2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth

by Giles Foden

  EIGHT

  Each morning, as the smell of woodsmoke filled the camp, those who hadn’t done so the night before filled up their water botties from Dr Hanschell’s chaguls. They then queued up for tea and porridge, to fortify themselves for the day ahead. Some time previously, in the early hours before daylight, the porters had gathered up embers from last night’s dying fire and wrapped them in leaves, in order to preserve them for the next stopping-place. The porters had then stoked the fire for the breakfast cook-up, before heading out of camp, leaving the muzungu or white men to wake in their own good time. This they would generally do to a deafening dawn chorus of tropical birds.

  The servants Tom, Rupia and Marapandi might bring the senior officers tea in bed. Spicer, Dr Hanschell and Eastwood would then get up and attend to their personal ablutions. Part of these included Spicer’s shaving with his cut-throat razors. Tyrer combing his yellow hair and fixing his monocle in his eye had once been a familiar morning sight—but there had been no news of Piccadilly Johnny for some time.

  As usual, Tait and Mollison would roll towards the porridge pot like the biblical giants Gog and Magog. Their deliberate lumbering methods, says Shankland, ‘infuriated Dudley, who, as a cadet, had been taught to jump at a word of command, race to the mast-head and down again, and work to a stop-watch. Tait and Mollison refused to be hustled. They would gaze with patient wonder at the thin dry gesticulating Dudley, and what they thought of him nobody knew, for Tait spoke little and Mollison practically not at all.’

  Each new day was another step forward on the great task. Using one of the milometers it was established that since leaving Mwenda Mkosi they averaged six miles a day. It was slow going, and hot too. Mimi and Toutou’s hulls were beginning to warp under the sun, in spite of their tarpaulins.

  Something in the men prayed for the rains against which they were racing. They longed—as the trees and shrubs seemed to do—for the cataclysmic downpour of the second rainy season, which would begin in October, less than a month away.

  The prevailing landscape was now the dry tree-savannah known locally as miombo. Seldom exceeding 50 feet, the spreading crowns of its Pterocarpus species covered vast areas on either side of Lake Tanganyika, playing an important part in the region’s economic life. Bushbuck, sable and roan antelope abounded here, with lions in customary attendance, ready to pounce from the yellow grasses.

  Small rodents such as the hyrax also thrived in this habitat, and were sometimes hunted by setting alight long lines of brush to drive them into nets. However, most of the fires that swept through the region were the result of natural combustion—except for a few caused by human error.

  After talking about bread with the smous, Dr Hanschell had braved the baboons once more to cycle back to the tick-infested rest house where the pedlar had stayed. Judging it unfit for human habitation, he decided to burn it to the ground.

  It came first as a crackling noise on the wind, accompanied by a faint smell of burning. This grew stronger and before long the expedition could see a curtain of smoke rolling towards them over the savannah at a rapid pace. By the time it was half a mile away there were licks of orange flame at the men’s feet. This was deadly serious. Realising they could be engulfed, Spicer ordered a firebreak to be lit for about a hundred yards. It went up quickly, scorching the men’s faces and producing far more smoke than the steam engines’ exhausts. Within a quarter of an hour, the charred, smouldering line of the firebreak was engulfed by the bushfire.

  Spicer flicked his fly-whisk, weighing his options. The main worry was Mimi and Toutou. They would go up like matchsticks if the fire came near. And it was near. Flames leaped wildly into the air around the locomotives and the boats, and the men choked in the thick smoke as they tried to protect them. Spicer moved the entire expedition on to the still-smoking, blackened ground of the firebreak: the massive wheels of the engines, the oxen’s hooves, the boots of the naval volunteers and the bare feet of the labourers, all crowded on to this narrow strip of hot grey ash. Anyone wearing shoes with crepe rubber soles began to feel them stick. Yet the barefoot porters seemed unconcerned, the skin on their feet hardened by years of tramping through the bush.

  Round about them, spinning through the smoke, whirled clouds of white egrets and other birds snapping at the myriad insects being driven out by the flames. A zigzag of brown and grey rodents could also be seen in the unburnt grass, frantically climbing over stalks and tussocks of earth to escape the heat. Buzzards swooped down and grabbed them as they fled.

