Weller's War

by George Weller

  As the Belgians grew bolder the Italians grew more discreet. The South African Air Force began to send daily patrols of three Fairey-Hartebeest biplanes, which bombed Saio and machine-gunned the roads.

  Then solidly built, six-foot Major General Auguste Gilliaert arrived from the Congo. Known to his men as Kopi (“leopard”), he is a quiet and catlike man. It was decided that the plan for taking Mogi should be dropped and the meager forces entirely concentrated upon Gazzera's headquarters at Saio.

  While preparing for a broad-scale attack across Bortai Brook, Gilliaert, with Martens, was several times under fire in the front lines. An Italian machine-gun officer, when told his fire had almost wiped out the Belgian general staff, expressed astonishment that the Congolese commanders should be in the front line trenches. “With us nobody above the grade of captain comes that far up,” he said.

  The 3500 white Italian troops occupying Saio Heights outnumbered the total Belgian force. The Fascists also had the 45th, 181st, 187th and 188th battalions of Eritreans whose battle pennons were covered with honors conferred by Mussolini. Italian officers and men retreating from Addis Ababa and Jimma, under British pressure, were coming daily into Saio.

  While readying a master plan to storm Saio, Gilliaert kept in touch with British headquarters in Khartoum. “I based our chances of success upon continuous aggressive activity along Bortai Brook against Mogi,” Gilliaert told me, “applying Kitchener's maxim that you can try anything against an enemy who refuses to budge.”

  On July 1 the British radioed the Belgians that they had cut the 450-mile-long Shio-Addis Ababa road about 200 miles from Haile Selassie's capital. Gilliaert prepared to close the mouth of the Belgian bag into which the Italians were streaming.

  Believing British pursuit closer than it was, Gazzera blew the bridge over the Indina River, forty miles east of Saio, thus buttoning the eastern mouth of his own bag himself. But the Congolese offensive was still a dangerous gamble because the Italians were better armed and fed, held superior positions with more firepower, and outnumbered the three Belgian battalions between three and four to one.

  When the first battles of Bortai Brook were launched they were preceded by three days of rain and cold which took bitter effect on men and officers. This time a morning sun warmed the Congolese and put them in battle mood. At dawn on July 3 the Belgian advanced posts opened fire and half an hour later all the batteries of artillery entered into action. The Italians replied with the full intensity of their superior cannonading power.

  Duperoux's battalion went forward to take the two dumpling hills flanking each side of the road, which the Italians had gained in April. Duperoux's men crept through the brush and high grass toward the hills, infested with machine guns.

  The battalion in reserve, commanded by Major Boniface Robyn, crawled behind Duperoux's left. Simultaneously Gilliaert sent the third battalion under Vandermeersch upon the assignment that was the key to the entire operation: a long, swinging movement around the right, through grass higher than a man and along a goat path carefully plotted by scouting parties over a fortnight.

  The entire surprise operation was successful. The Italians, falling back from the two dumplings, found themselves flanked upon their left by Vandermeersch's forces and unable to hold the ravine of the Bortai between the dumpling and the Italian secondary line of fortifications strung across Saio Mountain. They melted away downhill toward the Sudanese plain on their right. They dared not use the road for direct retreat, for it was under continuous Belgian artillery fire.

  At 1:40 p.m., the encircling battalion was preparing an assault upon the Italian heights. Two Mitalia motorcars were seen descending the serpentine road toward the newly-won Belgian positions, bearing white flags.

  Gilliaert met the enemy a short distance from the Belgian side of Bortai Brook. The Force Publique of the Congo had crossed Africa to gain Belgium's first victory against the Axis. Sweet revenge for the invasion of the faraway homeland!

  Gazzera's surrender to Gilliaert—following the Duke of Aosta's surrender to Wavell of the British Middle East command—leaves the Allied arms in Ethiopia today with mastery as far as Mussolini is concerned. Final liquidation of the Fascist empire will come when the Italians holding out around Gondar give themselves up to the British troops that have been surrounding and starving them since July.

