Too Close to the Sun, page 13
While the Allies kept pushing south in pursuit of their German needles, in the middle of May Denys was still camped with Hoskins behind the lines at Kahe, west of Lake Jipe and close to the border. The rains had stopped, and the country sang. Lizards ran in peace, sap rose in the crop-headed willows, and each morning arrived amiably, as if there were no war. But the men resting at Kahe soon had to rejoin the big southern attack. On May 21, Smuts ordered Hoskins to command his division down the Pangani in three columns. Lumbering lines of men, oxen, horses, cycles, heavy guns, and wagons crawled through clouds of red dust kicked up by the animals. They had insufficient water and inadequate rations, and supply vehicles could not follow until trees were felled to form a makeshift road. Men marched for fifteen hours without food, then lay on the ground to sleep without blankets. Many contracted amoebic or bacillary dysentery, or both; others had blackwater fever, which turned their urine black and almost always ended in death. Fleas and jiggers accompanied everyone everywhere, and on the long march down the Pangani thousands of toes were amputated. Jungle sores as big as fists suppurated unchecked. The knee-length shorts and short sleeves worn by British forces left them vulnerable to mosquitoes bearing malaria (Schütztruppen had long sleeves and puttees), which often caused cardiac failure and insanity, as well as the better-known symptoms. The rivers they crossed were infested with crocodiles, and on the banks they all sank to their waists in mud. The crisis in the supply system worsened as they moved farther from headquarters. The exhaustion was bone-deep. It wasn’t the troglodyte world of the trenches, but it was another kind of hell. The war in East Africa—virtually unknown to the outside world—was, in its safari through purgatory, a negative metaphor for the Kenyan paradise of the epoch handed down in literature and myth. And the campaign remains buried under the weight of history, whereas Karen Blixen’s luminously famous first line—“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills”—has irreversibly enshrined the lyrical romance of the same landscape.
DENYS AND MOST of the division stopped for a week at Buiko, a dusty railway village where the Pare Mountains ended and the Usambara chain began. They were now fifty miles inside enemy territory, but the goal of capturing von Lettow, forcing his troops to surrender, and occupying the country seemed as elusive as ever. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the Buiko station, blowing up the offices, the points system, and the water tower, and they had driven away all the inhabitants except one Indian trader, who, in a shed with a little square window that served as a counter, sold soap, cigarettes, and Sanatogen. The soap, which was blue, cost a rupee and did not lather. But lather or not, it was wonderful to rest in the Buiko dusk after so many dismal marches. In the mornings the men swam in pools, hard soldiers’ bodies breaking the dark surface and carving through the water as the dawning sun gilded their indolent guns on the bank. A woundless tranquillity settled on Buiko. On June 4, 1916, Denys, Cranworth, Sir John Willoughby, who was commanding a unit of armored cars, and Colonel Robert Lyall, in charge of the Second Kashmir Rifles, all Old Etonians, gathered to celebrate the school’s foundation. Each brought a tin of food, and Denys, typically, managed to get hold of a bottle of champagne. “Never did floreat etona go down better,” Cranworth remarked.
The division followed the railway down to Mombo, a small German settlement fifty-five miles west of Tanga and the coast. The air was dark with tsetse. An officer rode into camp from the signal station carrying a Reuters dispatch about the battle of Jutland. It was difficult, in the tropical radiance of East Africa, to picture rows of gray battleships disgorging black smoke over the North Sea. “When we had read it,” one officer wrote, “our minds were filled with a torturing uncertainty which shadowed the whole of that day…. It made us anxious to be done with thissideshow, to have it finished once and for all, so that we might help to get to the root of the whole tragedy, at home in Europe.” Shortly afterward, they learned about the sinking of the Hampshire and the loss of Kitchener. Up on the plains outside Nairobi, a group of white farmworkers sat hunched over a wireless. “Suddenly, the news came through, ‘Kitchener is dead,’” one of them recalled. “There was a hush. Everyone spoke in whispers, ‘Surely this is the end of all things?’” But nothing had ended in the East African jungle. The Germans were retreating south toward Handeni, the terminus of the narrow-gauge tramway that connected with the northern railway at Mombo. This was about a hundred miles from the Kenyan border. On June 30, Denys was driving along a stony track not far from the main German column with Hoskins and his other aide-de-camp, Lieutenant E. R. Macmullan. They were traveling without an escort. Suddenly shots crackled over the thorn trees. Snipers had ambushed the car with rifle fire. Macmullan died instantly, a spurt of dark blood arcing from his neck over the top of the filthy windshield and landing with an innocent patter on the dry rocks. The shots went on. Denys almost took a hit; there was nowhere to drive. It seemed a pointless way for a general to die. But Denys faced off the attackers with gunfire and they disappeared back into the bush. He had saved the life of Hoskins, his hero. Later, the general recommended him for a Military Cross, which he was duly awarded. It was a comparatively rare honor in 1916.
