
’s there.

Even Admiral Jackson’s original order giving permission for Spicer’s expedition (‘It is both the duty and the tradition of the Royal Navy to engage the enemy wherever there is water to float a ship’) hovers in the background: ‘The lieutenant-commander paced the jetty impatiently; he was anxious to get to work now that the weary task of transport was completed. It was irksome that there should remain a scrap of water on which the White Ensign did not reign supreme.’

But this is also a topsy-turvy world in which Spicer is no longer the oldest lieutenant-commander in the Navy:

‘Tomorrow he had to lead a fleet into action, achieving at this early age the ambition of every naval officer, and he had much to think about.’

While the motor boat operation, as Forester presents it, replays the attack on the
Hedwig
in many of its details, some elements of the
Konigin Luise
are reminiscent of the
Götzen
, which Spicer never attacked. The captain of the
Konigin Luise
scuttles the ship, just as the captain of the
Götzen
did: ‘the
Konigin Luise
very suddenly fell over to one side. The commander had done his duty; he had groped his way through the wrecked engines to the sea cocks and had opened them.’

But if Forester has conflated several accounts, the sinking of the
Hedwig
provides the climax of the novel. The story of Spicer and the
Hedwig
’s German flag is retold without mention of the flag locker. ‘The
Matilda
and the
Amelia
came rushing up just as the German ensign, the last thing to disappear, dipped below the surface.’

The African Queen
can be read as a critique of the ethos of ‘striking a blow for Britain’ and the futility of much First World War heroism. Strictly speaking, Charlie and Rose fail in their mission, and if it’s a happy ending it’s a highly nuanced one. ‘So they left the Lakes and began the long journey to Matadi and marriage. Whether or not they lived happily ever after is not easily decided.’

It would certainly have been a long journey. Matadi is far over on the western side of Congo. Nevertheless, it is rich in associations with this story and those that touch on it. Evelyn Waugh wanted to fly to Matadi when he was stuck in Kabalo in 1930; Spicer passed through Matadi during his disappearing act, on his way to Kinshasa in 1916; Matadi also figures in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, when Marlow finds dying Congolese, exhausted from working on the new railway to Kinshasa—something Conrad had personally witnessed in 1890.

It’s another long journey from Joseph Conrad to Katharine Hepburn, unless you go via John Huston, who displayed some Kurtz-like (and indeed Spicer-like) characteristics during the filming of Forester’s novel in Africa in 1951. Like Spicer, Huston was obsessed with hunting, often disappearing for days with his rifle. The difficulties of the production are now legendary, as detailed in Katharine Hepburn’s
The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind
(1987). However, a harsher portrait of Huston had already appeared in Peter Viertel’s novel
White Hunter, Black Heart
(1953), which was made into a film by Clint Eastwood in 1990.

Forty years before Eastwood was to play Huston, interest in
The African Queen
as a movie project was by no means assured. ‘A story of two old people going up and down an African river—who’s going to be interested in that? You’ll be bankrupt.’ So said Alexander Korda, the British film mogul, to Sam Spiegel, the American producer who in 1950 bought the rights to Forester’s novel for Huston—who was then just finishing an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novella
The Red Badge of Courage
.

The African Queen
already had a chequered history as a film property. As Huston says in his autobiography
An Open Book
(1980), ‘Columbia had bought the rights years before from C. S. Forester, planning to make a film starring Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton. For some reason they didn’t make it. Then Warners bought the property from Columbia for Bette Davis. They, too, never followed through. Warners were willing to sell the rights to Horizon for $50,000. Sam [Spiegel] and I together had nothing like this amount.’