Of the many plagues that beset this land of Africa not the least are the
biting flies. Just as every tree and bush has thorns, so every fly has a
sting. Some bite by day only, some by night, and others at all times.
Even the ants have wings, and drop them in our soup as they resume their
plantigrade existence once again.
The worst biter that we have met in the many "fly-belts" that lie along
the Northern Railway is the tsetse fly: especially was he to be found at
a place called Same, and during the long trek from German Bridge on the
Northern Railway to Morogoro in the south. At one place there is a belt
thirty miles wide, and our progress was perpetual torture, unless we
passed that way at night. For the _Glossina morsitans_ sleeps by night
beneath leaves in the bush, and only wakes when disturbed. For this
reason we drive our horses, mules, and cattle by night through these
fly-belts. Savage and pertinacious to a degree are these pests, and
their bite is like the piercing of a red-hot needle. Simple and innocent
they appear, not unlike a house fly, but larger and with the tips of
their wings crossed and folded at the end like a swallow's. They are
mottled grey in colour, and their proboscis sticks out straight in
front. Hit them and they fall off, only to rise again and attack once
more; for their bodies are so tough and resistant, that great force is
required to destroy them. They are infected with trypanosomes, a kind of
attenuated worm that circulates in the blood, but fortunately not the
variety that causes sleeping sickness. At least we believe not. In any
case we shall not know for eighteen months, for that is usually the
latent period of sleeping sickness in man. Their bite is very poisonous,
and frequently produces the most painful sores and abscesses. But if
they are not lethal to man, they take a heavy toll of horses, mules, and
cattle. Through the night watches, droves of horses, remounts for
Brits's and Vandeventer's Brigades, cattle for our food and for the
transport, mules and donkeys, pass this way. Fine sleek animals that
have left the Union scarcely a month before, carefully washed in
paraffin in a vain attempt to protect them from flies and ticks. But
what a change in a short six weeks. The coat that was so sleek now is
staring, the eye quite bloodless, the swelling below the stomach that
tells its own story; wasting, incredible. Soon these poor beasts are
discarded, and line the roads with dull eyes and heavy hanging heads. We
may not shoot, for firing alarms our outposts and discloses our
position. To-night the lions and hyaenas that this war has provided with
such sumptuous repasts will ring down the curtain. A horse's scream in
the bush at night, the lowing of a frightened steer, a rustling of
bushes, and these poor derelicts, half eaten by the morning, meet the
indifferent gaze of the next convoy. More merciful than man are the
scavengers of the forest. They, at least, waste no time at the end.
Strange that the little donkeys should alone for a time at least escape
the fly; it is their soft thick coats that defeats the searching
proboscis. But after rain or the fording of a river their protecting
coats get parted by the moisture, and the fly can find his mark in the
skin. So the donkey and the Somali mule that generations of fly have
rendered tolerant to the trypanosome are the most reliable of our beasts
of burden. Soon, these too will go in the approaching rainy season, and
then we shall fall back on the one universal beast of burden, the native
carriers. Thousands of these are now being collected to march with their
head loads at the heels of our advancing columns. The veterinary service
is helpless with fly-struck animals. One may say with truth that the
commonest and most frequently prescribed veterinary medicine is the
revolver. Certainly it is the most merciful. Large doses of arsenic may
keep a fly-struck horse alive for months; alive, but robbed of all his
life and fire, his free gait replaced by a shambling walk. The wild
game, more especially the water buck and the buffalo whose blood is
teeming with these trypanosomes, but who, from generations of infection,
have acquired an immunity from these parasites, keep these flies
infected. Thus one cannot have domestic cattle and wild game in the same
area; the two are incompatible. And shortly the time will come, as
certainly as this land will support a white population, when the wild
game will be exterminated and _Glossina morsitans_ will bite no more.
More troublesome, because more widely spread, are the large family of
mosquitoes. The _anopheles_, small, grey and quietly persistent, carries
the malaria that has laid our army low. _Culex_, larger and more noisy,
trumpets his presence in the night watches: but the mischief he causes
is in inverse ratio to the noise he makes. _Stegomyia_, host of the
spirium of yellow fever, is also here, but happily not yet infected; not
yet, but it may be only a question of time before yellow fever is
brought along the railways or caravan routes from the Congo or the
rivers of the West Coast, where the disease is endemic. There for many
years it was regarded as biliary fever or blackwater or malaria. Now
that the truth is known a heavier responsibility is cast upon the
already overburdened shoulders of the Sanitary Officer and the
specialists in tropical diseases. _Stegomyia_, as yet uninfected, are
also found in quantities in the East; and with the opening of the Panama
Canal, that links the West Indies and Caribbean Sea, where yellow fever
is endemic, with the teeming millions of China and India, may materially
add to the burden of the doctors in the East. Living a bare fourteen
days as he does, infected _stegomyia_ died a natural death, in the old
days, during the long voyage round the Horn, and thus failed to infect
the Eastern Coolie, who would in turn infect these brothers of the West
Indian mosquito.
