Chapter 11

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.