This is the season of blackwater fever, the pestilence that stalks in the noontide and the terror of tropical campaigning. Hitherto with the exception of the Rhodesians who have had this disease previously in their northern territory, or men who have come from the Congo or the shores of the Great Lakes, our army has been fairly free from this dread visitation. The campaigning area of the coast and the railway line of British East Africa that gave our men malaria in plenty during the first two years of war, had not provided many of those focal areas in which this disease is distributed. The Loyal North Lancashires and the 25th Royal Fusiliers had been but little affected. The Usambara Valley along the Tanga-Moschi railway was also fairly free. On the big trek from Kilimanjaro to Morogoro the blackwater cases were almost entirely confined to Rhodesians and to the Kashmiris, who suffer in this way in their native mountains of Nepal. But once we struck the Central Railway and penetrated south towards the delta of the Rufigi the tale was different. British and South African troops began to arrive in the grip of this fell malady. It was written on their faces as they were lifted from ambulance or mule waggon. There was no need to seek the cause in the scrap of paper that was the sick report. All who ran could read it in the blanched lips, the grey-green pallor of their faces, the jaundiced eye, the hurried breathing. Thereupon came three days' struggle with Azrael's pale shape before the blackwater gave place to the natural colour again, or until the secreting mechanism gave up the contest altogether and the Destroying Angel settled firmly on his prey. At first, if there was no vomiting, it was easy to ply the hourly drinks of tea and water and medicine. But once deadly and exhausting vomiting had begun, one could no longer feed the victim by the mouth. Then came the keener struggle for life, for fluid was essential and had to be given by other ways and means. Into the soft folds of the skin of the arm-pits, breast and flanks we ran in salt solution by the pint. The veins of the arms we brought into service, that we might pour in this vitalising fluid. Day and night the fight goes on for three days, until it is won or lost. Here again, as in tick fever, we use the preparation 606, for which we are indebted to the great Ehrlich. Champagne is a great stand-by. So well recognised is the latter remedy that all old hands at tropical travel take with them a case of "bubbly water" for such occasions as these. Blessed morphia, too, brings ease of vomiting and is a priceless boon.
You ask me the cause of this disease, and I have to admit that among the authorities themselves there are no settled convictions. Some hold—and for my part I am with them—that the attack is caused by quinine given in too large a dose to a subject who is rotten with malaria. But there are others who maintain that it is a malarial manifestation only, and that the big dose of quinine, which seems to some to precipitate the attack, is only a coincidence. Be that as it may, there is little difference in the treatment adopted by either school. Death achieves his victory as frequently with one as with another. Certain it is that, to the common mind, quinine is the reputed cause and is avoided in large doses by men who have once had blackwater, or who are in that low rotten state that predisposes to it. In one point all agree, that one must be saturated with malaria before blackwater can develop. So great is the aversion shown by some men to the big doses of quinine as laid down by regulations, that men have often refused to take their quinine. Others, too, who have protested at first, take their quinine ration only to find themselves in the grip of this disease within twelve hours. Such a case was a Frenchman named Canarie (and the colour of his face, upon admission, did not belie his name), who had been treated for blackwater fever by the great Koch in Uganda many years before, and had been warned by him against big doses of quinine. That evening he was on my hands, fortunately soon to recover, and to win a prolonged convalescent leave out of this rain to the sunny and non-malarial slopes of Wynberg.
Seldom do the rumbling ambulances roll in but among their human freight is some poor wretch snoring into unconsciousness or in the throes of epileptiform convulsions. Custom has sharpened our clinical instinct, and where, in civil life, we would look for meningitis, now we only write cerebral malaria, and search the senseless soldier's pay-book for the name that we may put upon the "dangerous list." As this name is flashed 12,000 miles to England, I sometimes wonder what conception of malaria his anxious relatives can have.
For there is no aspect of brain diseases that cerebral malaria cannot simulate; deep coma or frantic struggling delirium. A drop of blood from the lobe of the ear and the microscope reveals the deadly "crescents"—the form the subtertian parasite assumes in this condition. No time this for waiting or expectant treatment. Quinine must be given in huge doses, regardless of the danger of blackwater, and into the muscles or, dissolved in salt solution, into the veins. The Germans have left me some fine hollow needles that practice makes easy to pass into the distended swollen veins. Through this needle large doses of quinine are injected, and in six hours usually no crescent remains to be seen. As a rule, conscious life returns to these senseless bodies after some hours; but, unhappily, such success does not always crown our efforts. Then it is the padre's turn, and in the cool of the following afternoon the firing party, with arms reversed, toils behind our sky-pilot to that graveyard on the sunlit slopes of Mount Uluguru, where our surgical failures are put to rest.
