Title: Sketches of the East Africa Campaign
Author: Dolbey, Robert Valentine, 1878-1937
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Sketches of the East Africa Campaign" ***

This book is indexed by ISYS Web Indexing system to allow the reader find any word or number within the document.

CAMPAIGN***


SKETCHES OF THE EAST AFRICA CAMPAIGN

BY CAPT. ROBERT V. DOLBEY, R.A.M.C.

AUTHOR OF "A REGIMENTAL SURGEON IN WAR AND PRISON"


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

1918



TO
L.A.D. AND C.B.



PREFACE


The bulk of these "Sketches" were written without any thought of
publication. It was my practice in "writing home" to touch upon
different features of the campaign or of my daily experiences, and only
when I returned to England to find that kind hands had carefully
preserved these hurried letters, did it occur to me that, grouped
together, they might serve to throw some light on certain aspects of the
East Africa campaign, which might not find a place in a more elaborate
history.

For the illustrations, I have been able to draw upon a number of German
photographs which fell into our hands.

I should like to take this opportunity of thanking Mr. H.T. Montague
Bell for the care and kindness with which he has grouped this collection
of inco-ordinate sketches and formed it into a more or less
comprehensive whole.

ROBERT V. DOLBEY,

ITALY,

_February_, 1918.



CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION
THIS ARMY OF OURS
THE NAVY AND ITS WORK
LETTOW AND HIS ARMY
INTELLIGENCE
GERMAN TREATMENT OF NATIVES
GOOD FOR EVIL
THE MECHANICAL TRANSPORT
THE SURGERY OF THIS WAR
MY OPERATING THEATRE AT HANDENI
SOME AFRICAN DISEASES
HORSE SICKNESS
THE WOUNDED FROM KISSAKI
MY OPERATING THEATRE IN MOROGORO
THE GERMAN IN PEACE AND WAR
LOOTING
SHERRY AND BITTERS
NATIVE PORTERS
THE PADRE AND HIS JOB
FOR ALL PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES
THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD
THE BIRDS OF THE AIR
BITING FLIES
NIGHT IN MOROGORO
THE WATERS OF TURIANI
SCOUTING
"HUNNISHNESS"
FROM MINDEN TO MOROGORO
A MORAL DISASTER
THE ANGEL OF MOROGORO
THE WILL TO DESTROY
DAR-ES-SALAAM (THE HAVEN OF PEACE)



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


RHODESIANS CROSSING A GERMAN BRIDGE OVER THE PANGANI RIVER, NEAR MOMBO,
WHICH THEY HAD SAVED FROM DESTRUCTION

BRITISH SHELLS EXPLODING A GERMAN AMMUNITION DUMP.

EXCITEMENT OF THE NATIVES

OUR FIRST WATER SUPPLY AT HANDENI

MY OPERATING THEATRE AT MOROGORO. TWO WOUNDED RHODESIANS AND MY TWO
OPERATING-ROOM BOYS

SISTER ELIZABETH. THE GERMAN SISTER

HUNS ON TREK

AN ENEMY DETACHMENT ON TREK. MACHINE-GUN PORTERS IN FRONT

NATIVES BUILDING A BANDA

A TYPICAL STRETCH OF ROAD THROUGH OPEN BUSH

THE NATIVE VILLAGE OF MOROGORO

A GERMAN DUG-OUT

OLD PORTUGUESE WATERGATE, DAR-ES-SALAAM

MAP OF GERMAN EAST AFRICA



INTRODUCTION


These sketches of General Smuts' campaign of 1916 in German East Africa,
do not presume to give an accurate account of the tactical or
strategical events of this war. The actual knowledge of the happenings
of war and of the considerations that persuade an Army Commander to any
course of military conduct must, of necessity, be a closed book to the
individual soldier. To the fighting man himself and to the man on the
lines of communication, who helps to feed and clothe and arm and doctor
him, the history of his particular war is very meagre. War, to the
soldier, is limited to the very narrow horizon of his front, the daily
work of his regiment, or, at the most, of his brigade. Rarely does news
from the rest of one brigade spread to the troops of another in the
field. Only in the hospital that serves the division are the events of
his bit of war correlated and reduced to a comprehensive whole. Even
then the resulting knowledge is usually wrong. For the imagination of
officers, and of men in particular, is wonderful, and rumour has its
birthplace in the hospital ward. One may take it as an established fact
that the ordinary regimental officer or soldier knows little or nothing
about events other than his particular bit of country. Only the Staff
know, and they will not tell. Sometimes we have thought that all the
real news lives in the cloistered brain of the General and his Chief of
Staff. Be this as it may, we always got fuller and better correlated and
co-ordinated news of the German East African Campaign from "Reuter" or
from _The Times_ weekly edition.

But if the soldier in the forward division knows nothing of the
strategical events of his war, there are many things of which he does
know, and so well too that they eclipse the greater strategical
considerations of the war. He does know the food he eats and the food
that he would like to eat; moreover, he knew, in German East Africa,
what his rations ought to be, and how to do without them. He learnt how
to fight and march and carry heavy equipment on a very empty stomach. He
learnt to eke out his meagre supplies by living on the wild game of the
country, the native flour, bananas and mangoes. He knew what it meant to
have dysentery and malaria. He had marched under a broiling sun by day
and shivered in the tropic dews at night. He knew what it was to sleep
upon the ground; to hunt for shade from the vertical sun. These and many
other things did he know, and herein lies the chief interest of this or
of any other campaign.

For, strange as it may seem, the soldier in East Africa was more
concerned about his food and clothing, the tea he thirsted for, the
blisters that tormented his weary feet, the equipment that was so heavy,
the sleep that drugged his footsteps on the march, the lion that sniffed
around his drowsy head at night, than about the actual fighting. These
are the real points of personal interest in any campaign, and if these
sketches bear upon the questions of food, the matter of transport, the
manner of the soldier's illness, the hospitals he stayed in, the tsetse
fly that bit him by day, the mosquitoes that made his nights a perfect
torment, they are the more true to life. For fights are few, and, in
this thick bush country, frequently degenerate into blind firing into a
blinder bush; but the "jigger" flea is with the soldier always.

But this campaign is far different from any of the others in which our
arms are at present engaged. First and of especial interest was this
army of ours; the most heterogeneous collection of fighting men, from
the ends of the earth, all gathered in one smoothly working homogeneous
whole. From Boers and British South Africans, from Canada and Australia,
from India, from home, from the planters of East Africa, and from all
the dusky tribes of Central Africa, was this army of ours recruited. The
country, too, was of such a character that knowledge of war in other
campaigns was of little value. Thick grass, dense thorn scrub, high
elephant grass, all had their special bearing on the quality of the
fighting. Close-quarter engagements were the rule, dirty fighting in the
jungle, ambushes, patrol encounters; and the deadly machine-gun that
enfiladed or swept every open space. We cannot be surprised that the
mounted arm was robbed of much of its utility, that artillery work was
often blind for want of observation, that the trench dug in the green
heart of a forest escaped the watchful eyes of aeroplanes, that this war
became a fight of men and rifles, and, above all, the machine-gun.

In this campaign the Hun has been the least of the malignant influences.
More from fever and dysentery, from biting flies, from ticks and
crawling beasts have we suffered than from the bullets of the enemy.
Lions and hyaenas have been our camp followers, and not a little are we
grateful to these wonderful scavengers, the best of all possible allies
in settling the great question of sanitation in camps. For all our roads
were marked by the bodies of dead horses, mules and oxen, whose stench
filled the evening air. Much labour in the distasteful jobs of burying
these poor victims of war did the scavengers of the forest save us.

The transport suffered from three great scourges: the pest of
horse-sickness and fly and the calamity of rain. For after twelve hours'
rain in that black cotton soil never a wheel could move until a hot sun
had dried the surface of the roads again. Roads, too, were mere bush
tracks in the forest, knee-deep either in dust or in greasy clinging
mud.

Never has Napoleon's maxim that "an army fights on its stomach" been
better exemplified than here. All this campaign we have marched away
from our dinners, as the Hun has marched toward his. The line of
retreat, predetermined by the enemy, placed him in the fortunate
position that the further he marched the more food he got, the softer
bed, more ammunition, and the moral comfort of his big naval guns that
he fought to a standstill and then abandoned. Heavy artillery meant
hundreds of native porters or dove-coloured humped oxen of the country
to drag them; and heavy roads defied the most powerful machinery to move
the guns.

In order to appreciate the great difficulty with which our Supply
Department has had to contend, we must remember that our lines of
communication have been among the longest in any campaign. From the
point of view of the railway and the road haul of supplies, our lines of
communication have been longer than those in the Russo-Japanese War. For
every pound of bully beef or biscuit or box of ammunition has been
landed at Kilindini, our sea base, from England or Australia, railed up
to Voi or Nairobi, a journey roughly of 300 miles. From one or other of
those distributing points the trucks have had to be dragged to Moschi on
the German railway, from there eastward along the German railway line to
Tanga as far as Korogwe, a matter of another 500 miles. From here the
last stage of 200 miles has been covered by ox or mule or horse
transport, and the all-conquering motor lorry, over these bush tracks to
Morogoro. Can we wonder, then, that the great object of this campaign
has been to raise as many supplies locally as possible, and to drive our
beef upon the hoof in the rear of our advancing army? Nor is the German
unconscious of these our difficulties. He has with the greatest care
denuded the whole country of supplies before us, and called in to his
aid his two great allies, the tsetse fly and horse sickness, to rob us
of our live cattle and transport animals on the way.

At first we thought the German in East Africa to be a better fellow than
his brother in Europe, more merciful to his wounded prisoner, more
chivalrous in his manner of fighting. But the more we learn of him the
more we come to the conclusion that he is the same old Hun as he is in
Belgium--infinitely crafty, incredibly beastly in his dealings with his
natives and with our prisoners. Only in one aspect did we find him
different, and this by reason of the fact that we were winning and
advancing, taking his plantations and his farms, finding that he had
left his women and children to our charge. Then we saw the alteration.
For I had known what eight months in German prisons in Europe mean to a
soldier prisoner of war, and now I had German prisoners in my charge.
Anxious to please, eager to conciliate, as infinitely servile to us, now
they were in captivity, as they were vile and bestial and arrogant to us
when they were in authority, were these prisoners of ours.

Nor was this the only aspect from which the campaign in German East
Africa appealed to those of us who had taken part in the advance from
the Marne to the Aisne in September, 1914. Then we saw what looting
meant, and how the German officer enriched his family home with trophies
looted from many chateaux. We knew of French houses that had been
stripped of every article of value; we saw, discarded by the roadside,
in the rapid and disorganised retreat to the Aisne, statuary and
bronzes, pictures and clocks, and all the treasures of French homes. Now
we were in a position to loot; but how differently our officers and men
behaved! The spoils of hundreds of German plantations at our mercy; and
hardly a thing, save what was urgently needed for hospitals or food,
taken. Every house in which the German owner lived was left unmolested;
only those abandoned to the mercy of the native plunderer had we
entered. It pays a great tribute to the natural goodness of our men,
that the German example of indiscriminate looting and destruction was
not followed.

To people in England, and, indeed, to many soldiers in France, it seemed
that this campaign of ours in German East Africa was a mere side-show.
It appeared to be a Heaven-sent opportunity to escape the cold wet
misery of the trenches in Flanders. To some it spelt an expedition of
the picnic variety; they saw in this an opportunity of spending halcyon
days in the game preserves, glorious opportunities for making
collections of big game heads, all sandwiched in with pleasant and
successful enterprises against an enemy that was waiting only a decent
excuse to surrender.

How different has been the reality, however! The picnic enterprise has
turned out to be one of the most arduous in our experience. Many of us
had served in France and the Dardanelles before, and we thought we knew
what the hardships of war could mean. If the truth be told, the soldier
suffered in East Africa, in many ways, greater hardships, performed
greater feats of endurance, endured more from fever and dysentery and
the many plagues of the country than in either of the other campaigns;
the soldier marched and fought and suffered and starved for the simple
reason that time was of the essence of the whole campaign. From June
until Christmas we had to crowd in the campaigning of a whole year; for
once the rains had started all fighting was perforce at an end. Once the
transport wheels had stopped in the black cotton soil mud the army had
to halt. All the time the great aim of the expedition was to get on and
farther on. We had to advance and risk the shortage of supplies, or we
would never reach the Central Railway. And there was not a soldier who
would not prefer to push on and suffer and finish the campaign than wait
in elegant leisure with full rations to contemplate an endless war in
the swamps of East Africa.

The early history of the war in this theatre had been far from
favourable to our arms. In late 1914 our Expeditionary Force failed in
their landing at Tanga, a misfortune that was not compensated for by our
subsequent reverse at Jassin near the Anglo-German border on the coast.
The gallant though unsuccessful defence of the latter town by our Indian
troops, however, caused great losses to the enemy, and robbed him of
many of his most distinguished officers. But against these we must
record the very fine defence of the Uganda Railway and the successful
affair at Longido near the great Magadi Soda Lake in the Kilimanjaro
area. But when South Africa, in 1916, was called in to redress the
balance of India in German East Africa, the new strategic railway from
Voi to the German frontier was only just commenced, and the enemy were
in occupation of our territory at Taveta. To General Smuts then fell the
task of co-ordinating the various units in British East Africa,
strengthening them with South African troops, pushing on the railway
toward Moschi, and driving the German from British soil. In so far as
his initial movements were concerned, General Smuts carried out the
plans evolved by his predecessors. After a series of difficult but
brilliant engagements, the enemy were forced back to Moschi, and to the
Kilimanjaro area, which, in places, was very strongly held. From this
point he mapped out his own campaign. Colonel von Lettow was
out-manoeuvred by our flanking movements, and forced to retire partly
along the Tanga railway eastward to the sea, and partly towards the
Central Railway in the heart of the enemy country.

Two outstanding features of this campaign may be mentioned: the faith
the whole army had in General Smuts, the loyalty, absolute and complete,
that all our heterogeneous troops gave to him; and the natural goodness
of the soldier. As for the latter, Boer or English, Canadian, East
African or Indian, all showed that they could bear the heat and dust and
dirty fighting, the disease and privation just as gallantly,
uncomplainingly, and well, as did their British comrades on the Western
front.

Finally, there is one very generous tribute that our army would pay to
the Germans in the field, and that is to the excellence of the
leadership of Lettow, and the devotion with which he has by threats and
cajolings sustained the failing courage of his men. Nor can one forget
that in this war the mainstay of our enemy has lain in the discipline
and devotion of the native troops. Here, indeed, in this campaign the
black man has kept up the spirit of the white. Nor does this leave the
future unclouded with potential trouble, for, in this war, the black man
has seen the white, on both sides, run from him. The black man is armed
and trained in the use of the rifle, and machine-gun, and his
intelligence and capacity have been attested to by the degree of fire
control that he mastered. It must be more than a coincidence that in the
two colonies--East Africa and the Cameroon--where the Germans used
native troops they put up an efficient and skilful resistance, while in
South-West Africa, where all the enemy troops were white, they showed
little inclination for a fight to a finish. In Colonel von
Lettow-Vorbeck the German army has one of the most able and resourceful
leaders that it has produced in this war.



THIS ARMY OF OURS


Since Alexander of Macedon descended upon the plains of India, there can
never have been so strange and heterogeneous an army as this, and a
doctor must speak with the tongues of men and angels to arrive at an
even approximate understanding of their varied ailments. The first
division that came with Jan Smuts from the snows of Kilimanjaro to the
torrid delta of the Rufigi contained them all.

The real history of the war begins with Smuts; for, prior to his coming,
we were merely at war; but when he came we began to fight. A brief
twenty-four hours in Nairobi, during which he avoided the public
receptions and the dinners that a more social chief would have graced;
then he was off into the bush. Wherever that rather short, but well-knit
figure appeared, with his red beard, well streaked with grey, beneath
the red Staff cap, confidence reigned in all our troops. And to the end
this trust has remained unabated. Many disappointments have come his
way, more from his own mounted troops than from any others; but we have
felt that his tactics and strategy were never wrong. Thus it was that
from this heterogeneous army, Imperial, East African, Indian and South
African, he has had a loyalty most splendid all the time. He may have
pushed us forward so that we marched far in advance of food or supplies,
thrust us into advanced positions that to our military sense seemed very
hazardous. But he meant "getting a move on," and we knew it; and all of
us wished the war to be over. Jan Smuts suffered the same fever as we
did, ate our food, and his personal courage in private and most risky
reconnaissances filled us with admiration and fear, lest disaster from
some German patrol might overtake him. To me the absence of criticism
and the loyal co-operation of all troops have been most wonderful. For
we are an incurably critical people, and here was a civilian, come to
wrest victory from a series of disasters.

First in interest, perhaps, as they were ever first in fight, are the
Rhodesians, those careless, graceful fellows that have been here a year
before the big advance began. Straight from the bush country and fever
of Northern Rhodesia, they were probably the best equipped of all white
troops to meet the vicissitudes of this warfare. They knew the dangers
of the native paths that wound their way through the thorn bush, and
gave such opportunities for ambush to the lurking patrol. None knew as
they how to avoid the inviting open space giving so good a field of fire
for the machine-gun, that took such toll of all our enterprises. With
them, too, they brought a liability to blackwater fever that laid them
low, a legacy from Lake Nyasa that marked them out as the victims of
this scourge in the first year of the big advance.

The Loyal North Lancashires, too, have borne the heat and burden of the
day from the first disastrous landing at Tanga. Always exceedingly well
disciplined, they yield to none in the amount of solid unrewarded work
done in this campaign.

Of the most romantic interest probably are the 25th Royal Fusiliers, the
Legion of Frontiersmen. Volumes might be written of the varied careers
and wild lives lived by these strange soldiers of fortune. They were led
by Colonel Driscoll, who, for all his sixty years, has found no work too
arduous and no climate too unhealthy for his brave spirit. I knew him in
the Boer War when he commanded Driscoll's Scouts, of happy, though
irregular memory; their badge in those days, the harp of Erin on the
side of their slouch hats, and known throughout the country wherever
there was fighting to be had. The 25th Fusiliers, too, were out here in
the early days, and participated in the capture of Bukoba on the Lake. A
hundred professions are represented in their ranks. Miners from
Australia and the Congo, prospectors after the precious mineral earths
of Siam and the Malay States, pearl-fishers and elephant poachers,
actors and opera singers, jugglers, professional strong men, big-game
hunters, sailors, all mingled with professions of peace, medicine, the
law and the clerk's varied trade. Here two Englishmen, soldiers of
fortune or misfortune, as the case might be, who had specialised in
recent Mexican revolutions, till the fall of Huerta brought them, too,
to unemployment; an Irishman there, for whom the President of Costa Rica
had promised a swift death against a blank wall. Cunning in the art of
gun-running, they were knowing in all the tides of the Caribbean Sea,
and in every dodge to outwit the United States patrol. Nor must I forget
one priceless fellow, a lion-tamer, who, strange to say, feared
exceedingly the wild denizens of the scrub that sniffed around his
patrol at night.

Of our Indian forces the most likeable and attractive were the
Kashmiris, whom the patriot Rajah of Kashmir has given to the India
Government. Recruited from the mountains of Nepal--for the native of
Kashmir is no soldier--they meet one everywhere with their eager smiling
faces. In hospital they are always professing to a recovery from fever
that their pallid faces and enlarged spleens belie, and they take not
kindly to any suggestion of invaliding.

These battalions of Kashmir Rifles, the Baluchis and the King's African
Rifles have done more dirty bush fighting than any troops in this
campaign. The Baluchis, in particular, have covered themselves with
glory in many a fight.

The most efficient soldiers in East Africa are the King's African
Rifles; unaffected by the fever and the dysentery of the country, and
led by picked white officers, they are in their element in the thorn
jungle in which the Germans have conducted their rearguard actions.
Known at first as the "Suicides Club," the King's African Rifles lost a
far greater proportion of officers than any other regiment. Nor is it a
little that they owe to the gallant leader of one battalion, Colonel
Graham, who lost his life early in the advance on Moschi. These
regiments are recruited from Nyasaland in the south to Nubia and
Abyssinia in the north. Yaos, known by the three vertical slits in their
cheeks; slim Nandi, with perforated lobes to their ears; ebony
Kavirondo; Sudanese of an excellent quality; Wanyamwezi from the country
between Tabora and Lake Tanganyika, the very tribe from whom the German
Askaris are recruited, and all the dusky tribes that stretch far north
to Lake Rudolph and the Nile. Nor should one forget the Arab Rifles,
raised by that wonderful fellow Wavell, whose brother was a prisoner
with me in Germany. A professing Mohammedan, he was one of very few
white men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He harried the Huns
along the unhealthy districts of the coast, until a patrol, in ambush,
laid him low near Gazi.

Last, and most important, the army of South Africans, whose coming spelt
for us the big advance and the swift move that made us master of the
whole country from Kilimanjaro to the Rufigi. A great political
experiment and a most wonderfully successful one was this Africander
army, English and Boers, under a Boer General. For the first time since
the Great War in South Africa, the Boers made common cause with us,
definitely aligned themselves with us in a joint campaign and provided
the greatest object lesson of this World War. If the campaign of German
East Africa was worth while, its value has been abundantly proved in
this welding of the races that, despite local disagreements, has
occurred. The South African troops have found the country ill adapted to
their peculiar genius in war, and the blind bush has robbed the mounted
arm of much of its efficiency. Not here the wide distances to favour
their enveloping tactics. Much have they suffered from fever, hardships
and privation, and to their credit lies the greatest of all marches in
this campaign, the 250 mile march to Kondoa Irangi in the height of the
rainy season. The South African Infantry arrived in Kondoa starved and
worn and bootless after this forced march to extricate the mounted
troops, whose impetuous ardour had thrust them far beyond the
possibility of supplies, into the heart of the enemy's country. We
cannot sufficiently praise the apparently reckless tactics that made
this wonderful march towards the Central Railway, or the uncomplaining
fortitude of troops who lived in this fever-stricken country, on
hippopotamus meat, wild game and native meal. To the Boer, as to all of
us, this campaign must have taught a wonderful lesson, for many
prejudices have been modified, and it has been learnt that "coolies" (as
only too often the ignorant style all natives of India) and "Kaffirs,"
can fight with the best.

This campaign would have been largely impossible, were it not for the
Cape Boys and other natives from the Union, who have come to run our
mule and ox transport. Their peculiar genius is the management of
horses, mules and cattle. Different from other primitive and negro
people, they are very kind to animals, infinitely knowledgeable in the
lore of mule and ox, they can be depended upon to exact the most from
animal transport with the least cruelty. Wonderful riders these; I have
seen them sit bucking horses in a way that a Texas cowboy or a Mexican
might envy.

One should not leave the subject of this army without reference to the
Cape Corps--that experiment in military recruiting which many of us were
at first inclined to condemn. But from the moment the Cape Boy enlisted
in the ranks of the Cape Corps his status was raised, and he adopted,
together with his regulation khaki uniform and helmet, a higher
responsibility towards the army than did his brother who helped to run
the transport. They have been well officered, they have been a lesson to
all of us in the essential matters of discipline and smartness, they
have done much of the dirty work entailed by guarding lines of
communication, and now, when given their longed-for chance of actual
fighting on the Rufigi, they have covered themselves with distinction.
For my part, as a doctor, I found they had too much ego in their cosmos,
as is commonly the fault of half-bred races, and a sick Cape Corps
soldier seemed always very sick indeed; yet, as the campaign progressed,
we came to like and to admire these troops the more, so that their
distinction won in the Rufigi fighting was welcomed very gladly by all
of us.

Later in the campaign arrived the Gold Coast Regiment; and now the
Nigerian Brigade are here. Very, very smart and soldier-like these Hausa
and Fulani troops; Mohammedan, largely, in religion, and bearded where
the East Coast native is smooth-faced, they will stay to finish this
guerilla fighting, for which their experience in the Cameroon has so
well fitted them. The Gold Coast Regiment has always been where there
has been the hardest fighting, their green woollen caps and leather
sandals marking them out from other negroid soldiers. And their
impetuous courage has won them many captured enemy guns, and, alas! a
very long list of casualties. But in hospital they are the merriest of
happy people, always joking and smiling, and are quite a contrast to our
much more serious East Coast native; they have earned from their white
sergeants and officers very great admiration and devotion. By far the
best equipped of any unit in the field, they had, as a regiment, no less
than eight machine-guns and a regimental mountain battery.



