CHAPTER V

IN THE KILWA AREA—IN THE SOUTHERN VALLEY OF THE LOWER RUFIJI

On the 26th January, 1917, the Regiment, under the command of Major Goodwin, left Kitambi for Ngarambi Chini, and reached its destination next day, after camping for the night on the road at Namatwe, a spot distant fourteen and a half miles from the former place. From this point the roads in the neighbourhood were regularly patrolled; and on the 31st January the Regiment moved to Kiyombo—a place some six miles north of Ngarambi Chini—where the brigade camp was established. From the 29th January to the 6th February A and B Companies were detached from the Regiment, and were stationed first at Namburage and later at a place on the banks of the Lugomya River, to which the name of Greene’s Post was given. From all these points, the work of patrolling the roads in the vicinity was regularly carried out; and on the 3rd February Lieutenant Shields, with Colour-Sergeant Nelson, 50 rank and file and 1 machine-gun, were sent out on this duty from Njimbwe, where the Pioneer Company was then on a detached post, along the road leading to Utete. It should be noted that the Utete here mentioned is not the largish town on the right bank of the Rufiji River which bears that name, but a much smaller place situated about eleven miles north of Kiyombo.

The patrol under Lieutenant Shields had orders to meet a patrol of the King’s African Rifles from Kiwambi at a point some nine miles from Njimbwe, but he had proceeded along the road leading to Utete for a distance of only about a mile and a half when the advance point sent back to report that they had seen a group of about ten German _Askari_ on the eastern or right side of the track. It was a favourite trick of the Germans at this time to dress themselves and their native soldiers in kit belonging to the British which had fallen into their hands, and thus to occasion confusion as to who was friend and who was foe. The country through which Lieutenant Shields was patrolling was for the most part of a fairly open character, though it was covered with rank grass, set pretty thickly with trees, and studded here and there with patches of underwood. The party of the enemy had only been glimpsed for a moment, but as Lieutenant Shields went forward at once, followed or accompanied by Colour-Sergeant Nelson, a white man, dressed like an officer of the King’s African Rifles, appeared at a little distance ahead of the advance point, crying out in English, “Don’t fire! we are K.A.R.’s.” Lieutenant Shields, who was very short-sighted, taken in by this treacherous ruse, bade his men not fire, and the enemy, who appear to have been about 200 strong with many Europeans among them, thereupon poured a volley into the patrol from the bush at very short range. This was followed by the blowing of bugles and an assault. Lieutenant Shields and Colour-Sergeant Nelson were both shot, as also was the corporal in charge of the machine-gun while trying to bring his piece into action. A German who attempted to approach Shields as he lay on the ground was shot by a man of the Gold Coast Regiment, and the rest of the machine-gun team managed to get their gun away safely. The patrol, however, had to retire in disorder, and in addition to the casualties already enumerated 8 rank and file were missing and were afterwards ascertained to have been killed, while 2 stretcher-bearers were wounded, and 1 machine-gun carrier, 1 transport-carrier and 2 stretcher-bearers were also missing. The patrol further lost 3 boxes of small-arm ammunition, 6 machine-gun belts, 2 stretchers and a medical haversack.

It was Lieutenant Shields, it will be remembered, who held the advanced post on the ridge beyond the summit of Gold Coast Hill during those soul-searching hours between 11 a.m. and dusk on the 15th December. It seemed a tragedy that this gallant young officer, who had come unscathed through the ordeal of that day, and who had earned for himself a high reputation for coolness and courage, should lose his life in the paltry wayside ambush above described.

George Hilliard Shields was at the outbreak of war a member of the Education Department of the Gold Coast, and held the post of headmaster of the Government Boys’ School at Accra. He had earlier filled a scholastic post in Raffles’ Institute at Singapore: and in the Gold Coast he distinguished himself by passing the very difficult interpreter’s examination in the Ga language. Like so many Gold Coast civilians, Mr. Shields early volunteered for active service, but it was not found possible to release him from civil employment until the Regiment was ordered to East Africa in the middle of 1916. He will long be remembered in Accra for the excellent and manly influence which he exerted over the boys who were under his tutelage.