One can always tell, you know, the onset of such a complication as this; for when one finds the victim of malaria hazy and stupid after his fever has abated; and, more especially, if he develops wandering tendencies, leaving his stretcher at night to choose another bed in the ward, often to the protesting consternation of its present occupant, then one passes the word to Sister Elizabeth to get the transfusion apparatus ready. I shall not readily forget one stout fellow, a white company sergeant-major in the Gold Coast Regiment, who was lost in the bush and discovered after many days in the grip of this fell disease. Him they bore swiftly to me at Handeni, and after many injections and convulsions innumerable, he was restored to conscious life again. Sent back by me eventually to Korogwe with a letter advising his invaliding out of the country, he opened and read my report upon the way. But he was of those who do not take kindly to invaliding. Who would run his machine-gun section, if he were away, and his battalion in action? Who like he could know the language and the little failings of his dusky machine-gun crew that he had trained so long and so carefully in the Cameroon? So he appeared in the books of the Stationary Hospital at Korogwe as an ordinary case of convalescent malaria on his own statement. And when they would send him still further back to M'buyuni he broke out from hospital one night, and, with his native orderly, boarded the train to Railhead and marched the other 200 miles to Morogoro. Here I met him on the road starting out on the next long trek of 125 miles to Kissaki. For news had come to him that the Gold Coast Regiment had been in action and their impetuous courage rewarded by captured enemy guns and a long casualty list. But he was determined and unrepentant, one of his beloved machine-guns had been put out of action. How could I hold him back? So joining forces with another white sergeant of his regiment, who was hardly recovered from a wound, these two good fellows set out with a note that, _this_ time, was not to be destroyed, for the instruction of their regimental doctor.
A third scourge responsible for frequent admissions into hospital is "tick-fever." Rather an unpleasant name, isn't it? And in its course and effect it fully acts up to its reputation. More commonly known as "relapsing fever," this illness attacks men who have been sleeping on the floor of native huts, which in this country are swarming with these parasites. Once in seven days for five or seven weeks these men burn with high fever—higher and more violent even than malaria—but sooner over. As you may imagine, it leaves them very debilitated; for no sooner does the victim recover from one attack than another is due. The ticks that are the host of the spirillum, the actual cause of the disease, live in the soft earth on the floor of native huts at the junction of the vertical cane rods and the soil. Here, by scraping, you may discover hundreds of these loathsome beasts in every foot of wall. But they are fortunately different from the grass ticks that, though unpleasant, are not dangerous to man. For the tick that carries the spirillum is blind and cannot climb any smooth surface. So to one sleeping on a bed or even a native "machela" above the ground, he is harmless. But woe betide the tired soldier who attempts to escape the tropical rain by taking refuge on the floor. In sleep he is attacked, and when his blind assailant is full of blood he drops off; so the soldier may never know that he has been bitten. I got twelve cases alone from one company of the Rhodesians, who sheltered in a native village near Kissaki. Of course, not every tick is infected, and for that we have to be very grateful. At the height of the fever the spirillum appears in the blood as an attenuated, worm-like creature, actively struggling and squirming among the blood corpuscles. A drop of blood taken from the ear shows hundreds of these young snakes beneath the microscope. For the cure we are again indebted to that excellent Hun bacteriologist Ehrlich, who gave us .606—a strong arsenical preparation that we dissolve in a pint of salt solution, and inject into the veins at the height of the paroxysm of fever. This definitely destroys the spirillum, and no further attacks of fever result; but this injection, once its work is done, does not confer immunity from other attacks. It is typical of the Hun and his anti-Semitic feelings that Ehrlich, the most distinguished of German scientists, perhaps, after Koch, has never received the due reward of all the distinction he has conferred on German medicine, for the offence that he was a Jew. We should have honoured him, as we have done Jenner or Lister.
Relapsing, orRückfallfever, as the Germans call it, was one of the common dodges used by them to deceive the ingenuous British doctor. For the subtle Hun prisoner knew that, if he pretended to this disease, it would win him at least a week in the grateful comfort of a hospital, and perchance the ministering joys conferred by German nursing sisters, until the expected relapse did not occur; then the British doctor, realising the extent of his deception, would thrust these shameless malingerers to the cold comfort of the prison camp.
How is it, you might ask me, that there are any natives left, if tropical Africa is so full of such beastly diseases as this? Is it that the native is naturally immune, or is it that the white man is of such a precious quality that he alone is attacked by these parasites and poisonous biting flies? The fact is that the native is affected also, and in childhood chiefly, so that the infant mortality in many native tribes is very high. And there is little doubt that repeated attacks of malaria in youth, if recovered from, do confer a kind of protection against attacks in adult life. But this is not the case with newly introduced disease; for the sleeping sickness that came to Uganda along the caravan routes from the Congo, has swept away fully a million of the natives along the shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza.
