Too Close to the Sun (18 page)

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.