Marching on Tanga

Chapter I

When the troop train ran into the siding at Taveta the dawn was breaking. All through the night we had been moving by fits and starts over the new military line from Voi, moving through a dark and desolate land which, eighteen months before, had been penetrated by very few men indeed. In that night journey we could see little of the country. Not that we slept—our progress was too freakish, and the Indian railway trucks in which we were packed were too crowded for that—but because the night seemed to lie upon it with a peculiar heaviness. All the time one was conscious, without seeing them, of the imminence of vast mountain masses, even though our line carried us for the most part over a fairly open plain. One was conscious, I say, of all these heavy mountains to the north: first the Burra Hills, and later the bulk of Kilimanjaro itself; and when, at a little after five o'clock, the sky began to lighten, we could see that the plain through which we moved was scattered with smaller hills of symmetrical, volcanic shape, to the very summits of which the thick bush climbed.

 

In the shape of these hillocks there was nothing unusual, for isolated fragments of this kind are scattered over a great part of Africa; but to the men with whom I was travelling, and to whose fortunes for many months to come my own must be linked, these hills bore a very different significance. The smooth green knoll past which we now crept was Salaita, the scene of a most bitter reverse and of a bloodless victory. The wooded crest which marked our southern horizon, two gentle summits with a dip between, was the ridge of Latema, in the Kitowo Hills, blocking that gate between Kilimanjaro and the Pare Mountains which had been forced six weeks before upon the eve of the rains. The nek of Latema-Reata meant a great deal to my companions the Rhodesians. In that fight, when things were going badly, an officer and seventeen men of the regiment had held the narrow passage for hours; and that, so we were told, had been the turning-point in the action which unlocked the gate and made our new invasion possible.

Nearly all the men in the regiment had fought at Salaita and Latema, and, what is more than that, had undergone the weary months of waiting before, when, after the failure before Tanga, everything was touch-and-go in East Africa. When almost daily the Uganda line had been raided by small parties of German askaris, when Mombasa and Nairobi had been equally threatened by an enemy superior in numbers, they had clung to and held that immense defensive line, wanting provisions, wanting water, wanting the very next necessity of life in those parts, quinine. All these privations the Second Rhodesia Regiment had suffered. The unit which left Salisbury over eight hundred strong, moved down after their six months' rest in the highlands with a strength of just under six hundred rifles. At the time when I left them, and at which this narrative will close, they could not put into the firing line more than fifty men; their machine-guns had been returned to Ordnance for want of gunners, and pestilence had swept away the lives of all their transport animals. But they had fulfilled their destiny, which was to be the tempered spearhead of the First Brigade: the weapon which in three months was driven to the heart of the German province.

The move which had cast us so suddenly into Taveta, ahead of the other units of the First Division, was characteristic of the secrecy and swiftness with which Jan Smuts works. Indeed, we were not quite assured that the greater rains were spent and that an advance on a large scale would be possible. We had expected to lie for a week or two at M'buyuni, where the forces of invasion were concentrating, until the weather had hardened and the ways were sure, and on that morning at Taveta the Pare Hills, a fine fantastic tangle of mountain to the southward, from which blue vapours lazily uncurled, wore a very watery look, while of Kilimanjaro itself nothing could be seen, for even the nearer foothills were half veiled in mist. Yet, though the weather were doubtful there was no manner of doubt in the minds of those who were returning to our adventure. This campaign was to be so different ... so very different. To begin with, we should no longer starve: for great accumulations of animal and mechanical transport were being massed behind us; nor need we lack for men since the South African contingent—a force as large as our own— was in the field; cavalry too would now be at hand to complete the work of the infantry battalions. Brits, we were told, was arriving or had even arrived in Mombasa with his mounted men. It is strange in these later days to remember how much we staked on Brits and the Second Mounted Brigade. . . . But I think that the thing which most sustained our confidence and made us embark with such high hopes upon the second phase of the East African operations was our absolute confidence in the leadership of Smuts. That he was a fine strategist, the move on Moshi, in spite of the failure of the northern enveloping column, had shown us. Of his personal courage we had been assured by the incidents of the Lumi fight; but there was yet another factor—in this case one might almost have called it a personal tribute—in his success which demanded our confidence, and that was the luck which has followed him throughout his career. Every one believed in his fortune no less than in his attainments; and it was partly this belief that sent us so happily on our way, for Fortune is the deity of all others whose shrines are never desolate in these precarious days.

In Taveta itself, at the time when we arrived, there was little enough to be seen. It has never had anything to show for its importance on the map but a little mission-station on the crown of a low hill, lying in the marches above the Lumi, as the knoll of Brent lies in the turf-moors at the foot of Mendip. There, indeed, there were trenches and the bleached bones of German dead; but the old station had been found so pestilential that ever . . .