But the native has a sure sense of the unhealthiness of any locality, and one must be prepared for trouble when one notices that the native villages are built up on the hillsides. This was specially remarked by us on our long trek down the Pangani, and thus we were warned of the fever that lurked in the bright green lush meadows beside the water, and the "fly" that soon overtook our transport mules and cattle and the horses of General Brits' 2nd Mounted Brigade. At first we thought the columns of smoke along the mountain-sides beside the Pangani were signal fires for the enemy; but before long, when the roads were choked with victims of "fly" and horse-sickness, we realised the wisdom that induced the simple native to take his sheep and cattle up the hillsides and above the danger zone. When one spends only a short time in some native huts, it is quite clear how he escapes infection. For the floor is covered with a layer of wood ashes that is usually deadly to bugs and fleas and ticks and other crawling beasts; and the atmosphere is so full of wood smoke that the most enterprising mosquito or tsetse-fly would flee, as we do, choking from the acrid smoke. So the native fire that burns within his hut day and night not only serves to cook his food and to keep wild beasts away, but also supplies him with an excellent form of Keating's Powder for the floor and smoke to drive the winged insects from the grateful warmth of his fireside.
Lying beside the road with outstretched neck and a spume of white froth on nose and muzzle are the horses of the 2nd Mounted Brigade; with bodies swollen by the decomposition that sets in so rapidly in this sun, and smelling to high heaven, are the fine young horses that came so gallantly through Kahe some ten days ago. "Brits' violets" the Tommies call them, as they seek a site to windward to pitch their tents. "Hyacinths" they mutter, as the wind changes in the night, and drives them choking from their blankets, illustrating the truth of the South African "Kopje-Book" maxim, "One horse suffices to move a camp—if he be dead enough." For weeks after the Brigade passed through M'Kalamo the air was full of stench, and the bush at night alive with lions coming for the feast. For this is horse-sickness, the plague that strikes an apparently healthy horse dead in his tracks, while the Boer trooper hastily removes bridle and saddle and picks another horse from the drove of remounts that follow after. No time to drag the body off the road; so the huge motor lorries choose another track in the bush to avoid this unwholesome obstruction.
Horse-sickness takes ten short days to develop after infection, and the organism is so tiny that it passes through the finest filter and is ultramicroscopic. That means that it is too small to be recognised by the high power of an ordinary microscope. There was horse-sickness in the bush meadows beside the river near Kahe. Careless troopers watered their horses, after sundown, when the dew was on the grass and death lurked in the evening moisture where it had been absent in the dry heat of the afternoon.
Two very busy days were before us when the wounded came in from Kissaki, so badly shaken and so pale and wan after their journey. They had been cared for by the Field Ambulance before I got them, and by the extraordinary excellence of the surgery paid the greatest of tributes to the care of the surgeons in front. The German hospital there, half finished—for our advance had been far ahead of German calculations—fell into our hands and with it a German doctor and some nurses. The nurses had been very kind to our men and worked well for our doctors, but they had followed the usual German custom in this country, of being too liberal with morphia. That this drug can become a curse is well known, though it is, when given in reason, the greatest blessing, the most priceless boon of war. One feels perhaps that the sisters had given it without the surgeon's knowledge, and not entirely to give ease from pain, but also perhaps to give rest to the ward, the quiet that would allow these over-worked women to get some sleep themselves. It was written on the faces of the three amputation cases that they had had too much morphia. And as this drug robs men of their appetite, keeps them thin, and prevents their wounds from healing, it became my unpleasant task to break them of it. This was only to be done by hardening one's heart, by giving bromide and stout, and insisting on the egg and milk that interspaced all meals. It is so easy to get a reputation for kindness by being too complacent in giving way to requests for morphia. It made one feel such an absolute brute to disregard the wistful pleading eye, the hands that tugged at the mosquito curtains to show they were awake, when, late at night, I made my evening round. But it had to be done, and I fear the work and the sun and the tropics made one's temper very short, particularly when it was only possible by losing one's temper to preserve the indifference to these influences that was necessary to complete the cure. It was very hard on them at the time, especially as they were rotten with malaria and tick fever, in addition to their wounds. But there were other ways in which one made it up to them, if they did but know it. Nor did they see that quinine given by the veins, so much more trouble to me and to the sister, was better for them than the quinine tablet that was so easily swallowed, and so ineffectual. Nor could they, one thought, always know that 606 had to be given for tick fever, and that it was of no value save when given at the height of fever, when they felt so miserable and so disinclined to be disturbed.
There was Shelley, the Irishman, a big policeman from Johannesburg, badly wounded in the thigh. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans and remained so for three days, until our next advance found him installed in the German hospital. His wound was so bad that amputation alone was left to do. When the worst of the dressings was over and the stage of daily change of gauze and bandage had arrived, he always liked Sister Elizabeth to do his dressings. Sister's hands were much more gentle than mine, and Shelley always associated me with pain, little knowing that, if a dressing is to be well and properly done, it is always inseparable from a certain amount of suffering. But I saw through his blarney, and he was added to the list of those who preferred sister's hands to my attentions.