THE NAVY AND ITS WORK


To the Navy that alone has made this campaign possible, we soldiers owe
our grateful thanks. But there have been times when, in our blindness,
we have failed to realise how great the task was to blockade 400 miles
of this coast and to keep a watchful eye on Mozambique. For before the
Portuguese made common cause with us, there was a great deal of
gun-running along the southern border of German East Africa, which our
present Allies found impossible to watch. Two factors materially aided
the Germans in making the fight they have. First, there was the lucky
"coincidence" of the Dar-es-Salaam Exhibition. This exhibition, which
was to bring the whole world to German East Africa in August, 1914,
provided the military authorities with great supplies of machinery,
stores and exhibits from all the big industrial centres; and these were
swiftly adapted to the making of rifles and munitions of war. To this
must be added the most important factor of all, the _Königsberg_, lying
on the mud flats far up the Rufigi, destroyed by us, it is true, but not
before the ship's company of 700, officers and men, and most of the guns
had been transported ashore, the latter mounted on gun carriages and
dragged by weary oxen or thousands of black porters to dispute our
advance. In due course, however, these were abandoned, one by one, as we
pressed the enemy back from the Northern Railway south to the Rufigi.
Last, but by no means least, was the moral support their wireless
stations gave them. These, though unable, since the destruction of the
main stations, to transmit messages, continued for some time to receive
the news from Nauen in Germany. By the air from Germany the officers
received the Iron Cross, promotion, and the Emperor's grateful thanks.

But if you would see what work the Navy has done, you must first begin
at Lindi in the south. There you will see the _Präsident_ of the D.O.A.
line lying on her side with her propellers blown off and waiting for our
tugs to drag her to Durban for repair. And in the Rufigi lying on the
mudbanks, fourteen miles from the mouth, you will see the _Königsberg_,
once the pride of German cruisers, half sunk and completely dismantled.
The hippopotami scratch their tick-infested flanks upon her rusted
sides, crocodiles crawl across her decks, fish swim through the open
ports. In Dar-es-Salaam you will see the _König_ stranded at the harbour
mouth, the _Tabora_ lying on her side behind the ineffectual shelter of
the land; the side uppermost innocent of the Red Cross and green line
that adorned her seaward side. For she was a mysterious craft. She flew
the Red Cross and was tricked out as a hospital ship on one side, the
other painted grey. True, she had patients and a doctor on board when a
pinnace from one of our cruisers examined her, but she also had
machine-guns mounted and gun emplacements screwed to her deck, and all
the adaptations required for a commerce raider. So our admiral decided
that, after due notice, so suspicious a craft were better sunk. A few
shots flooded her compartments and she heeled over, burying the lying
Cross of Geneva beneath the waters of the harbour. Further up the creek
you will see the _Feldmarschall_ afloat and uninjured, save for the
engines that our naval party had destroyed, and ready, to our amazement,
at the capture of the town, to be towed to Durban and to carry British
freight to British ports, and maybe meet a destroying German submarine
upon the way. Further up still you will find the Governor's yacht and a
gunboat, sunk this time by the Germans; but easy to raise and to adapt
for our service. Strange that so methodical a people should have bungled
so badly the simple task of rendering a valuable ship useless for the
enemy. But they have blundered in the execution of their plans
everywhere. The attempt to obstruct the harbour mouth at Dar-es-Salaam
was typical of their naval ineptitude. Barely two hundred yards across
this bottle-neck, it should have been an easy job to block. So they sank
the floating dock in the southern portion of the channel and moored the
_König_ by bow and stern hawsers, to the shores on either side in
position for sinking. Instead of flooding her they prepared an explosive
bomb and timed it to go off at the fall of the tide. But the bomb failed
to explode, and an ebb tide setting in, broke the stern moorings and
drove her sideways on the shore. Here she lies now and the channel is
still free to all our ships to come and go. We found, at the occupation,
the record of the court-martial on the German naval officer responsible
for the failure of the plan. He seems to have pleaded, with success, the
fact that his dynamite was fifteen years old. After that no further
attempt was made, and for nearly a year before we occupied the town our
naval whalers and small cruisers sailed, the white ensign proudly
flying, into the harbour to anchor and to watch the interned shipping.
It must have been a humiliating spectacle to the Hun; but he was
helpless. Woe betide him, if he placed a mine or trained a gun upon this
ship of ours. The town would have suffered, and this they could not
risk.

Yet further up the coast, near Tanga, the _Markgraf_ lies beached in
shallow water, and the _Reubens_ a wreck in Mansa Bay.

In most of our naval operations our intelligence has been excellent, and
Fortune has been kind. It seemed to the Germans that we employed some
special witchcraft to provide the knowledge that we possessed. So they
panicked ingloriously, and sought spies everywhere, and hanged
inoffensive natives by the dozen to the mango trees. One day one of our
whalers entered Tanga harbour the very day the German mines were lifted
for the periodical overhaul. The Germans ascribed such knowledge to the
Prince of Evil. The whaler proceeded to destroy a ship lying there, and,
on its way out, fired a shell into a lighter that was lying near. In
this lighter were the mines, as the resulting explosion testified. This
completed the German belief in our possession of supernatural powers of
obtaining information.

Again at the bombardment and capture of Bagamoyo by the Fleet, it seemed
to the Hun that wherever the German commander went, to this trench or to
that observation post, our 6-inch shells would follow him. All day long
they pursued his footsteps, till he also panicked and searched the bush
for a hidden wireless. He it was who shot our gallant Marine officer, as
our men stormed the trenches, and paid the penalty for his rashness
shortly after.

The little German tug _Adjutant_, which in times of peace plied across
the bar at Chinde to bring off passengers and mails to the ships that
lay outside, has had a chequered career in this war. Slipping out from
Chinde at the outbreak of war, she made her way to Dar-es-Salaam. From
there she essayed another escapade only to fall into our hands.
Transformed into a gunboat, she harried the Germans in the Delta of the
Rufigi, until, greatly daring, one day she ran ashore on a mudbank in
the river. Captured with her crew she was taken to pieces by the Germans
and transported by rail to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. And there the
Belgians found her, partly reconstructed, as they entered the harbour. A
little longer delay, and the resurrected _Adjutant_ would have played
havoc with our small craft and the Belgians', which had driven the
German ships off the vast waters of this lake.



LETTOW AND HIS ARMY


Lettow, the one-eyed, or to give him his full title, Colonel von
Lettow-Vorbeck, is the heart and soul of the German resistance in East
Africa. Indomitable and ubiquitous, he has kept up the drooping spirits
of his men by encouragement, by the example of great personal courage,
and by threats that he can and will carry out. Wounded three times, he
has never left his army, but has been carried about on a "machela" to
prevent the half-resistance that leads to surrender. And now we hear he
has had blackwater, and, recovering, has resumed his elusive journeys
from one discouraged company to another all over the narrowing area of
operations that alone is left to the Hun of his favourite colonial
possessions. For to the fat shipping clerk of Tanga, whose soul lives
only for beer and the leave that comes to reward two years of effort,
the temptation to go sick or to get lost in the bush in front of our
advancing armies is very great. He is not of the stuff that heroes are
made of, and surrender is so safe and easy. A prison camp in Bombay is
clearly preferable to this unending retreat. He has done enough for
honour, he argues, he has proved his worth after two and a half years of
resistance! This colony has put up the best fight of all, "and the
_Schwein Engländer_ holds the seas, so further resistance is hopeless."
"We are not barbarians, are we Fritz?" But Fritz has ceased to care.
"Ahmednagar for mine," says he, reverting to the language he learnt in
the brewery at Milwaukee, in days that now seem to belong to some
antenatal life. Soon he will look for some white face beneath the
strange sun helmet the English wear, up will go his hands, and
"Kamerad"--that magic word--will open the doors to sumptuous ease behind
the prison bars.

But Lettow is going "all out." His black Askaris are not discouraged,
and, in this war, the black man is keeping up the courage of the white.
Had the native soldiers got their tails down the game was up as far as
the Germans were concerned. But these faithful fellows see the "Bwona
Kuba," as they call Lettow, here encouraging, everywhere inspiring them
by his example, and they will stay with him until the end. Like many
great soldiers, Lettow is singularly careless in his dress; and the tale
is told at Moschi of a young German officer who stole a day's leave and
discussed with a stranger at a shop window the chances of the ubiquitous
Lettow arriving to spoil his afternoon. Nor did he know until he found
the reprimand awaiting him in camp that he had been discussing the
ethics of breaking out of camp with the "terror" himself.

A soldier of fortune is Lettow. His name is stained with the hideous
massacres of the Hereros in South-West Africa. His was the order,
transmitted through the German Governor's mouth, that thrust the Herero
women and children into the deserts of Damaraland to die. Before the war
in South Africa, rumour says, he was instructor to the "Staats
Artillerie," which Kruger raised to stay the storm that he knew
inevitably would overwhelm him. Serving, with Smuts and Botha themselves
in the early months of the Boer war, he joined the inglorious procession
of foreigners that fled across the bridge at Komati Poort after Pretoria
fell, and left the Boer to fight it out unaided for two long and weary
years more. No wonder that Lettow has sworn never to surrender to that
"damned Dutchman Jan Smuts." Chary of giving praise for work well done,
he yet is inexorable to failure. The tale is told that Lettow was
furious when Fischer, the major in command at Moschi, was bluffed out of
his impregnable position there by Vandeventer, evacuated the northern
lines, and retired on Kahe, thus saving us the expense of taking a
natural fortress that would have taxed all our energies. White with
rage, he sent for Fischer and handed him one of his own revolvers. "Let
me hear some interesting news about you in a day or two." And Fischer
took the pistol and walked away to consider his death warrant. He looked
at that grim message for two days before he could summon up his courage:
then he shot himself, well below the heart, in a spot that he thought
was fairly safe. But poor Fischer's knowledge of anatomy was as unsound
as his strategy, for the bullet perforated his stomach. And it took him
three days to die.

A tribe which has contributed largely to the German military forces is
the Wanyamwezi. Of excellent physique, they long resisted German
domination, but now they are entirely subdued. Hardy, brave and willing,
they are the best fighters and porters, probably, in the whole of East
Africa. Immigrant Wanyamwezi, enlisted in British East Africa into our
King's African Rifles, do not hesitate to fight against their blood
brothers. There is no stint to the faithful service they have given to
the Germans. But for them our task would have been much easier. For
drilling and parade the native mind shows great keenness and aptitude;
little squads of men are drilled voluntarily by their own N.C.O.'s in
their spare time; and often, just after an official drill is over, they
drill one another again. Smart and well-disciplined they are most
punctilious in all military services.



INTELLIGENCE


Of all the departments of War in German East Africa probably the most
romantic and interesting is the Intelligence Department. Far away ahead
of the fighting troops are the Intelligence officers with their native
scouts. These officers, for the most part, are men who have lived long
in the country, who know the native languages, and are familiar with the
lie of the land from experience gained in past hunting trips. Often
behind the enemy, creeping along the lines of communication, these
officers carry their lives in their hands, and run the risk of betrayal
by any native who happens across them. Sleeping in the bush at night,
unable to light fires to cook their food, lest the light should attract
the questing patrol, that, learning of their presence in the country,
has been out after them for days. Hiding in the bush, short of rations,
the little luxuries of civilisation long since finished, forced to smoke
the reeking pungent native tobacco, living off wild game (that must be
trapped, not shot), and native meal, at the mercy of the natives whom
both sides employ to get information of the other, these men are in
constant danger. Nor are the amenities of civilised warfare theirs when
capture is their lot.

Fortunately for the British Empire there has never been any lack of
those restless beings whose wandering spirits lead them to the confines
of civilisation and beyond. To this type of man the African continent
has offered a particular attraction, and we should have fared badly in
the East African campaign, if we could not have relied upon the services
of many of them. They are for the most part men who have abandoned at an
early age the prosaic existence previously mapped out for them, and
plunging into the wilds of Africa have found a more attractive
livelihood in big game shooting and prospecting. By far the most
exhilarating calling is that of the elephant hunter, who finds in the
profits he derives from it all the compensation he requires for the
hardships, the long marches, and the grave personal dangers. In the most
inaccessible parts of the continent he plies his trade, knowing that his
life may depend upon the quickness of his eye and intellect and the
accuracy of his aim. Nor are his troubles over when his quarry has been
secured. The ivory has still to be disposed of, and it is not always
safe to attempt to sell in the territory where the game has been shot.
The area of no man's land in Africa has long since been a diminishing
quantity, and the promiscuous shooting of elephants is not encouraged.
It becomes necessary, therefore, to study the question of markets, and
the successful hunter finds it convenient to vary the spheres of his
activities continually.

Not the least of the assets of these men is the knowledge they have of
the native and the hold they have obtained over them. That man will go
farthest who relies on the respect rather than on the fear he inspires.
The latter may go a long way, but unless it has the former to support
it, the chances are against it sooner or later. One man I know of owed
his life more than once to his devotion to a small stick that walking,
sitting or lying he never allowed out of his hand. The native mind came
to attach magical powers to the stick, and consequently to the man
himself. On one eventful journey when he had gone farther afield than
his wont, and farther than his native porters cared to accompany him,
symptoms of mutiny made their appearance. A council was held as to
whether he should be murdered or not; he was fortunate enough to
overhear it. The only possible deterrent seemed to be a dread of the
magical stick, but the two ringleaders affected to make light of it.
Realising that the time had come for decisive action, the white man
summoned the company, told them that his stick had revealed the plot to
him and warned them of the danger they ran. To clinch his argument he
offered to allow the ringleaders to return home, taking the stick with
them; but told them that they would be dead within twenty-four hours,
and the stick would come back to him. To his dismay they accepted the
challenge, and for him there could be no retreat. In desperation he
poisoned the food they were to take with them, and awaited developments.
The two natives set off early in the morning. By the afternoon they were
back again, and with them the stick. In the solitude of their homeward
trek their courage had oozed out; they feared the magic, and fortunately
had not touched the poisoned provisions. In the feasting that had to
celebrate this satisfactory denouement it was possible to substitute
other food for that which had been taken on the abortive journey. Magic
or the fear of it had saved the situation; but the instincts of loyalty
had been fired previously by a character that had many attractive
features and never allowed firmness to dispossess justice.

At the outbreak of the war two of our Nimrods--whom I shall call Hallam
and Best--were camped by the Rovuma river. Hearing that there were
British ships at Lindi, they made for the coast to offer their services
in the sterner hunt, after much more dangerous game, that they knew had
now begun. The native runner that brought them the news from Mozambique
also warned them of the German force that was hot foot in pursuit of
them. So they tarried not in the order of their going, and made for the
shelter of the fleet. But Best would read his weekly _Times_ by the
light of the lamp at their camp table for all the Huns in Christendom,
he said, and derided Hallam's surer sense of danger near at hand. So in
the early hours their pickets came running in, all mixed up with German
Askaris, and the ring of rifle and machine-gun fire told them that their
time had come. Capsizing the tell-tale lamp, they scattered in the
undergrowth like a covey of partridges, Hallam badly wounded in the leg
and only able to crawl. The friendly shelter of the papyrus leaves
beside the river-bank was his refuge; and as he plunged into the river
the scattered volley of rifle shots tore the reeds above him. All night
they remained there. Hallam up to his neck in water, and the ready prey
of any searching crocodile that the blood that oozed from his wounded
leg should inevitably have attracted; the Germans on the bank. Next
morning the trail of blood towards the river assured the enemy that
Hallam was no more, for who could live in these dangerous waters all
night, wounded as he was? But if Hallam could hunt like a leopard, he
could also swim like a fish. Next day brought a native fishing canoe
into sight, and to it he swam, still clutching the rifle that second
nature had caused him to grab as he plunged into the reeds. With a wet
rifle and nine cartridges he persuaded the natives not only to ferry him
across to the Portuguese side, but also to carry him in a "machela," a
hammock slung between native porters, from which he shot "impala" for
his food. But somehow word had got across the river that Hallam had
eluded death, and the German Governor stormed and threatened till the
Portuguese sent police to arrest the fugitive. But the native runner who
brought him news of his discovery also brought word of the approaching
police. So with his rifle and three cartridges to sustain him, often
delirious with fever, and the inflammation in his leg, he commandeered
the men of a native village and persuaded them, such was the prestige of
his name, to carry him twenty-eight days in the "machela" to a friendly
mission station on Lake Nyasa. Here the kindly English sisters nursed
him back to life and health again.

Best was not so lucky, for he was taken prisoner. But there was no
German gaol that could hold so resourceful a prisoner as this. In due
time he made his escape, and was to be found later looping the loop
above Turkish camps in the Sinai Peninsula.

One German, of whom our information had been that "his company did
little else but rape women and loot goats," fell into my hands when we
took the English Universities Mission at Korogwe. Could this be he, I
thought, as I saw an officer of mild appearance and benevolent aspect
speaking English so perfectly and peering at me through big spectacles?
Badly wounded and with a fracture of the thigh, he had begged me to look
after him, saying the most disloyal things about the character and
surgical capacity of the German doctor whom we had left behind to look
after German wounded. Not that the _Oberstabsarzt_ did not deserve them,
but it was so gratuitously beastly to say them to me, an enemy. He
deplored, too, with such unctuous phrases, the fact that war should ever
have occurred in East Africa. How it would spoil the years of toil,
toward Christianity, of many mission stations! How the simple native had
been taught in this war to kill white men; hitherto, of course, the
vilest of crimes. How the march of civilisation had been put back for
twenty-five years. How the prestige of the white man had fallen, for had
not natives seen white men, on both sides, run away before them? Many
such pious expressions issued from his lips. But the true Hun character
came out when he asked whether the hated Boers were coming? The most
vindictive expression, that even the benevolent spectacles could only
partly modify, clouded his face, and he complained to me most bitterly
of the black ingratitude of the Boers toward Germany. "All my life, from
boyhood," he complained, "have I not subscribed my pfennigs to provide
Christmas presents for the poor Boers suffering under the heel of
England. Did not German girls," he whined, "knit stockings for the women
of that nation that was so akin to the Germans in blood, and that lay so
pitifully prostrate beneath the feet of England?" Nor would he be
appeased until I assured him that the Boers were far away.

Another, whose reputation was that of "a hard case, and addicted to
drink," I found also in hospital in Korogwe, recovered from an operation
for abscess of the liver, and living in hospital with his wife. Spruce
and rather jumpy he insisted on exhibiting his operation wound to me,
paying heavy compliments to English skill in surgery; not, mark you,
that he had any but the greatest contempt that all German doctors, too,
profess for British medicine and surgery. But he hoped, by specious
praise, to be sent to Wilhelmstal and not to join the other prisoners in
Ahmednagar. Bottles of soda-water ostentatiously displayed upon his
table might have suggested what his bleary eye and shaky hands belied.
So I contented myself with removing the pass key to the wine cellar,
that lay upon the sideboard, and duly marked him down on the list for
transfer to Wilhelmstal.

That the spirit of Baron Munchausen still lives in German East Africa is
attested to by Intelligence reports. It says a great deal for Lettow's
belief in the accuracy of our information that he very promptly put a
stop to the notoriety and reputation for valour that two German officers
enjoyed. One had made an unsuccessful attempt to bomb the Uganda Railway
on two occasions; but neither time did he do any damage, though, on each
occasion, he claimed to have cut the line. The other, possessed of
greater imagination, reported to his German commander that he had
attacked one of our posts along the railway, completely destroying it
and all in it. The painful truth he learnt afterwards from German
headquarters was that the English suffered no casualties, and the post
was comparatively undamaged.

The sad fate of one enterprising German officer who set out to make an
attack upon one of our posts was, at the time, the cause, of endless
jesting at the expense of the Survey and Topographical Department of
British East Africa. He was relying upon an old English map of the
country, but owing to its extreme inaccuracy, he lost his way, ran out
of water, and made an inglorious surrender. This, of course, was
attributed by the Germans to the low cunning employed by our
Intelligence Department that allowed the German authorities to get
possession of a misleading map.

That retribution follows in the wake of an unpopular German officer, as
shown by extracts from captured German diaries, is attested to by the
record of two grim tragedies in the African bush, one of an officer who
"lost his way," the other of an officer who was shot by his own men.



GERMAN TREATMENT OF NATIVES


One of the features of German military life that fills one with horror
and disgust is their brutality to the native. Nor do they make any
attempt to cloak their atrocities. For they perpetuate them by
photographs, many of which have fallen into our hands; and from these
one sees a tendency to gloat over the ghastly exhibits. The pictures
portray gallows with a large number of natives hanging side by side. In
some, soldiers are drawn up in hollow square, one side of it open to the
civil population, and there is little doubt that these are punitive and
impressive official executions, carried out under "proper judicial
conditions" as conceived by Germans. But what offends one's taste so
much are the photographs of German officers and men standing with
self-conscious and self-satisfied expressions beside the grim gallows on
which their victims hang. From the great number of these pictures we
have found, it is quite clear that not only are such executions very
common, but that they are also not unpleasing to the sense of the German
population; otherwise they would not bequeath to posterity their own
smiling faces alongside the unhappy dead. With us it is so different.
When we have to administer the capital penalty we do it, of course,
openly, and after full judicial inquiry in open court. Nor do we rob it
of its impressive character by excluding the native population. But such
sentences in war are usually carried out by shooting, and photographs
are not desired by any of the spectators. It is a vile business and
absolutely revolting to us, nor do we hesitate to hurry away as soon as
the official character of the parade is over. I well remember one such
execution, in Morogoro, of a German Askari who assaulted a little German
girl with a "kiboko" during the two days' interregnum that elapsed
between Lettow's departure and our occupation of the town. To British
troops the most unwelcome duty of all is to form a part of a firing
party on such occasions. The firing party are handed their rifles,
alternate weapons only loaded with ball cartridge, that their sense of
decency may not be offended by the distasteful recollection of killing a
man in cold blood. For this assures that no man knows whether his was
the rifle that sped the living soul from that pitiful cringing body.

In the past the Germans have had constant trouble with the natives, not
one tribe but has had to be visited by sword and flame and wholesale
execution. That this is not entirely the fault of the natives is shown
by the fact that we have not experienced in East Africa and Uganda a
tenth part of the trouble with our natives, notoriously a most restless
and warlike combination of races.

It was thought at one time that, if the Germans seriously weakened their
hold on some of the more troublesome tribes and withdrew garrisons from
localities where troops alone had kept the native in subjection, risings
of a terrible and embarrassing character would be the result. That such
fear entered also into the German mind is shown by the fact that for
long they did not dare to withdraw certain administrative officials, and
much-valued soldiers of the regular army, who would have been of great
service as army commanders, from their police work. Notably is this the
case at Songea, in the angle between Lake Nyasa and the Portuguese
border. To the state of terror among the German women owing to the fear
of a native rising during the intervening period between the retreat of
their troops and the arrival of our own in Morogoro I myself can
testify. For the German nursing sisters who worked with me told of the
flight to this town of outlying families, and how the women were all
supplied with tablets of prussic acid to swallow, if the dreadful end
approached. For death from the swift cyanide would be gentler far than
at the hands of a savage native. But the Germans have to admit that as
they showed no mercy to the native in the past, so they could expect
none at such a time as this. They told me of the glad relief with which
they welcomed the coming of our troops, and how with tears of gratitude
they threw swift death into the bushes, much indeed as they hated the
humiliating spectacle of the gallant Rhodesians and Baluchis making
their formal entry into the fair streets of Morogoro.

The German hold on the natives is, owing to severe repressive measures
in the past and the unrelaxing discipline of the present war, most
effective and likely to remain so, until our troops appear actually
among them. Indeed, the fear of a native rising, and the butchery of
German women and children has been ever on our minds, and we have had to
impress upon the native that we desired or could countenance no such
help upon their part. All we asked of the native population was to keep
the peace and supply us with information, food and porters. We sent word
among the restless tribes to warn them to keep quiet, saying that, if
the Germans had chastised them with whips, we would, indeed, chastise
them with scorpions in the event of their getting out of hand. And we
must admit that, almost without exception, the natives of all tribes
have proved most welcoming, most docile and most grateful for our
arrival. Had it not been for the clandestine intrigues of the German
planters and missionaries whom we returned to their homes and
occupations of peace, there would have been no trouble. But the Hun may
promise faithfully, may enter into the most solemn obligations not to
take active or passive part further in the war; but, nevertheless, he
seems unable to keep himself from betraying our trust. Such a born spy
and intriguer is he that he cannot refrain from intimidating the native,
of whose quietness he is now assured by the presence of our troops, by
threats of what will befall him when the Germans return, if he, the
native, so much as sells us food or enters our employment as a porter.

But the native is extraordinarily local in his knowledge, his world
bounded for him by the borders of neighbouring and often hostile tribes.
We are not at all certain that any but coast or border tribes can really
appreciate the difference between British rule and the domination that
has now been swept away.

Recent reports on all sides show the desire for peace and the end of the
war; for war brings in its train forced labour, the requisition of food,
and the curse of German Askaris wandering about among the native
villages, satisfying their every want, often at the point of the
bayonet. Preferable even to this are the piping times of peace, when the
German administrator, with rare exceptions, singularly unhappy in his
dealing with the chiefs, would not hesitate to thrash a chief before his
villagers, and condemn him to labour in neck chains, on the roads among
his own subjects. And this, mark you, for the failure of the chief to
keep an appointment, when the fat-brained German failed to appreciate
the difference in the natives' estimation of time. By Swahili time the
day commences at 7 a.m. In the past, it was no wonder that chiefs,
burning with a sense of wrong and the humiliation they had suffered,
preferred to raise their tribe and perish by the sword than endure a
life that bore such indignity and shame.