At 1.30 p.m. a standing patrol was sent forward to the Kibega River on the Unguara road, where it entrenched itself. Shortly afterwards a small enemy patrol appeared on the road to the south of this post and was fired upon. The men composing it bolted into the bush, their porters dropping their loads, which turned out to be part of the small-arms ammunition lost by Lieutenant Shields earlier in the day. Later in the afternoon the enemy returned and, supported by three maxims, attacked the post. The patrol of the Regiment held on for a while, but finding itself outnumbered, retired through the bush to the camp at Njimbwe, losing one man.

On the 4th February, the Regiment left the camp at Kiyombo and moved forward to Njimbwe, which lies about five miles to the north, where the 40th Pathans presently joined them; and from here, as usual, small patrols were daily sent out along the roads in the neighbourhood.

On the 5th February the Pioneer Company and the Battery left Njimbwe at 5.30 a.m., in the midst of a terrific thunderstorm, for the purpose of supporting the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles, who were about to deliver an attack upon two German camps, both of which overlooked the Ngarambi-Utete road. They came in contact with an enemy post, which was quickly dislodged, and they subsequently joined up with the King’s African Rifles, only to learn that the elusive enemy had abandoned his camps.

The detachment camped for the night with the King’s African Rifles at the junction of the road to Utete with another track; and as a token that the dry season was now fairly over, heavy rain fell with melancholy persistency during all the hours of darkness. The men, of course, had no shelter save such as they had been able to improvise for themselves on the preceding evening; and there are, perhaps, few more dreary or depressing experiences than that of lying out all night under the relentless beat of a steady tropical downpour. The cold felt has little in common with the brisk, keen cold of a frosty day or that met with at a high altitude; but it has certain raw and penetrating properties, and the discomfort becomes hourly more acute, while at every moment the puddles suck and squelch beneath you, and fresh streams of colder water flow in from unexpected directions to chill you to the bone.

At 8 a.m. on the following morning—February 6th—the detachment left its comfortless bivouac, and marched and waded back to Njimbwe over a shockingly bad track, which the heavy rain of the night before had reduced to a quagmire and in places had flooded to a depth of two feet. The detachment had hardly got into camp when some carriers, who had been out searching for fuel, ran in with the news that the enemy was approaching. An attack quickly followed, the enemy taking up a line from south-east to west, and approaching in places to within 200 yards of the camp. The surprise was complete, and some of the men of the 40th Pathans, who were outside the perimeter when the attack began, were unfortunately injured by their own machine-gun fire. The enemy, however, was not in any great strength, and he had evidently not realized that he was attacking so large a force. When he discovered the situation he drew off somewhat hastily, and was hotly pursued for over a mile. Only a few of the attacking force were seen, but among them an European was observed wearing a King’s African Rifles hat and flash, and two _Askari_, one with a turban and one with the green knitted cap which is part of the service kit of the men of the Gold Coast Regiment. The casualties sustained by the latter were 1 man killed, 3 wounded, 1 gun-carrier and 5 transport-carriers wounded, and 1 Gold Coast Volunteer missing, of whom nothing was ever subsequently heard. The 40th Pathans lost 6 men killed and 18 wounded, while the known enemy losses were 10 men wounded, including 1 European. Immediately after this incident, Captain Harman took out a patrol to repair the telephone-line, which had been cut, while for some time previously it had been frequently tapped by the enemy.

The next few days were occupied in patrolling the roads in the neighbourhood of the camp; and on the 9th February the bodies of Lieutenant Shields, Colour-Sergeant Nelson, and of eight soldiers, who had been killed on the Utete road on the 3rd February, were discovered. A burial party was sent out, and the bodies of Lieutenant Shields and Colour-Sergeant Nelson were brought back to the camp, where the burial service was read by the Rev. Captain Nicholl, and Holy Communion was celebrated.