And there was Rose, a mere lad, who had also lost a leg from wounds; he lay awake at night, though not in great pain, during the process of breaking him of the morphia habit. When I pretended not to hear his little moan, as I made my evening round, he tugged at his mosquito curtain to show that he was awake. But asperin and bromide and a nightly drink of hot brandy and water soon broke off this habit. After that it was easy to cut off the alcohol by degrees as he grew to like his eggs in milk the more. He, too, always had some reason why Sister should do his dressings, and I think that Sister Elizabeth and he plotted together that I should have some other more important job to do when Rose's turn came to go upon the table.
Then there was Parsons, the printer, who in times of peace produced theRand Daily Mail; he had also lost a leg and he surprised me with his special knowledge of the various qualities of paper.
In the corner of the verandah that had been turned into an extra ward by screening it off with native reed-fencing was Gilfillan, the most perfect patient. Propping his foot against the wall to correct the foot-drop that division of the nerve of his leg had caused, he had passed many sleepless nights in his long and wearisome convalescence.
Beside the door, beckoning to me in a mysterious manner, was Drury, a trooper in the South African Horse. In his eyes a suspicious light, as he earnestly requested to be moved. "For God's sake take me away, they're trying to poison my food; and those Germans over there are going to shoot me to-night." This poor lad had been shot badly through the shoulder, and only by the skill of Moffat, the surgeon from Cape Town, had he retained what was left of his shattered arm. Now malaria, in addition, had him in its grip, and his mental condition told me plainly that his brain was being affected. With the greatest difficulty Sister Elizabeth and I persuaded him to undergo the quinine transfusion into his veins that restored him to sober sense the next day. "I really did think those two German prisoners were going to shoot me," he said. But the two prisoners in his ward were more afraid of him than he of them, and their broken legs, for they had got in the way of one of our machine-guns, precluded any movement from their beds. Our men were extraordinarily kind to German prisoners in the ward. The Boers were different; they were never unkind, but they ignored them completely, for the Union of South Africa had too much to forgive in the Rebellion and in German South-West Africa. "Now then, Fritz, there ain't no bleeding sausage for you this morning;" and Fritz, smilingly obedient, stretched out his hand for the cold bacon that was his breakfast. Toward the end Sister Hildegarde was just as kind to our men as she was to her own people, and she was highly indignant with me when I stopped the night orderly from waking her, early one morning, when I had to transfuse a blackwater case with salt solution. She thought, she who had had quite enough to do the day before, that I did not call her because I thought she did not want to get up. She felt that I was tacitly drawing a distinction between her conduct of that morning and the self-denial of the other night, when she and Elizabeth sat up all night and day with a German soldier who had perforated his intestines during an attack of typhoid fever. I had operated upon him to close the hole the typhoid ulcer had made. The German doctor, to whom we had given his liberty, in order that he might attend the civil population, and whom I had called in consultation over the case, had disagreed with our diagnosis. But I had overruled him, and at the operation was glad to be able to show him and the German sisters that our diagnosis was right, and that I was not operating on him just because he happened to be a prisoner of war. The German sisters were grateful to us for getting up at night and in the early morning to give him the salt solution that might save his life, and they repaid it in the only way they could, by kindness to our men. But in any case they could not help liking our sick soldiers, and many is the time that they have been indignant with me for deficiencies in food and equipment which I could not help. "Our German soldiers would have complained until their cries reached Lettow himself," they said, "if they had to put up with what you make your soldiers endure."
And if, at first, Hildegarde, of the sour and disapproving face, did little irregular things for wounded German soldiers, faked temperature charts, prepared little forbidden meals at night, and in other ways pretended to a degree of illness in her German soldiers that my clinical eye refused to see, I could not altogether blame her. When I remembered the treatment that I saw our sick and wounded prisoners in Germany get from the Hun doctor, I was often furious, and determined to do a bit of "strafing" on my own. But I could not forget that the French and Belgian nurses did just the same for our wounded in German hands, adding bandages to unwounded limbs, describing to the German doctor our sleepless nights of pain when the walls of that French convent had echoed only to our snores, preparing delicious feasts, at night, for us to compensate for German rations, and in many ways contriving to keep us longer in their hands and to postpone the journey that would land us in the vileness of a German prison hospital. Hildegarde had her troubles too, for she had not heard for two years of her lover in Germany, whose mild and bespectacled face peered from a photograph in her room. He did not look to be made of heroic mould, but who can tell? Long ago he may have bitten the dust of Flanders or found another sweetheart to console him. And the native hospital boys, swift to recognise the changes of war and the comparative leniency of British discipline, got out of hand and failed to clean and scrub as they did in former days. Then I would inquire and uphold Hildegarde, and the recalcitrant Mahomed would be marched off to receive fifteen of the best from the Provost Sergeant.
"Jambo bwona," and the sycophantic Ali would leap to his feet and raise the dirty red fez that adorned his head. "Jambo," said Nazoro, the senior boy, standing to attention. For Nazoro was a Wanyamwezi from Lake Tanganyika and disdained any of Ali's dodges to conciliate me. Graceful as a deer was Nazoro, and a good Askari lost in a better operating-room boy. This was my morning greeting as I peeped in before breakfast to see that the operating theatre was swept and garnished for the day's work. "Good morning," said Elizabeth, looking up from the steriliser where she was preparing instruments for the morning operations.