But our job has not been rendered any easier by the difficulty we have
experienced in pacifying the simple blacks by attempts to dispel the
fears of rapine and murder at the hands of our soldiers, with which the
Germans have been at such pains to saturate the native mind. This, in
conjunction with the suspicion which the native of German East Africa
has for any European, and more especially his horror of war, has made us
prepared to see the native bolt at our approach.

But if our task has succeeded, there has been striking ill success on
the part of the Germans in organising and inducing, in spite of their
many attempts and the obvious danger to their own women and children,
these native tribes to oppose our advance. Fortunately for us, and for
the white women of the country, tribes will not easily combine, and are
loath to leave their tribal territory.

Many of us have looked with some concern upon the mere possibility of
this German colony being returned to its former owners. We must remember
that we shall inevitably lose the measure of respect the native holds
for us, if we contemplate giving back this province once more to German
ruling. Prestige alone is the factor in the future that will keep order
among these savage races who have now learnt to use the rifle and
machine-gun, and have money in plenty to provide themselves with
ammunition. The war has done much to destroy the prestige that allows a
white man to dominate thousands of the natives. For to the indigenous
inhabitants of the country, the white man's ways are inexplicable; they
cannot conceive a war conducted with such alternate savagery and
chivalry. To those who look upon the women of the vanquished as the
victors' special prize, the immunity from outrage that German women
enjoy is beyond their comprehension. For that reason we shall welcome
the day when an official announcement is made that the British
Government have taken over the country. One would like to see big
"indabas" held at every town and centre in the country, formal raising
of the Union Jack, cannon salutes, bands playing and parades of
soldiers.



GOOD FOR EVIL


When the rains had finished, by May, 1916, in the Belgian Congo, General
Molitor began to move upon Tanganyika. Soon our motor-boat flotilla and
the Belgian launches and seaplanes had swept the lake of German
shipping; and the first Belgian force landed and occupied Ujiji, the
terminus of the Central Railway.

Then the blood of the Huns in Africa ran cold in their veins, and the
fear that the advancing Belgians would wreak vengeance for the crimes of
Germany in Belgium and to the Belgian consuls in prison in Tabora,
gripped their vitals. Hastily they sent their women and children at all
speed east along the line to Tabora, the new Provincial capital, and
planned to put up the stiff rearguard actions that should delay the
enemy, until the English might take Tabora and save their women from
Belgian hands. For the English, those soft-hearted fools, who had
already so well treated the women at Wilhelmstal, could be as easily
persuaded to exercise their flabby sentimentalism on the women and
children in Tabora. So ran the German reasoning.

Slowly and relentlessly the Belgian columns swept eastward along the
railway line, closely co-operating with the British force advancing from
Mwanza, south-east, toward the capital. But, in Molitor, the German
General Wable had met more than his match, and soon, outgeneralled and
out-manoeuvred, he had to rally on the last prepared position, west of
Tabora. Then, daily, went the German parlementaires under the white
flag, that standard the enemy know so well how to use, to the British
General praying that he would occupy Tabora while Wable kept the
Belgians in check. But the British General was adamant, and would have
none of it; and as Wable's shattered forces fled to the bush to march
south-east to where Lettow, the ever-vigilant, was keeping watch, the
Belgians entered the fair city of Tabora. And here were over five
hundred German women and children, clinging to the protection that the
Governor's wife should gain for them. For Frau von Schnee was a New
Zealand woman, and she might be looked to to persuade the British to
restrain the Belgian Askari.

But there was no need. The behaviour of Belgian officers and their
native soldiers was as correct and gentlemanly as that of officers
should be, and, to their relief and surprise, those white women found
the tables turned, and that their enemy could be as chivalrous to them
as German soldiers--their own brothers--had been vile to the wretched
people of Belgium. There was no nonsense about the Belgian General;
stern and just, but very strict, he brought the German population to
heel and kept them there. Cap in hand, the German men came to him, and
begged to be allowed to work for the conqueror; their carpenters' shops,
the blacksmiths' forges were at the service of the high commander. No
German on the footpaths; hats raised from obsequious Teuton heads
whenever a Belgian officer passes. How the chivalry of Belgium heaped
coals of fire upon the German heads! And had the Hun been of such, a
fibre as to appreciate the lesson, of what great value we might hope
that it would be? But decent treatment never did appeal to the German;
he always held that clemency spelt weakness, and the fear of the
avenging German Michael. For did not the Emperor's Eagle now float over
Paris and Petersburg? That he knew well; for had not High Headquarters
told him of the message from the Kaiser by wireless from Nauen, the
self-same message that conveyed to Lettow himself the Iron Cross
decoration?

The Governor's wife was allowed to retain her palace and servants; but
all German women were kept strictly to their houses after six at night.
No looting, no riots, no disturbance. And German women began to be
piqued at the calm indifference of smart Belgian officers to the favours
they might have had. Openly chagrined were the local Hun beauties at
such a disregard of their full-blown charms.

"I fear for our women and children in Tabora," said the German doctor to
me in Morogoro. "Ach! what will the Belgians do when they hear the tales
that are told of our German troops in Belgium? You don't believe these
stories of German brutalities, do you?" he said anxiously, conciliatory.
But I did, and I told him so. "But you don't know the Belgian Askari; he
is cannibal; he is recruited from the pagan tribes in the forest of the
Congo, he files his front teeth to a point, and we know he is short of
supplies. What is going to happen to German children? It is the truth I
tell you," he went on, evidently with very sincere feeling. "You know
what became of the 1,500 Kavirondo porters your Government lent to the
Belgian General. Where are our prisoners that the Belgians took in Ujiji
and along the line? Eaten; all eaten." And he threw up his hands
tragically to heaven. "I know you won't believe it, but I swear to you
that Rumpel's story is true." Rumpel was Lettow's best intelligence
agent. "Our scout was a prisoner with a company of Belgian Askaris, you
know, and it was only that the Belgian company commander wanted to get
information from him that he was not eaten at once. Haven't you heard
the tale that Rumpel tells after his escape? How the senior native
officer came to his Belgian commander and complained that they had no
food, the villages were empty, not so much as an egg or chicken to be
got. Irritably, the Belgian officer shouted that the soldiers knew that
no one had food, and they must wait till they got to the next post on
the morrow. 'But,' urged the native sergeant softly, 'there are the
prisoners.' 'Oh, the prisoners,' said the Belgian officer, relieved by
an easy way out of a very difficult situation. 'Well, not more than
sixteen, remember that.' And the sergeant went away."

This and countless other lies did the Germans tell us of our Belgian
Allies. But how different the truth when it reached us at last along the
railway by our troops that came from the northern column to join us at
Morogoro. Not a German woman insulted; not one fat German child missing;
no occupied house even entered by the Belgian troops, not so much as a
chicken stolen from a German compound.

So just, so completely impartial was General Molitor, that he applied to
German prisoners, in territory then occupied by him, the very rules and
regulations that the German command had laid down for the governing of
English and Belgian and other Allied prisoners. Only the vile, the
unspeakable regulations, and every ordinance in that printed list of
German rules that destroyed the prestige of the white man in the
native's eyes, did he omit. If the Germans were indifferent to this one
elementary rule of the white race in equatorial Africa--the white man's
law that no white man be degraded before a native--then the Belgian
would show the Hun how to play the game.

"We must hack our way through," said Bethmann-Hollweg. And we, in
Morogoro, were very curious to see what manner of vengeance the Belgians
might wreak. Nor would we have blamed them over-much for anything they
might have done. I had lived in German prisons with elderly Belgian
officers whose wives and grown-up daughters had been left behind in
occupied parts of Belgium. We all had shuddered at the stories they told
us; nor did we wonder that these unhappy fathers had often gone insane.
And when we learnt the truth about Tabora, and knew too, to our disgust,
that such un-German clemency was attributed to Belgian fear of the
avenging German Michael and not to natural Belgian chivalry, we were
furious. What can one do with such a people?



THE MECHANICAL TRANSPORT


A cloud of red dust along a rough bush track, a rattling jar
approaching, and the donkey transport pulls into the bushes to let the
Juggernaut of the road go by. Swaying and plunging over the rough
ground, lurches one of our huge motor lorries. Perched high up upon the
seat, face and arms burnt dark brown by the tropical sun, is the driver.
Stern faced and intent upon the road, he slews his big ship into a
better bit of road by hauling at the steering wheel. Beside him on the
seat the second driver. Ready to their hands the rifles that may save
their precious cargo from the marauding German patrol which lies hidden
in the thick bush beside the road. In the big body of the car behind are
two thousand pounds of rations, and atop of all a smiling "tota," the
small native boy these drivers employ to light their fires and cook
their food at night. And this load is food for a whole brigade alone for
half a day; so you may see how necessary it is that this valuable cargo
arrives in time.

It may sound to you, in sheltered London, a pleasant and agreeable thing
to drive through this strange new country full of the wild game that
glimpses of Zoological Gardens in the past suggest. "A Zoo without a
blooming keeper." But there is no department of war that does such hard
work as these lorry drivers.

For them no rest in the day that is deemed a lucky one, if it provides
them only with sixteen hours' work. The infantry of the line have their
periodical rests, a month it may be, of comparative leisure before the
enemy trenches. But for mechanical transport there is no peace, save
such as comes when back axles break, and the big land ship is dragged
into the bush to be repaired. Hot and sweating men striving to renew
some part or improvise, by bullock hide "reims," a temporary road repair
that will bring them limping back to the advance base. Here the company
workshop waits to repair these derelicts of the road. Burning with
malaria, when the hot sun draws the lurking fever from their bones,
tortured with dysentery, they've got to do their job until they reach
their lorry park again. But often the repair gang cannot reach a
stranded lorry, and the drivers, helpless before a big mechanical
repair, have to camp out alongside their car, till help arrives and tows
them in. A tarpaulin rigged up along one side of the lorry, poles cut
from the thorn bush, and they have protection from the burning sun by
day. A thorn hedge, the native "boma," keeps out lions and the sneaking
hyaena at night. Nor are their rifles more than a half protection, for
the '303 makes so clean a hole that it is often madness to attempt to
shoot a lion with it. Once wounded he is far more dangerous a foe. Here
the "tota" earns his pay, for he can hunt the native villages for
"cuckoos," the native fowls, and eggs.

The load of rations must not, save at the last extremity, be broached.

And the roads they travel on: you never saw such things, mere bush
tracks where the pioneers have cut down trees and bushes, and left the
stumps above the level earth. No easy job to steer these great lumbering
machines between these treacherous stumps. From early dawn to late night
you'll meet these leviathans of the road, diving into the bush to force
a new road for themselves when the old track is too deep in mud or dust,
plunging and diving down water-courses or the rocky river-beds, creeping
with great care over the frail bridge that spans a deep ravine. A bridge
made up of tree-trunks laid lengthwise on wooden up-rights. The lion and
the leopard stand beside the road, with paw uplifted, in the glare of
the headlights at night.

Nor is there only danger from flood and fever and the denizens of the
forest. There is ever to be feared the lurking German patrol that trains
its dozen rifles upon the driver, knowing full well that he must sit and
quietly face it out, or the lorry, once out of control, plunges against
a tree and becomes, with both its drivers, the prey of these marauders.
So, while his mate fumbles with the bolt lever of his rifle, the driver
takes a firmer grip of the wheel, gives her more "juice," and plunges
headlong down the road. At Handeni I once had a driver with five bullets
in him; they had not stopped him until he reached safety, and his mate
was able to take over. Nor does this exhaust the risks of his job, for
there is the land mine, buried in the soft dust of the road, or beneath
the crazy bridge. Laid at night by the patrol that harasses our lines of
communication, they are the special danger of the first convoy to come
along the road in the morning. Troops we have not to spare to guard
these long lines of ours, so, in particularly dangerous places, the
driver carries a small guard of soldiers on the top of his freight
behind him. Native patrols, very wise at noticing any derangement of the
surface dust, patrol the highways at dawn to lift these unwelcome
souvenirs from the roads.

From South Africa, from home, and from Canada, come the drivers and
mechanics of the motor transport. The Canadians, stout fellows from
Toronto, Winnipeg, and the Far West, enlisted in the British A.S.C. in
Canada, and arrived in England only to be sent to East Africa. It seems
at first sight a strange country to which to send these men from the
north, but in fact it was a very happy choice. For they got away from
the cold dampness of England and Flanders into the summer seas of the
South Atlantic, where the flying fish and rainbow nautilus filled them
with surprise. Cape Town and Durban must have been for these Canadian
lads a new world only previously envisaged by them, in the big all-red
map that hangs on the walls of Canadian schools, A little difficult at
first, apt to chafe at the restrictions that, though perhaps not
necessary for themselves in particular, were yet essential in preserving
discipline in the whole mixed unit, rather inclined to resent certain
phases of soldier life. But soon they settled down to do their job, to
take trouble over their work rather than make trouble by grousing over
it. Well they proved their worth by the number that now fill the
non-commissioned ranks, and may be judged by the commendation of their
commanding officers. I used to think that they came to see me in
particular, at the long sick parades I held in Morogoro and Handeni,
because I too lived, like some of them, in British Columbia. I cannot
flatter my soul by thinking that they came for the special quality of
the quinine or medical advice I dished out to them. It may have been
that they were far from home, and I seemed a friend in a very strange
land.

All I know is, that I felt a great compliment was paid to me that they
should be grateful for the often hurried and small attentions that I
could give them. They would sometimes bring me Canadian papers that took
me back two and a half years, to the time when I came to England on a
six weeks' holiday from my work, a holiday that has now spun out to
three and a half years, and shows every sign of going further still.
Very well these men stood the climate, in spite of their fair colouring,
in a country that penalises the blonde races more than the brown, that
makes us pay for our want of protective pigment. One stout fellow I well
remember, who had acute appendicitis at Morogoro, was the driver, or
engineer as they are called, of a Grand Trunk Pacific train that ran
from Edmonton in Alberta to Prince Rupert on the Pacific. We operated
upon him, and, though he did very well, yet he must have suffered many
things from our want of nursing in his convalescence. Very considerate
and uncomplaining he was, like all the good fellows in our hospital,
giving no trouble, and making every allowance for our difficulties. In
fact, the great trouble one has among soldiers, is to get them to make
any complaint to their own medical officer. If one suggests things to
them or asks them leading questions, they will sometimes admit to
certain deficiencies in food or treatment by the orderlies. But of what
one did oneself or what the German sister left undone, there was never a
complaint to me; though I rather think there were many grouses when once
they left the hospital. It seemed to me that it was not that they didn't
know better, or that they didn't know that certain things were wrong,
for it is a very intelligent army, this of ours, and has been in
hospital before in civil life, but all along I felt that they did not
like to hurt one's feelings by not getting well as quickly as they
might, and that they often pretended to a degree of comfort and ease
from pain that I'm sure was not the fact. But this phase is often met
with in civil life too, a doctor has much to be grateful for that many
of his patients insist on getting well or saying that they are better,
just to please him.

The German surgical sister was always kind to our men, and when the
serious state of the wound was past she would do the dressings herself,
while I went about some other work. Our men liked her, and I remember
that our Canadian engine driver offered her, in his kindly way, to give
her a free pass on the Grand Trunk Railway. He little knew that this
German sister represented no small part of two big German shipping
companies that could once have provided her with free passes over any
railway in the world. I had under me, too, a couple of Canadian drivers
whose lorry in crossing one of the ramshackle bridges over a river, hit
the railing on the side and plunged to the rocky depths below. A loose
tree-trunk that formed the roadbed of the bridge had jerked the steering
wheel from the driver's hands. Over went the lorry on top of them, and
the mercy of Providence only interposed a big rock that left room below
for the two drivers to escape the crushing that would have killed them.
Badly bruised only, they left me later to recover of their contusion in
the hospital at Dar-es-Salaam.



THE SURGERY OF THIS WAR


"Please give us a drop of Johnnie Walker before you do my dressing,"
said my Irish sergeant, who had lost his leg in the fight at Kangata.
Lest you might think that by "Johnnie Walker" he asked for his favourite
brand of whiskey, I may tell you that we had no stimulant of that kind
with us. It was chloroform he wanted to dull the pain that dressing his
severed nerves entailed. Always full of cheer and blarney, he kept our
ward alive, only when the time for daily dressing came round did his
countenance fall. Then anxious eyes begged for ease from pain. But this
once over, he laid his tired dirty face upon the embroidered pillow and
jested of all the things the careful German housewife would say could
she but see her embroidered sheets and the blue silk cushion from her
drawing-room that kept his amputated leg from jars. We had no water to
wash the men, barely enough for cooking and for surgical dressings, but
there were silk bedspreads and eiderdown quilts and all the treasures of
German sitting-rooms. And the fact that they were taken from the Germans
was balm to these wounded men.

There was Murray, a regimental sergeant-major, his leg badly broken by
the lead slug from a German Askari's rifle, ever the fore-most at the
padre's services, chanting the responses and leading all the hymns. And
Wehmeyer, the young Boer, who had accidentally blown a great hole
through his leg above the ankle joint. And Green, the Rhodesian sergeant
who had been brought in, almost _in extremis_, with blackwater. Nor was
his condition improved by the experience of having been blown up in the
ambulance by a land mine, hidden in the thick dust of the road. Thrown
into the air by the force of the explosion, the car had turned over on
him and the driver, who was killed. And there was Becker the blue-eyed
German prisoner with a bullet through his femoral artery and his hip.
Blanched from loss of blood before I could tie the vessel and stanch the
bleeding, his leg suspended in our improvised splints, and on his way to
make a splendid recovery. And Taube, another German prisoner, shot
through the abdomen, and recovering after his operation. Gentle and
conciliatory, with eyes of a frightened rabbit, he was the son of the
great Taube, the physiologist of Dresden.

Cheek by jowl, in the best bed, was Zahn, the hated Ober-Leutenant,
loathed by his own men, one of whom wrote in his diary that he loved to
see the bombardment of Tanga, "for Zahn was there, the ----, and I hope
he'll meet a 12-inch shell." Jealous of his officer's prerogative, and
disinclined to be nursed in the same ward with our soldiers and his own,
he gave a lot of trouble, demanding inordinately, victimising our
orderly, unashamedly selfish. But he was sheltered from my wrath by the
grave gunshot wound of his thigh. Cowardly under suffering, he was in
striking contrast to Becker, who stood graver pain with hardly a flinch.
After a great struggle he was eventually moved to Korogwe to the
stationary hospital. There it became necessary to amputate his leg, and
Zahn surrendered what little courage he had left. "No leg to-night, no
Zahn to-morrow," he said to his nurse. And he was right, for at eleven
that night he had no leg, and at two the next morning there was no Zahn
upon this earth.

And there was Sergeant Eve of the South African Infantry, who got a
D.C.M., a Londoner, and of unquenchable good humour. Vastly pleased with
the daily bottle of stout we got for him with such difficulty, from
supplies, he faced the awful daily dressing of his shattered leg without
flinching, pretending to great comfort and an excellent position of his
splint, which his crooked leg and my practised eye belied.

And there was Smith, yet a boy, but who always felt "champion" and
"quite comfortable," though his days were few in the land and his pain
must have been very severe. Yet in his case he had days of that merciful
euthanasia, the wonderful ease from pain that sometimes lasts for days
before the end. In great contrast with these was an individual with a
wound through the fleshy part of the thigh, by far the least seriously
wounded of all in the ward, who never failed with his unending requests
to the patient orderlies and his eternal complainings, until a public
dressing-down from me brought him to heel. And Glover who wept that I
had lost his bullet, that unforgivable carelessness in a surgeon that
allows a bullet, removed at an operation, to be thrown away with
discarded dressings.

But, of all, the perfect prince was De La Motte, a subaltern in the 29th
Punjabis, ever the leader of the dangerous patrols along the native bush
paths that give themselves so readily to ambush. Shot through the spine
and paralysed below the waist his life was only a question of months.
But if he had little time to live, he had determined to see it through
with a gay courage that was wonderful to see. Previously wounded in
France, he yet seemed, though he cannot possibly have been in ignorance,
to be buoyed up with the perfect faith in recovery with which fractured
spines so often are endowed; never asking me awkward questions, he made
it so easy for me to do his daily dressing, so grateful for small
attentions, and so ready to believe me when I told him that it was only
a question of weeks before he would be home again. And in spite of all
fears I have just heard he did get home to see his people, and by his
cheerful courage to rob Death of all his terrors.



MY OPERATING THEATRE AT HANDENI


Up the wide stone steps, under the arch of purple Bougainvillea and you
are in my operating theatre. A curtain of mosquito gauze screens it from
the vulgar gaze. Behind these big wooden doors a week ago was the office
of this erstwhile German jail. To the left and right, now all clean and
white painted, were the living rooms of the German jailor and his wife,
but for the present they are transformed into special wards for severely
wounded men. On the lime-washed wall and very carefully preserved is
"_Gott strafe England_" which the late occupants wrote in charcoal as
they fled. Strange how all German curses come home to roost, and move us
to the ridicule that hurts the Hun so much and so surely penetrates his
pachydermatous hide. That the "Hymn of Hate" should be with us a cause
for jest, and "strafe" be adopted, with enthusiasm, into the English
language, he cannot understand. To him, as often to our own selves, we
shall always be incomprehensible.

Through the gauze screen on to the white operating table passed all the
flotsam of wounded humanity in the summer months. All the human wreckage
that marked the savage bush fighting from German Bridge to Morogoro came
to me upon this table. And its white cleanness, our towels and surgical
gloves and overalls, filled them with a sense of comfort and of safety
after weary and perilous journeys, that was in no way detracted from by
the gleaming instruments laid out beside the table. Even this chamber of
pain was a haven of refuge to these broken men after long jolting rides
over execrable roads.

But a particularist among surgeons would have found much to disapprove
of in this room. Cracks in the stone floor let in migrating bands of red
ants that no disinfectant would drive away. Arrow slit windows, high up
in the walls, gave ingress to the African swallow, redheaded and
red-backed, whose tuneful song was a perpetual delight. His nests
adorned the frieze, but they were full of squeaking youngsters and we
could not shut the parents out. So we banished them during operating
hours by screens of mosquito gauze; and to reward us, they sang to our
bedridden men from ward window-sills.

But despite these shortcomings of the operating theatre itself, we did
good work here, and got splendid results. For God was good, and the
clean soil took pity upon our many deficiencies. Earth, that in France
or Gallipoli hid the germs of gangrene and tetanus, here merely produced
a mild infection. Lucky for us that we did not need to inject the
wounded with tetanus antitoxin. But an added charm was given to our work
by the necessity of improvisation. Broken legs were put up in plaster
casings with metal interruptions, so that the painful limb might be at
rest, and yet the wound be free for daily dressings. The Huns left us
plaster of Paris, damp indeed but still serviceable after drying; the
corrugated iron roofing of the native jail provided us with the
necessary metal. Then by metal hoops the leg was slung from home-made
cradles, and I defy the most modern hospital to show me anything more
comfortable or efficient. Broken thighs were suspended in slings from
poles above the bed, painted the red, white and black that marked German
Government Survey posts. Naturally in a field hospital such as this, we
had no nurses; but our orderlies, torn from mine shafts of Dumfriesshire
and the engine sheds of the North British Railway, did their best, and
compensated by much kindliness for their lack of nursing training.

Sadly in need were we of trained nurses; for the bedsores that developed
in the night were a perpetual terror. Ring pillows we made out of grass
and bandages, but a fractured thigh, as you know, must lie upon his
back, and we had little enough rectified spirit to harden the
complaining flesh. But nurses we could not have at so advanced a post as
this. The saving factor of all our work lay in the natural goodness of
the men. They felt that many things were not right; for ours is a highly
intelligent army and knows more of medicine and surgery than we, in our
blindness, realise. But they made light of their troubles, as they
learnt the difficulties we laboured with. So grateful were they for
small attentions. That we should go out of our way to take pains to
obtain embroidered sheets and lace-edged pillows, absolved us in their
eyes from all the want of surgical nursing. Liberal morphia we had to
give to compensate for nursing defects. I have long felt that I would
rather work for sick soldiers than for any class of humanity; and in
fifteen years I have come to know the sick human animal in all his
forms. So that the least that one could do was to scheme to get the
precious egg by private barter with the natives, and to find the silk
pillow that spelt comfort, but was the anathema of asepsis. No wonder
that such splendid and uncomplaining victims spurred us to our best
endeavours and made of toil a very joy.