By June 20, the Allies had occupied Handeni. Smuts had other troops moving in from the east and south; it seemed he finally had the enemy on the run. On the twenty-third, Hoskins himself led a picked column to attack a German encampment on the Lukigura River. Denys marched through the night. The track was impassable by wheeled transport, so they loaded the guns onto the mules. After twenty hours on foot, they opened fire on Germans positioned on the opposite ridge of the valley. The boom of the old German rifles gradually faded. It was Hoskins’s first notable achievement and, according to the official history, “one of the few engagements of the campaign in which the British troops enjoyed the elation of victory in battle…. The whole force gained new confidence in itself and its commander.” Soon the central railway, too, was under British control, isolating its terminus, Dar es Salaam (also the seat of government). In July, Tanga fell. “One can only think with pain of the South African mob, with their cowboy habits, in well kept and clean Tanga, but this will only be a passing episode,” wrote the Hamburg Nachricten when the news reached the motherland.
Smuts’s army was winning the war, and decomposing on its feet. “Mere superiority in numbers, without full ability not only to move them rapidly but to maintain them adequately, was an embarrassment, not an advantage,” the official history acknowledged with hindsight. The supply chain, lengthening daily as the troops pressed southward, now virtually collapsed. Ha Ha Sheppard, the commander Denys most despised, wired the War Office, “Many men are almost naked.” They were also malnourished. Since May, the First Division, the effective fighting force in the vital northern sector, had lost fifteen hundred of its fifty-five hundred men. It took seven hours for lorries to transport the worst casualties back to the temporary field hospital at Handeni. The ruts were so deep, and the lorries so hot, that many of the wounded were jolted or cooked to death. Half the division had had malaria. Sixty thousand Allied horses and mules had already perished, and twice as many oxen. But the men carried on. By the third week of August 1916, the division was well on the way to Morogoro, the old German capital and an important depot immediately north of the Uluguru Mountains. After two days of marching, they heard bombs falling from their own aircraft. They entered the undefended town on August 26 and commandeered a sausage-making machine in the Bahnhof Hotel. Cranworth inspected the hastily evacuated government house. “On every piece of furniture was laid an exhibit of human excreta,” he wrote. “This example of frightfulness apparently pleased them and certainly didn’t hurt us, but struck me as a curious example of Kultur.”
Von Lettow’s units withdrew south of the railway, and Denys’s division was ordered out in pursuit, marching around the eastern edge of the Ulugurus with both infantry brigades pushing to cut off enemy routes south. It was one of the most difficult operational zones of the campaign; Smuts wrote later that they were waging “a campaign against nature.” The eight-thousand-foot Ulugurus rose abruptly behind Morogoro, slashed by gorges and swampy valleys, slopes jungly with ancient trees woven together by creepers. “Picture the difficulty of keeping in touch with your own people in such a jungle, which, the moment you enter it, swallows you up in its depth of undergrowth as if you were a rabbit taking cover in a field of ripe corn,” a frontiersman wrote. In repose, it was a tranquil landscape. The mountains maintained, in their dignity, that war was nothing to do with the Ulugurus. At the end of the day, the cliffs cooled and eastward shafts of sun filtered through the clouds to flood the dry grass in amber light. Close to camp, butterflies lay folded along the reeds, and when the sun began to warm their brittle Prussian-blue wings they quivered in the still valley air. But the enemy had destroyed the bridges as they retreated, and Denys spent the first days of September supervising the construction of new ones, to the crashing accompaniment of the howitzer battery shelling forward units. (“Colonel furious, I furious, all of us wet and filthy,” a KAR subaltern wrote.) Vehicles were again unusable, and the division was dependent on the files of Kavirondo porters threading up and down the valleys with gourds at their waists and chop boxes on their heads. Hoskins reached Tulo on September 9. Nine hundred Germans were fighting hard. At camp, stretcher bearers greaved in mud ferried in the wounded and bloodied bodies that lay heaped and steaming on the ambulance carts as if conjured by Goya. But by the morning of September 13 the Germans had slipped away.
