"What do I think of this country, and how does the Hun of East Africa
compare with his European brother?" you ask me. Well, to begin with the
Colony, as of the greater importance, I must confess to be very taken
with it, and I hope most sincerely that our Government will never give
it back. Though it is not so suited as British East Africa for European
colonisation, there are yet great areas of sufficient elevation to allow
of white women and children living, for years, without suffering much
from the vertical sun and the fevers of the country. There are many
places where one only sees a mosquito for three months of the year, the
soil is very fertile, and labour not only willing and efficient, but
also very cheap. The European, too, has learnt to live properly in this
country, and to avoid the midday sun; all offices and works are closed
from twelve to three. If only man would learn wisdom in the amount of
beer he drinks, and the food he eats, the tale of disease would be much
less.
The colony is fully developed with excellent railways, well-built
houses, a tractable and well-disciplined native population.
Dar-es-Salaam in particular, seems to have been the apple of the German
colonial eye. There are fine mission stations in all the healthy regions
of the country, and great plantations of rubber, sisal, cotton, and corn
abound. The white women and children, though rather pasty and washed out
after at least two years' residence in the country, do not appear
debilitated after their long tropical sojourn. The planters have, as a
rule, invested all their belongings in their plantations, and make the
country more a home than our people in East Africa, who are of a more
wealthy and leisured class. Roads have been made and bridges built. In
fact, the pioneering and donkey work has all been done, and the country
only waits for us to step into our new inheritance.
To me it has been a source of surprise that the German, who consistently
drinks beer in huge quantities, takes little or no exercise, and
cohabits with the black women of the country extensively, should have
performed such prodigies of endurance on trek in this campaign. One
would have thought that the Englishman, who keeps his body fitter for
games, eschews beer for his liver's sake, and finds that intimacy with
the native population lowers his prestige, would have done far better in
this war than the German. That in all fairness he has not done so is due
to the fact that we, as an invading army, were unable to look after
ourselves or to care for ourselves in the same way as the German.
We have had to carry kit and heavy ammunition, to sleep with only a
ground sheet beneath us, through the tropic rains, to do without the
shelter and protection of mosquito nets. The German soldier, even a
private in a white or Schutzen Kompanie, as distinct from the
under-officer with an Askari regiment or Feld Kompanie, as it is called,
has had at least eight porters to carry all his kit, his food, his bed,
to have his food ready prepared at the halting-places, and his bed
erected, and mosquito curtains hung. Only on night patrols has he run
risk from the mosquito. "How can you ask your men to carry loads and
then fight as well, in Equatorial Africa?" they say to us. His captured
chop boxes, for each individual is a separate unit and has his own food
carried and prepared for him, have provided us, often, with the only
square meals our men have enjoyed. Never short of food or drink or
porters, ever marching toward his food supplies along a predetermined
line of retreat, the German walks toward his dinner, as our men have
marched away from theirs. Well paid too, five rupees a day pay and three
rupees a day ration money, he had had no stint of eggs and chickens and
the fruit of the country, that have been rarest of luxuries to us. "Far
better if you had had fewer men and done them properly in the matter of
food and hospitals and porters," captured German officers have often
said to me. "How your men can stand it and do such marches is incredible
to us." That is always the tenour of their remarks, their criticism, and
they are clearly right, had such a policy been a practicable one for us,
which it was not. At first the feeling between the soldiers of the two
countries was good and war was conducted, even by them, in a more or
less chivalrous manner. We thought the East African Hun a better fellow
than his European brother. But it was only because he knew the game was
up in East Africa, and thought that he had better behave properly, lest
the retribution, that would be sure to follow, would fall heavily upon
him. Later we found him to be the same old Hun, the identical savage
that we know in Europe; the fear of consequences only restrains him
here. It is his nature and the teaching of his schools and professors.
We have often been amazed at the disclosures from German officers'
pocket-books. In the same oiled silk wrapping we find photographs of his
wife and children, and cheek by jowl with them, the photographs of
abandoned women and filthy pictures, such as can be bought in low
quarters of big European cities. Their absence of taste in these matters
has been incomprehensible to us. When we have taxed them with it, they
are unashamed. "It is you who are hypocrites," they reply; "you like
looking at forbidden pictures, if no one is about to see, but you don't
carry them in your pocket-books. We, however, are natural, we like to
look at such things, why should we not carry them with us?" If this be
hypocrisy, I prefer the company of hypocrites. In their houses it was
the same; disgusting pictures, masquerading in the guise of art, adorned
the walls, evidences of corrupt taste and doubtful practices in every
drawer and cupboard. Even the Commandant of Bukoba, von Stuemer, and his
name did not belie his nature, though, before the war, quite popular
with the British officials and planters of Uganda, had a queer taste in
photography. In the big family album were evidences of his astonishing
domestic life; for there were photographs of him in full regimentals,
with medals and decorations, sitting on a sofa beside his wife, who was
in a state of nature. Others portrayed him without the conventionalities
of clothing, and his wife in evening dress.
Officers from the Cameroon have confirmed the filthy habits of the Huns
and Hunnesses, how they defiled the rooms in the hospital at Duala that
they occupied just before they were sent away; how disgusting were their
habits in the cabins of the fine Atlantic liner that took them back to
Europe. Not that it is their normal custom; it was merely to render the
rooms uninhabitable for us who were to follow, and their special way of
showing contempt and hatred for their foes. Do you wonder that the
stewards and crew of the Union Castle liner struck work rather than
convey and look after these beasts on the voyage to Europe? Our French
missionary padre tells me that it was just the same in Alsace. The
incident at Zabern after the manoeuvres was entirely due to the disgust
and indignation of the French people at the defiling of their beds and
bedrooms by the German soldiers, who had been billeted upon them.