 

 

 

 

Marching on Tanga

Chapter VI

 

In that camp by the river sleep did not come easily. I suppose we were too tired to sleep. I lay there staring at the fire, where the wood embers were gradually falling to white ash, and listening to the restlessness of the night where so much life moved by the river. The Colonel's orderly threw another bough on the fire. The boiling sap hissed with a sound that was wholly proper to the night, and then the bark cracked and broke into flame, lighting the figures of the men who lay about our fire, and I fell to wondering what manner of men we really were whom a blind fate had dumped down together in a spot where no man had ever trodden before.

I saw the Colonel lying there, glowing within, as I made sure, from the consciousness of the stretcher's rejection, and rather enjoying that cold couch in his role of old campaigner. Further off lay M-, who now for many years had scarcely slept beneath any roof but that velvety sky in which the Southern Cross is hung; and beyond him B-the Quartermaster, already fast asleep. Then the fire flickered on to the spare face of Capell's orderly, a lanky fellow who had fought in all the wars of Africa, and once—how many years ago?—had been at Rugby School. I could not help wondering what all these men were thinking of; and then, strangely enough, the sight of each of them impressed me with a sudden memory of the places with which they were connected in my mind: so that when I thought of the Colonel I saw those homely fields that lie beneath the Lickey Hills, and the great lake at Cofton, swarming with winter wild-fowl. The dim form of M-gave me a vision of the mountains of Skye, rising black over a grey-green sea; while from B-, most precious memory of all, I stole a dream of the turf moors of Somerset, golden in buttercup time, and yet another of stonewalled farmyards in autumn, with the taste of pomace in the air, and white mists lapping the lower cliffs of Mendip. So, numbering remembered joys, I snatched what sleep the mosquitoes would allow me.

I must have been sleeping lightly, for a sudden cry in the night made me hold my breath and then the darkness was full of confused sound: with the shouts of men, the trampling of mules and horses. This could only be one thing: a surprise attack with the bayonet. A scurry of hoofs swept past me in the dark, scattering the ashes of the dead fire. And yet no shots had been fired. At any rate we should soon know the worst. If they had broken through our pickets in the dark, God help us! And then a breathless sergeant ran up to headquarters to tell us that a lion had stolen within the perimeter and stampeded the mules. Their keeper had awakened to see the beast's great shape moving like a shadow towards him, and had cried out; and after that the whole camp had been thrown into an uproar. If this alarm had taken a less seasoned regiment, a great deal of damage might have been done; and as it was, I wondered what would have happened if we had been attacked that night, as ours was the only section of the perimeter on which pickets were posted.

Now it was impossible to sleep, if only for the cold, and at dawn of a most beautiful morning we set off again, following for several miles the uphill track down which we had stumbled the night before. It was strange how much easier the daylight made it—that, and above all the sweet and vigorous morning air. At the top of the hills we made a new line for the river, and reached, before midday, an open space, where for a little while we bivouacked. Even so we were far ahead of our transport and our rations, which rolled up painfully, and by degrees. In all this campaign I was full of pity for the wretched bullocks who were forced to work (and there was no way out of it) under the most distressing conditions, growing leaner and leaner on the thin pasturage of the bush, and driven —for they were willing beasts—until they dropped. Here it was obvious that we had utterly outmarched them. For the greater part of the night they had been pushed and pulled through the sand of dry nullahs, working beyond their strength in a country that was waterless. All the transport officers complained that they could do no more, unless the beasts were to be sacrificed for the sake of one day's march. Indeed, they had scarcely strength to struggle down to the Pangani, unladen, for watering.

But early in the afternoon we were ordered to inspan. In this war and with this General nothing was impossible. Very slowly and with infinite pain we rejoined the old trade route, passing through a wide stretch of relatively open country, which had lain hidden from us between the thick bush and the Pangani. The track was level, and fairly easygoing, else our oxen would never have finished it.

At last in that golden humid evening, when the low sun cast long shadows, we halted, wondering what would be done with us.

Certainly something unusual was toward. In the clear sky an aeroplane shone like a yellow dragonfly. The field artillery with their quickfirers rolled past, and, swishing through the long grass as though it were their natural element, a score of motorcars loaded with the general staff, came by: the last of them, a grey Vauxhall, with shining pointed radiator, in which Jan Smuts was sitting, with Collier, his Chief of Staff.

The General's car turned through a lane in our ranks and made off towards the line of bush to eastwards. In a little while it was whispered that there was good reason for our haste: that the Northern Army (as the Germans call it) under Kraut, was still in Same, and that Hannyngton, with the Second Brigade, was at their heels. Here was the defensive position on which we had expected them to retire.

Over miles of bush we could see the blue masses of the Pare, and in front of them, paler by contrast, the hill of Kitamuli, which overhangs the railway . . .