SOME AFRICAN DISEASES


This is the season of blackwater fever, the pestilence that stalks in
the noontide and the terror of tropical campaigning. Hitherto with the
exception of the Rhodesians who have had this disease previously in
their northern territory, or men who have come from the Congo or the
shores of the Great Lakes, our army has been fairly free from this dread
visitation. The campaigning area of the coast and the railway line of
British East Africa that gave our men malaria in plenty during the first
two years of war, had not provided many of those focal areas in which
this disease is distributed. The Loyal North Lancashires and the 25th
Royal Fusiliers had been but little affected. The Usambara Valley along
the Tanga-Moschi railway was also fairly free. On the big trek from
Kilimanjaro to Morogoro the blackwater cases were almost entirely
confined to Rhodesians and to the Kashmiris, who suffer in this way in
their native mountains of Nepal. But once we struck the Central Railway
and penetrated south towards the delta of the Rufigi the tale was
different. British and South African troops began to arrive in the grip
of this fell malady. It was written on their faces as they were lifted
from ambulance or mule waggon. There was no need to seek the cause in
the scrap of paper that was the sick report. All who ran could read it
in the blanched lips, the grey-green pallor of their faces, the
jaundiced eye, the hurried breathing. Thereupon came three days'
struggle with Azrael's pale shape before the blackwater gave place to
the natural colour again, or until the secreting mechanism gave up the
contest altogether and the Destroying Angel settled firmly on his prey.
At first, if there was no vomiting, it was easy to ply the hourly drinks
of tea and water and medicine. But once deadly and exhausting vomiting
had begun, one could no longer feed the victim by the mouth. Then came
the keener struggle for life, for fluid was essential and had to be
given by other ways and means. Into the soft folds of the skin of the
arm-pits, breast and flanks we ran in salt solution by the pint. The
veins of the arms we brought into service, that we might pour in this
vitalising fluid. Day and night the fight goes on for three days, until
it is won or lost. Here again, as in tick fever, we use the preparation
606, for which we are indebted to the great Ehrlich. Champagne is a
great stand-by. So well recognised is the latter remedy that all old
hands at tropical travel take with them a case of "bubbly water" for
such occasions as these. Blessed morphia, too, brings ease of vomiting
and is a priceless boon.

You ask me the cause of this disease, and I have to admit that among the
authorities themselves there are no settled convictions. Some hold--and
for my part I am with them--that the attack is caused by quinine given
in too large a dose to a subject who is rotten with malaria. But there
are others who maintain that it is a malarial manifestation only, and
that the big dose of quinine, which seems to some to precipitate the
attack, is only a coincidence. Be that as it may, there is little
difference in the treatment adopted by either school. Death achieves his
victory as frequently with one as with another. Certain it is that, to
the common mind, quinine is the reputed cause and is avoided in large
doses by men who have once had blackwater, or who are in that low rotten
state that predisposes to it. In one point all agree, that one must be
saturated with malaria before blackwater can develop. So great is the
aversion shown by some men to the big doses of quinine as laid down by
regulations, that men have often refused to take their quinine. Others,
too, who have protested at first, take their quinine ration only to find
themselves in the grip of this disease within twelve hours. Such a case
was a Frenchman named Canarie (and the colour of his face, upon
admission, did not belie his name), who had been treated for blackwater
fever by the great Koch in Uganda many years before, and had been warned
by him against big doses of quinine. That evening he was on my hands,
fortunately soon to recover, and to win a prolonged convalescent leave
out of this rain to the sunny and non-malarial slopes of Wynberg.

Seldom do the rumbling ambulances roll in but among their human freight
is some poor wretch snoring into unconsciousness or in the throes of
epileptiform convulsions. Custom has sharpened our clinical instinct,
and where, in civil life, we would look for meningitis, now we only
write cerebral malaria, and search the senseless soldier's pay-book for
the name that we may put upon the "dangerous list." As this name is
flashed 12,000 miles to England, I sometimes wonder what conception of
malaria his anxious relatives can have.

For there is no aspect of brain diseases that cerebral malaria cannot
simulate; deep coma or frantic struggling delirium. A drop of blood from
the lobe of the ear and the microscope reveals the deadly
"crescents"--the form the subtertian parasite assumes in this condition.
No time this for waiting or expectant treatment. Quinine must be given
in huge doses, regardless of the danger of blackwater, and into the
muscles or, dissolved in salt solution, into the veins. The Germans have
left me some fine hollow needles that practice makes easy to pass into
the distended swollen veins. Through this needle large doses of quinine
are injected, and in six hours usually no crescent remains to be seen.
As a rule, conscious life returns to these senseless bodies after some
hours; but, unhappily, such success does not always crown our efforts.
Then it is the padre's turn, and in the cool of the following afternoon
the firing party, with arms reversed, toils behind our sky-pilot to that
graveyard on the sunlit slopes of Mount Uluguru, where our surgical
failures are put to rest.

One can always tell, you know, the onset of such a complication as this;
for when one finds the victim of malaria hazy and stupid after his fever
has abated; and, more especially, if he develops wandering tendencies,
leaving his stretcher at night to choose another bed in the ward, often
to the protesting consternation of its present occupant, then one passes
the word to Sister Elizabeth to get the transfusion apparatus ready. I
shall not readily forget one stout fellow, a white company
sergeant-major in the Gold Coast Regiment, who was lost in the bush and
discovered after many days in the grip of this fell disease. Him they
bore swiftly to me at Handeni, and after many injections and convulsions
innumerable, he was restored to conscious life again. Sent back by me
eventually to Korogwe with a letter advising his invaliding out of the
country, he opened and read my report upon the way. But he was of those
who do not take kindly to invaliding. Who would run his machine-gun
section, if he were away, and his battalion in action? Who like he could
know the language and the little failings of his dusky machine-gun crew
that he had trained so long and so carefully in the Cameroon? So he
appeared in the books of the Stationary Hospital at Korogwe as an
ordinary case of convalescent malaria on his own statement. And when
they would send him still further back to M'buyuni he broke out from
hospital one night, and, with his native orderly, boarded the train to
Railhead and marched the other 200 miles to Morogoro. Here I met him on
the road starting out on the next long trek of 125 miles to Kissaki. For
news had come to him that the Gold Coast Regiment had been in action and
their impetuous courage rewarded by captured enemy guns and a long
casualty list. But he was determined and unrepentant, one of his beloved
machine-guns had been put out of action. How could I hold him back? So
joining forces with another white sergeant of his regiment, who was
hardly recovered from a wound, these two good fellows set out with a
note that, _this_ time, was not to be destroyed, for the instruction of
their regimental doctor.

A third scourge responsible for frequent admissions into hospital is
"tick-fever." Rather an unpleasant name, isn't it? And in its course and
effect it fully acts up to its reputation. More commonly known as
"relapsing fever," this illness attacks men who have been sleeping on
the floor of native huts, which in this country are swarming with these
parasites. Once in seven days for five or seven weeks these men burn
with high fever--higher and more violent even than malaria--but sooner
over. As you may imagine, it leaves them very debilitated; for no sooner
does the victim recover from one attack than another is due. The ticks
that are the host of the spirillum, the actual cause of the disease,
live in the soft earth on the floor of native huts at the junction of
the vertical cane rods and the soil. Here, by scraping, you may discover
hundreds of these loathsome beasts in every foot of wall. But they are
fortunately different from the grass ticks that, though unpleasant, are
not dangerous to man. For the tick that carries the spirillum is blind
and cannot climb any smooth surface. So to one sleeping on a bed or even
a native "machela" above the ground, he is harmless. But woe betide the
tired soldier who attempts to escape the tropical rain by taking refuge
on the floor. In sleep he is attacked, and when his blind assailant is
full of blood he drops off; so the soldier may never know that he has
been bitten. I got twelve cases alone from one company of the
Rhodesians, who sheltered in a native village near Kissaki. Of course,
not every tick is infected, and for that we have to be very grateful. At
the height of the fever the spirillum appears in the blood as an
attenuated, worm-like creature, actively struggling and squirming among
the blood corpuscles. A drop of blood taken from the ear shows hundreds
of these young snakes beneath the microscope. For the cure we are again
indebted to that excellent Hun bacteriologist Ehrlich, who gave us
.606--a strong arsenical preparation that we dissolve in a pint of salt
solution, and inject into the veins at the height of the paroxysm of
fever. This definitely destroys the spirillum, and no further attacks of
fever result; but this injection, once its work is done, does not confer
immunity from other attacks. It is typical of the Hun and his
anti-Semitic feelings that Ehrlich, the most distinguished of German
scientists, perhaps, after Koch, has never received the due reward of
all the distinction he has conferred on German medicine, for the offence
that he was a Jew. We should have honoured him, as we have done Jenner
or Lister.

Relapsing, or _Rückfall_ fever, as the Germans call it, was one of the
common dodges used by them to deceive the ingenuous British doctor. For
the subtle Hun prisoner knew that, if he pretended to this disease, it
would win him at least a week in the grateful comfort of a hospital, and
perchance the ministering joys conferred by German nursing sisters,
until the expected relapse did not occur; then the British doctor,
realising the extent of his deception, would thrust these shameless
malingerers to the cold comfort of the prison camp.

How is it, you might ask me, that there are any natives left, if
tropical Africa is so full of such beastly diseases as this? Is it that
the native is naturally immune, or is it that the white man is of such a
precious quality that he alone is attacked by these parasites and
poisonous biting flies? The fact is that the native is affected also,
and in childhood chiefly, so that the infant mortality in many native
tribes is very high. And there is little doubt that repeated attacks of
malaria in youth, if recovered from, do confer a kind of protection
against attacks in adult life. But this is not the case with newly
introduced disease; for the sleeping sickness that came to Uganda along
the caravan routes from the Congo, has swept away fully a million of the
natives along the shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza.

But the native has a sure sense of the unhealthiness of any locality,
and one must be prepared for trouble when one notices that the native
villages are built up on the hillsides. This was specially remarked by
us on our long trek down the Pangani, and thus we were warned of the
fever that lurked in the bright green lush meadows beside the water, and
the "fly" that soon overtook our transport mules and cattle and the
horses of General Brits' 2nd Mounted Brigade. At first we thought the
columns of smoke along the mountain-sides beside the Pangani were signal
fires for the enemy; but before long, when the roads were choked with
victims of "fly" and horse-sickness, we realised the wisdom that induced
the simple native to take his sheep and cattle up the hillsides and
above the danger zone. When one spends only a short time in some native
huts, it is quite clear how he escapes infection. For the floor is
covered with a layer of wood ashes that is usually deadly to bugs and
fleas and ticks and other crawling beasts; and the atmosphere is so full
of wood smoke that the most enterprising mosquito or tsetse-fly would
flee, as we do, choking from the acrid smoke. So the native fire that
burns within his hut day and night not only serves to cook his food and
to keep wild beasts away, but also supplies him with an excellent form
of Keating's Powder for the floor and smoke to drive the winged insects
from the grateful warmth of his fireside.



HORSE-SICKNESS


Lying beside the road with outstretched neck and a spume of white froth
on nose and muzzle are the horses of the 2nd Mounted Brigade; with
bodies swollen by the decomposition that sets in so rapidly in this sun,
and smelling to high heaven, are the fine young horses that came so
gallantly through Kahe some ten days ago. "Brits' violets" the Tommies
call them, as they seek a site to windward to pitch their tents.
"Hyacinths" they mutter, as the wind changes in the night, and drives
them choking from their blankets, illustrating the truth of the South
African "Kopje-Book" maxim, "One horse suffices to move a camp--if he be
dead enough." For weeks after the Brigade passed through M'Kalamo the
air was full of stench, and the bush at night alive with lions coming
for the feast. For this is horse-sickness, the plague that strikes an
apparently healthy horse dead in his tracks, while the Boer trooper
hastily removes bridle and saddle and picks another horse from the drove
of remounts that follow after. No time to drag the body off the road; so
the huge motor lorries choose another track in the bush to avoid this
unwholesome obstruction.

Horse-sickness takes ten short days to develop after infection, and the
organism is so tiny that it passes through the finest filter and is
ultramicroscopic. That means that it is too small to be recognised by
the high power of an ordinary microscope. There was horse-sickness in
the bush meadows beside the river near Kahe. Careless troopers watered
their horses, after sundown, when the dew was on the grass and death
lurked in the evening moisture where it had been absent in the dry heat
of the afternoon.



THE WOUNDED FROM KISSAKI


Two very busy days were before us when the wounded came in from Kissaki,
so badly shaken and so pale and wan after their journey. They had been
cared for by the Field Ambulance before I got them, and by the
extraordinary excellence of the surgery paid the greatest of tributes to
the care of the surgeons in front. The German hospital there, half
finished--for our advance had been far ahead of German calculations--
fell into our hands and with it a German doctor and some nurses. The
nurses had been very kind to our men and worked well for our doctors,
but they had followed the usual German custom in this country, of being
too liberal with morphia. That this drug can become a curse is well
known, though it is, when given in reason, the greatest blessing, the
most priceless boon of war. One feels perhaps that the sisters had given
it without the surgeon's knowledge, and not entirely to give ease from
pain, but also perhaps to give rest to the ward, the quiet that would
allow these over-worked women to get some sleep themselves. It was
written on the faces of the three amputation cases that they had had too
much morphia. And as this drug robs men of their appetite, keeps them
thin, and prevents their wounds from healing, it became my unpleasant
task to break them of it. This was only to be done by hardening one's
heart, by giving bromide and stout, and insisting on the egg and milk
that interspaced all meals. It is so easy to get a reputation for
kindness by being too complacent in giving way to requests for morphia.
It made one feel such an absolute brute to disregard the wistful
pleading eye, the hands that tugged at the mosquito curtains to show
they were awake, when, late at night, I made my evening round. But it
had to be done, and I fear the work and the sun and the tropics made
one's temper very short, particularly when it was only possible by
losing one's temper to preserve the indifference to these influences
that was necessary to complete the cure. It was very hard on them at the
time, especially as they were rotten with malaria and tick fever, in
addition to their wounds. But there were other ways in which one made it
up to them, if they did but know it. Nor did they see that quinine given
by the veins, so much more trouble to me and to the sister, was better
for them than the quinine tablet that was so easily swallowed, and so
ineffectual. Nor could they, one thought, always know that 606 had to be
given for tick fever, and that it was of no value save when given at the
height of fever, when they felt so miserable and so disinclined to be
disturbed.

There was Shelley, the Irishman, a big policeman from Johannesburg,
badly wounded in the thigh. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans
and remained so for three days, until our next advance found him
installed in the German hospital. His wound was so bad that amputation
alone was left to do. When the worst of the dressings was over and the
stage of daily change of gauze and bandage had arrived, he always liked
Sister Elizabeth to do his dressings. Sister's hands were much more
gentle than mine, and Shelley always associated me with pain, little
knowing that, if a dressing is to be well and properly done, it is
always inseparable from a certain amount of suffering. But I saw through
his blarney, and he was added to the list of those who preferred
sister's hands to my attentions.

And there was Rose, a mere lad, who had also lost a leg from wounds; he
lay awake at night, though not in great pain, during the process of
breaking him of the morphia habit. When I pretended not to hear his
little moan, as I made my evening round, he tugged at his mosquito
curtain to show that he was awake. But asperin and bromide and a nightly
drink of hot brandy and water soon broke off this habit. After that it
was easy to cut off the alcohol by degrees as he grew to like his eggs
in milk the more. He, too, always had some reason why Sister should do
his dressings, and I think that Sister Elizabeth and he plotted together
that I should have some other more important job to do when Rose's turn
came to go upon the table.

Then there was Parsons, the printer, who in times of peace produced the
_Rand Daily Mail_; he had also lost a leg and he surprised me with his
special knowledge of the various qualities of paper.

In the corner of the verandah that had been turned into an extra ward by
screening it off with native reed-fencing was Gilfillan, the most
perfect patient. Propping his foot against the wall to correct the
foot-drop that division of the nerve of his leg had caused, he had
passed many sleepless nights in his long and wearisome convalescence.

Beside the door, beckoning to me in a mysterious manner, was Drury, a
trooper in the South African Horse. In his eyes a suspicious light, as
he earnestly requested to be moved. "For God's sake take me away,
they're trying to poison my food; and those Germans over there are going
to shoot me to-night." This poor lad had been shot badly through the
shoulder, and only by the skill of Moffat, the surgeon from Cape Town,
had he retained what was left of his shattered arm. Now malaria, in
addition, had him in its grip, and his mental condition told me plainly
that his brain was being affected. With the greatest difficulty Sister
Elizabeth and I persuaded him to undergo the quinine transfusion into
his veins that restored him to sober sense the next day. "I really did
think those two German prisoners were going to shoot me," he said. But
the two prisoners in his ward were more afraid of him than he of them,
and their broken legs, for they had got in the way of one of our
machine-guns, precluded any movement from their beds. Our men were
extraordinarily kind to German prisoners in the ward. The Boers were
different; they were never unkind, but they ignored them completely, for
the Union of South Africa had too much to forgive in the Rebellion and
in German South-West Africa. "Now then, Fritz, there ain't no bleeding
sausage for you this morning;" and Fritz, smilingly obedient, stretched
out his hand for the cold bacon that was his breakfast. Toward the end
Sister Hildegarde was just as kind to our men as she was to her own
people, and she was highly indignant with me when I stopped the night
orderly from waking her, early one morning, when I had to transfuse a
blackwater case with salt solution. She thought, she who had had quite
enough to do the day before, that I did not call her because I thought
she did not want to get up. She felt that I was tacitly drawing a
distinction between her conduct of that morning and the self-denial of
the other night, when she and Elizabeth sat up all night and day with a
German soldier who had perforated his intestines during an attack of
typhoid fever. I had operated upon him to close the hole the typhoid
ulcer had made. The German doctor, to whom we had given his liberty, in
order that he might attend the civil population, and whom I had called
in consultation over the case, had disagreed with our diagnosis. But I
had overruled him, and at the operation was glad to be able to show him
and the German sisters that our diagnosis was right, and that I was not
operating on him just because he happened to be a prisoner of war. The
German sisters were grateful to us for getting up at night and in the
early morning to give him the salt solution that might save his life,
and they repaid it in the only way they could, by kindness to our men.
But in any case they could not help liking our sick soldiers, and many
is the time that they have been indignant with me for deficiencies in
food and equipment which I could not help. "Our German soldiers would
have complained until their cries reached Lettow himself," they said,
"if they had to put up with what you make your soldiers endure."

And if, at first, Hildegarde, of the sour and disapproving face, did
little irregular things for wounded German soldiers, faked temperature
charts, prepared little forbidden meals at night, and in other ways
pretended to a degree of illness in her German soldiers that my clinical
eye refused to see, I could not altogether blame her. When I remembered
the treatment that I saw our sick and wounded prisoners in Germany get
from the Hun doctor, I was often furious, and determined to do a bit of
"strafing" on my own. But I could not forget that the French and Belgian
nurses did just the same for our wounded in German hands, adding
bandages to unwounded limbs, describing to the German doctor our
sleepless nights of pain when the walls of that French convent had
echoed only to our snores, preparing delicious feasts, at night, for us
to compensate for German rations, and in many ways contriving to keep us
longer in their hands and to postpone the journey that would land us in
the vileness of a German prison hospital. Hildegarde had her troubles
too, for she had not heard for two years of her lover in Germany, whose
mild and bespectacled face peered from a photograph in her room. He did
not look to be made of heroic mould, but who can tell? Long ago he may
have bitten the dust of Flanders or found another sweetheart to console
him. And the native hospital boys, swift to recognise the changes of war
and the comparative leniency of British discipline, got out of hand and
failed to clean and scrub as they did in former days. Then I would
inquire and uphold Hildegarde, and the recalcitrant Mahomed would be
marched off to receive fifteen of the best from the Provost Sergeant.



MY OPERATING THEATRE IN MOROGORO


"Jambo bwona," and the sycophantic Ali would leap to his feet and raise
the dirty red fez that adorned his head. "Jambo," said Nazoro, the
senior boy, standing to attention. For Nazoro was a Wanyamwezi from Lake
Tanganyika and disdained any of Ali's dodges to conciliate me. Graceful
as a deer was Nazoro, and a good Askari lost in a better operating-room
boy. This was my morning greeting as I peeped in before breakfast to see
that the operating theatre was swept and garnished for the day's work.
"Good morning," said Elizabeth, looking up from the steriliser where she
was preparing instruments for the morning operations.

Educated partly in England and speaking the language perfectly, she
hated us only a little less than the other Germans. But she was good at
her job and conscientious, and a very great help to us. Always as
cheerful as one could expect a woman to be who worked for the English
soldiers and dressed the wounds of men to fit them to return to the
field to fight against her people again. Who knows that the tall
Rhodesian, from whose feet she so skilfully removed the "jiggers" and
cleansed the wounds of a long trek, would not, all the sooner for her
care, perhaps be drawing a bead upon her husband in the near future?
Very proud was Elizabeth of her husband's Iron Cross that the Kaiser had
sent by wireless only last week; news of which was told to her by a
wounded prisoner just brought in. For her husband, who, to judge from
his wife's description, must have been quite a good fellow for a Hun,
was in command of one of the "Schutzen" companies down near the Rufigi.
He, too, had lived long in England to learn the ways of English shipping
companies that would prove of such value to the Deutsch Ost-Afrika Line.
So jubilant was she at the news that I had to give her a half-holiday to
recover; twice only in the four months we worked together was Elizabeth
as happy: once when she got a letter, by the infinite kindness of
General Smuts, from her husband, and another time when a letter came
from Switzerland to tell her of her baby in Hamburg, her mother, and the
two brothers that were in the cavalry in the advance into Russia. At
first, I must confess, I thought that this charming and intelligent lady
had offered to work for us, especially as she refused our pay, in order
to get information of the regiments and the prevailing diseases and sick
rate of our army. Soon I had reason to know that she played the game,
and stayed only in order to work to help the prisoners of her own
people, and our wounded too. For any day her husband might want help
from us or might be brought in wounded to our hospital, where she could
nurse and tend to him herself. Our men liked to be attended by her, for
she was gentler far than I and never short-tempered with them.

Nazoro we found in chains on our arrival for the offence of having
attacked a German, and only his usefulness in the operating theatre
saved him from the prison. In spite of the disapproval of Elizabeth and
other Germans, I struck off the chains, feeling that he very probably
had good excuse for his offence. But the Germans never failed to point
out what a dangerous man he was. Once indeed he was slack and casual, so
I promptly ordered him to be "kibokoed," and thereafter I could find no
fault in his work and behaviour. Possessed of three wives, for he was
passing rich on sixteen rupees a month, he asked one day for leave to
celebrate the arrival of his first son. This I granted, only to be
assailed a fortnight later by requests for leave to attend his
grandmother's funeral, and to see a sick friend. But these had a
familiar ring about them, and were not successful in procuring the lazy
day that is so beloved by African humanity.

But Ali was of a different mould; small and slight and anxious to
please, he was nevertheless swift to leave his work when once my back
was turned. Forsaken in love--for he had been deserted by his wife--he
had forsworn the sex and buried his sorrows in "Pombe," the Kaffir beer
that effectually deprived him of what little intelligence he had. He was
a "fundi" at taking out jiggers, and sat for hours at the feet of our
foot-soldiers; quickly adopting an air of authority that occasionally
brought him swift blows from East African troopers, who do not tolerate
easily such airs in a native, he produced the unbroken jigger flea with
unfailing regularity and prescribed the pail of disinfectant in which
the tortured feet were soaked. Another long suit of his was the bandage
machine, and the hours he could steal away from real work were spent in
endless windings of washed though much stained bandages.

The German women hated us far more even than did the men; nor did those
who, like Elizabeth, knew England, fail to believe any the less the
German stories of English wickedness. When I told her of Portugal's
entry into the war, and how our ancient and hereditary ally had handed
over to England sixty out of the seventy-one German ships she had taken
in her ports, Elizabeth snorted with rage and said that England, of
course, forced all the little nations to fight against Germany.

One of my friends, and not the least welcome, was Corporal Nel. A Boer,
he had come up from the Union with Brits. Tiring of war, he chose the
nobler part played by the guard that cherishes German captured cattle.
Swiftly losing his job owing to an outbreak of East Coast fever among
his herd, he took to a vagabond's life. Wanted by the police in the
Union, I am told, he avoided his regiment and lived with the natives.
Forced to come to me one night with an attack of angina pectoris, he was
grateful for the ease from suffering that amyl-nitrite, morphia and
brandy gave in that exquisitely painful affliction. Accordingly he
consented to organise some natives who should be armed with passes
signed by me, and illuminated with Red Crosses and other impressive
signs, and collect eggs and chickens and fruit for my patients in
hospital. So impressed were the natives with the Ju-Ju conferred by my
illumination of these passes with coloured chalks, that they brought me
a daily and most welcome supply of these necessaries for our men. But
the arm of the Law is long, and it sought out Corporal Nel within the
native hut in which he made his home. And soon, to my sorrow and the
infinite grief of our lambs in hospital, for whom those eggs, chickens,
mangoes, and bananas spelt so much in the way of change of food, the
Provost Sergeant had this wanderer in his chitches.