Educated partly in England and speaking the language perfectly, she hated us only a little less than the other Germans. But she was good at her job and conscientious, and a very great help to us. Always as cheerful as one could expect a woman to be who worked for the English soldiers and dressed the wounds of men to fit them to return to the field to fight against her people again. Who knows that the tall Rhodesian, from whose feet she so skilfully removed the "jiggers" and cleansed the wounds of a long trek, would not, all the sooner for her care, perhaps be drawing a bead upon her husband in the near future? Very proud was Elizabeth of her husband's Iron Cross that the Kaiser had sent by wireless only last week; news of which was told to her by a wounded prisoner just brought in. For her husband, who, to judge from his wife's description, must have been quite a good fellow for a Hun, was in command of one of the "Schutzen" companies down near the Rufigi. He, too, had lived long in England to learn the ways of English shipping companies that would prove of such value to the Deutsch Ost-Afrika Line. So jubilant was she at the news that I had to give her a half-holiday to recover; twice only in the four months we worked together was Elizabeth as happy: once when she got a letter, by the infinite kindness of General Smuts, from her husband, and another time when a letter came from Switzerland to tell her of her baby in Hamburg, her mother, and the two brothers that were in the cavalry in the advance into Russia. At first, I must confess, I thought that this charming and intelligent lady had offered to work for us, especially as she refused our pay, in order to get information of the regiments and the prevailing diseases and sick rate of our army. Soon I had reason to know that she played the game, and stayed only in order to work to help the prisoners of her own people, and our wounded too. For any day her husband might want help from us or might be brought in wounded to our hospital, where she could nurse and tend to him herself. Our men liked to be attended by her, for she was gentler far than I and never short-tempered with them.
Nazoro we found in chains on our arrival for the offence of having attacked a German, and only his usefulness in the operating theatre saved him from the prison. In spite of the disapproval of Elizabeth and other Germans, I struck off the chains, feeling that he very probably had good excuse for his offence. But the Germans never failed to point out what a dangerous man he was. Once indeed he was slack and casual, so I promptly ordered him to be "kibokoed," and thereafter I could find no fault in his work and behaviour. Possessed of three wives, for he was passing rich on sixteen rupees a month, he asked one day for leave to celebrate the arrival of his first son. This I granted, only to be assailed a fortnight later by requests for leave to attend his grandmother's funeral, and to see a sick friend. But these had a familiar ring about them, and were not successful in procuring the lazy day that is so beloved by African humanity.
But Ali was of a different mould; small and slight and anxious to please, he was nevertheless swift to leave his work when once my back was turned. Forsaken in love—for he had been deserted by his wife—he had forsworn the sex and buried his sorrows in "Pombe," the Kaffir beer that effectually deprived him of what little intelligence he had. He was a "fundi" at taking out jiggers, and sat for hours at the feet of our foot-soldiers; quickly adopting an air of authority that occasionally brought him swift blows from East African troopers, who do not tolerate easily such airs in a native, he produced the unbroken jigger flea with unfailing regularity and prescribed the pail of disinfectant in which the tortured feet were soaked. Another long suit of his was the bandage machine, and the hours he could steal away from real work were spent in endless windings of washed though much stained bandages.
The German women hated us far more even than did the men; nor did those who, like Elizabeth, knew England, fail to believe any the less the German stories of English wickedness. When I told her of Portugal's entry into the war, and how our ancient and hereditary ally had handed over to England sixty out of the seventy-one German ships she had taken in her ports, Elizabeth snorted with rage and said that England, of course, forced all the little nations to fight against Germany.
One of my friends, and not the least welcome, was Corporal Nel. A Boer, he had come up from the Union with Brits. Tiring of war, he chose the nobler part played by the guard that cherishes German captured cattle. Swiftly losing his job owing to an outbreak of East Coast fever among his herd, he took to a vagabond's life. Wanted by the police in the Union, I am told, he avoided his regiment and lived with the natives. Forced to come to me one night with an attack of angina pectoris, he was grateful for the ease from suffering that amyl-nitrite, morphia and brandy gave in that exquisitely painful affliction. Accordingly he consented to organise some natives who should be armed with passes signed by me, and illuminated with Red Crosses and other impressive signs, and collect eggs and chickens and fruit for my patients in hospital. So impressed were the natives with the Ju-Ju conferred by my illumination of these passes with coloured chalks, that they brought me a daily and most welcome supply of these necessaries for our men. But the arm of the Law is long, and it sought out Corporal Nel within the native hut in which he made his home. And soon, to my sorrow and the infinite grief of our lambs in hospital, for whom those eggs, chickens, mangoes, and bananas spelt so much in the way of change of food, the Provost Sergeant had this wanderer in his chitches.
