Since Alexander of Macedon descended upon the plains of India, there can
never have been so strange and heterogeneous an army as this, and a
doctor must speak with the tongues of men and angels to arrive at an
even approximate understanding of their varied ailments. The first
division that came with Jan Smuts from the snows of Kilimanjaro to the
torrid delta of the Rufigi contained them all.
The real history of the war begins with Smuts; for, prior to his coming,
we were merely at war; but when he came we began to fight. A brief
twenty-four hours in Nairobi, during which he avoided the public
receptions and the dinners that a more social chief would have graced;
then he was off into the bush. Wherever that rather short, but well-knit
figure appeared, with his red beard, well streaked with grey, beneath
the red Staff cap, confidence reigned in all our troops. And to the end
this trust has remained unabated. Many disappointments have come his
way, more from his own mounted troops than from any others; but we have
felt that his tactics and strategy were never wrong. Thus it was that
from this heterogeneous army, Imperial, East African, Indian and South
African, he has had a loyalty most splendid all the time. He may have
pushed us forward so that we marched far in advance of food or supplies,
thrust us into advanced positions that to our military sense seemed very
hazardous. But he meant "getting a move on," and we knew it; and all of
us wished the war to be over. Jan Smuts suffered the same fever as we
did, ate our food, and his personal courage in private and most risky
reconnaissances filled us with admiration and fear, lest disaster from
some German patrol might overtake him. To me the absence of criticism
and the loyal co-operation of all troops have been most wonderful. For
we are an incurably critical people, and here was a civilian, come to
wrest victory from a series of disasters.
First in interest, perhaps, as they were ever first in fight, are the
Rhodesians, those careless, graceful fellows that have been here a year
before the big advance began. Straight from the bush country and fever
of Northern Rhodesia, they were probably the best equipped of all white
troops to meet the vicissitudes of this warfare. They knew the dangers
of the native paths that wound their way through the thorn bush, and
gave such opportunities for ambush to the lurking patrol. None knew as
they how to avoid the inviting open space giving so good a field of fire
for the machine-gun, that took such toll of all our enterprises. With
them, too, they brought a liability to blackwater fever that laid them
low, a legacy from Lake Nyasa that marked them out as the victims of
this scourge in the first year of the big advance.
The Loyal North Lancashires, too, have borne the heat and burden of the
day from the first disastrous landing at Tanga. Always exceedingly well
disciplined, they yield to none in the amount of solid unrewarded work
done in this campaign.
Of the most romantic interest probably are the 25th Royal Fusiliers, the
Legion of Frontiersmen. Volumes might be written of the varied careers
and wild lives lived by these strange soldiers of fortune. They were led
by Colonel Driscoll, who, for all his sixty years, has found no work too
arduous and no climate too unhealthy for his brave spirit. I knew him in
the Boer War when he commanded Driscoll's Scouts, of happy, though
irregular memory; their badge in those days, the harp of Erin on the
side of their slouch hats, and known throughout the country wherever
there was fighting to be had. The 25th Fusiliers, too, were out here in
the early days, and participated in the capture of Bukoba on the Lake. A
hundred professions are represented in their ranks. Miners from
Australia and the Congo, prospectors after the precious mineral earths
of Siam and the Malay States, pearl-fishers and elephant poachers,
actors and opera singers, jugglers, professional strong men, big-game
hunters, sailors, all mingled with professions of peace, medicine, the
law and the clerk's varied trade. Here two Englishmen, soldiers of
fortune or misfortune, as the case might be, who had specialised in
recent Mexican revolutions, till the fall of Huerta brought them, too,
to unemployment; an Irishman there, for whom the President of Costa Rica
had promised a swift death against a blank wall. Cunning in the art of
gun-running, they were knowing in all the tides of the Caribbean Sea,
and in every dodge to outwit the United States patrol. Nor must I forget
one priceless fellow, a lion-tamer, who, strange to say, feared
exceedingly the wild denizens of the scrub that sniffed around his
patrol at night.
Of our Indian forces the most likeable and attractive were the
Kashmiris, whom the patriot Rajah of Kashmir has given to the India
Government. Recruited from the mountains of Nepal--for the native of
Kashmir is no soldier--they meet one everywhere with their eager smiling
faces. In hospital they are always professing to a recovery from fever
that their pallid faces and enlarged spleens belie, and they take not
kindly to any suggestion of invaliding.
These battalions of Kashmir Rifles, the Baluchis and the King's African
Rifles have done more dirty bush fighting than any troops in this
campaign. The Baluchis, in particular, have covered themselves with
glory in many a fight.
The most efficient soldiers in East Africa are the King's African
Rifles; unaffected by the fever and the dysentery of the country, and
led by picked white officers, they are in their element in the thorn
jungle in which the Germans have conducted their rearguard actions.