For some weeks past the men of the Regiment had been suffering very acutely from lack of sufficient food. Not only was the supply inadequate, but much of the stuff sent up had to be condemned as quite unfit for human consumption. Many of the men were terribly emaciated, and some eighty of them were subsequently sent to hospital suffering from starvation. Had the Regiment not had the good fortune to find a few food plots planted with cassava, things would have been even worse than they were. The officers would have fared no better had not some of them chanced to possess a slender stock of European provisions, which they shared in common; but the officers of a neighbouring mess had to live for weeks upon nothing but mealie porridge, which they consumed at frequent intervals throughout the day, as they found it impossible to eat at a sitting enough of this filling but unsatisfying stuff to allay their hunger for more than a few hours.

The discipline of the men of the Gold Coast Regiment under this prolonged and trying ordeal was beyond all praise. They had followed their white officers across the sea to this unknown land, where they had endured cold such as they had never dreamed of, where they had been grilled by the sun and parched by unappeasable thirst. They had plodded manfully up hill and down dale, across barren, arid flats, and had waded through a water-logged country. Whenever and wherever they had met the enemy they had fought him like the fine soldiers they are, until the saying, “The green caps never go back,” had passed into a proverb in the German camp. Now in the heart of a dismal swamp, they were slowly but surely starving. Yet never once did they murmur or blame their officers.

During the next fortnight the Regiment remained in the camp at Njimbwe, sending out patrols, some of which had difficulty in preventing themselves from being cut off by the suddenly deepening swamps, when a more than usually heavy downpour flooded the low-lying land; squabbling with enemy forage-parties for possession of the rare patches of cassava; taking an occasional prisoner; and sustaining a few attacks upon its outposts. During one of the latter incidents, on Valentine’s Day, Machine-gun Corporal Tinbela Busanga behaved with great gallantry, working his gun, after he had been badly wounded in the arm, until he was too faint with loss of blood to carry on. On this day, though the enemy was driven off without difficulty, two men of B Company were wounded. On another occasion, a patrol of six men, under Corporal Amandu Fulani 4, was ambushed and killed to a man, though not until they had made a hard fight of it. Amandu Fulani, who was a very smart and gallant young soldier, had been orderly to the Governor at Accra, but when D Company was ordered to East Africa, he insisted upon accompanying “his brothers.” When his body was found, it had been stripped of his uniform, but a gunshot wound in the abdomen had been bound up with his _kamar-band_. Though the enemy had removed his casualties, there were abundant signs that the little patrol had sold their lives dearly.

And during all this time the entry in the War Diary of the Regiment, “Half Rations,” sounds its reiterated and despairing note.

On the 23rd February the Gold Coast Regiment moved out of Njimbwe camp at daybreak, marched to Ngarambi Chini, which was reached at 2 p.m., and where an hour’s halt was called. The march was continued till 6 p.m., at which time Namatewa was reached. The distance traversed was a good twenty miles, which at any time is a tough bit of work for a body of marching men, but though a few swamps were met with the road was drier than might have been expected. None the less, the men, in their then half-famished condition, arrived very tired, and were glad to find that the Pioneer Company, which had gone on in advance, had got a comfortable camp ready for their reception, and had succeeded in finding excellent water. This latter feat had been performed, not for the first time, by Corporal Musa Fra-Fra, a native of the North-Eastern Province of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. This man seemed to possess some strange instinct which enabled him unerringly to discover water if such were to be obtained anywhere by digging or otherwise; and though he obstinately refused to reveal his secret or to show any one how to perform similar miracles, frequent use was made of his strange faculty by the officers of the Pioneer Company during the campaign in East Africa.

From this point the Regiment marched by fairly easy stages to Kitambi, at the foot of the hills, to Mtumbei Chini, Chemera, and Mitole, where it arrived on the 27th February, and went into camp to reorganize and recuperate. The men had richly earned a period of rest, for they had been continuously on the march or on active service ever since their arrival at Kilindini, in British East Africa, exactly seven months earlier.