"What do I think of this country, and how does the Hun of East Africa compare with his European brother?" you ask me. Well, to begin with the Colony, as of the greater importance, I must confess to be very taken with it, and I hope most sincerely that our Government will never give it back. Though it is not so suited as British East Africa for European colonisation, there are yet great areas of sufficient elevation to allow of white women and children living, for years, without suffering much from the vertical sun and the fevers of the country. There are many places where one only sees a mosquito for three months of the year, the soil is very fertile, and labour not only willing and efficient, but also very cheap. The European, too, has learnt to live properly in this country, and to avoid the midday sun; all offices and works are closed from twelve to three. If only man would learn wisdom in the amount of beer he drinks, and the food he eats, the tale of disease would be much less.
The colony is fully developed with excellent railways, well-built houses, a tractable and well-disciplined native population. Dar-es-Salaam in particular, seems to have been the apple of the German colonial eye. There are fine mission stations in all the healthy regions of the country, and great plantations of rubber, sisal, cotton, and corn abound. The white women and children, though rather pasty and washed out after at least two years' residence in the country, do not appear debilitated after their long tropical sojourn. The planters have, as a rule, invested all their belongings in their plantations, and make the country more a home than our people in East Africa, who are of a more wealthy and leisured class. Roads have been made and bridges built. In fact, the pioneering and donkey work has all been done, and the country only waits for us to step into our new inheritance.
To me it has been a source of surprise that the German, who consistently drinks beer in huge quantities, takes little or no exercise, and cohabits with the black women of the country extensively, should have performed such prodigies of endurance on trek in this campaign. One would have thought that the Englishman, who keeps his body fitter for games, eschews beer for his liver's sake, and finds that intimacy with the native population lowers his prestige, would have done far better in this war than the German. That in all fairness he has not done so is due to the fact that we, as an invading army, were unable to look after ourselves or to care for ourselves in the same way as the German.
We have had to carry kit and heavy ammunition, to sleep with only a ground sheet beneath us, through the tropic rains, to do without the shelter and protection of mosquito nets. The German soldier, even a private in a white or Schutzen Kompanie, as distinct from the under-officer with an Askari regiment or Feld Kompanie, as it is called, has had at least eight porters to carry all his kit, his food, his bed, to have his food ready prepared at the halting-places, and his bed erected, and mosquito curtains hung. Only on night patrols has he run risk from the mosquito. "How can you ask your men to carry loads and then fight as well, in Equatorial Africa?" they say to us. His captured chop boxes, for each individual is a separate unit and has his own food carried and prepared for him, have provided us, often, with the only square meals our men have enjoyed. Never short of food or drink or porters, ever marching toward his food supplies along a predetermined line of retreat, the German walks toward his dinner, as our men have marched away from theirs. Well paid too, five rupees a day pay and three rupees a day ration money, he had had no stint of eggs and chickens and the fruit of the country, that have been rarest of luxuries to us. "Far better if you had had fewer men and done them properly in the matter of food and hospitals and porters," captured German officers have often said to me. "How your men can stand it and do such marches is incredible to us." That is always the tenour of their remarks, their criticism, and they are clearly right, had such a policy been a practicable one for us, which it was not. At first the feeling between the soldiers of the two countries was good and war was conducted, even by them, in a more or less chivalrous manner. We thought the East African Hun a better fellow than his European brother. But it was only because he knew the game was up in East Africa, and thought that he had better behave properly, lest the retribution, that would be sure to follow, would fall heavily upon him. Later we found him to be the same old Hun, the identical savage that we know in Europe; the fear of consequences only restrains him here. It is his nature and the teaching of his schools and professors.
We have often been amazed at the disclosures from German officers' pocket-books. In the same oiled silk wrapping we find photographs of his wife and children, and cheek by jowl with them, the photographs of abandoned women and filthy pictures, such as can be bought in low quarters of big European cities. Their absence of taste in these matters has been incomprehensible to us. When we have taxed them with it, they are unashamed. "It is you who are hypocrites," they reply; "you like looking at forbidden pictures, if no one is about to see, but you don't carry them in your pocket-books. We, however, are natural, we like to look at such things, why should we not carry them with us?" If this be hypocrisy, I prefer the company of hypocrites. In their houses it was the same; disgusting pictures, masquerading in the guise of art, adorned the walls, evidences of corrupt taste and doubtful practices in every drawer and cupboard. Even the Commandant of Bukoba, von Stuemer, and his name did not belie his nature, though, before the war, quite popular with the British officials and planters of Uganda, had a queer taste in photography. In the big family album were evidences of his astonishing domestic life; for there were photographs of him in full regimentals, with medals and decorations, sitting on a sofa beside his wife, who was in a state of nature. Others portrayed him without the conventionalities of clothing, and his wife in evening dress.
