CHAPTER II

THE ADVANCE ON THE DAR-ES-SALAAM—LAKE TANGANYIKA RAILWAY

The military situation, at the moment when the Gold Coast Regiment received its orders to take the field, was approximately as follows. Tanga, the coast terminus of the more northerly of the two German railways, had fallen some time before, and the whole line from Moschi to the sea was now in the hands of the British. A column of Indian troops was moving down the coast with Sandani at the mouth of the Wami river, Bagamoyo at the mouth of the Kingani, and Dar-es-Salaam, the terminus of the principal railway, as its successive objectives. The enemy had been driven, not only away from the Tanga-Moschi railway, but to the south of the Pangani-Handeni-Kondoa-Irangi road; and General Smuts had established General Headquarters on the left bank of the Lukigura River, which falls into the Wami on its left bank at a point distant some sixty miles from its mouth.

The Commander-in-Chief had with him here the First Division under Major-General Hoskyns, consisting of the 1st and 2nd East African Brigades under the command respectively of Brigadier-General Sheppard and Brigadier-General Hannyngton. With the exception of a machine-gun detachment of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, which was attached to the 2nd East African Infantry Brigade, both these brigades were composed of Indian troops. The Gold Coast Regiment was about to join up with the 25th Royal Fusiliers, and with it to form the Divisional Reserve.

On the right, the Second Division, which was composed of South African Infantry and mounted troops, under Major-General Van der Venter, had its advanced base at Kondoa-Irangi and for its objective Dadoma, on the main railway which runs from Dar-es-Salaam to Kigome, near Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika.

Between the Second Division and General Smuts’ troops, a force composed of South African mounted men, under the command of Brigadier-General Brits, was operating independently, with Kilossa on the railway as its objective. It was General Smuts’ intention to attack the railway with the First Division at Morogoro, a mission station, which lies not quite fifty miles due east of Kilossa.

It had not yet been found possible to establish a main base at Tanga; and at the moment all supplies were being landed at Kilindini, and were conveyed thence, by the railway route which the Regiment had followed, to Korogwe on the Tanga-Moschi line. An advanced base had been formed at Handeni, five-and-thirty miles to the south-east of Korogwe; and for six weeks General Smuts had been compelled to remain inactive in his camp on the Lukigura River, while sufficient stores, etc., were being accumulated to render a further and continuous advance possible.

His plan, as will be seen by the disposition of his forces, was to attack the main German railway line, as nearly as possible simultaneously, at Dar-es-Salaam on the coast, at Morogoro, at Kilossa and at Dadoma. This would have the effect of depriving the enemy of the use of the line and of driving him to the south of it; after which an attempt would be made to expel him from the country north of the Rufiji River.

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The Regiment had been inspected by General Edwards on the 30th July, and on the 4th August, leaving the Depôt Company to establish itself at Korogwe, they left their temporary camp at Ngombezi and began their march to Msiha, the headquarters of the First Division on the banks of the Lukigura. It was now that their troubles began, and the nine days of that march live in the memory of officers and men as perhaps the most trying period of the whole campaign.

Though the altitude was not great, the climate was cool even at midday; but while the Europeans belonging to the force found it wonderfully bracing, the men missed the genial warmth of their native land, and at night suffered greatly from the cold.

The line of march led along an unmetalled track, over which motor-lorries had been ploughing their way for weeks, and the surface had been reduced to a fine powder some six to eight inches in depth. The constant passage of lorries, and now the first-line transport of the Regiment—which consisted of mule-carts and of the carriers who had accompanied the force from the Gold Coast—and the plodding feet of the men on the march stirred up this loose deposit into a dense fog of a dull-red hue. As the day advanced, each man became plastered with particles of this fine red dust, which seemed to possess peculiarly penetrating properties, till one and all resembled so many figures fashioned from _terra cotta_. Eyes, nostrils and mouths became filled with this stuff, occasioning acute thirst; but the way was waterless, save for a few foul holes half filled with brackish water.

The lot of the rear-guard was the hardest, for the second-line transport, locally supplied to the Regiment, consisted of South African ox-wagons, each of which was drawn by a team of sixteen oxen driven by Cape boys. The imported cattle had many of them become infected by _trypanosomæ_, and not a few were literally on their last legs. The exigencies of the situation, however, rendered it necessary for these luckless brutes to be driven as long as they could stand; but progress was incredibly slow, and frequent halts were occasioned to unyoke some miserable ox, which had fallen never to rise again, and thereafter to rearrange his yoke-fellows. At the best, as they crept forward, the floundering wagons with their straining teams churned the dust into impenetrable, ruddy clouds, which, mingling with the fog already caused by the passage of the infantry, well-nigh smothered the men who formed the rear-guard. Though the actual length of each day’s march was fairly short, the last man rarely reached the camping-place until long after dark.