  This massive fire barely merits a mention in Magee’s account. ‘Bush fires annoyed us a good deal,’ he writes, ‘and we frequently had to make a hurried shift to avoid being burnt out.’ Perhaps his brevity indicates just how harrowing it was—so much so that he doesn’t want to relive it in print. One certainly gets a more powerful sense of the danger from Dr Hanschell’s account (as related by Shankland):

  Suddenly the wind changed. Instead of carrying the fiercest of fire straight towards them it blew the flames slantwise towards the road they had come up, and passed only 150 yards from them, blistering their faces. The smaller flames petered out on reaching the line where the new fire had been started. A great gust of wind followed, swirling smoke and ashes in their faces and showering them with bits of burning grass and embers: men climbed up onto the boats and beat out those that showered on the covering tarpaulins. Soon the danger was past and they all stood with eyes streaming and blackened faces with Mimi and Toutou in a burnt-out desert, with here and there a clump of trees still smouldering.

  The bushfire bonded the men and in the ensuing period they all put their backs into the work. But they were soon to be challenged again. Having fought the fire, they were now short of water. Travelling across the plain beyond Mwenda Mkosi, making for the foothills of the Mitumbas, they had encountered many dry spots. It was assumed these had caused the fire, though the suspicion was raised that it might have been Africans in the pay of the Germans (certainly Zimmer’s memoirs suggest they knew the ‘top-secret’ mission was on its way, though he mentions no such counter-measures). At this stage nobody seems to have suspected it was the rest house that Dr Hanschell had burned down.

  Water was growing scarcer and scarcer, and the miombo began to feel like a desert. The lorry brought back just enough water to quench the thirsty boilers of the steam engines, and the men frequently had to sacrifice their drinking and washing supply for the same. Occasionally, they were driven to seek out rare patches of swampy ground where they would dig down deep and squeeze the mud through mosquito nets to extract the moisture. But for the time being, there was just enough.

  There were plenty of other difficulties. The traction engines kept tumbling over on their sides. Or they bogged down in streams. Or sand silted up their boilers. There were bridges to build, rivers to ford, trees to uproot with dynamite. What’s more, the oxen that helped shift the engines when they got stuck began to die—from tsetse fever, tick fever, exhaustion. There was nothing the Boer driver or his Zulu assistant could do.

  Contrary to everyone’s expectations—including his old adversary, Engineer Lieutenant Cross—Spicer kept his cool. Only two signs of stress showed: the constant smoking of the monogrammed cigarettes in his long holder and the nervous tic of letting his beard grow for two days, then shaving it off again, week after week. ‘Throughout all these difficulties and apprehensions,’ writes Byron Farwell in The Great War in Africa, ‘Spicer-Simson remained calm and confident, undismayed by present difficulties or thoughts of future problems. Micawber-like, he trusted to his luck, sure that something would turn up—as, indeed, frequently happened.’

  Without warning one day a sunburnt Belgian officer emerged from the scrub at the head of a column of askaris. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Freiesleben↓ and explained (for he spoke fluent English) that he had been sent by the Vice-Governor-General of the Katanga back in Elizabethville.

  ≡ Freiesleben was actually a Dane in the Belgian service. Coinciden
tally, a man of the same name was the river captain Joseph Conrad was sent to relieve on the trip up the Congo in 1890 that inspired his Heart of Darkness (1902). In the novella he is called Fresleven.

  Some of the men in his column, he announced, could supplement the expedition’s existing guard, provided Commander Spicer-Simson was willing to accept them. The new askaris unhooked their bandoliers, set up their rifles in tripods and sat down on the dusty ground, tired out after their hard march. They wore shorts, so their knees were covered in tsetse bites or with ticks they had gathered as they passed through the long grass.

  As Mimi and Toutou were laid up for the night, a sentry was posted. The oxen were driven out to pasture by the Boer and his Zulu, and the steam locomotives—their boilers emitting strange pings and clanks as the heat dissipated—were washed down and their gauges checked. A broken gauge glass would spell disaster, as steam would escape through it and the metal plates in the combustion chamber below the boiler would buckle. While these nightly chores were completed, Freiesleben was invited to join the officers’ mess.

