Nine Faces Of Kenya

by Elspeth Huxley

  The working of these patrols became more and more perfect. Knowledge of the desert improved, and in addition to patrols for destruction and intelligence work, we developed a system of fighting patrols. The latter, consisting of twenty to thirty Askari, or even more, and sometimes equipped with one or two machine-guns, went out to look for the enemy and inflict losses upon him. In the thick bush the combatants came upon each other at such close quarters and so unexpectedly, that our Askari sometimes literally jumped over their prone adversaries and so got behind them again. The influence of these expeditions on the self-reliance and enterprise of both Europeans and natives was so great that it would be difficult to find a force imbued with a better spirit.

  My Reminiscences of East Africa General von Lettow-Vorbeck.

  The first serious engagement of the war took place at sea when, on 20 September 1914, the German cruiser Königsberg entered Zanzibar harbour, sank HMS Pegasus, which had put in for repairs, made off at speed, and disappeared into the delta of the Rufiji river.

  The delta of the four-hundred-mile Rufiji river, German East Africa’s mightiest waterway, encompasses an area roughly the size of metropolitan New York. Lying in the sodden embrace of mud and mangrove trees, it is a morass of serpentine creeks and brackish tidal channels, clogged with sandbars, writhing with crocodiles, snarling with mosquitoes, trembling with the crash of elephant herds in the matted rain forest around its banks. The delta does not welcome man; one almost expects to find rubbery prehistoric animals wallowing about in its miasma. It breathes isolation and spawns disease. Even a fugitive would hesitate before seeking asylum here.

  But (Captain) Looff had not hesitated on the day he sank Pegasus. If he were to make desperately needed repairs on his ship – or at least try to make them – he must have temporary refuge from the Royal Navy. The Rufiji offered the nearest haven. And if its delta was a forbidding cesspool, so much the better: few if any other spots on the coast could have been more ideally suited as a hideout. The seaward side of the river mouth was guarded by a line of reefs and islands. The delta itself had six main arms to the ocean, at least four of which – the Kikunja, Simba Uranga, Suninga and Kiomboni channels – were not only navigable for a light cruiser of Königsberg’s relatively shallow draft but were also joined to each other by a network of narrow creeks. Several of these, barely navigable at high tide, would enable Königsberg to confound her pursuers by dodging about far inland, well beyond range of British guns. Further protection was offered by the tall and dense vegetation on the banks: with topmasts housed or camouflaged, Königsberg might well remain invisible for months.

  Ships of the Royal Navy mounted guard at the entrance to the delta’s main channels ready to pounce upon Königsberg when she emerged. She never did. Nor could British warships reach her up the shallow tidal fingers of the delta. Two monitors, small ships of very shallow draught designed to operate in coastal waters, were towed out from Britain. They crept up one of the delta’s channels and opened fire on the heavily armed and camouflaged battleship concealed among the vegetation. Badly battered, the monitors retreated for repairs. Their second attempt succeeded.

  Königsberg had now become a waterborne abbatoir. Her centre funnel missing, the cruiser was ablaze from stem to stern. All gun crews and ammunition parties in the forward part of the ship were dead. “Blood flowed all over the deck,” wrote Lieutenant Wenig; “only shovelfuls of sand made it passable…. Corpses lay in heaps near the forecastle. Two torn-off heads rested side by side beneath a locker.” On the unprotected bridge, officers had been begging Looff to take cover. He had refused. Even when a shell fragment punctured him for the second time and turned his naval whites scarlet with his own blood, he had insisted that his presence on the bridge would buck up the crew. A few minutes later, however, he was forced to step down: another explosion studded him with shrapnel in a dozen places, one splinter slicing his stomach wide open. First Officer Georg Koch immediately took command of the cruiser from its dying captain.