The physical trials to which the rank and file were exposed—the choking dust, the raging thirst which it occasioned, the inadequate supply of brackish water, met with at long intervals, which seemed powerless to appease even when it did not aggravate their sufferings, the nauseating stench arising from the putrifying carcases of dead horses, mules and oxen, with which the line of march was thickly strewn, the bitterly cold nights, and the ominous way in which man after man succumbed to pneumonia—were rendered almost unbearable by reason of the superstitious fears by which the men were haunted. The memory of that long railway journey, which half of them had made in open trucks, through the freezing cold of the nights and early mornings high up in the mountains, was still fresh in their minds. They had seen many of their comrades suddenly stricken by pneumonia—to them a by no means familiar disease—and killed thereby after a few days or hours of painful struggle for life. Now they found themselves in an unknown land, separated from their homes by immeasurable distances, with wide expanses of sour scrub spreading around them, and holding for them no promise of finality; while day after day, they plodded, parched and choking, along that interminable road, saw their fellows succumb at every halting-place, and learned presently to believe that the water with its salt-taste, which was alone available to allay their thirst, and of which they could never obtain enough, was a poisoned draught that was killing them. This was a devil’s country to which their officers had brought them—a land of evil spirits out of which they could never hope again to win their way. The Europeans—officers and non-commissioned officers alike—sought ceaselessly to cheer and hearten-up their men; but for the first time in the memory of any of them, their efforts met with no response. The men had become unrecognizable. Usually the most cheerful and light-hearted of mankind, they wore now a sullen, hang-dog air. They were sulky, suspicious and resentful. For the first time in the history of the Regiment their confidence in their officers—which to these men has become a religion—had been strained almost to the breaking-point. And their officers knew it. “You could not get a grin out of them at any price,” said one who had seen his men in many a tight place, and had never known them to show even a passing sign of discouragement or depression; and when you cannot conjure a grin out of the gnarled features of a man of the Gold Coast Regiment, something very like the Trump of Doom has sounded for him.

The Regiment, after resting on the 8th August at Handeni, and drawing a fresh supply of rations, pushed on for another four days to Mahazi, where it duly reported its arrival to the headquarters of the First Division.

The front had now been reached, the enemy was close at hand, and there was a river of running water to delight the hearts of the parched and dust-coated men. The reaction was immediate. There was no lack of grins now; and these found their reflections in the faces of a band of anxious officers, as they listened to the cheerful babble resounding from their new encampment. It is a music that is discordant enough at times, but now it was more than welcome after the sullen silence of suspicion and distrust that had brooded over the camp and the line of march for more than a week.

On the 13th August the Regiment moved forward on the road to Turiani. The country in which they found themselves was no longer grey or powdered red with dust, but actually green, though it was still, for the most part, covered by waist-high scrub and grass, and the folds of the undulating plain rendered any extended view impossible. The proximity of the enemy, as is usual in warfare of this type, was more certain than his whereabouts, and all military precautions were henceforth taken during the day’s march to Turiani, and during the subsequent advance.

On the 15th August the Regiment moved to Chasi, and on the 16th August, after working all day at the construction of two bridges, the camp was advanced to Kwevi Lombo, near the Makindu River, and established at about 11 p.m.

On the 17th August the Regiment received orders to move forward in the early afternoon to Dakawa, where fighting had been in progress all day. The men, resting in camp after their hard day and late night, had listened all the morning, like a pack of terriers quivering with excitement, to the familiar sounds of machine-gun and rifle-fire; and after a march of four and a half hours they reached Dakawa at 7 p.m. Here General Smuts had established his headquarters, and Colonel Rose personally reported to him the arrival of the Regiment. General Smuts ordered the Regiment to sit down and rest until the rising of the moon, and then to proceed to a ford two and a half miles west of the main road. At dawn, if the enemy was still in position, they were to cross the river and join General Enslin’s Brigade, which belonged to the force operating independently under Major-General Brits.

These orders were duly carried out, the Regiment being guided to the ford by the celebrated scout, Lieutenant Pretorius, a way for the infantry having been beaten down through the tough high grass by a body of South African mounted men. This movement was carried out by the Regiment with the least avoidable noise. The enemy, however, becoming aware that the ford was occupied, drew off during the night; and next morning, therefore, the Regiment returned to its own division, and camped near a broken bridge over the Mkundi River, a left affluent of the Wami. Here it remained until the 23rd August, when it moved forward eight and a half miles to Kimamba, and thence, on the 24th August, to a camp on the banks of the Ngere-Ngere, a small stream which falls into the Ruwu on its left bank a few miles above Mafisa.