  At first he declined, then changed his mind. He turned up at the little dining area the British officers had created under some trees carrying two bottles of wine, and he proved to be very convivial company. During dinner, accordingly to Shankland’s account, Spicer gave his formal reply to the Belgian officer. He thanked the Vice-Governor-General for sending men to guard Mimi and Toutou as they got closer to the German lines, and accepted the extra troops to protect the expedition.

  Freiesleben burst out laughing (he had very white teeth, Dr Hanschell recalled).

  ‘You think we are here to protect you?’ he asked. ‘No, mon Commandant, we are here to protect the Congo from you!’

  His cigarette-holder poised halfway to his mouth, Spicer was for once rendered speechless and it fell to Dr Hanschell to step into the breach.

  ‘I don’t think the Congo is in much danger from us,’ he said. ‘We’re nearly all amateurs, you know, except for the Commander.’

  ‘Exactly!’ replied Freiesleben triumphantly. ‘That’s precisely the point. You English have a genius for amateurism. That’s what makes you so dangerous. It’s always pretty obvious what professionals are going to do, but who but amateurs could have dreamed up an expedition like this?’

  Spicer recovered his voice. ‘You appear to think better of our prospects than most of your colleagues,’ he said. He was probably thinking of the Belgian sporting gentlemen in Elizabethville who had laid 100–1 against them making the lake.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Freiesleben. ‘I think 28 English amateurs with guns in their hands are capable of any folly—of any heroism—and no government in its senses would allow them to wander about unwatched. We’ll be very relieved to get you out of the Katanga again, I can assure you. You nearly took it over once, with fewer men than that!’

  Spicer was perplexed. ‘You really can’t believe that we have any designs against our allies?’

  ‘Perhaps not. I can only say that you English amateurs have been quite good in the past at taking other people’s colonies.’

  Freiesleben turned his sunburnt face to the doctor. ‘And when we heard that you were already burning down government property, the Vice-Governor-General thought it was time someone should investigate.’

  At this, the doctor’s own face went rather red.

  A few days later, on 4 September, with Freiesleben’s men protecting their flanks, the expedition reached a place called Mobile Kabantu. Here, on an expanse of sandy ground surrounded by dense scrub, Lee had built them a thatched barn in which to store material as they prepared for their ascent of the Mitumbas. The mountain range towered above them all as Mimi and Toutou arrived at the new camp. Beyond the ridge, storm clouds were rumbling, as if some great mountain god were warning them to go no further.

  That evening, as the expedition were buttoning themselves into their sleeping bags, there was a furious cry, followed by the sound of rifle shots. Spicer’s boy, Tom, sprinted into the bush as his master shot at him six times from his tent.

  NINE

  At breakfast Spicer explained that Tom had scratched his cherished razors by rubbing them in sand. The poor boy, who had somehow escaped the volley of shots, had only been trying to win his master’s favour by sharpening them. It is said (though only by white authorities) that Tom did not seem any the worse for his near-death experience. He still poured the tea with a smile as the team prepared for another day’s work. The day in question was 5 September 1915–82 days since they had left London—and they were about to ascend the Mitumbas.

  Things started well. By the end of the day they had climbed 14½ miles up the mountainside on their narrow, winding road. On the 6th they had to wash out the boilers of the steam engines, which were silted up with muddy water, the supply of which remained a problem. On the 7th they reached the biggest of the bridges that Lee had built in expectation of their passage. It was 108 feet long and 32 feet below was a dried-up river gorge. Like the first bridge, which needed to be rebuilt, this one was made of timber—about 500 tons worth, said Wainwright, who was in charge of the transport train.

  The bouncing pathway of logs covered with soil held up well. Pulled by the first locomotive—attached by a steel cable—Mimi slowly crossed the gorge. The engine was in the process of mounting the other side, which came up from the bridge at quite an incline, when the cable began to fray and suddenly snapped. The customised trailer carrying Mimi careered back down to the bridge, striking it with such force that the trailer bounced to one side and stopped—hovering over the rocks in the old river bed below—with one wheel in mid-air.