  Vastly outnumbered by the Italians, even after surrender, the Belgians have been hard put to handle 15,000 prisoners in all of Galla Sidamo. At Saio alone nine generals, 370 lesser officers, 2575 Italians and 3500 native soldiers surrendered to the Congolese force which, with 2000 porters, made hardly 5000 men.

  The first Congolese officers who entered Saio to complete the negotiations told your correspondent today: “We literally waded in Italians. We were embarrassed to find how many enemies had fallen into our hands. The Italians were chagrined to find that we numbered only three battalions instead of three divisions with South African reinforcements, as their intelligence service had led them to believe.”

  The proudest achievement of the Belgian general staff is that the public market in Saio has been functioning normally since three days after the fall and that no looting has occurred. At nearby Mogi, when 900 Eritreans found that all but 50 of the 250 Belgians originally besieging them had been withdrawn, they wished to start fighting but were dissuaded by their Italian officers.

  Belgian deaths were 462 men, both white and black, four-fifths of whom died of disease. The Italians probably lost about three times as many, although casualty figures are not available.

  The younger, more belligerent Italian officers taken prisoner by the Belgians blame their defeat on the inertia and fear of older generals. Although sympathetic with Il Duce's imperialist ambitions, they have an intense dislike for the Fascist party coterie around Mussolini, whom they consider parvenus. Officers of all ranks seem to reserve their chief loyalty for the members of the Italian royal house.

  Being outnumbered three to one, the Belgians were hard put to handle large numbers of prisoners like the battalion of captured Blackshirts. They have solved this by taking the Italian carabinieri—Mussolini's constabulary—returning their rifles loaded, and setting them to watch the herds of prisoners. The carabinieri show no objection to guarding masses of other Italians.

  Captured Italian officers were allowed to keep their sidearms as a sign of honorable defeat. One officer offered for sale to the Belgians a dazzling revolver entirely plated with gold from muzzle to butt.

  In surrendering, Gazzera asked safe conduct for the Eritreans to British prison camps. This request, granted by Gilliaert, was a needed precaution because the Ethiopian “patriots” who fought at Bure and Gore under British officers considered the disarmed Italians fair game. The 650 Italians who surrendered at Bure came into the Belgian lines almost naked, their garments having been purloined by Ethiopians.

  The Italian governor at Gore asked the Belgians to provide at least two of the feared Niam-Niams for each truckful of prisoners to prevent molestation. An Italian priest who insisted on going into the countryside, against Belgian advice, is missing.

  Your correspondent has been unsuccessfully attempting to undertake the ten-day journey to Addis Ababa. Belgians here state that at least fifty men would be necessary as escort on the journey to the capital. The settlement of old differences between the Gallas and Amharites, who served in Mussolini's army and who have lately revealed their faithfulness to Haile Selassie, is still proceeding actively, with all participants amply armed.

  The Italian decision to surrender doubtless was accelerated by the desertion of an entire battalion of mixed Gallas and Amharites under Eritrean officers, who are now roaming the western highlands fending for themselves. The Negus—Selassie—has sent sixty members of his personal constabulary as the nucleus of a force intended to bring order. But until the region becomes more pacified such measures may not prove effective. Dajazmach Wayessa Bakako, political boss of Saio, upon whom your correspondent paid a courte
sy visit yesterday, stated he had about 100,000 Gallas under his jurisdiction. However, a rotogravure newspaper picture of Haile Selassie, with his family, hung prominently upon the mud wall of Bakako's residence and the chieftain expressed his warm loyalty to the Negus. Bakako also presented the visiting press a gift of ten eggs and two live chickens.

  An attack upon the Belgian Congo, no matter from what quarter, can be made only at great cost to the invader, now that the Belgian forces have the experience of their successful campaign against Italian strongholds in Ethiopia.

  Soldiers of the Congolese Force Publique—in peacetime a sort of police constabulary—fought under the most difficult conditions in their first foreign war. They have learned the secret of resting through days of terrific heat, scouting strange territory under protection of the cool night and attacking at dawn. They have learned the laborious routine of camouflaging positions with bundles of elephant grass changed daily because it yellows in the tropical sun, revealing critical points.