  Even without guns to fire back, Königsberg stayed alive for a while under Severn’s merciless hammering. It no longer seemed to matter that the monitor had been deprived of its spotter: the gunners now had the range and an oily obelisk of smoke, nearly a mile high, clearly marked the cruiser’s position. Between 1.00 and 2.30 that afternoon, Severn’s decks jumped continually to the recoil of forty-two more salvoes, the shells gradually crawling aft along Königsberg’s entire length. Mersey soon joined the bombardment with twenty-eight broadsides, and after 1.40, with the arrival of the relief spotter plane, hardly a salvo failed to bring the signal “H.T.” – hit target.

  At 2.20, just as Severn’s Fullerton decided that he had begun to waste shells, the spotter confirmed this was the message: “Target destroyed.”

  Looff had now resumed command of his floating heap of scrap metal. By rights he should have been dead, but the steel in his stomach had been stopped short of the abdominal wall by his heavy watch and a gold cigarette case. At 1.30, while bulkheads and deck plates screamed under the relentless blows of the falling six-inch shells, Looff – lying prone on a mattress which someone had brought to the bridge – gasped out four orders to First Officer Koch. They were swiftly obeyed. First, the breechblocks of all the guns were removed and thrown over the side, while a party felt its way below decks to flood the magazines. Then the wounded were placed aboard the ship’s boats and rowed ashore, through continually exploding water, by the rest of the crew. Koch was the last man to leave the cruiser; Looff, too weak even to sit up, had been taken off with the other wounded. Koch joined him on the beach after carrying out the fourth order: to arm a torpedo and break Königsberg’s back.

  At two o’clock, Looff watched the torpedo do its work: “A muffled noise, weaker than we expected, hardly noticeable in the thunder of the enemy shells…. With a short jerk, the ship turns slightly on its side, and sinks slowly to its upper deck in the mud-coloured water of the Rufiji….”

  That was as far down as she would ever go. Her battle flags still flew. At sunset, an officer went aboard and lowered them as a bugle sounded and the crew gave three cheers for the Emperor. Then the Imperial Eagle was carefully folded. Later, it would be presented to Looff.

  Königsberg had a sting in her tail.

  Divers recovered the breechblocks. Work parties removed the guns from their mountings and poled them on rafts to the shore. They were then lifted on to wagons and dragged through the bush, by four hundred sweating, chanting Africans, to Dar es Salaam. Here, the machinists at the naval shipyard and railway workshops improvised mobile gun carriages. It was not long before the German land forces boasted ten new field pieces – the heaviest artillery in East Africa. Königsberg might have been a gutted skeleton of buckled steel, but her guns had not been silenced.

  The Battle for the Bundu Charles Miller.

  These powerful long-range guns were to prove invaluable to von Lettow-Vorbeck in the long-drawn-out campaign to come.

  Following the disastrous failure, in November 1914, of a large force sent from India to capture the German port of Tanga, 1915 was a year of stagnation while men and matériel were assembled in the British Protectorate for the invasion of German East Africa. Both sides sent patrols over the border to gain intelligence and boost morale. Captain Richard Meinertzhagen, now serving with the Royal Fusiliers, took part in one of these.

  28.XII.1915. Karungu, Victoria Nyanza

  On the 23rd I left Karungu with Drought and fifteen Intelligence scouts. We carried nothing except what we could take in our ruck-sacks and we each had 150 rounds of .303 ammunition. We crossed the border on the 25th and soon got news from natives of an enemy patrol at Kitambi Hill, so we continued our march and at 5 pm we located four tents, fires burning and by the mercy of God, no precautions, no sentries and men lounging about. We could count fourteen askaris. The country was good for stalking and we were well in position for a rush at dusk. In fact, the men having left their rifles in their tents and there being no sent
ry, we rushed them silently from not more than a few paces. We used bayonets only and I think we each got our man. Drought got three, a great effort. I rushed into the officer’s tent where I found a stout German on a camp bed. On a table was a most excellent Xmas dinner. I covered him with my rifle and shouted to him to hold his hands up. He at once groped under his pillow and I had to shoot, killing him at once. My shot was the only one fired. We now found we had seven unwounded prisoners, two wounded and fifteen killed, a great haul. I at once tied up the prisoners whilst Drought did what he could for the wounded. We covered the dead with bushes and I placed sentries round the camp and sent out a patrol of three men. Drought said he was hungry, so was I, and why waste that good dinner? So we set to and had one of the best though most gruesome dinners I have ever had, including an excellent Xmas pudding. The fat German dead in bed did not disturb us in the least nor restrain our appetites, but looking back on it now I wonder we could manage it. After that excellent meal, I searched the German’s kit. He was a reserve officer and apparently by name_____, a letter on his person being addressed to Graf_____. So I must have shot a Duke. The first Duke I have killed. His luncheon-basket was a most elaborate arrangement, with plated dishes and cutlery, all marked with a coronet. These Drought and I purloined, thinking it a pity to leave them to be looted. We cleared out after dark, but were unable to bury the bodies, having no tools with which to dig. With our prisoners we marched till midnight and then slept with sentries out and we were off again on the 26th and reached here without incident yesterday afternoon.