OVER THE NEXT MONTH and a half, as rain halted the advance south, Denys’s debilitated division was reconstituted. Twelve thousand spent South Africans went home. The bulk of those who remained moved to make their base at Kilwa Kisiwani, a former Arab slave port 120 miles south of Dar and 300 miles from Kenya. The first to arrive either took up defensive positions or began building piers. On November 13, Hoskins and Denys established headquarters in a villa near the whitewashed German church. West African regiments had come to beef up Hoskins’s protean field force—barefoot Nigerians and Gold Coasters in conical pith helmets. But in an offensive fifty miles northwest, tsetse flies killed off 660 newly arrived mules and ponies in five weeks and a lion ate thirteen men. The rains were unusually heavy, and the waterlogged black cotton soil swallowed a wagon and its six mules. “Rations were so green with rottenness and so full of weevils and maggots that they could only be eaten with the eyes closed,” said a Baluchi officer. Besides fending off mosquitoes and rats that gnawed on wounds, men had to use razors to extract burrowing grubs from their flesh. (Cranworth had one in his penis.) They camped among pools of yellow water spiraled with blood, T. S. Eliot’s “rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones.” Many enemy camps had already been evacuated. A Baluchi detachment approached one with bayonets fixed, but found only gramophones continually playing German military marches. The battle of Kibata, at the beginning of December, unfurled in a miasma of orders and counterorders, runners and telegraph wires, midnight footsteps on gravel paths, and the whine of the solitary mosquito that always succeeded in penetrating the net. Both sides spent Christmas trying to bury their dead before the hyenas got to them.
The casualty lists lengthened. Still, Hoskins was confident. “I feel with one big effort the end is in sight,” he wired the War Office. Smuts sent von Lettow a Christmas letter congratulating him on receiving Germany’s highest military honor, the Pour le Mérite. Von Lettow replied politely, saying that he approved of what he called “the mutual personal esteem and chivalry which existed throughout.” Talk of chivalry at this stage of the war revealed the isolation of the East Africa campaign. It was a throw-back to another age of warfare, one in which men still believed in the mystical value of patriotism. By the end of 1916, after the apocalypse on the Somme, in which almost twenty thousand British men were killed by German machine guns in a single day, the expiatory magic of the Grail was perceived at home as the lie it was.
ON JANUARY 20, 1917, Denys and Hoskins were eating breakfast at temporary headquarters near Kibata, discussing what to do next. Suddenly a runner appeared with the electrifying news that Smuts was relinquishing his command. He was going to the imperial conference in London and had selected Hoskins to replace him as commander in chief. This was perfect for Denys, as it would mean high-octane adventuring without the brake of high command—effectively, he had become high command, since Hoskins treated him as an equal. Hastily organizing their servants to pack and their syces (grooms) to saddle their mounts, he and Hoskins rode twenty miles to a waiting Ford, which conveyed them to a landing strip cleared from the bush at Kilwa. A Royal Flying Corps BE2C biplane was waiting. It was a patched-up reject from the western front with a seventy-horsepower engine, and it looked more like a metal butterfly than a plane, but it lofted them over the emerald delta of the Rufiji basin and landed in a typhoon of dust at the British army’s forward command post.