THE GERMAN IN PEACE AND WAR


"What do I think of this country, and how does the Hun of East Africa
compare with his European brother?" you ask me. Well, to begin with the
Colony, as of the greater importance, I must confess to be very taken
with it, and I hope most sincerely that our Government will never give
it back. Though it is not so suited as British East Africa for European
colonisation, there are yet great areas of sufficient elevation to allow
of white women and children living, for years, without suffering much
from the vertical sun and the fevers of the country. There are many
places where one only sees a mosquito for three months of the year, the
soil is very fertile, and labour not only willing and efficient, but
also very cheap. The European, too, has learnt to live properly in this
country, and to avoid the midday sun; all offices and works are closed
from twelve to three. If only man would learn wisdom in the amount of
beer he drinks, and the food he eats, the tale of disease would be much
less.

The colony is fully developed with excellent railways, well-built
houses, a tractable and well-disciplined native population.
Dar-es-Salaam in particular, seems to have been the apple of the German
colonial eye. There are fine mission stations in all the healthy regions
of the country, and great plantations of rubber, sisal, cotton, and corn
abound. The white women and children, though rather pasty and washed out
after at least two years' residence in the country, do not appear
debilitated after their long tropical sojourn. The planters have, as a
rule, invested all their belongings in their plantations, and make the
country more a home than our people in East Africa, who are of a more
wealthy and leisured class. Roads have been made and bridges built. In
fact, the pioneering and donkey work has all been done, and the country
only waits for us to step into our new inheritance.

To me it has been a source of surprise that the German, who consistently
drinks beer in huge quantities, takes little or no exercise, and
cohabits with the black women of the country extensively, should have
performed such prodigies of endurance on trek in this campaign. One
would have thought that the Englishman, who keeps his body fitter for
games, eschews beer for his liver's sake, and finds that intimacy with
the native population lowers his prestige, would have done far better in
this war than the German. That in all fairness he has not done so is due
to the fact that we, as an invading army, were unable to look after
ourselves or to care for ourselves in the same way as the German.

We have had to carry kit and heavy ammunition, to sleep with only a
ground sheet beneath us, through the tropic rains, to do without the
shelter and protection of mosquito nets. The German soldier, even a
private in a white or Schutzen Kompanie, as distinct from the
under-officer with an Askari regiment or Feld Kompanie, as it is called,
has had at least eight porters to carry all his kit, his food, his bed,
to have his food ready prepared at the halting-places, and his bed
erected, and mosquito curtains hung. Only on night patrols has he run
risk from the mosquito. "How can you ask your men to carry loads and
then fight as well, in Equatorial Africa?" they say to us. His captured
chop boxes, for each individual is a separate unit and has his own food
carried and prepared for him, have provided us, often, with the only
square meals our men have enjoyed. Never short of food or drink or
porters, ever marching toward his food supplies along a predetermined
line of retreat, the German walks toward his dinner, as our men have
marched away from theirs. Well paid too, five rupees a day pay and three
rupees a day ration money, he had had no stint of eggs and chickens and
the fruit of the country, that have been rarest of luxuries to us. "Far
better if you had had fewer men and done them properly in the matter of
food and hospitals and porters," captured German officers have often
said to me. "How your men can stand it and do such marches is incredible
to us." That is always the tenour of their remarks, their criticism, and
they are clearly right, had such a policy been a practicable one for us,
which it was not. At first the feeling between the soldiers of the two
countries was good and war was conducted, even by them, in a more or
less chivalrous manner. We thought the East African Hun a better fellow
than his European brother. But it was only because he knew the game was
up in East Africa, and thought that he had better behave properly, lest
the retribution, that would be sure to follow, would fall heavily upon
him. Later we found him to be the same old Hun, the identical savage
that we know in Europe; the fear of consequences only restrains him
here. It is his nature and the teaching of his schools and professors.

We have often been amazed at the disclosures from German officers'
pocket-books. In the same oiled silk wrapping we find photographs of his
wife and children, and cheek by jowl with them, the photographs of
abandoned women and filthy pictures, such as can be bought in low
quarters of big European cities. Their absence of taste in these matters
has been incomprehensible to us. When we have taxed them with it, they
are unashamed. "It is you who are hypocrites," they reply; "you like
looking at forbidden pictures, if no one is about to see, but you don't
carry them in your pocket-books. We, however, are natural, we like to
look at such things, why should we not carry them with us?" If this be
hypocrisy, I prefer the company of hypocrites. In their houses it was
the same; disgusting pictures, masquerading in the guise of art, adorned
the walls, evidences of corrupt taste and doubtful practices in every
drawer and cupboard. Even the Commandant of Bukoba, von Stuemer, and his
name did not belie his nature, though, before the war, quite popular
with the British officials and planters of Uganda, had a queer taste in
photography. In the big family album were evidences of his astonishing
domestic life; for there were photographs of him in full regimentals,
with medals and decorations, sitting on a sofa beside his wife, who was
in a state of nature. Others portrayed him without the conventionalities
of clothing, and his wife in evening dress.

Officers from the Cameroon have confirmed the filthy habits of the Huns
and Hunnesses, how they defiled the rooms in the hospital at Duala that
they occupied just before they were sent away; how disgusting were their
habits in the cabins of the fine Atlantic liner that took them back to
Europe. Not that it is their normal custom; it was merely to render the
rooms uninhabitable for us who were to follow, and their special way of
showing contempt and hatred for their foes. Do you wonder that the
stewards and crew of the Union Castle liner struck work rather than
convey and look after these beasts on the voyage to Europe? Our French
missionary padre tells me that it was just the same in Alsace. The
incident at Zabern after the manoeuvres was entirely due to the disgust
and indignation of the French people at the defiling of their beds and
bedrooms by the German soldiers, who had been billeted upon them.



LOOTING


Looting, although you may not know it, is the natural impulse of
primitive man. And in war we are very primitive. To take what does not
belong to one is very natural when a man is persuaded that he can be
absolved from the charge of theft by quoting military necessity. How
surely in war one sheds the conventions of society! It has the
attraction of buried treasure; the charm of getting something for
nothing. But there are different ways or degrees of looting.

Now there were a few of us in German East Africa who had been in the
Retreat from Mons and the subsequent advance to the Marne and beyond it
to the Aisne. Indelibly engraved upon our minds were the pictures of
French chateaux and farmhouses looted by the German troops in their
advance and abandoned to us in their retreat. All along the countless
roads the German transport had pressed, hurrying to the Aisne, were
evidences of the loot of German officers and men. In roadside ditches,
half buried in the late summer vegetation, were pictures and bronzes,
china and statuary, the loot the German officer had chosen to adorn the
walls of his ancestral Schloss. Marble figures leant drunkenly against
the wayside hedges, big brass clocks strewed the ditches. Long before,
of course, had the German rank and file been compelled to jettison their
prizes, for the transport horses were nearly foundered and only
officers' loot could be retained. Later, when the exhaustion of the
horses was complete, and capture of the waggons seemed imminent, the
regimental equipment and food supply, and, finally, the loot of high
officers had to be abandoned. The whole story of that retreat was to be
read in the discard by the roadside. The regimental butcher had clung to
his meat and the implements of his trade until the last; and when we
found the roads littered with carcases of oxen, sacks of pea flour and
sausage machines, we knew that we would shortly find the General's loot
beside the hedge.

In the houses, too, both the chateaux and the comfortable French
farmhouses, we saw what manner of man the Hun could be in the matter of
looting. Where the soldier could not loot he could not refrain from
destroying. Floors were knee-deep in women's gear, household goods,
private letters and all the treasures of French linen chests. Trampled
by muddy German boots were the fine whiteness of French bed-linen. Nor
had the German soldier refrained from the last exhibit of his
"_Kultur_," but left filthy evidences of his bestial habits behind him
to ensure that the bedrooms would be uninhabitable by us.

Remembering all these things we wondered how our men would behave now
that the tables were turned and they in a position to loot the treasures
of many German farms and plantation houses. Of course, divisional orders
against looting and wanton destruction were very strict. Where houses
were at the mercy of small patrols and bodies of our men under
non-commissioned officers, far from the path of the main advancing army,
the temptation to all must have been immense, and it speaks volumes for
the natural goodness of our men and their ingrained sense of order that
never in this whole country was looting done by any of our troops. True
many houses were plundered, and there was a certain amount of wanton
damage; but it was all done by the plundering native or by the Hun
himself in his retreat.

For our calculating enemy left no stone unturned to deprive us of any of
the useful booty of war. He deliberately destroyed and ravaged and burnt
the property of his fellow-countrymen, and mentally determined to send
in the claim for damage against us. A German will always complain and
send in a bill of costs to us, when he is once assured of the protection
of British troops.

Naturally, of course, we requisitioned and gave receipts for any article
or property that might be of use to us for our hospitals or our
supplies. In fact, our scrupulous regard for enemy property will
probably result in very many fraudulent claims against our Government
when the war is over. How easy to add mythical articles of great value
to the list attested to by the signature of a British Staff officer. Who
could blame a Hun when the British were such fools and forgery of
receipts so easy?

But such was the regard we paid to German women and children that, if a
house were occupied, we took nothing and disturbed nothing. A German
farmhouse was an oasis of plenty amid a very hungry army. It made us
sometimes wonder whether it was quite right to leave German ducks and
fowls and sheep behind us, when we had to live on mealie meal and tough
trek-ox. But the women were so terrified, at first, that we gave such
farms a wide berth when scarcity of water did not force us to camp
within the enclosures. Shortly, however, as is the German custom, these
women would profit by their immunity and come to regimental headquarters
that listened so patiently and courteously to the tale of pawpaws or
mangoes--fruit that was really wild--vanished in the night. In no
campaign, I dare swear, has so much respect been given to occupied
houses, so much consideration to conquered people. The German Government
paid this compliment to our army, that they left their women and
children behind to our tender mercies.

At Handeni, ours being a Casualty Clearing Station, our equipment
included 200 stretchers, with little hospital equipment, beyond the
men's own blankets and their kit. No sooner did we come along and
install ourselves in the abandoned German fort than the 5th South
African Infantry were in action at Kangata to win 125 casualties. For us
they were to nurse and keep until convalescent; for there was no
stationary hospital behind us, and forty miles of the worst of bad roads
robbed us of the chance of transporting them to the railway.

So every afternoon I went to German planters' houses (empty, of course),
for forty miles around, in a swift Ford car. And back in triumph we bore
bedsteads and soft mattresses that heavy German bodies so lately had
impressed. Warm from the Hun, we brought them to our wounded. Down
pillows, soft eiderdown quilts for painful broken legs; mattresses for
pain-racked bodies. And one's reward the pleasure and appreciation our
men showed at these attempts to ameliorate _their_ lot. They were so
"bucked" to see us coming back at night laden with the treasures of
German linen chests. It would have done your heart good to see their
dirty, unwashed faces grinning at me from lace-edged pillows.
Silk-covered cushions from Hun drawing-rooms for painful amputation
stumps!

So I had the double pleasure, all the expectancy and the delight of
seeing our men so pleased. Forty bedsteads and beds complete we found in
that district, until the bare white-washed walls of the jail were
transformed. White paint, too, we discovered in plenty, and soon our
wards were virginal in their whiteness. And when I tell you that at one
time I had no less than thirteen gunshot fractures of thigh and leg
alone and other wounds in proportion, in the hospital, you may judge how
necessary beds were.

But the natives had nearly always been before us, and the confusion was
indescribable, drawers turned out, the contents strewed upon the floors,
cupboards broken into, and all portable articles removed. Pathetic
traces everywhere of the happy family life before war's devastating
fingers rifled all their treasures. Photographs, private letters, a
doll's house, children's broken toys.

And from some letters one gathered that insight into the relations
between the plantation owner and the manager who lived there. At one
farm, apparently owned by an Englishman who paid his manager, a German
Dane from Flensburg, the princely sum of 200 rupees a month, we found
that one, at least, of our own people knew how to grind the uttermost
labour from his German employee. For there were letters from the manager
asking for leave after 2 ½ years' labour at this plantation, and
pointing out that the German Government had laid down the principle of
European leave every two years. To this came the cold reply that his
employer cared nothing for German Government regulations; the contract
was for three years, and he would see to it that this provision was
carried out. One later letter begged for financial assistance to tide
him over the coming months; for his wife and children had been ill and
he himself in hospital at Korogwe with blackwater fever for two months.
"And how shall I pay for food the next two months, if my pay is 200
rupees only, and hospital expenses 500?"



SHERRY AND BITTERS


A common inquiry put to doctors is, "What do you think of the alcohol
question in a tropical campaign?" Do we not think that it is a good
thing that our army is, by force of circumstances, a teetotal one? Much
as we regret to depart from an attitude that is on the whole hostile to
alcohol, I must say that it is our conviction that in the tropics a
certain amount of diffusible stimulant is very beneficial and quite free
from harm. And the cheapest and most reliable stimulant of that nature
one can obtain commercially is, of course, whiskey. This whole campaign
has been almost entirely a teetotal one for reasons of transport and
inability to get drink. Not for any other reason, I can assure you. But
where the absence of alcohol has been no doubt responsible for a
wonderful degree of excellent behaviour among our troops, I yet know
that the few who were able to get a drink at night felt all the better
for it. At the end of the day here, when the sun has set and darkness,
swiftly falling, sends us to our tents and bivouacs, there comes a
feeling of intense exhaustion, especially if any exercise has been
taken. And exercise in some form, as you have heard, is absolutely
essential to health after the sun has descended toward the west about
four o'clock in the afternoon. For men and officers go sick in standing
camp more than on trek, and, often, the more and the longer the men are
left in camp to rest, with the intention of recuperation, the more they
go down with malaria and dysentery.

It is no sudden conclusion we have come to as to the value of alcohol,
but we certainly feel that a drink or two at night does no one any harm.
But the drink for tropics must not be fermented liquor: beer and wine
are headachy and livery things. Whisky and particularly vermouth are far
the best. And vermouth is really such a pleasant wholesome drink too.
The idea of vermouth alone is attractive. For it is made from the dried
flowers of camomile to which the later pressings of the grape have been
added. One has only to smell dried camomile flowers to find that their
fragrance is that of hay meadows in an English June! Camomile
preparations, too, are now so largely used in medicine and still keep
their reputation for wholesome and soothing qualities that it has
enjoyed for generations. How could one think that harm could lurk in the
tincture of such fragrant things as the flowers of English meadows? No
little reputation as a cure and preventive for blackwater fever does
vermouth enjoy! We know that we must always, if we would be wise, be
guided by local experience and local custom, and it is told of the
Anglo-German boundary Commission in East Africa, that the frontier
between the two protectorates can still be traced by the empty vermouth
bottles! But there were no cases of blackwater. I am told, on that very
long and trying expedition.

In the survey of the whole question of Prohibition in the future, the
essential difference of the requirements of humanity in tropical
countries must be taken into consideration. There is no doubt, and in
this all medical men of long tropical experience will agree, that some
stimulant is needed by blond humanity living out of his geographical
environment and debilitated by the adverse influence of his lack of
pigment, the vertical sun and a tropical heat. It is more than probable
that a proviso will have to be added to any world-wide scheme of
prohibition. The cocktail, the universal "sherry and bitters" and
"sundowner" will have to be retained. To expect a man, so exhausted that
the very idea of food is distasteful, to digest his dinner, is to ask
too much of one's digestive apparatus. And this we must all admit, that
if a man in the tropics does not eat, then certainty he may not live.



NATIVE PORTERS


Toiling behind the column on march is the long and ragged line of native
porters, the human cattle that are, after all, the most reliable form of
transport in Equatorial Africa. Clad in red blankets or loin cloths or
in kilts made of reeds and straw, they struggle on singing through the
heat. Grass rings temper the weight of the loads to their heads, each
man carrying his forty pounds for the regulation ten miles, the
prescribed day's march in the tropics. Winding snake-like along the
native paths, they go chanting a weird refrain that keeps their interest
and makes the miles slip by. Here are some low-browed and primitive
porters from the mountains, "Shenzies," as the superior Swahili call
them, and clad only in the native kilt of grass or reeds. Good porters
these, though ugly in form, and lacking the grace of the Wanyamwezi or
the Wahehe.

At night they drop their loads beside the water-holes that mark the
stages in the long march, and seek the nearest derelict ox or horse and
prepare their meals, with relish, from the still warm entrails. This,
with their "pocha," the allowance of mealie meal or mahoga, keeps them
fat, their stomachs distended, bodies shiny and spirits of the highest.
Round their camp fires they chatter far into the night, relieved, by the
number of the troops and the plentiful supply of dead horses in the
bush, from the ever-present fear of the lion that, in other days, would
lift them at night, yelling, from their dying fires. One wonders that
their spirits are so high, for they would get short shrift and little
mercy from German raiding parties behind our advance. For the porter is
fan-game, and is as liable to destruction as any other means of
transport. Nor would the Germans hesitate a moment to kill them as they
would our horses. But the bush is the porters' safeguard, and at the
first scattering volley of the raiding party, they drop their loads and
plunge into the undergrowth. Later, when we have driven off the raiders,
it is often most difficult to collect the porters again. Naturally the
British attitude to the porter _genus_ differs from that of the Hun. Our
aim, indeed, is to break up an enemy convoy, but we seek to capture the
hostile porters that we may use them in our turn, all the more welcome
to us for the increased usefulness that German porter discipline has
given them.

Porters are the sole means of transport of the German armies; to these
latter are denied the mule transport and the motor lorries that eat up
the miles when roads are good. So they take infinite pains to train
their beasts of burden. Often they are chained together in little groups
to prevent them discarding their loads and plunging into the jungle when
our pursuit draws near. The German knows the value of song to help the
weary miles to pass, and makes the porters chant the songs and choruses
dear to the native heart. Increasingly important these carriers become
as the rains draw near, and the time approaches when no wheels can move
in the soft wet cotton soil of the roads. Nor are the porters altogether
easy to deal with. Very delicate they often are when moved from their
own district and deprived of their accustomed food. Dysentery plays
havoc in their ranks. For the banana-eating Baganda find the rough grain
flour much too coarse and irritating for their stomachs. So our great
endeavour is to get the greatest supply of local labour. Strange to say,
it is here that our misplaced leniency to the German meets its due
reward.

It is not easy to tell the combatant, unless he be caught red-handed.
They all wear khaki, the only difference being that a civilian wears
pearl buttons, the soldiers the metal military button with the Imperial
Crown stamped on it. When it is borne in mind that the buttons are
hooked on, one can imagine how simple it is to transform and change
identity. Nor are the helmets different in any way, save that a
soldier's bears the coloured button in the front; but as this also
unscrews, the recognition is still more difficult.

With these people, it has been our habit to send them back to their
alleged civil occupations after extracting an undertaking that they will
take no further active or passive part in the war. But, to our surprise,
when we sought for labour or supplies in their country districts, we
found that we could obtain neither. Upon inquiry of the natives we learn
that our late prisoners are conducting a campaign of intimidation.
"Soon--in a year--we shall all return, and the English will be driven
out. If you labour or sell eggs, woe betide you in the day of
reckoning." What can the native do? As they say to us, "We see the
Germans returning to their farms just as they were before; the
missionaries installed in their mission stations again. What are we to
believe?"



THE PADRE AND HIS JOB


How often, in this war, has not one pitied the Army Chaplain! As a
visitor to hospital, as a dispenser of charity, as the bearer of
hospital comforts and gifts to sick men, as an indefatigable organiser
of concerts, as the cheerful friend of lonely men, he is doing a real
good work. But that is not his job, it is not what he came out to do.

And the padre, willing, earnest, good fellow that he is, is conscious
that he is often up against a brick wall, a reserve in the soldier that
he cannot penetrate. The fact is, that he has rank, and that robs him of
much of his power to reach the private soldier. But he must have rank,
just as much as a doctor. Executive authority must be his, in order to
assert and keep up discipline. And yet there is the constant barrier
between the officer and the man. Doctors know and feel it: feel that, in
the officer, they are no longer the doctor. Now, however, great changes
have been wrought and the medical officer likes to be called "doc," just
as much as the chaplain values the name "padre." There's something so
intimate about it. Such a tribute to our job and our responsibility and
the trust and confidence they have in us.

The soldier is not concerned about his latter end; all that troubles him
about his future, is the billet he yearns for, the food he hopes to get,
the rest he is sure is due to him, his leave and the time when--how he
longs for that!--he may turn his sword into a ploughshare and have done
with war and the soldier's beastly trade.

Of course, in little matters like swearing, the padre is wise and he
knows what Tommy's adjective is worth. He knows that Tommy is a simple
person and apt to reduce his vocabulary to three wonderful words: three
adjectives which are impartially used as substantives, adjectives,
verbs, or adverbs. That is all. The earnest young chaplain at first
gasps with horror at the flaming words, and would not be surprised if
the heavens opened and celestial wrath descended on these poor sinners'
heads. But he soon learns that these little adornments of the King's
English mean less than nothing. For Tommy is a reverent person, he is
not a blasphemer in reality; he is gentle, infinitely kind, incredibly
patient, extraordinarily generous, if the truth be told. His language
would lead one to believe that his soul is entirely lost. But when one
knows what this careless, generous, and kindly person is capable of, one
feels that his soul is a very precious thing indeed. And there is one
way the padre can touch this priceless soul: that is, by serving in the
ranks with him. Then all the barriers fall, all the reserve vanishes,
and the padre comes into his own, and saves more souls by his example
than by oceans of precept. There he finds himself, he has got his real
job at last.

Among the South African infantry brigade, that did that wonderful march
to Kondoa Irangi, two hundred and fifty miles in a month, in the height
of the rainy season, were fourteen parsons. All serving in the ranks as
private soldiers, they carried a wonderful example with them. It was
their pride that they were the cleanest and the best disciplined men in
their respective companies. No fatigue too hard, no duty too irksome.
Better soldiers they showed themselves than Tommy himself. Of a bright
and cheerful countenance, particularly when things looked gloomy, they
were ready for any voluntary fatigue. The patrol in the thick bush that
was so dangerous, fetching water, quick to build fires and make tea,
ready to help a lame fellow with his equipment, always cheery, never
grousing, they lived the life of our Lord instead of preaching about it.

For the padre's job, I take it, is to teach the men the right spirit, to
send them to war as men should go, to assure them that this is a holy
fight, that God is on their side.

He knows that Tommy, if he speculates at all upon his latter end, does
so in the pagan spirit, the spirit that teaches men that there is a
special heaven for soldiers who are killed in war, that the manner of
their dying will give them absolution for their sins. And the padre
knows that the pagan spirit is the true spirit and yet he may not say
so. He may not suggest for a moment that sin will be forgiven by
sacrifice, for that is Old Testament teaching; his Bishop tells him that
he must not trifle with this heresy, but he must inculcate in sinful man
that he can, by repentance, and by repentance only, gain absolution for
past misdeeds.

And the chaplain knows Tommy, and he knows that he will never get him on
that tack. He knows that any soldier, who is any good, looks upon it as
a cowardly, mean and contemptible thing to crawl to God for forgiveness
in times of danger, when they never went to him in days of peace. And I
know many a chaplain who is with the soldier in this belief.

A little of war, and the padre very soon finds his limitations. To begin
with, he is attached to a Field Ambulance and not to a regiment, as a
rule. The only time he sees the men is when they are wounded. Then he
often feels in the way and fears to obstruct the doctor in his job. So
all that is left is going out with the stretcher-bearing party at night,
showing a good example, cool in danger, merciful to the wounded. But
that again is not his job.

First, when he laid aside the sad raiment of his calling, and put on his
khaki habiliments of war, he thought that the chief part of his job was
to shrive the soldier before action, and to comfort the dying. Later he
found that the soldier would not be shriven, and found, to his surprise,
that the dying need no comfort. Very soon he learnt that wounded men
want the doctor, and chiefly as the instrument that brings them morphia
and ease from pain. And when the wound is mortal, God's mercy descends
upon the man and washes out his pain. How should he need the padre, when
God Himself is near?

Early in his military career the young ministers of the Gospel were
provided with small diaries, in which they might record the dying
messages of the wounded. Then came disillusion, and they found the dying
had no messages to send; they are at peace, the wonderful peace that
precedes the final dissolution, and all they ask is to be left alone.

So is it to be wondered at, that men with imagination, men like Furze,
the Bishop of Pretoria, saw in a vision clear that the padre's job lay
with the living and not with the dying, that he could point the way by
the example of a splendid life with the soldier, far better than by a
hundred discourses, as an officer, from the far detachment of the
pulpit. Thus was the idea conceived and so was the experiment carried
out. And all of us who were in German East Africa can vouch for the
splendid results of these excellent examples. For the private soldier
saw that his fellow-soldier, handicapped as he was by being a parson,
could know his job and do his job as a soldier better than Tommy could
himself. To his surprise, he found that here was a man who could make
himself intelligible without prefixing a flaming adjective when he asked
his pal to pass the jam. Here was a N.C.O., a real good fellow too, who
could give an order and point a moral without the use of a blistering
oath; a man who was a man, cool under fire, ready for any dangerous
venture, cheerful always, never grousing, always generous and open as a
soldier should be, never preaching, never openly praying, never asking
men to do what he would not do himself. Can you wonder that Tommy
understood, and, understanding, copied this example?