  Army Diary 1899–1926 Richard Meinertzhagen.

  With the arrival at Mombasa on 19 February 1916 of General Jan Smuts as Commander-in-Chief, the go-ahead was given for the long-awaited invasion of German East Africa. Reinforcements from India and South Africa had already arrived. A two-pronged advance was planned, one on each side of Mount Kilimanjaro, starting from Longido. Captain Angus Buchanan was with the 1st Division.

  It was on a Sunday morning, the 5th of March, 1916, that the advance began….

  We were an infantry column, a column made up of variously dressed soldiers of different races, a column of various kind and equipment, eloquent of the brotherhood of colonies. We streamed out in column of route, after scouts had preceded us by half an hour or so. The 129th Baluchis, olive-hued Indian soldiers in turbans and loose-kneed trousers, were in advance; then their maxim battery of gunners and side-burdened, bridle-led mules. Then came the 29th Punjabis, another regiment of similar kind, followed closely by some battalions of South African artillery – a bold array of gun-carriages and ammunition wagons, each drawn by eight span of sturdy South-American-bred mules, and driven by reckless Cape boys mounted on the line of near mules. Then followed more infantry, the 25th Royal Fusiliers, of familiar face and colour, of our own kind, but soiled and sunburnt with long exposure; the 1st King’s African Rifles, well-trained natives of stalwart appearance, khaki-clad as the rest, but with distinctive dark-blue puttees and light close-fitting headgear. And so on, and so on, down the line, except that one might mention the ammunition column in the rear, a long line of two-wheeled carts, drawn by two span of patient, slow-gaited oxen. In the rear, trailing far behind, came the miscellaneous transport – some motors, large four-wheeled mule-wagons, Scotch carts, and water carts, an assortment of varied, somewhat gipsy-like kind. The wagons, which were most in evidence, and which carry from three thousand to four thousand pounds, were drawn by ten span of mules, or by sixteen to twenty span of oxen, and all were ordered and driven by capable management of men from South Africa, who had long experience in trekking in their own country. In all it was probably a column of a fighting strength of from 4,000 to 5,000 men, with its necessary large following of accoutrements.

  When the column reached far out into the grass-grown, sandy plain – for it was open highland here – one could look back, almost as far as the eye could distinguish, and see the course of the column, as the fine line of a sinuous thread drawn across the blank space of an incomplete map! To-day, the map was marked; to-morrow, the thin dust-line would be gone onward, and the desert veld would again lie reposed in vagueness.

  Thus did we leave our harbour of safety to venture far into the enemy’s country on “the long trek”; to travel amidst dust, and dryness, and heat, for many days.

  Three Years of War in East Africa Angus Buchanan.

  Riding through the featureless and fever-ridden bush of the Pangani valley Francis Brett Young, medical officer attached to the 2nd Rhodesia Regiment, came to an immense swamp.