Hoskins was a popular appointment. First, he was British. Second, he was known to be an effective administrator. He took command at an auspicious moment—by the beginning of 1917, Smuts had occupied three-quarters of German East Africa and was in control of all ports as well as both railways. But although von Lettow was in retreat, he was still determined to tie up as many Allied servicemen as he could. And the situation on the ground was appalling. Men were sick, half-starved, and facing crippling transport and communication difficulties over a four-hundred-mile front the supply routes of which groped back a hundred miles. Wounded men could be three hundred miles from a field hospital. The country south of Rufiji, where they were headed, was little known and covered in low-lying tropical forest. The rain had begun again with undue violence (it was one of the wettest seasons ever), drowning Hoskins’s hopes of striking a decisive blow to end the campaign. In the middle of February, he was forced to end his offensive till the land dried out in May—to all intents and purposes a three-month cease-fire. But it gave him the opportunity to reorganize. Choosing the southern port of Lindi as his operational headquarters, and working under a battalion of thunderous clouds, he bombarded the War Office with telegrams pleading for guns, medical supplies, bayonets, and, above all, reinforcements.
The Germans, too, were up against it in the first months of 1917, though now they were almost self-sufficient. They vulcanized their own rubber, distilled salt from plants, and made bread from sweet potatoes, bandages from bark, and benzine for von Lettow’s car from copra, the dried flesh of the coconut. They learned how to extract fat from elephants and hippos (a well-fed hippo provided more than two bucketfuls of appetizing white fat), ripen maize artificially, and make shoes from antelope hide and captured saddles. Officers traveled in small units, each with a cook, servants, and chickens—though the latter tended to reveal their position to the enemy. (“An order issued in one force that the crowing of cocks before 9 am was forbidden brought no relief,” von Lettow recorded in his memoirs. When food supplies dwindled, a directive came down that no officer was allowed more than five servants. In fact, despite their resourcefulness they had far too little nourishment. Nis Kock, the Jutlander, was struggling to manufacture mines in the Rufiji jungle. “The German army was so weak during these months,” he wrote, “that a puff of wind could have tumbled it over,” though he added, “but the puff of wind did not come.” He kept trying with the mines until he blew himself up.
Throughout February, Denys and Hoskins continued to deluge the War Office with requests. They also asked Uganda and Nigeria for porters and set about the recruitment of new KAR battalions. Hoskins calculated that, as the majority of the transport animals had died, he needed 160,000 porters. Meanwhile, Denys dealt with reports of broken roads and broken-down transport as well as ox wagons loaded with diseased corpses, limping columns of emaciated prisoners, and hundreds of German East Africa Indian civilians whom nobody wanted. “The enemy is evidently systematically handing over all useless mouths to us,” Hoskins wired the War Office in exasperation in one of his nightly telegrams. Failing supplies had devastating consequences. People tried stewed hippo sweet-breads and bush rat pie, as well as poisonous roots and herbs, which killed some of them. They dug up horse carcasses and ate them. One company consumed the rawhide spars of a bridge. Into these strained camps came the news that six hundred Germans had cut through the British cordon and were marching on Tabora. (This splinter group was kept on the run for eight months and finally forced to surrender near the British border in October.) But then more armored cars arrived and were fitted up in Dar, exhausts cracking as loudly as their machine guns. Extensive repairs were completed on the railways. Hoskins and Denys began to zoom around the country in open-topped staff cars and on small planes, inspecting troops, meeting field commanders, and liaising with their allies. They drove through the coconut groves edging the coastal plains to meet with Portuguese commanders in Dar, where base wallahs shifted paper from one pile to the next in borrowed headquarters, and in the hotels exhausted white officers paid exorbitant prices for adulterated whiskey and stolen army supplies. On April 18, 1917, Denys and Hoskins flew up to Lake Victoria for a meeting with Belgian commander Colonel Huyghé at his Ujiji headquarters. Denys managed to get a few days at Gilgil. “He had done awfully well throughout the war,” wrote Galbraith, who was now too crippled by arthritis even to drive. “He’s not a soldier, and hates soldiering. He seems to think this campaign will be over about August.” By the third week of April, it looked as if Hoskins’s elaborate transport plans were beginning to pay off, as almost five hundred lorries were on their way. He had increased the KAR from thirteen to twenty-two battalions and had one hundred thousand Africans in the field. (It was far fewer than he needed, but never mind.) In the end, the War Office fulfilled the majority of his requests. “He had managed to get things done by urgent representations and hard work,” wrote an officer who was there.