When he saw a man inspired by some inward Spirit that made him careless
of danger, contemptuous of death, fulfilling all the Soldier's
requirements in the way of manhood, he knew quite well that some Divine
inward fire upheld this once despised follower of Christ. Then lo! the
transformation. First, the oaths grew rarer in the ranks and vanished;
then came the discovery that, after all, it really was possible to
conduct a conversation in the same language as the soldier used at home
with his wife and children; that, after all, the picturesque adjectives
that flavoured the speech of camps were not necessary; that there was
really no need for two kinds of speech, the language of the camp and the
language of the drawing-room.

And the process of redemption was very curious. All are familiar of
course with the hymn tunes that are sung by marching soldiers, tunes
that move their female relatives and amiable elderly gentlemen to a
quick admiration for the Christian soldier. All know too that, could the
admiring throng only hear the words to which these hymn tunes were sung,
the crowd would fly with fingers to their ears, from such apparent
blasphemy. Well, these well-known ballads were first sung at the padre,
and especially at the padre who was masquerading as a soldier. And when
the soldier saw that the padre could see the jest and laugh at it too,
and know that it meant nothing, then he felt that he had got a good
fellow for his sky pilot. Can you wonder that the soldier spoke of his
padre comrade in such generous terms and that the whole tone of the
regiment improved? The men were better soldiers and better Christians
too.

There is one trap into which a padre falls when marching with a
regiment. Provided, by regulations, with a horse, he is often unwise
enough to ride alongside his marching cure of souls. It would, perhaps,
do him good if he could hear, as I did, the comments of two Scottish
sergeants in the rear. "Our Lord did not consider it beneath him to ride
upon a donkey, but this man of God needs must have a horse."

"How is it that I don't get close to the good fellows on board the
ship?" said a very good and earnest padre to me. "Why don't these
fellow-officers of mine come to church? How is it that fellows I know to
be good and generous and kindly are yet to be found at the bar, in the
smoking-room, when my service is on? Why is it that the decent, nice
fellows aren't professing Christians, and some of the fellows who are my
most regular attendants haven't a tenth of the character and quality and
charm of these apparent pagans?"

What could I do but tell him the truth? I knew him well and felt that he
would understand. Most fellows, I said, don't come to church, because if
they've good and decent characters, they hate to be hypocrites. Now you
know, padre, in this improper world of ours, that many men are sinners,
by that I mean that convention describes as sinful some of the things
they do. What do you tell us when we go to early chapel in the morning?
"Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins and are in love
and charity with your neighbours and intend to lead a new life ... draw
near with faith and take this Holy Sacrament ..." Well, then, can you
conceive that such a state of mind exists in an otherwise decent man
that he finds the burden of his sin not intolerable, as he should do,
but that he hugs that special sin as a prisoner may hug his chains? That
his sin, or let us call it his breach of the conventions of Society, is
the one dear precious thing in his existence at the present moment. He
doesn't want to reform or to lead a new life. Later, no doubt, he'll
tire of this sin and then he may come to church again. But how could a
man of character go to God's House and be such an infernal hypocrite? He
cannot partake of the Body and Blood of Christ any more when he is in
that state of mind. So you see, padre, it is often the honest men who
won't be hypocrites, that won't go to your church.

Many the padre that used to drift into our hospital on the long trek to
Morogoro, Church of England, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, and those
who look after the "fancy religions," as Tommy calls them. By that term
is designated any man who does not belong to either of the above three.
One such fellow came to our mess the other day, and in answer to our
query as to the special nature of his flock, he answered that, though
strictly speaking a Congregationalist, he had found that he had become a
"dealer in out-sizes in souls," as he called it. He kept, as he said, a
fatherly eye (and a very good eye too, that we could see) on Dissenters
in general, Welsh Baptists, Rationalists, and all the company of queerly
minded men we have in this strange army of ours. Later we heard that he
had brought with him an excellent reputation from the Front. And that is
not easy to acquire from an army that is hard to please in the matter of
professors of religion.



FOR ALL PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES


The missionaries and the Allied civilians released from Tabora have the
usual tale to tell of German beastliness, of white men forced to dig
roads and gardens, wheel barrows and other degrading work under the
guard of native soldiers, insulted, humiliated, degraded before the
native Askaris at the instance of German officers and N.C.O.s in charge.
The Italian Consul-General working in the roads! We may forget all this:
it is in keeping with our soft and sentimental ways. But will the
French? Will Italy forgive? There will be no weakness there when the day
of reckoning comes. All this we had from the Commission of Inquiry in
Morogoro and Mombasa that sat to take evidence. Gentle nurses of the
Universities' English Mission, missionary ladies who devoted a lifetime
in the service of the Huns and the natives in German East, locked up
behind barbed wire for two years, without privacy of any kind,
constantly spied upon in their huts at night by the native guard, always
in terror that the black man, now unrestrained, even encouraged by his
German master, should do his worst. Can you wonder that they kept their
poison tablets for ever in their pockets that they might have close at
hand an end that was merciful indeed compared with what they would
suffer at native hands? So with many tears of relief they cast friendly
Death into the bushes as the Askaris fled before the dust of our
approaching columns. Do you blame gentle Sister Mabel that she would
never speak to any Hun in German, using only Swahili and precious little
of that?

Far worse the story told by the broken Indian soldiers, prisoners since
the fight at Jassin, left abandoned, half dead with dysentery and fever,
by the Germans on their retreat to Mahenge. A commission of inquiry held
by British officers of Native Indian regiments elicited the facts. The
remains of two double companies, one Kashmiris, the other Bombay
Grenadiers, to the number of 150, were brought to Morogoro and there
farmed out to German contractors. Here they toiled on the railway,
clearing the land, bringing in wood from the jungle building roads, half
starved and savagely ill-treated. They might burn with fever or waste
their feeble strength in dysentery, it made no difference to their
brutal jailers. To be sick was to malinger in German eyes: so they got
"Kiboko" and their rations reduced, because, forsooth, a man who could
not work could also not eat. To "Kiboko" a prisoner of war and an Indian
soldier is a flagrant offence against the laws of war. But to the
contractor there were no laws but of his making, and he laid on thirty
lashes with the rhinoceros hide Kiboko to teach these stiff-necked
"coolies" not to sham again. And as these soldiers lay half dead with
fever on the road, their German jailers gave orders that their mouths
and faces be defiled with filth, a crime unspeakable to a Moslem. Will
the Mohammedan world condone this? The fruit of this treatment was that
eighty of these wretched soldiers died and were buried at Morogoro. But
these prisoners, on their release, marching through the streets caught
sight of two of their erstwhile jailers walking in freedom and security
and going about then daily avocations as if there was no war. These
Germans had, of course, told our Provost Marshal that they were
civilians, and never had or intended to take part in the war. So these
two men on their word, the word of a Prussian, mark you well, were
allowed all the privileges of freedom in Morogoro. One of them, Dorn by
name, a hangdog ruffian, owned the house we took over as a mess, and
tried to get receipts from us for things we took for the hospital, that
really belonged to other people.

But the Indian soldiers' evidence was the undoing of Dorn and his
fellow-criminal. Arrested and put into jail, they were sent to
Dar-es-Salaam for trial by court-martial on the evidence. How the guard
hoped that an attempt to escape would be made, such an attempt as was so
often the alleged reason for the shooting of so many of our English
prisoners. The sense of discipline in the Indian troops was such that,
no matter how great the temptation to avenge a thousand injuries and the
unexampled opportunity offered by a long railway journey through dense
bush, they delivered their prisoners safe in Dar-es-Salaam. It is said
that nothing would persuade Dorn and his comrade to leave the safe
shelter of the railway truck. No, they did not want to go for a walk in
the bush, they would stay in the truck, thank you! No matter how great
the invitation to flight was offered by an open door and the temporary
disappearance of the guard. Do you think these two ruffians will get the
rope? I wonder.

The other day at Kissaki the Germans sent back ten of our white
prisoners, infantry captured at Salaita Hill, Marines from the
_Goliath_. All these weary months the Huns had dragged these wretched
prisoners all over the country. And yet there are some who tell us that
the German is not such a Hun here as he is in Europe. The fact is he is
worse, if possible, inconceivably arrogant and cruel at first,
incredibly anxious to conciliate our prisoners when the tide had turned
and vengeance was upon him. Burning by fever by day, chilled by tropic
dews at night, these poor devils had been harried and kicked and cursed
and ill-used by Askaris and insulted by native porters all that long
retreat from Moschi to Kissaki and beyond. No "machelas" for them if
they were ill, no native hammocks to carry them on when their poor
brains cried out against the malaria that struck them down in the
noonday sun. Kicked along the road or left to die in the bush, these the
only two alternatives. And the beasts were kinder than the Huns: they at
least took not so long to kill. Forced to do coolie labour, to dig
latrines for native soldiers, incredibly humiliating, such was their
lot! Many of them died by the roadside. Many died for want of medicine.
There was no lack of drugs for Germans, but there was need for economy
where prisoners were concerned. What more natural than that they should
keep their drugs for their own troops? Who could tell their pressing
need in months to come? But the indomitable ones they kept and keep them
still. Only yesterday they released the naval surgeon captured on the
pseudo-hospital ship _Tabora_ in Dar-es-Salaam. Did he get the treatment
that custom ordains an officer should have, or did he also dig latrines
and cook his _bit_ of dripping meat over a wood fire like a "shenzy"
native? I leave that to you to answer. How could we tell he was a
doctor? that is the Huns' excuse. "He only had a blue and red epaulet on
his white drill tunic, there was no red cross on his arm." But
apparently after twenty months they discovered this essential fact. And
what was left of him struggled into our lines under a white flag the
other day. But here, as in Germany, not all the Huns were Hunnish. Some
there were who cursed Lettow and the war in speaking to the prisoners,
and, in private talks, professed their tiredness of the whole beastly
campaign. But these, our men noticed, were ever the quickest to
"strafe," always the first to rail and upbraid and strike when a German
officer was near.

Fed on native food, chewing manioc, mahoja for their flour, the ground
their bed, so they existed; but ever in their captive hearts was the
knowledge that we were coming on, behind them ever the thunder of our
guns, the panic flights of their captors, timid advances from native
soldiers, unabashed tokens of conciliation from the Europeans
alternating with savage punishment. This was meat and drink indeed to
them. Cheerfully they endured, for Nemesis was at hand. How they
chuckled to see the German officer's heavy kit cut down to one chop box,
native orderlies cut off, fat German doctors waddling and sweating along
the road? Away and ever away to the south, for the hated "Beefs" were
after them, coming down relentlessly from the north. Even a lay brother,
"Brother John," they kept until the other day. And their stiff-necked
prisoners refused to receive the conciliatory amelioration of their lot
that would be offered one day, to be, for no apparent reason, withdrawn
the next. "No, thank you, we don't want extra food now! We really don't
need a native servant now, we will still do our own fatigues. No. We
don't want to go for a walk. We've really been without all these things
for so long that we don't miss them now. Anyhow it won't be for long,"
they said.

The German commandant turned away furiously after the rejection of his
olive branch. For he knew now that his captives knew that the game was
up, and it gave him food for thought indeed.



THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD


We are camped for the present on the edge of a plateau, overlooking a
vast plain that stretches a hundred miles or more to where Kilimanjaro
lifts his snow peaks to the blue. All over this yellow expanse of grass,
relieved in places by patches of dark bush, are great herds of wild game
slowly moving as they graze. Antelope and wildebeests, zebra and
hartebeests, there seems no end to them in this sportsman's paradise. At
night, attracted by to-morrow's meat that hangs inside a strong and
well-guarded hut, the hyaenas come to prowl and voice their hunger and
disappointment on the evening air.

The general impression in England, you know, was that in coming to East
Africa we had left the cold and damp misery of Flanders for a most
enjoyable side-show. We were told that we should spend halcyon days
among the preserves, return laden with honours and large stores of
ivory, and in our spare moments enjoy a little campaigning of a picnic
variety, against an enemy that only waited the excuse to make a graceful
surrender. But how different the truth! To us with the advance there has
been no shooting; to shoot a sable antelope (and, of course, we have
trekked through the finest game preserves in the world, including the
Crown Prince's special Elephant Forests) is to ask for trouble from the
Askari patrol that is just waiting for the sound of a rifle shot to
bring him hot foot after us. So the sable antelope might easily be
bought by very unpleasant sacrifice. All shooting at game, even for
food, except on most urgent occasions, is strictly forbidden, for a
rifle shot may be as misleading to our own patrols and outposts as it
would be inviting to the Hun.

This war had led us from the comparative civilisation of German
plantations to the wildest, swampiest region of Equatorial Africa. After
rain the roads tell the story of the wild game, for in the mud are the
big slot marks of elephants and lions and all the denizens of the bush.
But at the bases and back in British East Africa where there are no
lurking German Askari patrols, many fellows have had the time of their
lives with the big game. Afternoon excursions to the wide plains and
their bush where the wild game hide and graze.

We are often asked how we manage to avoid the lions and the other wild
beasts of the country that come to visit the thorn bomas that protect
our transport cattle at night? Strange as it may seem, we do not have to
avoid them, for they do not come for us or for the natives, nor yet for
the live cattle so much as for the dead mules and oxen. I dare say there
have never been so many white and black men in a country infested with
lions who have suffered so little from the beasts of the field as we
have.

In the first place, the advance of so great an army has frightened away
a very large number of the wild game. All that have stayed are the
larger carnivora, like the hyaena or the lion. And they are a positive
Godsend to us. For instead of attacking our sentries and patrols at
night, as you might imagine, they are the great scavengers and camp
cleaners of the country. Of vultures there are too few in this land,
probably because the blind bush robs them of the chance of spotting
their prey. Were it not for lions and hyaenas, we should be in a bad
way. For they come to eat all our dead animals, all the wastage of this
army, the tribute our transport animals are paying to fly and to
horse-sickness. For in spite of fairy tales about lions one must believe
the unromantic truth that a lion prefers a dead ox to a man, and a black
man to a white one. So you will not be surprised when I tell you that in
this army of ours of at least 30,000 men I have only had two cases of
mauling by the larger carnivora to deal with. And such cases as these
would all pass through my hands. There was only one case of lion
mauling, and that a Cape Boy who met a young half-grown cub on the road
and unwisely ran from it. At first curiosity attracted this animal, and
later the hunting instinct caused him to maul his prey. So they brought
him in with the severe blood-poisoning that sets in in almost all cases
of such a nature. For the teeth and claws of the larger carnivora are
frightfully infectious. This Cape Boy died in forty-eight hours. Yet one
other case was that of an officer who met a leopardess with cubs in the
bush when out after guinea fowl. She charged him, and he gave her his
left arm to chew to save his face and body. Then alarmed by his yells
and the approach of his companion she left him, and he was brought one
hundred miles to the railway. But he was in good hands at once, and when
I saw him the danger of blood-poisoning had gone and he was well upon
his way to health again.

The same experience have we had with snakes. The hot dry dusty roads and
the torn scrub abound with snakes and most of them of a virulently
poisonous quality. But one case only of snake-bite have I seen, and that
a native. The fact that the wild denizens of the field and forest are
much more afraid of us than we of them saves us from what might appear
to be very serious menace. Even the wounded left out in the dense bush
have not suffered from these animal pests, but the dead, of course, have
often disappeared and their bleached bones alone are left to tell the
story. One might think that the hyaena, the universal scavenger, would
be as loathed by the native as he is by us whose dead he disinters at
night, if we have been too tired or unable to bury our casualties deep
enough. But, strange as it may seem, the hyaena is worshipped by one
very large tribe in East Africa, the Kikuyu. For these strange people
have an extraordinary aversion to touching dead people. So much so, that
when their own relatives seem about to die they put them out in the bush
with a small fire and a gourd of water, protected by a small erection of
bush against the mid-day sun, and leave the hyaenas to do the rest. So
it comes about that this beast is almost sacred, and a white man who
kills one runs some danger of his life, if the crime is discovered. It
is hardly to be wondered at that the hyaenas in the "Kikuyu" country are
far bolder than in other parts. Elsewhere and by nature the hyaena is an
arrant coward. Here, however, he will bite the face off a sleeping man
lying in the open, or even pull down a woman or child, should they be
alone; elsewhere he only lives on carrion.

The German is not a sportsman as we understand the term, though the
modern young German who apes English ways, comes out to East Africa
occasionally to make collections for his ancestral Schloss. That the
Crown Prince should have reserved large areas for game preserves speaks
for this modern tendency in young Germany. The average German is not
keen on exercise in the tropics, he will be carried by sweating natives
in a chair or hammock where Englishmen on similar errands will walk and
shoot upon the way. This slothful habit leads us to the conviction that
very much of the country is not explored as it should be, and I have
been told by prospectors for precious minerals, who were serving in our
army, of the wonderful store of mineral deposits in German East Africa.
One noted prospector who fell into my hands at Handeni could so little
forget his occupation of peace in this new reality of war, that he
always took out his prospector's hammer on patrol with him, and chipped
pieces of likely rock to bring back to camp in his haversack. He it was
who told me of his discovery of a seam of anthracite coal in the bed of
a river near the Tanga railway. On picket he had wandered to the edge of
the ravine and fallen over. Struggling for life to save himself by the
shrubs and growing plants on the face of this precipice, he eventually
found his way to the bottom of the ravine, on the top of a small
avalanche of earth. Judge, then, of his astonishment when, looking up,
he saw that his fall had exposed a fine seam of coal. This discovery
alone, in a country where the railway engines are forced to burn wood
fuel or expensive imported coal from Durban, is of the greatest
importance. The experience of most of us seemed to be that the Germans,
in the piping days of peace, preferred elegant leisure in a hammock and
the prospect of cold beer beneath a mango tree to the sterner delights
of laborious days in thickly wooded and inaccessible mountains. One of
the first results of this campaign will be to bring the enterprising
prospector from Rhodesia and the Malay States to what was once the
"Schöne Ost-Afrika" of the German colonial enthusiast.

But big game hunting, except a man hunts for a living, as do the
elephant poachers in Mozambique or the Lado Enclave, soon loses its
savour to white men after a time. It is not long before the rifle is
discarded for the camera by men who really care for wild life in wilder
countries. Herein the white man differs from the savage, who kills and
kills until he can slay no longer. Strange it is to think that farmers
and planters in East Africa so soon tire of big game hunting, that they
do not trouble even to shoot for the pot or to get the meat that is the
ration provided for their native labourers, but employs a native, armed
with a rifle and a few cartridges, to shoot antelope for meat.

To one in whom the spirit of adventure and romance is not dead what more
attractive than an elephant hunter's life? To work for six months and
make two or three thousand pounds, and spend the proceeds in a riotous
holiday, until the heavy tropic rains are over and the bush is dry
again. But few realise the rare qualities that an elephant hunter must
have. He must be extraordinarily tough, quite hardened to the toil and
diseases of the country, knowing many native tongues, largely immune
from the fever that lays a white man low many marches from civilisation
and hospitals, of an endurance splendid, with hope to dare the risk, and
courage to endure the toil. For the professional elephant hunter is now,
by force of circumstance and white man's law, become a wolf of the
forest, and the hands of all Governments are against him. He must mark
his elephant down, be up with the first light and after him, must
manoeuvre for light and wind and scent to pick the big bull from the
sheltering herd of females. If the head shot is not possible, the lung
shot or stomach shot alone is left. And six hours' march through
waterless country before one comes up with the elephant resting with his
herd is not the best preparation for a shot. If one misses, one may as
well go home another eight hours back to water. But if you hit and
follow the bull through the thorny bush, you do not even then know
whether you will find the victim. If, however, you find traces three
times in the first hour, or see the blood pouring from the trunk--not
merely blown in spray upon the bushes--then the certain conviction comes
that within an hour you will find your kill. Then the long march back to
camp, all food and water and the precious tusks carried by natives,
often too exhausted at the end to eat. A man who cannot march thirty
miles a day, and fulfil all the other requirements, should relegate
elephant hunting to the world of dreams. All the big successful elephant
poachers are well known: most of them are English, some of them are
Boers, a few only French or American; but seldom does a German attempt
it or live to repeat his experience. Far better to shut his eyes to this
illicit traffic and assist these strange soldiers of fortune to get
their ivory to the coast, and then enjoy the due reward of this
complaisant attitude.



THE BIRDS OF THE AIR


I think it is rather a pity that no naturalist has studied the birds of
German East Africa in the intimate and friendly spirit that many men
have done at home. It has been said that the bright plumage of Central
African birds is given them as compensation for the charm of song that
is a monopoly of the European bird. That this is the case in the damp
forests and swamps and reed beds along the Rufigi and other big rivers,
there is no doubt. Gaudy parrots and iridescent finches flash through
the foliage of trees along the Mohoro river, monkeys slide down the
ropes formed by parasitic plants that hang from the tree branches, to
dip their hands in the water to drink; only to flee, chattering to the
tree-tops, as they meet the gaze of apparently slumbering crocodiles.
Great painted butterflies flit above the beds of lilies that fringe the
muddy lagoons, the hippopotamus wallows lazily in the warm sunlit
waters. Here, it is true, is the Equatorial Africa of our schoolboy
dreams; and the birds have little but their glittering plumage to
recommend them.

But we are apt to forget that the greater portion of Tropical Africa,
certainly all that is over five hundred feet above the sea, which
constitutes the greater part of the country with the exception of the
coast region, is not at all true to the picture that most of us have in
our minds. For the character of the interior is vastly different: great
rolling plains of yellow grass and thorn scrub, with the denser foliage
of deciduous trees along the river-banks. Here, indeed, you may find
sad-coloured birds that are gifted with the sweetest of songs. In the
bed of the Morogoro River lives a warbler who sings from the late
afternoon until dusk, and he is one of the very few birds that have that
deep contralto note, the "Jug" of the nightingale. And there are little
wrens with drab bodies and crimson tails that live beside the dwellings
of men and pick up crumbs from the doors of our tents, and hunt the rose
trees for insects. In the thorn bushes of higher altitudes are grey
finches that might have learnt their songs beside canary cages. The
African swallows, red headed and red backed, have a most tuneful little
song; they used to delight our wounded men in hospital at Handeni when
they built their nests in the roofs of this one-time German jail, and
sang to reward us for the open windows that allowed them to feed their
broods of young.

In the mealie fields are francolins in coveys, very like the red-legged
partridge in their call, though in plumage nearer to its English
brother. There, too, the ubiquitous guinea fowl, the spotted "kanga"
that has given us so many blessed changes of diet, utters his strident
call from the tops of big thorn trees. The black and white meadow lark
is here, but the "khoran" or lesser bustard of South Africa, that
resembles him so much in plumage on a much larger scale, is absent. The
brown bustard, so common in the south, is the only representative of the
turkey tribe that I have seen here. Black and white is a very common
bird colouring; black crows with white collars follow our camps and
bivouacs to pick up scraps, and the brown fork-tailed kite hawks for
garbage and for the friendly lizard too, in the hospital compound. One
night, as I lay in my tent looking to the moon-lit camp, Fritz, our
little ground squirrel that lived beneath the table of the mess tent,
met an untimely fate from a big white owl. A whirr of soft owl wings to
the ground outside my tent, a tiny squeak, and Fritz had vanished from
our compound too.

Vultures of many kinds dispute with lion and hyaena for the carrion of
dead ox or mule beside the road of our advance. King vultures in their
splendour of black, bare red necks and tips of white upon their wings,
lesser breeds of brown carrion hawks and vultures attend our every camp.
Again the vulture is not so common as in South Africa, for here it is
blind in this dense bush and has to play a very subsidiary part to the
scavenging of lions and hyaenas. Down by the swamps one evening we shot
a vulture that was assisting a moribund ox to die. True we did not mean
to kill him, for we owe many debts of gratitude to vultures; but, to my
surprise, my native boy seemed greatly pleased. Lifting the big black
tail he showed me the white soft feathers beneath, and by many signs
appeared to indicate that these feathers were of great value. Then I
looked again, and it was a marabou stork. My boy, who had been with
marabou and egret poachers in the swamps and rice-fields of the lower
Rufigi, knew the value of these snowy feathers.



BITING FLIES


Of the many plagues that beset this land of Africa not the least are the
biting flies. Just as every tree and bush has thorns, so every fly has a
sting. Some bite by day only, some by night, and others at all times.
Even the ants have wings, and drop them in our soup as they resume their
plantigrade existence once again.

