Looting, although you may not know it, is the natural impulse of
primitive man. And in war we are very primitive. To take what does not
belong to one is very natural when a man is persuaded that he can be
absolved from the charge of theft by quoting military necessity. How
surely in war one sheds the conventions of society! It has the
attraction of buried treasure; the charm of getting something for
nothing. But there are different ways or degrees of looting.
Now there were a few of us in German East Africa who had been in the
Retreat from Mons and the subsequent advance to the Marne and beyond it
to the Aisne. Indelibly engraved upon our minds were the pictures of
French chateaux and farmhouses looted by the German troops in their
advance and abandoned to us in their retreat. All along the countless
roads the German transport had pressed, hurrying to the Aisne, were
evidences of the loot of German officers and men. In roadside ditches,
half buried in the late summer vegetation, were pictures and bronzes,
china and statuary, the loot the German officer had chosen to adorn the
walls of his ancestral Schloss. Marble figures leant drunkenly against
the wayside hedges, big brass clocks strewed the ditches. Long before,
of course, had the German rank and file been compelled to jettison their
prizes, for the transport horses were nearly foundered and only
officers' loot could be retained. Later, when the exhaustion of the
horses was complete, and capture of the waggons seemed imminent, the
regimental equipment and food supply, and, finally, the loot of high
officers had to be abandoned. The whole story of that retreat was to be
read in the discard by the roadside. The regimental butcher had clung to
his meat and the implements of his trade until the last; and when we
found the roads littered with carcases of oxen, sacks of pea flour and
sausage machines, we knew that we would shortly find the General's loot
beside the hedge.
In the houses, too, both the chateaux and the comfortable French
farmhouses, we saw what manner of man the Hun could be in the matter of
looting. Where the soldier could not loot he could not refrain from
destroying. Floors were knee-deep in women's gear, household goods,
private letters and all the treasures of French linen chests. Trampled
by muddy German boots were the fine whiteness of French bed-linen. Nor
had the German soldier refrained from the last exhibit of his
"_Kultur_," but left filthy evidences of his bestial habits behind him
to ensure that the bedrooms would be uninhabitable by us.
Remembering all these things we wondered how our men would behave now
that the tables were turned and they in a position to loot the treasures
of many German farms and plantation houses. Of course, divisional orders
against looting and wanton destruction were very strict. Where houses
were at the mercy of small patrols and bodies of our men under
non-commissioned officers, far from the path of the main advancing army,
the temptation to all must have been immense, and it speaks volumes for
the natural goodness of our men and their ingrained sense of order that
never in this whole country was looting done by any of our troops. True
many houses were plundered, and there was a certain amount of wanton
damage; but it was all done by the plundering native or by the Hun
himself in his retreat.
For our calculating enemy left no stone unturned to deprive us of any of
the useful booty of war. He deliberately destroyed and ravaged and burnt
the property of his fellow-countrymen, and mentally determined to send
in the claim for damage against us. A German will always complain and
send in a bill of costs to us, when he is once assured of the protection
of British troops.
Naturally, of course, we requisitioned and gave receipts for any article
or property that might be of use to us for our hospitals or our
supplies. In fact, our scrupulous regard for enemy property will
probably result in very many fraudulent claims against our Government
when the war is over. How easy to add mythical articles of great value
to the list attested to by the signature of a British Staff officer. Who
could blame a Hun when the British were such fools and forgery of
receipts so easy?
But such was the regard we paid to German women and children that, if a
house were occupied, we took nothing and disturbed nothing. A German
farmhouse was an oasis of plenty amid a very hungry army. It made us
sometimes wonder whether it was quite right to leave German ducks and
fowls and sheep behind us, when we had to live on mealie meal and tough
trek-ox. But the women were so terrified, at first, that we gave such
farms a wide berth when scarcity of water did not force us to camp
within the enclosures. Shortly, however, as is the German custom, these
women would profit by their immunity and come to regimental headquarters
that listened so patiently and courteously to the tale of pawpaws or
mangoes--fruit that was really wild--vanished in the night. In no
campaign, I dare swear, has so much respect been given to occupied
houses, so much consideration to conquered people. The German Government
paid this compliment to our army, that they left their women and
children behind to our tender mercies.
At Handeni, ours being a Casualty Clearing Station, our equipment
included 200 stretchers, with little hospital equipment, beyond the
men's own blankets and their kit. No sooner did we come along and
install ourselves in the abandoned German fort than the 5th South
African Infantry were in action at Kangata to win 125 casualties. For us
they were to nurse and keep until convalescent; for there was no
stationary hospital behind us, and forty miles of the worst of bad roads
robbed us of the chance of transporting them to the railway.
So every afternoon I went to German planters' houses (empty, of course),
for forty miles around, in a swift Ford car. And back in triumph we bore
bedsteads and soft mattresses that heavy German bodies so lately had
impressed. Warm from the Hun, we brought them to our wounded. Down
pillows, soft eiderdown quilts for painful broken legs; mattresses for
pain-racked bodies. And one's reward the pleasure and appreciation our
men showed at these attempts to ameliorate _their_ lot. They were so
"bucked" to see us coming back at night laden with the treasures of
German linen chests. It would have done your heart good to see their
dirty, unwashed faces grinning at me from lace-edged pillows.
Silk-covered cushions from Hun drawing-rooms for painful amputation
stumps!
So I had the double pleasure, all the expectancy and the delight of
seeing our men so pleased. Forty bedsteads and beds complete we found in
that district, until the bare white-washed walls of the jail were
transformed. White paint, too, we discovered in plenty, and soon our
wards were virginal in their whiteness. And when I tell you that at one
time I had no less than thirteen gunshot fractures of thigh and leg
alone and other wounds in proportion, in the hospital, you may judge how
necessary beds were.
But the natives had nearly always been before us, and the confusion was
indescribable, drawers turned out, the contents strewed upon the floors,
cupboards broken into, and all portable articles removed. Pathetic
traces everywhere of the happy family life before war's devastating
fingers rifled all their treasures. Photographs, private letters, a
doll's house, children's broken toys.
And from some letters one gathered that insight into the relations
between the plantation owner and the manager who lived there. At one
farm, apparently owned by an Englishman who paid his manager, a German
Dane from Flensburg, the princely sum of 200 rupees a month, we found
that one, at least, of our own people knew how to grind the uttermost
labour from his German employee. For there were letters from the manager
asking for leave after 2 ½ years' labour at this plantation, and
pointing out that the German Government had laid down the principle of
European leave every two years. To this came the cold reply that his
employer cared nothing for German Government regulations; the contract
was for three years, and he would see to it that this provision was
carried out. One later letter begged for financial assistance to tide
him over the coming months; for his wife and children had been ill and
he himself in hospital at Korogwe with blackwater fever for two months.
"And how shall I pay for food the next two months, if my pay is 200
rupees only, and hospital expenses 500?"