Colonel R. A. de B. Rose, D.S.O., who had actively commanded the Regiment ever since the end of August, 1914, who had served with it throughout the Kameruns campaign before bringing it to East Africa, and who since January 20th had been in command of a column, was made a Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel with effect from the 1st January, 1917, to the great satisfaction of the officers and men.

* * * * *

This pause in the Regiment’s activities, though it was not destined to prove of any long duration, may be taken as providing a convenient opportunity briefly to review the general military situation as it stood at the end of the wet season of 1917. The rains in the lower valley of the Rufiji River began this year early in February, and in the ordinary course they might be expected to last until late in May, the commencement of the dry season in tropical East Africa usually synchronizing more or less accurately with the breaking of the south-west monsoon upon the shores of Ceylon on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

As we have seen, the drive from north to south, which had been begun in earnest in the preceding August, and for participation in which the Gold Coast Regiment had arrived just in time, had had the effect of expelling the enemy first from the country between the Tanga-Moschi and the Dar-es-Salaam-Lake Tanganyika railways, and later from the country between the last-named line and the Rufiji. Once across this river, a further retreat to the south became for the enemy almost a necessity; and when he found that he could not establish his winter headquarters in the highlands about Kibata mission station, he seems to have broken his forces up into comparatively small parties, and while keeping in touch with the troops on the southern side of the Rufiji, who were under General Hannyngton’s command, to have worked steadily south, living on the country as far as possible, and gradually making his way out of the water-logged areas amid which he had been overtaken by the break-up of the dry weather early in February.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German Commander-in-Chief, who throughout was the living soul of the resistance offered to the British, was not a man who believed in doing things by halves, and when he found that the valley of the Rufiji was untenable, he established his main headquarters nearly two hundred miles further to the south of that river, at a place lying within thirty-five miles of the Rovuma, which is the boundary between erstwhile German and Portuguese East Africa. The spot chosen was the mission station at Massassi, which is pleasantly situated at a height of 1500 feet above sea-level, and is a point at which the principal roads running through the south-eastern portion of the territory cross one another. The main road from the port of Lindi, which runs in a south-westerly direction to Makotschera on the Rovuna, and there effects a junction with the main road which skirts the northern bank of that river from Sassaware to its mouth, crosses at Massassi the main road from Newala on the south-east, which runs in a north-westerly direction to Liwale, and thence almost due north to the Rufiji River at Mikesse. From Liwale, moreover, another main road runs in a north-easterly direction to the sea at Kilwa Kivinje, and west by south to Songea—itself a point of junction of an elaborate road-system—and thence due west to Wiedhafen on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

Even in this campaign, it should be noted, the influence of British sea-power made itself felt, for though some supplies are known to have reached the enemy in spite of the naval blockade, the command of the sea had enabled General Hannyngton’s force to be slipped in behind the retreating Germans _viâ_ Kilwa, and had shown to von Lettow-Vorbeck the danger he ran of being cut off or surrounded by troops rapidly transported by sea to some spot south of the scene of his land operations. Apart from the commanding position which Massassi occupied as the key-point of the main lines of communication by land in this part of the country, and from its convenient proximity to the German-Portuguese boundary, its selection as von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main headquarters during the 1917 campaign was probably due to the fact that it could not easily be outflanked by troops conveyed further to the south by sea. With his main headquarters established at this point, moreover, and with all the principal highways in this part of the country at his immediate disposal, he could freely raid the districts to the north in which the scattered British forces were strongly established, and could occupy and hold, as long as it paid him to occupy and hold them, points of vantage such as Liwale, which could conveniently be used as his advance bases.