The worst biter that we have met in the many "fly-belts" that lie along
the Northern Railway is the tsetse fly: especially was he to be found at
a place called Same, and during the long trek from German Bridge on the
Northern Railway to Morogoro in the south. At one place there is a belt
thirty miles wide, and our progress was perpetual torture, unless we
passed that way at night. For the _Glossina morsitans_ sleeps by night
beneath leaves in the bush, and only wakes when disturbed. For this
reason we drive our horses, mules, and cattle by night through these
fly-belts. Savage and pertinacious to a degree are these pests, and
their bite is like the piercing of a red-hot needle. Simple and innocent
they appear, not unlike a house fly, but larger and with the tips of
their wings crossed and folded at the end like a swallow's. They are
mottled grey in colour, and their proboscis sticks out straight in
front. Hit them and they fall off, only to rise again and attack once
more; for their bodies are so tough and resistant, that great force is
required to destroy them. They are infected with trypanosomes, a kind of
attenuated worm that circulates in the blood, but fortunately not the
variety that causes sleeping sickness. At least we believe not. In any
case we shall not know for eighteen months, for that is usually the
latent period of sleeping sickness in man. Their bite is very poisonous,
and frequently produces the most painful sores and abscesses. But if
they are not lethal to man, they take a heavy toll of horses, mules, and
cattle. Through the night watches, droves of horses, remounts for
Brits's and Vandeventer's Brigades, cattle for our food and for the
transport, mules and donkeys, pass this way. Fine sleek animals that
have left the Union scarcely a month before, carefully washed in
paraffin in a vain attempt to protect them from flies and ticks. But
what a change in a short six weeks. The coat that was so sleek now is
staring, the eye quite bloodless, the swelling below the stomach that
tells its own story; wasting, incredible. Soon these poor beasts are
discarded, and line the roads with dull eyes and heavy hanging heads. We
may not shoot, for firing alarms our outposts and discloses our
position. To-night the lions and hyaenas that this war has provided with
such sumptuous repasts will ring down the curtain. A horse's scream in
the bush at night, the lowing of a frightened steer, a rustling of
bushes, and these poor derelicts, half eaten by the morning, meet the
indifferent gaze of the next convoy. More merciful than man are the
scavengers of the forest. They, at least, waste no time at the end.
Strange that the little donkeys should alone for a time at least escape
the fly; it is their soft thick coats that defeats the searching
proboscis. But after rain or the fording of a river their protecting
coats get parted by the moisture, and the fly can find his mark in the
skin. So the donkey and the Somali mule that generations of fly have
rendered tolerant to the trypanosome are the most reliable of our beasts
of burden. Soon, these too will go in the approaching rainy season, and
then we shall fall back on the one universal beast of burden, the native
carriers. Thousands of these are now being collected to march with their
head loads at the heels of our advancing columns. The veterinary service
is helpless with fly-struck animals. One may say with truth that the
commonest and most frequently prescribed veterinary medicine is the
revolver. Certainly it is the most merciful. Large doses of arsenic may
keep a fly-struck horse alive for months; alive, but robbed of all his
life and fire, his free gait replaced by a shambling walk. The wild
game, more especially the water buck and the buffalo whose blood is
teeming with these trypanosomes, but who, from generations of infection,
have acquired an immunity from these parasites, keep these flies
infected. Thus one cannot have domestic cattle and wild game in the same
area; the two are incompatible. And shortly the time will come, as
certainly as this land will support a white population, when the wild
game will be exterminated and _Glossina morsitans_ will bite no more.

More troublesome, because more widely spread, are the large family of
mosquitoes. The _anopheles_, small, grey and quietly persistent, carries
the malaria that has laid our army low. _Culex_, larger and more noisy,
trumpets his presence in the night watches: but the mischief he causes
is in inverse ratio to the noise he makes. _Stegomyia_, host of the
spirium of yellow fever, is also here, but happily not yet infected; not
yet, but it may be only a question of time before yellow fever is
brought along the railways or caravan routes from the Congo or the
rivers of the West Coast, where the disease is endemic. There for many
years it was regarded as biliary fever or blackwater or malaria. Now
that the truth is known a heavier responsibility is cast upon the
already overburdened shoulders of the Sanitary Officer and the
specialists in tropical diseases. _Stegomyia_, as yet uninfected, are
also found in quantities in the East; and with the opening of the Panama
Canal, that links the West Indies and Caribbean Sea, where yellow fever
is endemic, with the teeming millions of China and India, may materially
add to the burden of the doctors in the East. Living a bare fourteen
days as he does, infected _stegomyia_ died a natural death, in the old
days, during the long voyage round the Horn, and thus failed to infect
the Eastern Coolie, who would in turn infect these brothers of the West
Indian mosquito.

Fortunate it is in one way that _anopheles_ is the mosquito of lines of
communication, of the bases, of houses and huts and dwellings of man,
rather than of the bush. Our fighting troops are consequently not so
exposed as troops on lines of communication. For this blessing we are
grateful, for lines of communication troops can use mosquito nets, but
divisional troops on trek or on patrol cannot. Soon we shall see the
fighting troops line up each evening for the protective application of
mosquito oil. For where nets are not usable it is yet possible to
protect the face and hands for six hours, at least, by application of
oil of citronella, camphor, and paraffin. Nor is this mixture
unpleasant; for the smell of citronella is the fragrance of verbena from
Shropshire gardens.

Least in size, but in its capacity for annoyance greatest, perhaps, of
all, is the sand fly. Almost microscopic, but with delicate grey wings,
of a shape that Titania's self might wear, they slip through the holes
of mosquito gauze and torment our feet by night and day. The three-day
fever they leave behind is yet as nothing compared to the itching fury
that persists for days.

Finally there is the bott-fly, by no means the least unpleasant of the
tribe. Red-headed and with an iridescent blue body, he is very similar
to the bluebottle, and lives in huts and dwellings. But his ways are
different, for he bites a hole into one's skin, usually the back or
arms, and lays an egg therein. In about ten days this egg develops into
a fully grown larva, in other words a white maggot with a black head. It
looks for all the world like a boil until one squeezes it and pushes the
squirming head outside. But woe to him who having squeezed lets go to
get the necessary forceps; for the larva leaps back within, promptly
dies and forms an abscess. Often I have taken as many as thirty or forty
from one man. It is a melancholy comfort to find that this fly is no
respecter of persons, for the Staff themselves have been known to become
affected by this pest.

With the flies may be mentioned as one of the minor horrors of war in
East Africa, one of the little plagues that are sent to mortify our
already over-tortured flesh, the jigger flea. As if there were not
already sufficient trials for us to undergo, an unkind Providence has
sent this pest to rob us of what little enjoyment or elegant leisure
this country might afford. True to her sex, it is the female of the
species that causes all the trouble; the male is comparatively harmless.
Lurking in the dust and grass of camps, she burrows beneath the skin of
our toes, choosing with a calculated ferocity the tender junction of the
nails with the protesting flesh. No sooner is she well ensconced therein
than she commences the supreme business of life, she lays her eggs, by
the million, all enclosed in a little sack. What little measure of sleep
the mosquitoes, the sand flies and the stifling nights have left us,
this relentless parasite destroys. For her presence is disclosed to us
by itching intolerable. Then the skill of the native boys is called
upon, and dusky fingers, well scrubbed in lysol, are armed with a safety
pin, to pick the little interloper out intact. Curses in many languages
descend upon the head of the unlucky boy who fails to remove the sack
entire. For the egg-envelope once broken, abscesses and blood poisoning
may result, and one's toes become an offence to surgery.

All is well, if a drop of iodine be ready to complete the well-conducted
operation; but the poor soldier, whose feet, perforce, are dirty and who
only has the one pair of socks, pays a heavy penalty to this little
flea, that dying still has power to hurt. Dirt and the death of this
tiny visitor result in painful feet that make of marching a very
torture. So great a pest is this that at least five per cent. of our
army, both white and native, are constantly incapacitated. Hundreds of
toenails have I removed for this cause alone. Nor do the jiggers come
singly, but in battalions, and often as many as fifty have to be removed
from one wretched soldier's feet and legs. So we hang our socks upon our
mosquito nets and take our boots to bed with us, nor do we venture to
put bare feet upon the ground.

A yell in the sleeping camp at night, "Some damn thing's bit me;" and
matches are struck, while a sleepy warrior hunts through his blankets
for the soldier ant whose great pincers draw blood, or lurking centipede
or scorpion. For in these dry, hot, dusty countries these nightly
visitors come to share the warm softness of the army blanket. Next
morning, sick and shivering, they come to show to me the hot red flesh
or swollen limb with which the night wanderer has rewarded his
involuntary host.



NIGHT IN MOROGORO


There's nothing quite so wideawake as a tropical night in Africa. At
dawn the African dove commences with his long-drawn note like a boy
blowing over the top of a bottle, one bird calling to another from the
palms and mango trees. Then the early morning songsters wake.

There is no libel more grossly unfair than that which says the birds of
Africa have no song. The yellow weaver birds sing most beautifully, as
they fly from the feathery tops of the avenue of coconut palms that line
the road to the clump of bamboos behind the hospital.

But they fly there no longer now, for our colonel, in a spasm of
sanitation, cut down this graceful swaying clump of striped bamboos for
the fear that they harboured mosquitoes. As if these few canes mattered,
when our hospital was on the banks of the reed-fringed river. Morning
songsters with voices of English thrushes and robins wake one to gaze
upon the dawn through one's mosquito net. Small bird voices, like the
chiff-chaff in May, carry on the chorus until the sun rises. Then the
bird of delirium arrives and runs up the scale to a high monotonous note
that would drive one mad, were it not that he and the dove, with his
amphoric note, are Africa all over. A neat fawn-coloured bird this, with
a long tail and dark markings on his wings.

Then as the sun rises and the early morning heat dries up the song
birds' voices, the earth and the life of the palm trees drowse in the
sunshine.

But at night, from late afternoon to three in the morning, when the life
of trees and grasses and ponds ceases for a short while before it begins
again at dawn, the air is full of the busy voices of the insect world.
Until we came south to Morogoro, to the land of mangoes, coconut, palms,
bamboos, we had known the shrill voice of cicadas and the harsh metallic
noises of crickets in grass and trees. But here we made two new
acquaintances, and charming little voices they had too. One lived in the
grass and rose leaves of our garden, for the German blacksmith who
lately occupied our hospital building had planted his garden with
"Caroline Testout" and crimson ramblers. His voice was like the tinkling
of fairy hammers upon a silver anvil. And with this fine clear note was
the elusive voice of another cricket that had such a marked
ventriloquial character that we could never tell whether he lived in the
rose bushes or in the trees. His note was the music of silver bells upon
the naked feet of rickshaw boys, the tinkle that keeps time to the soft
padding of native feet in the rickshaws of Nairobi at night. At first I
woke to think there were rickshaw boys dragging rubber-tyred carriages
along the avenues of the town, until I found that Morogoro boasted no
rickshaws and no bells for native feet.

Punctuated in all the music of fairy bands and the whirr of fairy
machinery were the incessant voices of frogs. Especially if it had
rained or were going to rain, the little frogs in trees and ponds sang
their love songs in chorus, silenced, at times, by the deep basso of a
bull frog. And often, as our heads ached and throbbed with fever at
night, we felt a very lively sympathy for the French noblesse of the
eighteenth century, who are said to have kept their peasants up at night
beating the ponds with sticks to still the strident voices of these
frogs.

With it all there is a rustling overhead in the feathery branches of the
palms in the cobwebby spaces among the leaves that give the bats of
Africa a home. A twitter of angry bat voices, shrill squeaks and
flutters in the darkness. Then stillness--of a sudden--and the ground
trembles with a far-off throbbing as a convoy of motor lorries
approaching thunders past us, rumbling over the bridge and out into the
darkness, driving for supplies.

The road beside the hospital was the old caravan route that ran from the
Congo through Central Africa and by the Great Lakes to Bagamoyo by the
sea. For centuries the Arab slaver had brought his slave caravans along
this path: it may have been fever or the phantasies of disordered
subconscious minds half awake in sleep, or the empty night thrilling to
the music of crickets, that filled our minds with fancies in the
darkness. But this road seemed alive again. For this smooth surface that
now trembles to the thunder of motor lorries seemed to echo to the soft
padding of millions of slave feet limping to the coast to fill the
harems or to work the clove plantations of his most Oriental Majesty the
Sultan of Zanzibar.



THE WATERS OF TURIANI


Halfway between the Usambara and the Central Railway, the dusty road to
Morogoro crosses the Turiani River. In the woods beside the river, the
tired infantry are resting at the edge of a big rock pool. Wisps of blue
smoke from dying fires tell of the tea that has washed beef and biscuit
down dry and dusty throats. The last company of bathers are drying in
the sun upon the rocks, necks, arms and knees burnt to a sepia brown,
the rest of their bodies alabaster white in the sunshine. It is three
o'clock, and the drowsy heat of afternoon has hushed the bird and insect
world to sleep. Only in the tree-tops is the sleepy hum of bees, still
busy with the flowers, and the last twitter of soft birds' voices. Soft
river laughter comes up from the rocky stream-bed below, and, softened
by the distance to a poignant sweetness, the sound of church bells from
Mhonda Mission floats up to us upon the west wind.

Yesterday only saw the last of Lettow's army crossing the bridge and
echoed to the noise of the explosion that blew up the concrete pillars
and forced our pioneers to build a wooden substitute. Alas! for the
best-laid schemes of our General. The bird had escaped from the closing
net, and Lettow was free to make his retreat in safety to the Southern
Railway. Here at Turiani for a moment it seemed that the campaign was
over. Up from the big Mission at Mhonda, the mounted troops swept out to
cut off the German retreat. All unsuspected, they had made then-big
flank march to meet the eastern flanking column, and cut the road behind
the German force in a pincer grip. But the blind bush robbed our
troopers of their sense of direction, and the long trek through
waterless bush, the tsetse fly and horse-sickness that took their daily
toll of all our horses reduced the speed of cavalry to little more than
a walk. A mistake in a bush-covered hill in a country that was all hill
and bush, and the elusive Lettow slipped out to run and hide and fight
again on many another day.



SCOUTING


Of the many aspects of this campaign none perhaps is more thrilling than
life on the forward patrol. For the duty of these fellows is to go
forward with armed native scouts far in advance of the columns, to find
out what the Germans are up to, their strength, and the disposition of
their troops. Their reports they send back by native runners, who not
infrequently get captured. Like wolves in the forest they live, months
often elapsing without their seeing a white face, and then it is the
kind of white man that they do not want to see; every man's hand against
them, native as well as German, unable to light fires at night for fear
of discovery, sleeping on the ground, creeping up close, for in this
bush one can only get information at close quarters; always out of food,
forced to smoke pungent native tobacco. They have to live on the game
they shoot, and it is a hundred chances to one that the shot that gives
them dinner will bring a Hun patrol to disturb the feast. Theirs is
without doubt the riskiest job in such a war as this.

Here is the story of a night surprise, as it was told me. The long trek
had lasted all day, to be followed by the fireless supper (how one longs
for the hot tea at night!), and the deep sleep that comes to exhausted
man as soon as he gets into his blankets. Drowsy sentries failed to hear
the rustling in the thicket until almost too late; the alarm is given,
pickets run in to wake their sleeping "bwona," all mixed up with
Germans. The intelligence party scattered to all points of the compass,
leaving their camp kit behind them. There was no time to do aught but
pick up their rifles (that is second nature) and fly for safety to the
bush. Now this actual surprise party was led by one Laudr, an
Oberleutnant who had lived for years in South Africa, and had married an
English wife. Laudr had the reputation of being the best shot in German
East, but he missed that night, and my friend escaped, unharmed, the
five shots from his revolver. Next morning, cautiously approaching the
scene of last night's encounter, he found a note pinned to a tree. In it
Laudr thanked him for much good food and a pair of excellent blankets,
and regretted that the light had been so bad for shooting. But he left a
young goat tied up to the tree and my friend's own knife and fork and
plate upon the ground.

Another story this resourceful fellow told me concerning an exploit
which he and a fellow I.D. man, with twenty-five of their scouts, had
brought off near Arusha. They had been sent out to get information as to
the strength of an enemy post in a strongly fortified stone
building--the kind of half fort, half castle that the Germans build in
every district as an impregnable refuge in case of native risings. With
watch towers and battlements, these forts are after the style of
mediæval buildings. Equipped with food supplies and a well, they can
resist any attack short of artillery. Learning from the natives that the
force consisted of two German officers and about sixty Askaris, my
friend determined not to send back for the column that was waiting to
march from Arusha to invest the place. Between them they resolved to
take the place by strategy and guile. Lying hid in the bush, they
arranged with friendly natives to supply the guard with "pombe" the
potent native drink. Late that night, judging from the sounds that the
Kaffir beer had done its work, they crept up and disarmed the guard.
Holding the outer gate they sent in word to the commandant, a Major
Schneider, the administrator of the district, to surrender. He duly came
from his quarters into the courtyard accompanied by his Lieutenant.
"Before I consider surrender," he said, "tell me what force you've got?"
"This fort is surrounded by my troops, that is enough for you," said our
man. "In any case you see my men behind me, and, if you don't 'hands
up,' they'll fire." And the "troops"--half-clad natives--stepped forward
with levelled rifles.

The next morning the Major, still doubting, asked to see the rest of the
English troops, and on being informed that these were all, would have
rushed back to spring the mines that would have blown the place to
pieces. But the Intelligence Officer had not wasted his time the
previous night, and had very carefully cut the wires that led apparently
so innocently from the central office of the fort. My friend brought
this Major, a man of great importance in his district, to Dar-es-Salaam;
and during the whole journey the German never ceased to complain that
bluffing was a dishonourable means of warfare to employ.

On yet another occasion he had an experience that taxed his tact and
strength to the utmost. In the course of his work he seized the
meat-canning factory near Arusha that a certain Frau ----, in the
absence of her husband, was carrying on. The enemy used to shoot
wildebeest and preserve it by canning or by drying it in the sun as
"biltong" for the use of the German troops. My friend was forced to burn
the factory, and then it became his duty to escort this very practical
lady back to our lines. This did not suit her book at all. With tears
she implored him to send her to her own people. She would promise
anything. Cunningly she suggested great stores of information she might
impart. But he cared not for her weeping, and ordered her to pack for
the long journey to Arusha. Then tears failing her she sulked, and
refused to eat or leave her tent. But this found him adamant. Finally
she tried the woman's wiles which should surely be irresistible to this
man. But he was unmoved by all her blandishments. So surprised and
indignant was he that he threatened to tell her husband of her
behaviour, when he should catch him. But here it appears he made a false
estimate of the value of honour and dishonour among the Huns. "A loyal
German woman," she exclaimed, laughing, "is allowed to use any means to
further the interests of her Fatherland. My husband will only think more
highly of me when he knows." So this modern Galahad of ours turned away
and ordered the lady's tent to be struck and marched her off, taking
care that he himself was far removed from her presence in the caravan.
"What fools you English are," she flung back at him, as he handed her
into the custody that would safely hold this dangerous apostle of
_Kultur_ till the end of the war.



"HUNNISHNESS"


Wearily along the road from Korogwe to Handeni toiled a little company
of details lately discharged from hospital and on their way forward to
Division. Behind them straggled out, for half a mile or more, their line
of black porters carrying blankets and waterproof sheets. Arms and necks
and knees burnt black by many weeks of tropic sun, carrying rifle and
cartridge belts and with their helmets reversed to shade their eyes from
the westering sun, this little body of Rhodesians, Royal Fusiliers and
South Africans covered the road in the very loose formation these
details of many regiments affect. Far ahead was the advance guard of
four Rhodesians and Fusiliers. Nothing further from their thoughts than
war--for they were thirty miles behind Division--they were suddenly
galvanised into action by the sight of the advance guard slipping into
the roadside ditches and opening rapid rifle fire at some object ahead.

For at a turn of the road the advance guard perceived a large number of
Askaris and several white men collected about one of our telegraph
posts, while, up the post, upon the cross trees, was a white man, busily
engaged with the wires. One glance was sufficient to tell these wary
soldiers that the white men were wearing khaki uniforms of an unfamiliar
cut and the mushroom helmet that the Hun affects. So they took cover in
the ditches and opened fire, especially upon the German officer who was
busily tapping our telegraph wire. Down with a great bump on the ground
dropped the startled Hun, and the Askaris fled to the jungle leaving
their chop boxes lying on the road. From the safe shelter of the bush
the enemy reconnoitred their assailants, and taking courage from their
small numbers, proceeded to envelop them by a flank movement. But the
British officer in charge of the details behind, knew his job and threw
out two flanking parties when he got the message from the advance guard.
Our men outflanked the outflanking enemy, and soon as pretty a little
engagement as one could hope to see had developed. Finding themselves
partly surrounded by unsuspected strength the Germans scattered in all
directions, leaving a few wounded and dead behind upon the field. There
on his back, wounded in the leg and spitting fire from his revolver, was
lying the German officer determined to sell his life dearly. His last
shot took effect in the head of one of the Fusiliers who were charging
the bush with the bayonet; up went his hands, "Kamerad, mercy!" and our
officer stepped forward to disarm this chivalrous prisoner. Then they
wired forward to our hospital, at that time ten miles ahead, for an
ambulance, and proceeded to bury their only casualty and the dead
Askaris.

Happening to be on duty, I hurried to the scene of this action in one of
our ambulances, along the worst road in Africa. There I found the German
officer, an Oberleutnant of the name of Zahn, lying by the roadside
gazing with frightened eyes out of huge yellow spectacles. We dressed
his wound and gave him an injection of morphia, a cigarette, and a good
drink of brandy, and left him in the shade of a baobab tree to recover
from his fears. Then I turned toward the dividing of the contents of
captured chop boxes that was being carried out under the direction of
the officer in charge. On occasions such as these, the men were rewarded
with the only really square meal they had often had for days; for the
Hun is a past master in the art of doing himself well, and his chopboxes
are always full of new bread, chocolate, sardines and many little
delicacies. I stepped forward to claim the two Red Cross boxes that had
obviously been the property of the German doctor, and with some
difficulty--for no soldier likes to be robbed of his spoil--I managed to
establish the right of the hospital to them. In the boxes were not only
a fine selection of drugs and surgical dressings and a bottle of brandy,
but also the doctor's ammunition. And such ammunition too. Huge
black-powder cartridges with large leaden bullets; they would only fit
an elephant gun; and yet this was the kind of weapon this doctor found
necessary to bring to protect himself against British soldiers. Had that
doctor been caught with his rifle he would have deserved to be shot on
the spot. Nor were our men in the best of moods; for they had seen the
dead Fusilier, and were furious at the wounds these huge lead slugs
create.

The orderlies then lifted the German officer tenderly into the
ambulance; and the prisoner, now feeling full of the courage that
morphia and brandy give, beckoned to me. "Meine Uhr in meiner Tasche,"
he said, pointing to his torn trouser. "Well, what about it?" I asked.
Again he mentioned his watch in his pocket, and looked at his torn
trouser. "Do you suggest," I said sternly, "that a British soldier has
taken your beastly watch." "No, no, not for worlds," he exclaimed; "I
merely wish to mention the fact that when I went into action I had had a
large gold watch and a large gold chain, and much gold coin in my
pocket. And now," he said, "behold! I have no watch or chain." "What," I
said again, "do you suggest that these soldiers are thieves?" "No! Not
at all; but when I was wounded the soldiers, running up in their anxiety
to help me and dress my wound" (as a matter of fact they had run up to
bayonet him, had not the officer intervened, for this swine had
forfeited his right to mercy by emptying his revolver first and then
surrendering) "inadvertently cut away my pocket in slitting up my
trouser leg." "Then your watch," I continued coldly, "is still lying on
the field, or, if a soldier should discover it, he will deliver it to
General Headquarters, from whence it will be sent to you." Sure enough
that evening the sergeant-major in charge of the rearguard came in with
the missing watch and chain.

Later, we learned, from diaries captured on German prisoners, what
manner of brute this Zahn was.



FROM MINDEN TO MOROGODO


Judge of my surprise when, one morning in hospital at Morogoro, a fellow
walked in to see me whose face reminded me of times, two years back,
when I was in the Prisoners of War Camp at Minden in Westphalia. He
showed a fatter and more wholesome face certainly, he was clean and well
dressed, but still, unmistakably it was the man to whom I used to take
an occasional book or chocolate when he lay behind the wire of the inner
prison there. "It can't be you?" I said illogically. But it was.

But what a change these two years had wrought! Now an officer in the
Royal Flying Corps, the ribbon of the Military Cross bearing witness to
many a risky reconnaissance over the Rufigi Valley; but then a dirty
mechanic in the French Aviation Corps and a prisoner. But in December,
1914, there were no fat or clean English soldiers in German prisons.

And, as I looked, my mind went back to a wet morning when, the German
sentry's back being turned, a French soldier, working on the camp road,
dug his way near to the door of my hut and, still digging, told me that
there was an Englishman in the French camp, who wanted particularly to
see me. So that afternoon I walked boldly into the French camp as if I
had important business there, and found my way to the further hut. There
lying on a straw mattress, incredibly lousy and sandwiched between a
Turco from Morocco and a Senegalese negro soldier, I found a white man,
who jumped up to see me and was extraordinarily glad to find that his
message had borne fruit. Clad in the tattered but still unmistakable
uniform of a French artilleryman, three months' beard upon his face,
with white wax-like cheeks, blue nose and a dreadfully hunted
expression, stood this six emaciated feet of England. Drawing me aside
to a sheltered corner he told me his story; how, despairing of a job in
our Flying Corps at the commencement of the war, he had joined the
French Aviation Corps as a mechanic, and how he had been taken prisoner
early in September, 1914, when the engine of his aeroplane failed and he
descended to earth in the middle of a marching column of the enemy. Of
the early months of captivity from September to December in Minden he
told me many things. He and all the others lived in an open field
exposed to all the Westphalian winter weather, with no blankets, nothing
but what he now wore. They lived in holes in a wet clay field like rats
and--like rats they fought for the offal and pigwash on which the German
jailors fed them twice a day. Now he had been moved into a long hut,
open on the inner side that looked to the enclosed central square of the
lager, but well enclosed outside by a triple barbed wire fence.