  When the sun began to beat through the moist air myriads of dragon-flies, which had laid all night with folded wings and slender bodies stretched along the reeds, launched themselves into the air with brittle wings aquiver. Never in my life had I seen so many, nor such a show of bright ephemeral beauty. They hung over our path more like aeroplanes in their hesitant flight than any hovering birds. Again I was riding the mule Simba, and as I rode I cut at one of them with my switch of hippo hide, cut at it and hit it. It lay broken in the path, and in a moment, as it seemed, the bright dyes faded. I was riding by myself, quite alone; and as I dismounted I felt sick with shame at this flicker of the smouldering bête humaine; and though I told myself that this creature was only one of so many that would flash in the sun and perish; that all life in these savage wildernesses laboured beneath cruelties perpetual and without number: of beasts that prey with tooth and claw, of tendrils that stifle, stealing the sap of life, or by minute insistence splitting the seasoned wood, I could not be reconciled to my own ruthless cruelty. For here, where all things were cruel, from the crocodiles of the Pangani to our own armed invasion, it should have been my privilege to love things for their beauty and rejoice in their joy of life, rather than become an accomplice in the universal ill. I cursed the instinct of the collector which, I suppose, far more than that of the hunter, was at the root of my crime; and from this I turned back to the educative natural history of my schooldays, in which it was thought instructive to steal a bright butterfly from the live air to a bottle of cyanide, and to press a fragrant orchid between drab sheets of blotting-paper. And I thought, perhaps, when this war is over, and half the world has been sated with cruelty, we may learn how sweet a thing is life, and how beautiful mercy.

  Marching on Tanga Francis Brett Young.

  The East African Mounted Rifles started its brief career with six squadrons plus a maxim gun and signallers. The regiment took part in several battles during Smuts’ advance into German East Africa in 1916. Its Medical Officer reports an incident.

  Our casualties in the EAMR included Trooper C. A. Sherwood killed, and Lance-Corporal L. H. le May, wounded and captured when the advance guard was surprised. Later in the action Lieut R. C. Hill, commanding our Maxim Gun Section, as he galloped his guns out of action, was shot through the foot during the last intensive burst of fire from the enemy. There are various ways in which one may report oneself as a casualty, but this officer’s method was certainly peculiar. He was galloping at the time side by side with the Medical Officer and suddenly made the surprising remark: “Can I see you some time when you are not busy?” Since the Medical Officer was at the moment particularly busy in getting out of the way of a most unpleasant number of bullets, this apparently fatuous question caused a certain amount of irritation and profanity, until it was followed by the intimation: “I think I’ve been hit.” Sure enough, subsequent examination that evening by the inadequate light of a surreptitiously struck match revealed a bullet hole drilled clean through the ankle joint.

  The Story of the East African Mounted Rifles C. J. Wilson.

  The EAMR, the settlers’ regiment, never died but simply faded away. Transfers to the King’s African Rifles, the East African Transport Corps, Intelligence and other units reduced it to a single squadron. By May 1917 it had dwindled to the commanding officer, Major Clifford Hill, sergeant W. E. Powys and trooper L. M. Joubert. They, too, were transferred and that was the end.

&nbs
p; When the horses, mules and oxen on which the army’s transport depended in the early days of the campaign had perished almost to the last animal from horse-sickness, trypanosomiasis and exhaustion, the human porter became, in Kipling’s words, “the feet and hands of the army”. By the end of the campaign nearly 180,000 carriers had been recruited, registered, paid, fed and deployed, and of these some 40,000 had died, mainly from dysentery, malaria, pneumonia, hookworm and sheer fatigue.

  The plight of the porter, with his load of over fifty lbs, passes imagination. Cold, wet, hungry, sick with dysentery, pneumonia or both, their only food half-cooked porridge made of mealie-meal which was fermenting from being soaked, many staggered off the road to die in the reeking mud.

  The Carrier Corps Geoffrey Hodges.

  Never was road like that Handeni road. I remember it as one of the show roads of the colony: broad, hard, and clean. We found about two feet of dust on its surface…. dust that made of one colour all races of men, and gave us all one common cough “to the pits of all our stomachs” as Kipling has it…. And to the dust was added a stench that passes words: a stench now subtle and suggestive, now throttling and entirely disgusting; a stench that attracted one’s gaze only that it might be repelled by visions of a sated jackal’s half-eaten meal. For horses, oxen and mules have died by thousands…. Truly, war is hideous even at its base….