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.
[Illustration: KIBATA AND NGARAMBI AREA]
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.”