"Why do they put you in with coloured men?" I asked, as I looked at his
bedfellows.

"Oh, that's because I'm an Englishman, you know," he said. "When I came
here the commandant, finding who I was, was pleased to be facetious.
'Brothers in arms, glorious,' he chuckled, as he ordered my particular
abode here. 'You, of course, don't object to sleep with a comrade,' he
said, with heavy German humour. And I wanted to tell him, had I only
dared, that I'd rather sleep with a nigger from Senegal than with him."

"How about the lice?" I said, for it was not possible to avoid seeing
them on the thin piece of flannelette that was his blanket.

"Oh, I'm used to them now. Time was when I hunted my clothes all day
long, but now--nothing matters; in fact, I rather think they keep me
warm."

So I was quick and glad to help in the little way I could. Not that
there was much that I could do. But I at least had one good meal a day
and two of German prison food, but he had only three bowls of prisoner's
stew and soup. Lest you might think that I exaggerate, I will tell you
exactly what he had, and you may judge what manner of diet it was for a
big Englishman. Five ounces of black bread a day, part of barley and
part of potato, the rest of rye and wheat; for breakfast, a pint of
lukewarm artificial coffee made of acorns burnt with maize, no sugar;
sauerkraut and cabbage in hot water twice a day, occasionally some
boiled barley or rice or oatmeal, and now and then--almost by a miracle,
so rare were the occasions--a small bit of horseflesh in the soup. Could
one wonder at the wolfish look upon his face, the dreary hopelessness of
his expression? And on this diet he had fatigues to do; but on those
days of hard toil there was also a little extra bread and an inch of
German sausage.

But I could get some things from the canteen by bribing the German
orderly who brought our midday food, and I had some books. So the sun
shone, for a time, on Minden.

Nor was this fellow alone in these unhappy surroundings. There with him
were English civilian prisoners, clerks and school-teachers, technical
and engineering instructors, who once taught in German schools and
worked at Essen or in the shipyards. These wretched civilians, until
they were removed to Ruhleben, were not in much better case; but they
might, at least, sleep together on indescribable straw palliasses. Then
they were together; there was comfort in that at least.

By a strange turn of Fortune's wheel this very camp was placed upon the
site of the battlefield of Minden, when, as our guards would tell us, an
undegenerate England fought with the great Frederick against the French.

Moved to another camp this fellow had escaped by crawling under the
barbed wire on a dirty wet night in winter when the sentry had turned
his well-clothed back against the northern gale.



A MORAL DISASTER


All the Army is looking for the gunnery lieutenant, H.M.S. ----. Time
indeed may soften the remembrance of the evil he has done us, and in the
dim future, when we get to Dar-es-Salaam, we may even relent
sufficiently to drink with him; but now, just halfway along the dusty
road from Handeni to Morogoro, we feel that there's no torture yet
devised that would be a fitting punishment.

Strange how frail a thing is human happiness, that the small matter of a
misdirected 12-inch shell should blight the lives of a whole army and
tinge our thirsty souls with melancholy. For this clumsy projectile that
left the muzzle of the gun with the intention of wrecking the railway
station in Dar-es-Salaam became, by evil chance, deflected in its path
and struck the brewery instead. Not the office or the non-essential part
of the building, but the very heart, the mainspring of the whole, the
precious vats and machinery for making beer. And there will be no more
"lager" in German East Africa until the war is over.

All the long hot march from Kilimanjaro down the Pangani River and along
the dusty, thirsty plains we had all been sustained by the thought that
one day we would strike the Central Railway and, finding some sufficient
pretext to snatch some leave, would swiftly board a train for
Dar-es-Salaam and drink from the Fountain of East Africa. The one bright
hope that upheld us, the one beautiful dream that dragged weary
footsteps southward over that waterless, thorny desert was the
occupation of the brewery. We had heard its fame all over the country,
we had met a few of its precious bottles full at the Coast, had found
some empty--in the many German plantations we had searched.

Now "Ichabod" is written large upon our resting-places, the joy of life
departed, the sparkle gone from bright eyes that longed for victory,
and, as King's Regulations have it, alarm and consternation have spread
through all ranks. Even the accompanying news of the tears of the Hun
population in Dar-es-Salaam at this wanton destruction, failed to
comfort us.

The Navy were very nice about it. They were just as sorry as we, they
said. The gunner had been put under observation as a criminal lunatic,
we understood. But they had just come from Zanzibar, and every one knows
that all good things are to be found in that isle of clover. All the
excuses in the world won't give us back our promised beer again.



THE ANGEL OF MOROGORO


Standing on the river bridge that crossed the main road into Morogoro
was a slender figure in the white uniform of a nursing sister. In one
hand a tiny Union Jack, in the other a white flag.

"Don't shoot," she cried, "I'm an Englishwoman;" and the bearded South
African troopers, who were reconnoitring the approaches to their town,
stopped and smiled down upon her. "Take this letter to General Smuts,
please; it is from the German General von Lettow;" and handing it to one
of them, she shook hands with the other and told him how she had been
waiting for two years for him to come and release her from her prison.
For this nursing sister had been behind prison bars for two years in
German East Africa, and you may imagine how she had longed for the day
when the English would come and set her free.

This was Sister Mabel, the only nursing sister we had in Morogoro for
the first four months of our occupation. Her memory lives in the hearts
of hundreds of our wretched soldiers, who were brought with malaria or
dysentery to the shelter of our hospital. In spite of the fact that she
was one of the trained English nursing sisters of the English
Universities Mission in German East Africa, she was imprisoned with the
rest of the Allied civil population of that German colony from the
commencement of war until the time that Smuts had come to break the
prison bars and let the wretched captives free. She had had her share of
insult, indignity, shame and ill-treatment at the hands of her savage
gaolers. But in that slender body lived a very gallant soul, and that
gave her spirit to dare and courage to endure. So when we occupied
Morogoro and Lettow fled with his troops to the mountains, this very
splendid sister gave up her chance of leave well-earned to come to nurse
for us in our hospital. The Germans had failed to break the spirits of
these civilian prisoners, and they had full knowledge of the army that
was slowly moving south from Kilimanjaro to redress the balance of
unsuccessful military enterprise in the past. One can imagine the state
of mind of these wretched people when the news of our ill-fated attack
on Tanga in 1914 arrived; when they heard of our Indian troops being
made prisoners at Jassin, and saw from the cock-a-hoop attitude of the
Hun that all was well for German arms in East Africa. Then when Nemesis
was approaching, the German commandant came to their prison to make
amends for past wrongs. "I am desolated to think," he unctuously
explained, "that you ladies have had so little comfort in this camp in
the past, and I have come to make things easier for you now. The English
Government," he continued with an ingratiating smile, "have now begun to
treat our prisoners in England better, and I hasten to return good to
you for the evils that our women have suffered at the hands of your
Government. Is there anything I can do for you? Would you like native
servants? Would you care to go for walks?" But these brave women
answered that they had done without servants and walks for two years
now, and they could endure a little longer. "What do you mean," he
exclaimed in anger, "by a little longer?" But they answered nothing, and
he knew the news of our advance had come to them within their prison
cage. "Would you care to nurse our wounded soldiers?" he said more
softly. Sister Mabel said she would. So now for the first time she is
given a native servant, carried in state down the mountain-side in a
hammock, and installed in the German hospital in Morogoro. There, in
virtue of the excellence of her work and knowledge, she was given charge
of badly wounded German officers, and received with acid smiles of
welcome from the German sisters.

To her, at the evacuation of the town, had Lettow come, and, giving her
a letter to General Smuts, had asked her to put in a good word for the
German woman and children he was leaving behind him to our tender
mercies. "There is no need of letters to ask for protection for German
women," she told him; "you know how well they've been treated in
Wilhemstal and Mombo." But he insisted, and she consented, and so the
bearded troopers found this English emissary of Lettow's waiting for
them upon the river bridge.

Back came General Smuts's answer, "Tell the women of Morogoro that, if
they stay in their houses, they have nothing to fear from British
troops, nor will one house be entered, if only they stay indoors." And
the Army was as good as the word of their Chief; for no occupied house,
not one German chicken, not a cabbage was taken from any German house or
garden.

And now the despised and rejected English Sister had become the
"Oberschwester," and her German fellow nursing sisters had to take their
orders from her. But she exercised a difficult authority very kindly and
adopted a very cool and distant attitude toward them. But there was one
thing she never did again: she never spoke German any more, but gave all
her orders and held all dealings with the enemy in Swahili, the native
language, or in English. In this she was adamant.

Now, indeed, had the great work of her life begun; for into those four
months she crammed the devotion of a lifetime. Always full to
overcrowding, never less than 600 patients where we had only the
equipment for 200, the whole hospital looked to her for the nursing that
is so essential in modern medicine and surgery. For nurses are now an
absolute necessity for medical and surgical work of modern times, and we
could get no other sisters. The railway was broken, the bridges down,
and where could we look for help or hospital comforts or medical
necessities? We had pushed on faster than our supplies, and with the
equipment of a Casualty Clearing Station we had to do the work of a
Stationary Hospital. No beds save those we took over from the German
Hospital, no sheets nor linen. Can one wonder that she was everywhere
and anywhere at all homes and in all places? Six o'clock in the morning
found her in the wards; she alone of all of us could find no time to
rest in the afternoon; a step upon the verandah where she slept beside
the bad pneumonias and black-water fever cases found her always up and
ready to help. Nor was her job finished in the nursing; she was our
housekeeper too. For she alone could run the German woman cook, could
speak Swahili, and keep order among the native boys, buy eggs and fruit
and chickens from the natives, so that our sick might not want for the
essentially fresh foods. Then at last the railway opened up a big
Stationary Hospital, our Casualty Clearing Station moved further to the
bush, and Sister Mabel's work was done. But there was no elegant leisure
for her when she arrived at the Coast to take the leave she long had
earned in England. An Australian transport had some cases of
cerebro-spinal meningitis aboard, and wanted Sisters, and, as if she had
not already had enough to do, took her with them through the sunny South
Atlantic seas to the home that had not seen her since she left for
Tropical Africa five weary years before.



THE WILL TO DESTROY


The journey from Morogoro to Dar-es-Salaam is a most interesting
experience, a perfect object lesson in the kind of futile railway
destruction that defeats its own ends. For Lettow and his advisers said
that our long wait at M'syeh had ruined our chances. Complete
destruction of the railway and of all the rolling stock would hold us up
for the valuable two months until the rains were due. Our means of
supply all that time would be, perforce, the long road haul by motor
lorry, by mule or ox or donkey transport, two hundred miles, from the
Northern Railway. Lettow bet on the rains and the completeness of the
railway destruction he would cause; but he bargained without his
visitors. Little did he know the resource and capacity of our Indian
sappers and miners, our Engineer and Pioneer battalions.

They threw themselves on broken culverts and wrecked bridges; with only
hand tools, so short of equipment were they, they drove piles and built
up girders on heaps of sleepers and made the bridges safe again. Saving
every scrap of chain, every abandoned German tool, making shift here,
extemporising there, bending steel rails on hand forges, utilising the
scrap heaps the enemy had left, they finally won and brought the first
truck through, in triumph, in six weeks. But the first carriage was no
Pullman car. It exemplified the resource of our men and illustrated the
idea that proved Lettow wrong. For we adapted the engines of Ford and
Bico motor cars and motor lorries to the bogie wheels of German trucks
and sent a little fleet of motor cars along the railway. Light and very
speedy, these little trains sped along, each dragging its thirty tons of
food and supplies for the army then 120 miles from Dar-es-Salaam.

This adaptation of the internal combustion engine to fixed rails may not
be new, but it was unexpected by Lettow. And the German engineers left
it a little too late; they panicked at the last and destroyed wholesale,
but without intelligence. True, they put an explosive charge into the
cylinders of all their big engines and left us to get new cylinders cast
in Scotland. They blew out the grease boxes of the trucks; but their
performance, on the whole, was amateurish. For they blew up, with
dynamite, the masonry of many bridges and contented themselves that the
girders lay in the river below. But this was child's play to our Sappers
and Miners. With hand jacks they lifted the girders and piled up
sleepers, one by one beneath, until the girder was lifted to rail level
again. Now any engineer can tell you that the only way to destroy a
bridge is to cut the girder. This would send us humming over the cables
to Glasgow to get it replaced. It was what they did do on the most
important bridge over Ruwu River, but in their anxiety to do the thing
properly there--and they reckoned four months' hard work would find us
with a new bridge still unfinished--they forgot the old deviation, an
old spur that ran round the big span that crossed the river and lay
buried in the jungle growth. In ten days we had opened up this old
deviation, laid new rails, and had the line re-opened. When I passed
down the line we took the long way round by this long-abandoned track
and left the useless bridge upon our right. Much method but little
intelligence was shown in the destruction of the railway lines; for they
often failed to remove the points, contenting themselves with removing
the rails and hiding them in the jungle.

The German engineers must have wept at the orgy of devastation that
followed: blind fury alone seemed to animate this scene of blind
destruction. At N'geri N'geri and Ruwu they first broke the middle one
of the three big spans and ran the rolling stock, engines, sleeping
cars, a beautiful ambulance train, trucks and carriages, pell mell into
the river-bed below. But the wreckage piled up in a heap 60 feet high
and soon was level with the bridge again. So they broke the other spans
and ran most of the rest of the rolling stock through the gaps. When
these, too, had piled up, they finally ran the remainder of the rolling
stock down the embankments and into the jungle. Then they set fire to
the three huge heaps of wreckage, and the glare lit the heavens for
nearly a hundred miles. But the almost uninjured railway trucks that had
run their little race, down embankments into the bush, were saved to run
again.

Into Morogoro station steamed the trains with the German lettering and
freight and tare directions, carefully undisturbed, printed on their
sides. To us it seemed that the destruction of an ambulance train that
had in the past relied upon the Red Cross and our forbearance, was
cutting it rather fine and putting a new interpretation upon the Geneva
Convention. The Germans, however, argue that the English are such swine
they would have used it to carry supplies as well as sick and wounded.

And what a magnificent railway it was, and what splendid rolling stock
they had! Steel sleepers, big heavy rails, low gradients, excellent cuts
and bridge work; cuttings through rock smoothed as if by sandpaper and
crevices filled with concrete. Fine concrete gutters along the curves,
such ballasting as one sees on the North-Western Railway. Nothing cheap
or flimsy about the culverts. Railway stations built regardless of cost
and the possibility of traffic; stone houses and waiting-rooms roofed
with soft red tiles that are in such contrast to the red-washed
corrugated iron roofing one sees in British East Africa. Expensive
weighbridges where it seemed there was nothing but a few natives with an
occasional load of mangoes and bananas. Here was an indifference to mere
dividends; at every point evidence abounded of a lavish display of
public money through a generous Colonial Office. For in the
Wilhelmstrasse this colony was ever the apple of their eye, and money
was always ready for East African enterprises.

Yet the planters complain, just as planters do all over the world, of
the indifference of Governments and the parsimony of executive
officials. A Greek rubber planter told me, from the standpoint of an
intelligent and benevolent neutrality (and who so likely to know the
meaning of benevolence in neutral obligations as a Greek?), that the
Government charged huge freights on this line, killed young enterprise
by excessive charges, gave no rebates even to German planters, and in
other ways seemed indifferent to the fortunes of the sisal and rubber
planters. True they built the railway; but what use to a planter to
build a line and rob him of his profits in the freight? This gentleman
of ancient Sparta frankly liked the Germans and found them just; and he
was in complete agreement with the native policy that made every black
brother do his job of work, the whole year round, at a rate of pay that
fully satisfied this Greek employer's views on the minimum wage.



DAR-ES-SALAAM


(The Haven of Peace)

This town is indeed a Haven of Peace for our weary soldiers. The only
rest in a really civilised place that they have had after many hundreds
of miles of road and forest and trackless thirsty bush. In the cool
wards of the big South African Hospital many of them enjoy the only rest
that they have known for months. Fever-stricken wrecks are they of the
men that marched so eagerly to Kilimanjaro nine weary months before.
Months of heat and thirst and tiredness, of malaria that left them
burning under trees by the roadside till the questing ambulance could
find them, of dysentery that robbed their nights of sleep, of dust and
flies and savage bush fighting. And now they lie between cool sheets and
watch the sisters as they flit among the shadows of cool, shaded wards.
Only a short three months before and this was the "Kaiserhof," the first
hotel on the East Coast of Africa, as the German manager, with loud
boastfulness, proclaimed.

There had been a time when we doctors, then at Nairobi and living in
comfortable mosquito-proof houses, had blamed the men for drinking
unboiled water and for discarding their mosquito nets. But even doctors
sometimes live and learn, and those of us who went right forward with
the troops came to know how impracticable it was to carry out the Army
Order that bade a man drink only boiled water and sleep beneath a net.
Late in the night the infantryman staggers to the camp that lies among
thorn bushes, hungry and tired and full of fever. How then could one
expect him to put up a mosquito net in the pitch-black darkness in a
country where every tree has got a thorn? Long ago the army's mosquito
nets have adorned the prickly bushes of the waterless deserts. "Tuck
your mosquito net well in at night," so runs the Army Order. But what
does it profit him to tuck in the net when dysentery drags him from his
blanket every hour at night?

From the verandah of the hospital the soldier sees the hospital ship all
lighted up at night with red and green lights, the ship that's going to
take him out of this infernal climate to where the mosquitoes are
uninfected and tsetse flies bite no more. And there are no regrets that
the rainy season is commencing, and this is no longer a campaign for the
white soldier. On the sunlit slopes of Wynberg he will contemplate the
white sands of Muizenberg and recover the strength that he will want
again, in four months' time, in the swamps of the Rufigi. Now the time
has come for the black troops to see through the rest of the rainy
season, to sit upon the highlands and watch, across miles of intervening
swamp, the tiny points of fire that are the camp fires of German
Askaris.

Through the shady streets of this lovely town wander our soldier
invalids in their blue and grey hospital uniforms, along the well-paved
roads, neat boulevards, immaculate gardens and avenues of mangoes and
feathery palm trees. Along the sea front at night in front of the big
German hospital that now houses our surgical cases, you will find these
invalids walking past the cemetery where the "good Huns" sleep, sitting
on the beach, enjoying the cool sea breeze that sweeps into the town on
the North-East Monsoon.

Imagine the loveliest little land-locked harbour in the world, a white
strip of coral and of sand, groves of feathery palms, graceful shady
mangoes, huge baobab trees that were here when Vasco da Gama's soldiers
trod these native paths; and among them fine stone houses, soft
red-tiled roofs, verandahs all screened with mosquito gauze and
excellently well laid out, and you have Dar-es-Salaam.

Nothing is left of the old Arab village that was here for centuries
before the German planted this garden-city. Sloping coral sands, where
Arab dhows have beached themselves for ages past, are now supporting the
newest and most modern of tropical warehouses and wharves, electric
cranes, travelling cargo-carriers and a well-planned railway goods yard
that takes the freights of Hamburg to the heart of Central Africa.

It must be pain and grief to the German men and women whom our clemency
allows to occupy their houses, throng the streets and read the daily
Reuter cablegram, to see this town, the apple of their eye, defiled by
the "dirty English" the hated "beefs," as they call us from a mistaken
idea of our fondness for that tinned delicacy.

But the soldiers' daily swim in the harbour is undisturbed by sharks,
and the feel of the soft water is like satin to their bodies. Not for
these spare and slender figures the prickly heat that torments fat and
beery German bodies and makes sea-bathing anathema to the Hun. On German
yachts the lucky few of officers and men are carried on soft breezes
round the harbour and outside the harbour mouth in the evening coolness.

Arab dhows sail lazily over the blue sea from Zanzibar. If one could
dream, one could picture the corsairs' red flag and the picturesque Arab
figure standing high in the stern beside the tiller, and fancy would
portray the freight of spices and cloves that they should bring from the
plantations of Pemba and Zanzibar. But there are no dusky beauties now
aboard these ships; and their freight is rations and other hum-drum
prosaic things for our troops. The red pirate's flag has become the red
ensign of our merchant marine.

All the caravan routes from Central Africa debouch upon this place and
Bagamoyo. Bismarck looks out from the big avenue that bears his name
across the harbour to where the D.O.A.L. ship _Tabora_ lies on her side;
further on he looks at the sunken dry dock and a stranded German
Imperial Yacht. It would seem as if a little "blood and iron" had come
home to roost; even as the sea birds do upon his forehead. The grim
mouth, that once told Thiers that he would leave the women of France
nothing but their eyes to weep with, is mud-splashed by our passing
motor lorries.

The more I see of this place the more I like it. Everything to admire
but the water supply, the sanitation, the Huns and Hunnesses and a few
other beastlinesses. One can admire even the statue of Wissmann, the
great explorer, that looks with fixed eyes to the Congo in the eye of
the setting sun. He is symbolical of everything that a boastful Germany
can pretend to. For at his feet is a native Askari looking upward, with
adoring eye, to the "Bwona Kuba" who has given him the priceless boon of
militarism, while with both hands the soldier lays a flag--the imperial
flag of Germany--across a prostrate lion at his feet. "Putting it acrost
the British lion," as I heard one of our soldiers remark.

"_Si monumentum requiris circumspice_" as the Latins say; or, as Tommy
would translate, "If you want to see a bit of orl-right, look at what
the Navy has done to this 'ere blinking town." The Governor's palace,
where is it? The bats now roost in the roofless timbers that the 12-inch
shells have left. What of the three big German liners that fled to this
harbour for protection and painted their upper works green to harmonise
with the tops of the palm trees and thus to escape observation of our
cruisers? Ask the statue of Bismarck. He'll know, for he has been
looking at them for a year now. The _Tabora_ lies on her side half
submerged in water; the _König_ lies beached at the harbour mouth in a
vain attempt to block the narrow entrance and keep us out; the
_Feldmarschal_ now on her way upon the high seas, to carry valuable food
for us and maybe to be torpedoed by her late owners. The crowning
insult, that this ship should have recently been towed by the
_ex-Professor Woermann_--another captured prize.

What of the two dry docks that were to make Dar-es-Salaam the only
ship-repairing station on the East Coast? One lies sunk at the harbour
mouth, shortly, however, to be raised and utilised by us; the other in
the harbour, sunk too soon, an ineffectual sacrifice.

Germans and their womenfolk crowd the streets; many of the former quite
young and obvious deserters, the latter, thick of body and thicker of
ankle, walk the town unmolested. Not one insult or injury has ever been
offered to a German woman in this whole campaign. But these "victims of
our bow and spear" are not a bit pleased. The calm indifference that our
men display towards them leaves them hurt and chagrined. Better far to
receive any kind of attention than to be ignored by these indifferent
soldiers. What a tribute to their charms that the latest Hun fashion,
latest in Dar-es-Salaam, but latest by three years in Paris or London,
should provoke no glance of interest on Sunday mornings! One feels that
they long to pose as martyrs, and that our quixotic chivalry cuts them
to the quick.

There have been many bombardments of the forts of this town, and huge
dugouts for the whole population have been constructed. Great
underground towns, twenty feet below the surface, all roofed in with
steel railway sleepers. No wonder that many of the inhabitants fled to
Morogoro and Tabora. What a wicked thing of the Englander to shell an
"undefended" town! The search-lights and the huge gun positions and the
maze of trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements hewn out of
the living rock, of course, to the Teuton mind, do not constitute
defence.

But you must not think that we have had it all our own way in this
sea-warfare here. For in Zanzibar harbour the masts of H.M.S. _Pegasus_
peep above the water--a mute reminder of the 20th September, 1914. For
on that fatal day, attested to by sixteen graves in the cemetery, and
more on an island near, a traitor betrayed the fact that our ship was
anchored and under repairs in harbour and the rest of the fleet away. Up
sailed the _Königsberg_ and opened fire; and soon our poor ship was
adrift and half destroyed. A gallant attempt to beach her was foiled by
the worst bit of bad luck--she slipped off the edge of the bank into
deep water. But even this incident was not without its splendid side;
for the little patrol tug originally captured from the enemy, threw
itself into the line of fire in a vain attempt to gain time for the
_Pegasus_ to clear. But the cruiser's sharp stern cut her to the
water-line and sank her; and as her commander swam away, the
_Königsberg_ passed, hailed and threw a lifebuoy. "Can we give you a
hand?" said the very chivalrous commander of this German ship. "No; go
to Hamburg," said our hero, as he swam to shore to save himself to fight
again, on many a day, upon another ship.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Sketches of the East Africa Campaign" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.