  Through Gilliaert's and Martens' tactic of continuous aggression, the Belgians have learned how a small but mettlesome force, even in a strange land, may keep a large and irresolute army upon its own territory permanently in a state of uncertainty and self-defense.

  Major Duperoux, leader of the battalion now administering Saio, told your correspondent today: “Colonial warfare is the only form of encounter in battle remaining where the forces are sufficiently small that the meaning of conflict is comprehensible to the participant. In such a campaign you feel the clashing wills of the opposite leaders directly instead of remotely. Colonial warfare retains here what has been lost in the mass conflict of Europe.”

  Much curiosity has been felt as to why Gazzera failed to descend from the Ethiopian highland and invade the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan before the arrival of the Belgians. When Gilliaert asked the Italian general's chief of staff, Damico replied: “Gazzera did want to attack the Sudan but received contrary orders from the Duke of Aosta, who preferred that the expedition be withheld for political reasons.”

  The Italians then possessed ample provisions. When they hoisted the white flag they had hardly two months' supplies left.

  Being without political aspirations and responsibilities in Ethiopia, the Belgians are withdrawing fast, leaving the police problem between the British and Selassie.

  Gradually the rows of round grass huts, constructed in Congo fashion from elephant grass by Belgium's soldiers, will cease to be alien features of the Ethiopian highland. Eight 77s will soon be added to ten cannon which already have made the trans-African journey back to the Congo. Seventy machine guns, 122 automatic rifles, 6900 rifles, 15,000 hand grenades, twenty tons of radio equipment, and substantial medical supplies, most in excellent condition, make up the total booty.

  Belgian road crews are preparing the dizzy Gambela-Saio highway which still bites mouthfuls from the tires of their American trucks. A dozen Italians are at large here and their claims for recovery of property seized by Mussolini are being heard.

  The British have sent two officers with subordinates to take charge of western Ethiopia, in cooperation with Major Morris, administrator of the British territorial concession at Gambela, where the Union Jack now floats.

  At Bure, which was taken jointly by Belgian cyclists and the King's African Rifles, a chieftain named Licht Lakau holds authority, reportedly for the Negus. At Gore the famous Ethiopian patriot, General Mosfin, a refugee in the mountains throughout the Italian occupation, has emerged from hiding, and, with numerous followers already gathered, will probably take a leading role. The western Ethiopian situation will continue to count much in British policy towards Egypt.

  In summary of this hitherto unwritten fragment of the history of World War II, it may be said that while the King of the Belgians is prisoner among his own people, honored pictures of Leopold III and his tragically deceased Queen Astrid are hanging today above the officers' mess table here in the remotest part of Ethiopia—symbols that Belgium in Africa remembers Belgium in Europe, and has begun to exact the prices of invasion from the Axis.

  SWEET MUSIC IN THE JUNGLE

  (Never Published)

  Gambela Province, Galla Sidamo, western Abyssinia—

  probably mid-September 1941

  A son of the Congo jungle who crossed the entirety of Africa as a member of the Belgian expeditionary force was stimulated by Major General Auguste Gilliaert's ban upon looting to a degree that managed, through legitimate manipulation of exchange, to build four packages of cigarettes into a modern phonograph with sixty records.

  Stuffing his pockets with four packages containing twenty cigarettes each, the Congolese hiked to the former Italian headquarters of Saio, forty miles away and 5500 feet up a mountain. Italians in the prison camp were cigarette-famished, many of the lower grade officers not having smoked for over a year.

  The untutored jungleman sold the cigarettes at a piaster each—that's about five cents. Meanwhile, the bottom had fallen out of the market for Italian lire, replaced by Selassie's thalers. With eighty piasters of capital, the Congolese bought in the Saio marketplace a bale of lire thick enough to stuff a cannon's mouth. He then returned to the Italian prison camp without even bothering to count the lire.