This latter day’s march calls for a word of description. The Regiment, which was now acting as part of the reserve to the 2nd East African Brigade, marched last of the fighting troops, with the heavy transport and the actual rear-guard still further behind it. The country traversed was a flat plain broken by frequent undulations, and grown upon by shortish grass, brittle and wilted by the sun. Mean-looking trees were spattered all over the plain, but were usually wide enough apart to permit of the easy passage of armoured motor-cars. Of these a number, under the charge of naval officers, accompanied the marching men, scudding up and down the column and searching the country in the immediate neighbourhood of the line of march, much as a dog hunts on all sides of a path along which its owner is walking. Occasionally, a deep donga would be met with, which could not be negotiated by a motor-car; and then the marching men would turn to with their picks and shovels, fill in a section of the dried-up watercourse, and so fashion a temporary road across it which enabled the cars to pass. This was accomplished over and over again with great ease and rapidity; and for the rest, the country presented no serious obstacle to the use of these armoured vehicles.

August, in East Africa, is of course the height of the dry season, and in all tropical regions of this continent the dry season means a fierce heat, beating down during all the hours of daylight upon a parched and thirsty earth, and refracted from the wilted vegetation with an almost equal intensity. It means that every stream has run dry, and that even many of the larger rivers have shrunken into mere runnels. It means that sun-dried grass and scrub and the very leaves upon the trees have become brittle and inflammable as tinder; and that the bush fires, for the most part self-generated,—such as those which of old so greatly affrighted Hanno and his Carthaginian mariners on the West Coast of Africa—are ubiquitous,—are columns of smoke by day and pillars of fire by night. Any sudden change of wind at this season of the year may cause the traveller to be unexpectedly confronted by a wall of flame, raging almost colourless in the fierce sunlight, advancing on a wide front with innumerable explosions like the rattle of musketry, and with a rapidity which is apt to prove highly embarrassing.

During this day’s march the natural heat was intensified by these constant conflagrations, above which the agitated air danced in a visible haze, and from which there came a breath like that from a furnace, bearing in all directions innumerable charred and blackened fragments of vegetation. Through this heated atmosphere the marching troops plodded doggedly onward, parched with thirst, and playing an eternal game of hide and seek with the attacking bush-fires. Many narrow escapes occurred, and the first-line transport of the Gold Coast Regiment was once fairly caught, the casualties including 6 oxen, an army transport cart, 2 wagons, 10,800 rounds of small arm ammunition, 20 picks, 42 shovels, one rifle, some private kit, and a quantity of rations, all of which were burned to a cinder. Eighteen other oxen were so badly burned that they had to be slaughtered, their meat being issued as rations to the Divisional Reserve.

Another element besides fire, however, seemed to conspire this day against the advancing force; for the exact position of the Ngere-Ngere could not be located, and when the Regiment arrived at the place where it was to bivouac for the night, there was no water to be found in its vicinity. Water had, however, been discovered some miles further on, and carts were dispatched to fetch it. Darkness had already fallen, and the outlook was sufficiently depressing; but an officer of the Gold Coast Regiment, who happened to push his way into a patch of thick bush adjoining the camping-place, quite accidentally discovered the river by the simple process of pitching headlong into it. The Ngere-Ngere is a very winding stream, and though its neighbourhood was indicated by a belt of thick bush, the greenness of which could only be due to the proximity of water, the leading troops had missed this point on the road, to which the river happened to approach to within a distance of a few yards, and owing to an abrupt bend, which the bed of the stream takes at this place, the nearest point at which its banks were again struck was about a mile distant.

At once the glad tidings were given, and the men speedily obtained all the water they required. The Gold Coast Regiment had bivouacked for the night near the scene of its discovery; but though a start had been made that morning at 5.30 a.m., it was a late hour before the last troops struggled into camp.

Shortly after the Dar-es-Salaam railway had been crossed at Massambassi by the main force, B Company was placed at the disposal of Colonel O’Grady—an officer of the Indian Army, who had won for himself in the Himalayas a great reputation as an Alpine climber—and proceeded with him and a remnant of the East African Mounted Rifles into a clump of fertile, well-watered and hilly country, which was comparatively thickly populated, and where a number of German foraging-parties were believed to be at work. The tracks leading through these hills were wide enough for two to march abreast, but after the manner of native paths all the tropics over, they took no account of gradients, but led straight up each precipitous ascent till the summit was reached, and thence plunged down the opposite slope to encounter a fresh rise when the valley level was reached. It is inevitable that all paths in hilly country, which are made by folk who habitually go bare-footed, should deal with ascents and declivities in this switchback fashion; for roads scarped out of the hill’s face, unless they are constructed on scientific engineering principles, are speedily worn away by the annual torrential rains. This renders them agonising to men who do not use boots, for though the act of walking on the side of the foot is uncomfortable enough even for men who are well shod, it is excruciating to those who go bare-footed; and in their estimation any strain on the lungs and on the back-sinews, which the constant climbing and descent of hills entail, is preferable to this much more painful means of progression.