  There was chaos as men rushed to grab the cable, while another length of twisted steel was run out from the steam engine and attached to Mimi. Slowly they managed to haul her back on to the bridge. The locomotive’s wheels ground the dust as she dragged Mimi up the incline; the men put wedges of timber under the trailer’s wheel to stop it rolling back should the cable break again. Eventually the slope was too steep. They uncoupled Mimi, moving her to one side, and brought the second engine over and hooked it up to the first. But even with both traction engines attached (a procedure Wainwright called ‘double-banking’) the gradient was too much. The soil was simply too soft for the wheels of the steam engines to get a grip, in spite of their six-inch treads.

  After a brief discussion it was decided to bring up the oxen. The Boer herded them over the bridge and beyond the two linked engines. There were 32 animals yoked side by side, the Zulu pulling a leather cord attached to the front yoke and the Boer standing alongside with his long sjambok whip. He spoke to the oxen in ‘horse-whisperer’ fashion, calling each one by a special name. The meaning of the Afrikaans words Engelsmann (‘Englishman’) and Rooinek (‘Redneck’) was obvious enough to the expedition, but they found much of what the Boer said was incomprehensible.

  The beasts were attached to the front of the first locomotive, so that the chain now ran: oxen, first traction engine, second traction engine and finally Mimi on her trailer. The other trailer, bearing Toutou, was still back down the mountain, below the bridge. In the rough soil on either side of the road stood Spicer—smoking obsessively, he simply let Wainwright take charge—and those members of the expedition not directly involved with the transport, such as Dr Hanschell. They were joined by dozens of Africans who had come out of the bush to watch the fun. Shankland takes up the story:

  The oxen, with backs arched and hooves gripping the soft surface better than the wheels, seemed at times to be dragging the two locos and Mimi and her trailer as well. ‘Engelsmann! Rooinek! ‘ the Boer shouted. ‘Boschmann! Chaka! ‘ and as each ox heard his name he hurled his weight forward, but he got the lash just the same—it seemed to the doctor that Engelsmann and Rooinek, because of their names, got an extra vicious lash.

  This struggle continued for another day, as mile by mile they crept towards the top of the Mitumbas. Every hour threatened the arrival of the rains, which would make their a
scent impossible. Neither wheels nor hooves would be able to cope with deep mud. When the steam engines and the oxen failed to do the job, another method was used, known as ‘cabling’. The locomotive was uncoupled and driven several hundred yards up the slope into a specially dug pit. A hawser was then attached to a drum on the engine and Mimi and Toutou were drawn up.

  Near the top of the mountain range, however, neither cabling nor double-banking was feasible: the road was too winding for the first, too narrow for the second (there was no room for the steam engines to go back and forth without falling over). Magee describes the method devised by the ingenious Wainwright to get round this problem:

  A stout tree was selected about 20 yards ahead of the spot where the boat stood on its carriage in the trail. A block and tackle—that is, a pulley block with rollers, such as is used aboard any ship—was fixed to the tree. One end of the rope was attached to the boat carriage, the other end passed through the pulley block and attached by a cross-bar to the rearmost pair of oxen. The oxen faced downhill, in the opposite direction from and parallel with the boat.

  Spicer later took personal credit for this plan. ‘Then the idea occurred to me of balancing the weight of the oxen against the eight tons or so which had to be pulled up…and in that way the boat came slowly up.’

  Drawn in this manner, 50 yards at a time, Mimi and Toutou reached the top of the mountain. There, 6,400 feet above sea level, they came to rest on a pleasant meadow-plateau. The African bearers could lay down their loads at last, unwinding the thin cotton blankets with which they protected their heads from the heavy wooden crates and steel boxes they carried. Repairs were made to the steam engines and the trailers—Mimi and Toutou were intact, that was the important thing. The naval volunteers could congratulate themselves on a job well done and even Spicer was pleased, though he knew they still had a long way to go.