  He swapped the bundle of Il Duce's useless currency for an Italian officer's phonograph plus the records. The phonograph originating in Rome is now playing merrily in a grass hut somewhere in the Congo jungle.

  VI

  “In Darkest Africa”

  After the Belgian campaign in Ethiopia, Weller returned to Léopoldville to send his dispatches. From Stanleyville, he proceeded east for about two hundred miles, part of the way on foot with porters, to the village of Irumu. There he looked into the veracity of Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), the Welsh-born, American-bred explorer and journalist most famous for having tracked down the missing Dr. Livingstone.

  Weller's interest was, specifically, an expedition described in Stanley's 1890 bestseller, In Darkest Africa. Remarkably, Weller was able to locate several older tribesmen who had fought against Stanley and had their own version of the historic events—to which the reporter clearly gave credence. Late in life he wrote: “Only Pearl Harbor could have brought me out of this African wonderland.”

  TALKING DRUMS OF CONGO SAVED BY MISSIONARY

  Keeps Telegraph of Jungle Alive as Interest Begins to Wane

  Congo River Station, Yakusu, Stanleyville,

  Belgian Congo—October 10, 1941

  In the nick of time to save the vanishing art of talking drums, John Carrington, a young missionary at this jungle outpost, has prevented the younger generation of Congo peoples from losing forever a unique method of communication.

  Aided by a tall, deeply tattooed old drum master named Lifindiki Tuaytolo, which in English means “Quarrelsome Smith,” Carrington has been able within the last year to instill the river tribes centering around this Baptist station with sufficient interest in the jungle telegraph so that it will probably survive a few years more.

  Nearby a swimming hippopotamus' nose, barely appearing above the Congo's brown flood, made a ripple upstream. Carrington, who is a tall, blond Briton twenty-nine years old, stood beside a six-foot village drum beating out messages for the correspondent.

  “As soon as the tribesmen leave the villages and get acquainted with the white man's telephone and telegraph, they begin to disdain the drum,” he said. “They even forget their drum names, given to them by their fathers at birth.”

  At the correspondent's request Carrington, in drum language, asked the fisher people of the village, for whom meat is a rare delicacy, why they had failed to enter their canoes and spear the swimming hippo.

  Carrington translated the reply: “We cannot overpower majesty of his jaws.”

  The drum language is more elaborate than human speech, Carrington has found. When Germany invaded Belgium the jungle drums called it not simply a war, but a “war of spears and knives.”

  In drum language ev
ery word becomes a full phrase. The reason is that each drum, like the spoken language of the Lokele fisherfolk, uses only two tones, obtained by hollowing wood to different depths on opposite sides of the drum's soundhole. Contrary to human tones, the high note is called the man's voice because it carries farther, and the low note is called the woman's voice. One drumstick strikes the woman's side of the drum, the other the man's. Each blow corresponds to a syllable, but since many spoken words when drummed would sound identical, names are expanded into long synonyms to bring out variations. Thus the jungle telegraph has become a kind of poetry.

  Big bluish-black clouds were piling over the opposite side of the river. The villagers began fearfully closing the doors of their wicker huts when Carrington pounded the rain call, which goes: “Badman, son of disease, is coming down upon clods of earth.” Quarrelsome Smith took over the two rubber-ended drumsticks and began hammering out the call to frighten away the rain: “Don't come, rain; the men of our village don't want you.”

  The drum-making village of Yafolo, forty miles upriver, carves drums from the bolondo, a species of pterocarpus wood. Drums require a fortnight's work, cost $20 and up and last a decade. Eight-foot drums carry about fifteen miles, but, contrary to explorers' stories of the Congo, drum messages cannot be sent long distances. They cannot be sent to tribes with different languages.

  The polite drum word for a white is “white man spirit from the forest,” but until recently the synonym, “death on the river,” was common. Grief is “tears from eyes and crying from the mouth.” To express death the Lokele drums were saying long before missionaries like Carrington arrived: “Spirit has left body and body has returned to ground.”