Through these hills went Colonel O’Grady, the handful of white men composing the detachment of the East African Mounted Rifles—some dozen survivors of that gallant corps which had seen such hard times and had done such splendid work during the earlier phases of the campaign—and B Company of the Gold Coast Regiment. The valleys were thickly planted with native food-stuffs of all descriptions, including such luxuries as sugar-cane bananas, etc.; and eggs and fowls were also obtainable in moderate quantities. Patrols were sent out in all directions at once, to forage for the little force and thoroughly to search the surrounding country for German forage-parties. One of these—a body of eleven Germans, genially intoxicated to a man on native beer, and quite incapable of resistance—was brought in by the East African Mounted Rifles, and a few Askari,[1] who were also engaged in foraging, were captured by B Company. When this group of hills had been thoroughly searched, Colonel O’Grady released B Company, which at once rejoined the Regiment. The latter, meanwhile, had been following in the track of B Company, and at daybreak on the 3rd September, the whole corps entered the mission station at Matombo.

Footnote 1:

Askari = Native soldier.

These mission stations are a feature of erstwhile German East Africa. They are, for the most part, charmingly situated, generally upon the crest of a hill, whence a magnificent view of the surrounding country can be obtained. They consist, as a rule, of one or more substantially built two-storeyed buildings constructed of mud, or of locally made bricks, lime-washed, and roofed with red tiles, which are also manufactured on the spot. The church, which usually flanks them, is built of rough blocks of stone, as is that at Matombo, or of bricks or mud, as the case may be; and it is often surmounted by a tapering, red-tiled spire. The eminences upon which these stations have been established, and the land around their feet, are set with gardens, groves of fruit trees, and patches of cultivation, all of which obviously owe their existence to European initiative and supervision.

The native congregations ordinarily occupy a number of scattered hovels—built much further apart from one another than is the native habit in West Africa—thatched with grass, and placed at a respectful distance from the buildings occupied by the missionaries. The latter in German East Africa, unlike their prototypes on the West Coast, apparently did not welcome the too close proximity of their proselytes.

The mission buildings at Matombo were found to contain a number of Germans, who were supposed to be too old for active service, and a good many of their women and children. The church, which had been converted into a hospital, was full of German sick and wounded, who had been left in charge of a medical man of their own nationality. This interesting individual was allowed to continue his ministrations, and it was always believed—whether rightly or wrongly it is impossible to say—that he subsequently made use of the liberty thus accorded to him to signal the movements of the Regiment to his compatriots posted in the Uluguru mountains, the entrances to which the British were now engaged in forcing.

The whole of this hilly area was thickly populated by people clothed only in a kind of kilt made of grass, who, though many of them had been impressed by the Germans to serve as carriers, appeared to take no very close interest in the movements of either of the opposed forces. The Uluguru mountains were their home—the only world they knew; and these hapless folk had no alternative, therefore, but to remain where they were, watching with the philosophical resignation so characteristic of a tropical population this strife of gods or devils which had temporarily transformed the quiet countryside into an inferno. It was only occasionally that their equanimity was ruffled for a space by the chance explosion of a shell in close proximity to their dwellings.

General Smuts’ drive had so far proved successful, and the Germans, fighting a more or less continuous rear-guard action, but offering no very stubborn or prolonged resistance at any given point, had been forced back, first on to the line of the Dar-es-Salaam-Lake Tanganyika railway, and then across it into the mountainous country which lies between the railway and the low-lying valley of the Rufiji River.

The Gold Coast Regiment had itself crossed the railway line at a point some miles to the east of Morogoro, and had thence penetrated into the hilly country to the south for a distance of some fifteen miles, camping on Sunday, the 3rd September, in the neighbourhood of the mission station at Matomba. This place is situated on the northern edge of the Uluguru Mountains—highlands which occupy an area measuring approximately a hundred miles square—out of which it was now the task of the First Division to endeavour to drive the enemy, who had sought refuge in them.

It was on the 4th September, 1916—the day on which the mission station at Matomba was quitted—that the Gold Coast Regiment was fated, for the first time, to take a more active part in the East African campaign.