Officers from the Cameroon have confirmed the filthy habits of the Huns and Hunnesses, how they defiled the rooms in the hospital at Duala that they occupied just before they were sent away; how disgusting were their habits in the cabins of the fine Atlantic liner that took them back to Europe. Not that it is their normal custom; it was merely to render the rooms uninhabitable for us who were to follow, and their special way of showing contempt and hatred for their foes. Do you wonder that the stewards and crew of the Union Castle liner struck work rather than convey and look after these beasts on the voyage to Europe? Our French missionary padre tells me that it was just the same in Alsace. The incident at Zabern after the manoeuvres was entirely due to the disgust and indignation of the French people at the defiling of their beds and bedrooms by the German soldiers, who had been billeted upon them.
Looting, although you may not know it, is the natural impulse of primitive man. And in war we are very primitive. To take what does not belong to one is very natural when a man is persuaded that he can be absolved from the charge of theft by quoting military necessity. How surely in war one sheds the conventions of society! It has the attraction of buried treasure; the charm of getting something for nothing. But there are different ways or degrees of looting.
Now there were a few of us in German East Africa who had been in the Retreat from Mons and the subsequent advance to the Marne and beyond it to the Aisne. Indelibly engraved upon our minds were the pictures of French chateaux and farmhouses looted by the German troops in their advance and abandoned to us in their retreat. All along the countless roads the German transport had pressed, hurrying to the Aisne, were evidences of the loot of German officers and men. In roadside ditches, half buried in the late summer vegetation, were pictures and bronzes, china and statuary, the loot the German officer had chosen to adorn the walls of his ancestral Schloss. Marble figures leant drunkenly against the wayside hedges, big brass clocks strewed the ditches. Long before, of course, had the German rank and file been compelled to jettison their prizes, for the transport horses were nearly foundered and only officers' loot could be retained. Later, when the exhaustion of the horses was complete, and capture of the waggons seemed imminent, the regimental equipment and food supply, and, finally, the loot of high officers had to be abandoned. The whole story of that retreat was to be read in the discard by the roadside. The regimental butcher had clung to his meat and the implements of his trade until the last; and when we found the roads littered with carcases of oxen, sacks of pea flour and sausage machines, we knew that we would shortly find the General's loot beside the hedge.
In the houses, too, both the chateaux and the comfortable French farmhouses, we saw what manner of man the Hun could be in the matter of looting. Where the soldier could not loot he could not refrain from destroying. Floors were knee-deep in women's gear, household goods, private letters and all the treasures of French linen chests. Trampled by muddy German boots were the fine whiteness of French bed-linen. Nor had the German soldier refrained from the last exhibit of his "Kultur," but left filthy evidences of his bestial habits behind him to ensure that the bedrooms would be uninhabitable by us.
Remembering all these things we wondered how our men would behave now that the tables were turned and they in a position to loot the treasures of many German farms and plantation houses. Of course, divisional orders against looting and wanton destruction were very strict. Where houses were at the mercy of small patrols and bodies of our men under non-commissioned officers, far from the path of the main advancing army, the temptation to all must have been immense, and it speaks volumes for the natural goodness of our men and their ingrained sense of order that never in this whole country was looting done by any of our troops. True many houses were plundered, and there was a certain amount of wanton damage; but it was all done by the plundering native or by the Hun himself in his retreat.
For our calculating enemy left no stone unturned to deprive us of any of the useful booty of war. He deliberately destroyed and ravaged and burnt the property of his fellow-countrymen, and mentally determined to send in the claim for damage against us. A German will always complain and send in a bill of costs to us, when he is once assured of the protection of British troops.
Naturally, of course, we requisitioned and gave receipts for any article or property that might be of use to us for our hospitals or our supplies. In fact, our scrupulous regard for enemy property will probably result in very many fraudulent claims against our Government when the war is over. How easy to add mythical articles of great value to the list attested to by the signature of a British Staff officer. Who could blame a Hun when the British were such fools and forgery of receipts so easy?
But such was the regard we paid to German women and children that, if a house were occupied, we took nothing and disturbed nothing. A German farmhouse was an oasis of plenty amid a very hungry army. It made us sometimes wonder whether it was quite right to leave German ducks and fowls and sheep behind us, when we had to live on mealie meal and tough trek-ox. But the women were so terrified, at first, that we gave such farms a wide berth when scarcity of water did not force us to camp within the enclosures. Shortly, however, as is the German custom, these women would profit by their immunity and come to regimental headquarters that listened so patiently and courteously to the tale of pawpaws or mangoes—fruit that was really wild—vanished in the night. In no campaign, I dare swear, has so much respect been given to occupied houses, so much consideration to conquered people. The German Government paid this compliment to our army, that they left their women and children behind to our tender mercies.
At Handeni, ours being a Casualty Clearing Station, our equipment included 200 stretchers, with little hospital equipment, beyond the men's own blankets and their kit. No sooner did we come along and install ourselves in the abandoned German fort than the 5th South African Infantry were in action at Kangata to win 125 casualties. For us they were to nurse and keep until convalescent; for there was no stationary hospital behind us, and forty miles of the worst of bad roads robbed us of the chance of transporting them to the railway.