Known at first as the "Suicides Club," the King's African Rifles lost a
far greater proportion of officers than any other regiment. Nor is it a
little that they owe to the gallant leader of one battalion, Colonel
Graham, who lost his life early in the advance on Moschi. These
regiments are recruited from Nyasaland in the south to Nubia and
Abyssinia in the north. Yaos, known by the three vertical slits in their
cheeks; slim Nandi, with perforated lobes to their ears; ebony
Kavirondo; Sudanese of an excellent quality; Wanyamwezi from the country
between Tabora and Lake Tanganyika, the very tribe from whom the German
Askaris are recruited, and all the dusky tribes that stretch far north
to Lake Rudolph and the Nile. Nor should one forget the Arab Rifles,
raised by that wonderful fellow Wavell, whose brother was a prisoner
with me in Germany. A professing Mohammedan, he was one of very few
white men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He harried the Huns
along the unhealthy districts of the coast, until a patrol, in ambush,
laid him low near Gazi.
Last, and most important, the army of South Africans, whose coming spelt
for us the big advance and the swift move that made us master of the
whole country from Kilimanjaro to the Rufigi. A great political
experiment and a most wonderfully successful one was this Africander
army, English and Boers, under a Boer General. For the first time since
the Great War in South Africa, the Boers made common cause with us,
definitely aligned themselves with us in a joint campaign and provided
the greatest object lesson of this World War. If the campaign of German
East Africa was worth while, its value has been abundantly proved in
this welding of the races that, despite local disagreements, has
occurred. The South African troops have found the country ill adapted to
their peculiar genius in war, and the blind bush has robbed the mounted
arm of much of its efficiency. Not here the wide distances to favour
their enveloping tactics. Much have they suffered from fever, hardships
and privation, and to their credit lies the greatest of all marches in
this campaign, the 250 mile march to Kondoa Irangi in the height of the
rainy season. The South African Infantry arrived in Kondoa starved and
worn and bootless after this forced march to extricate the mounted
troops, whose impetuous ardour had thrust them far beyond the
possibility of supplies, into the heart of the enemy's country. We
cannot sufficiently praise the apparently reckless tactics that made
this wonderful march towards the Central Railway, or the uncomplaining
fortitude of troops who lived in this fever-stricken country, on
hippopotamus meat, wild game and native meal. To the Boer, as to all of
us, this campaign must have taught a wonderful lesson, for many
prejudices have been modified, and it has been learnt that "coolies" (as
only too often the ignorant style all natives of India) and "Kaffirs,"
can fight with the best.
This campaign would have been largely impossible, were it not for the
Cape Boys and other natives from the Union, who have come to run our
mule and ox transport. Their peculiar genius is the management of
horses, mules and cattle. Different from other primitive and negro
people, they are very kind to animals, infinitely knowledgeable in the
lore of mule and ox, they can be depended upon to exact the most from
animal transport with the least cruelty. Wonderful riders these; I have
seen them sit bucking horses in a way that a Texas cowboy or a Mexican
might envy.
One should not leave the subject of this army without reference to the
Cape Corps--that experiment in military recruiting which many of us were
at first inclined to condemn. But from the moment the Cape Boy enlisted
in the ranks of the Cape Corps his status was raised, and he adopted,
together with his regulation khaki uniform and helmet, a higher
responsibility towards the army than did his brother who helped to run
the transport. They have been well officered, they have been a lesson to
all of us in the essential matters of discipline and smartness, they
have done much of the dirty work entailed by guarding lines of
communication, and now, when given their longed-for chance of actual
fighting on the Rufigi, they have covered themselves with distinction.
For my part, as a doctor, I found they had too much ego in their cosmos,
as is commonly the fault of half-bred races, and a sick Cape Corps
soldier seemed always very sick indeed; yet, as the campaign progressed,
we came to like and to admire these troops the more, so that their
distinction won in the Rufigi fighting was welcomed very gladly by all
of us.
Later in the campaign arrived the Gold Coast Regiment; and now the
Nigerian Brigade are here. Very, very smart and soldier-like these Hausa
and Fulani troops; Mohammedan, largely, in religion, and bearded where
the East Coast native is smooth-faced, they will stay to finish this
guerilla fighting, for which their experience in the Cameroon has so
well fitted them. The Gold Coast Regiment has always been where there
has been the hardest fighting, their green woollen caps and leather
sandals marking them out from other negroid soldiers. And their
impetuous courage has won them many captured enemy guns, and, alas! a
very long list of casualties. But in hospital they are the merriest of
happy people, always joking and smiling, and are quite a contrast to our
much more serious East Coast native; they have earned from their white
sergeants and officers very great admiration and devotion. By far the
best equipped of any unit in the field, they had, as a regiment, no less
than eight machine-guns and a regimental mountain battery.