The German troops must have suffered considerably during the months immediately following their expulsion from the country north of the Rufiji, though it is doubtful whether they were called upon to endure a greater measure of physical discomfort or more acute starvation than that which fell to the lot of the Gold Coast Regiment and the 40th Pathans in their water-logged camp at Njimbwe, or to that of the Nigerian Brigade—which had now arrived in East Africa—and which, while holding with other troops the northern bank of the Rufiji during all that dismal rainy season, went lamentably short of everything save water, of which there was always an odious superfluity.

The fidelity of the German native soldiers at this period, and the fact that so few of them voluntarily surrendered to the British, have been quoted in certain ill-informed quarters as providing a striking testimony to the affection which the Germans are alleged to have inspired in the native population of East Africa. Subscription to any such opinion argues a complete misunderstanding of the military system which the Germans erected in their African colonies. It had for its basic principle the establishment among the native population of an isolated caste, whose members were not only allowed, but were actively encouraged, to assert their superiority over the rest of the inhabitants of the country, who, where a soldier was concerned, ceased to have any rights of person or of property, and could look for no redress when it was an _Askari_ who had maltreated them. It will be remembered that in the German mind, as it was revealed to a disgusted world in August and September, 1914, there existed a strange confusion of thought, which drew no distinction between fear of physical violence and the respect inspired by noble qualities. Thus it was openly declared by the German High Command that the organized bestialities practised in Belgium would cause the whole world “to respect the German soldier.” It was this characteristic confusion of ideas which led the Germans in their African colonies to seek to inspire the native population with a proper spirit of “respect” for their white rulers, by placing every ruffian who wore the Kaiser’s uniform above the law, and by bestowing upon him a free hand in so far as the treatment of the rest of the native population was concerned. An example may be cited, which is drawn from the personal knowledge of the present writer. In September, 1913, a German native soldier in the employment of the Togoland Government shot an old woman—a British subject—for an unwitting breach of quarantine regulations, and having shot her, proceeded to club her to death with the butt-end of his rifle Protests were duly made to the then Governor of Togoland, Duke Adolf Freidrich of Mecklenburg, and assurances were given that suitable notice had been taken of the incident. Yet when the British occupied Lome, the capital of Togoland, less than a year later, the culprit was found not even to have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment.

During the earlier part of the campaign, and as far as possible up to the very end, everything was done to mark the superiority of the _Askari_ over the rest of African mankind. They were provided with carriers who were, to all intents and purposes, their bondsmen and body-servants, their very rifles being carried for the soldiers when on the line of march and at a secure distance from the enemy. For their use a commando of women, under military escort, was marched about the country—a luxury with which the German officers also were for the most part plentifully provided; and, in fact, no stone was left unturned to impress upon the men themselves and upon the rest of the native population that the _Askari_ were a Chosen People in whose presence no dog must presume to bark.

The inevitable effect of this system was that the hand of every civilian native throughout the German colonies in Africa was against the _Askari_, and when war broke out these native soldiers were unable, even if they had been willing to risk so hazardous an experiment, to melt back into the native population from whom they had been completely differentiated and isolated, and whose undying hatred they had earned in good measure, shaken together, pressed down, and running over. Their only safety lay in holding together, and in maintaining as long as possible the tottering military system to which they owed alike their past privileges and their present imminent danger of death at the hands of an enemy, or of still worse things if they fell into the clutches of their outraged countrymen. Toward the end of 1916 a number of captured _Askari_ were sent back to British East Africa, and were there incorporated in a battalion of the King’s African Rifles. The reputation which they there won for themselves is instructive—excellent on parade, but a most violent and undisciplined crew when off duty, who in their relations with the native population respected the laws neither of God nor of man.

It was due to the German system, it is true, that the _Askari_ remained faithful to their white masters, but the reasons which inspired this fidelity are to the last degree discreditable to Germany and to her conception of the manner in which an European nation should “co-operate in the work of civilization”[2] among a primitive people in a distant land.

Footnote 2:

It was a British Prime Minister who declared, speaking during the early eighties of the nineteenth century, that if Germany desired colonies, “Great Britain would welcome her co-operation in the work of civilization.”