So every afternoon I went to German planters' houses (empty, of course), for forty miles around, in a swift Ford car. And back in triumph we bore bedsteads and soft mattresses that heavy German bodies so lately had impressed. Warm from the Hun, we brought them to our wounded. Down pillows, soft eiderdown quilts for painful broken legs; mattresses for pain-racked bodies. And one's reward the pleasure and appreciation our men showed at these attempts to amelioratetheirlot. They were so "bucked" to see us coming back at night laden with the treasures of German linen chests. It would have done your heart good to see their dirty, unwashed faces grinning at me from lace-edged pillows. Silk-covered cushions from Hun drawing-rooms for painful amputation stumps!
So I had the double pleasure, all the expectancy and the delight of seeing our men so pleased. Forty bedsteads and beds complete we found in that district, until the bare white-washed walls of the jail were transformed. White paint, too, we discovered in plenty, and soon our wards were virginal in their whiteness. And when I tell you that at one time I had no less than thirteen gunshot fractures of thigh and leg alone and other wounds in proportion, in the hospital, you may judge how necessary beds were.
But the natives had nearly always been before us, and the confusion was indescribable, drawers turned out, the contents strewed upon the floors, cupboards broken into, and all portable articles removed. Pathetic traces everywhere of the happy family life before war's devastating fingers rifled all their treasures. Photographs, private letters, a doll's house, children's broken toys.
And from some letters one gathered that insight into the relations between the plantation owner and the manager who lived there. At one farm, apparently owned by an Englishman who paid his manager, a German Dane from Flensburg, the princely sum of 200 rupees a month, we found that one, at least, of our own people knew how to grind the uttermost labour from his German employee. For there were letters from the manager asking for leave after 2 ½ years' labour at this plantation, and pointing out that the German Government had laid down the principle of European leave every two years. To this came the cold reply that his employer cared nothing for German Government regulations; the contract was for three years, and he would see to it that this provision was carried out. One later letter begged for financial assistance to tide him over the coming months; for his wife and children had been ill and he himself in hospital at Korogwe with blackwater fever for two months. "And how shall I pay for food the next two months, if my pay is 200 rupees only, and hospital expenses 500?"
A common inquiry put to doctors is, "What do you think of the alcohol question in a tropical campaign?" Do we not think that it is a good thing that our army is, by force of circumstances, a teetotal one? Much as we regret to depart from an attitude that is on the whole hostile to alcohol, I must say that it is our conviction that in the tropics a certain amount of diffusible stimulant is very beneficial and quite free from harm. And the cheapest and most reliable stimulant of that nature one can obtain commercially is, of course, whiskey. This whole campaign has been almost entirely a teetotal one for reasons of transport and inability to get drink. Not for any other reason, I can assure you. But where the absence of alcohol has been no doubt responsible for a wonderful degree of excellent behaviour among our troops, I yet know that the few who were able to get a drink at night felt all the better for it. At the end of the day here, when the sun has set and darkness, swiftly falling, sends us to our tents and bivouacs, there comes a feeling of intense exhaustion, especially if any exercise has been taken. And exercise in some form, as you have heard, is absolutely essential to health after the sun has descended toward the west about four o'clock in the afternoon. For men and officers go sick in standing camp more than on trek, and, often, the more and the longer the men are left in camp to rest, with the intention of recuperation, the more they go down with malaria and dysentery.
It is no sudden conclusion we have come to as to the value of alcohol, but we certainly feel that a drink or two at night does no one any harm. But the drink for tropics must not be fermented liquor: beer and wine are headachy and livery things. Whisky and particularly vermouth are far the best. And vermouth is really such a pleasant wholesome drink too. The idea of vermouth alone is attractive. For it is made from the dried flowers of camomile to which the later pressings of the grape have been added. One has only to smell dried camomile flowers to find that their fragrance is that of hay meadows in an English June! Camomile preparations, too, are now so largely used in medicine and still keep their reputation for wholesome and soothing qualities that it has enjoyed for generations. How could one think that harm could lurk in the tincture of such fragrant things as the flowers of English meadows? No little reputation as a cure and preventive for blackwater fever does vermouth enjoy! We know that we must always, if we would be wise, be guided by local experience and local custom, and it is told of the Anglo-German boundary Commission in East Africa, that the frontier between the two protectorates can still be traced by the empty vermouth bottles! But there were no cases of blackwater. I am told, on that very long and trying expedition.
In the survey of the whole question of Prohibition in the future, the essential difference of the requirements of humanity in tropical countries must be taken into consideration. There is no doubt, and in this all medical men of long tropical experience will agree, that some stimulant is needed by blond humanity living out of his geographical environment and debilitated by the adverse influence of his lack of pigment, the vertical sun and a tropical heat. It is more than probable that a proviso will have to be added to any world-wide scheme of prohibition. The cocktail, the universal "sherry and bitters" and "sundowner" will have to be retained. To expect a man, so exhausted that the very idea of food is distasteful, to digest his dinner, is to ask too much of one's digestive apparatus. And this we must all admit, that if a man in the tropics does not eat, then certainty he may not live.