Fortunate it is in one way that _anopheles_ is the mosquito of lines of
communication, of the bases, of houses and huts and dwellings of man,
rather than of the bush. Our fighting troops are consequently not so
exposed as troops on lines of communication. For this blessing we are
grateful, for lines of communication troops can use mosquito nets, but
divisional troops on trek or on patrol cannot. Soon we shall see the
fighting troops line up each evening for the protective application of
mosquito oil. For where nets are not usable it is yet possible to
protect the face and hands for six hours, at least, by application of
oil of citronella, camphor, and paraffin. Nor is this mixture
unpleasant; for the smell of citronella is the fragrance of verbena from
Shropshire gardens.
Least in size, but in its capacity for annoyance greatest, perhaps, of
all, is the sand fly. Almost microscopic, but with delicate grey wings,
of a shape that Titania's self might wear, they slip through the holes
of mosquito gauze and torment our feet by night and day. The three-day
fever they leave behind is yet as nothing compared to the itching fury
that persists for days.
Finally there is the bott-fly, by no means the least unpleasant of the
tribe. Red-headed and with an iridescent blue body, he is very similar
to the bluebottle, and lives in huts and dwellings. But his ways are
different, for he bites a hole into one's skin, usually the back or
arms, and lays an egg therein. In about ten days this egg develops into
a fully grown larva, in other words a white maggot with a black head. It
looks for all the world like a boil until one squeezes it and pushes the
squirming head outside. But woe to him who having squeezed lets go to
get the necessary forceps; for the larva leaps back within, promptly
dies and forms an abscess. Often I have taken as many as thirty or forty
from one man. It is a melancholy comfort to find that this fly is no
respecter of persons, for the Staff themselves have been known to become
affected by this pest.
With the flies may be mentioned as one of the minor horrors of war in
East Africa, one of the little plagues that are sent to mortify our
already over-tortured flesh, the jigger flea. As if there were not
already sufficient trials for us to undergo, an unkind Providence has
sent this pest to rob us of what little enjoyment or elegant leisure
this country might afford. True to her sex, it is the female of the
species that causes all the trouble; the male is comparatively harmless.
Lurking in the dust and grass of camps, she burrows beneath the skin of
our toes, choosing with a calculated ferocity the tender junction of the
nails with the protesting flesh. No sooner is she well ensconced therein
than she commences the supreme business of life, she lays her eggs, by
the million, all enclosed in a little sack. What little measure of sleep
the mosquitoes, the sand flies and the stifling nights have left us,
this relentless parasite destroys. For her presence is disclosed to us
by itching intolerable. Then the skill of the native boys is called
upon, and dusky fingers, well scrubbed in lysol, are armed with a safety
pin, to pick the little interloper out intact. Curses in many languages
descend upon the head of the unlucky boy who fails to remove the sack
entire. For the egg-envelope once broken, abscesses and blood poisoning
may result, and one's toes become an offence to surgery.
All is well, if a drop of iodine be ready to complete the well-conducted
operation; but the poor soldier, whose feet, perforce, are dirty and who
only has the one pair of socks, pays a heavy penalty to this little
flea, that dying still has power to hurt. Dirt and the death of this
tiny visitor result in painful feet that make of marching a very
torture. So great a pest is this that at least five per cent. of our
army, both white and native, are constantly incapacitated. Hundreds of
toenails have I removed for this cause alone. Nor do the jiggers come
singly, but in battalions, and often as many as fifty have to be removed
from one wretched soldier's feet and legs. So we hang our socks upon our
mosquito nets and take our boots to bed with us, nor do we venture to
put bare feet upon the ground.
A yell in the sleeping camp at night, "Some damn thing's bit me;" and
matches are struck, while a sleepy warrior hunts through his blankets
for the soldier ant whose great pincers draw blood, or lurking centipede
or scorpion. For in these dry, hot, dusty countries these nightly
visitors come to share the warm softness of the army blanket. Next
morning, sick and shivering, they come to show to me the hot red flesh
or swollen limb with which the night wanderer has rewarded his
involuntary host.