Transcriber’s Note

Full page illustrations are interpolated in mid-paragraph. These have been moved to the closest sensible paragraph break. Most, but not all, were not included in the pagination, and do not appear here with page numbers.

Errors, when reasonably attributable to the printer, have been corrected. The corrections appear as words underlined with a light gray. The original text will be shown when the mouse is over the word. Please see the transcriber’s [note] at the end of this text for details.

THE

GOLD COAST REGIMENT

IN THE EAST AFRICAN

CAMPAIGN

BY SIR HUGH CLIFFORD, K.C.M.G.

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1920

All rights reserved

TO

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL R. A. DE B. ROSE,

C.M.G., D.S.O.,

AND TO THE

OFFICERS, NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS

AND MEN

OF THE

GOLD COAST REGIMENT OF THE WEST

AFRICAN FRONTIER FORCE

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

IN ADMIRATION OF THEIR COURAGE, THEIR STEADFASTNESS AND THEIR

ACHIEVEMENTS, IN SYMPATHY WITH THEIR HEAVY LOSSES, AND IN

GRATITUDE FOR THE LUSTRE WHICH THEY SHED UPON THE

COLONY WHOSE NAME THEY BEAR

BY

THEIR SOMETIME GOVERNOR AND TITULAR

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

HUGH CLIFFORD.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE GOLD COAST REGIMENT
IN THE
EAST AFRICAN CAMPAIGN

CHAPTER I
THE VOYAGE TO AND ARRIVAL IN EAST AFRICA

When during the latter days of July, 1914, the prospect of war with the German Empire became imminent, the Gold Coast Regiment was rapidly mobilized, and detachments took up pre-arranged strategical positions on the borders of Togoland. On the declaration of war on the 4th August, the invasion of this German colony was promptly undertaken; and the Regiment, which had been joined at Lome, the capital of Togoland, by a small party of Tirailleurs from Dahomey, pursued the retreating enemy up the main line of railway to Kamina—the site of a very large and important German wireless installation—where, on the 28th August, he was forced to an unconditional surrender.

On the 18th September Major-General Dobell, who had been appointed to command the British and French troops which were about to undertake the invasion of the German Kameruns, arrived off Lome; and the bulk of the Gold Coast Regiment, leaving two companies to occupy the conquered territory in Togoland, and a small garrison in the Gold Coast and Ashanti, joined this Expeditionary Force.

In the Kameruns stiff fighting was experienced, and it was not until the 11th April, 1916, that the Gold Coast Regiment returned to its cantonments at Kumasi, after having been continuously upon active service for a period of twenty months.

In Togoland and in the Kameruns alike the Regiment had won for itself a high reputation for courage and endurance; and the fine spirit animating all ranks was strikingly displayed by the enthusiasm with which the news that the force was again required for active service overseas was received, though at that time the men had enjoyed only a very few weeks’ rest in their cantonments at Kumasi. Nor was this due to the courage born of ignorance, for the Regiment had learned from bitter experience the dangers and difficulties of the type of fighting in which it was about once more to take a part. The pursuit through bush and scrub, or through wide expanses of high grass, of a stubborn and crafty enemy is a task which, as many British regiments have learned in places spattered all up and down the tropics, imposes a peculiar strain upon the nerves and upon the endurance of the forces which engage in it. The enemy, who alone knows his plans and his objectives, and whose movements are designed to avoid rather than to seek contact with his pursuers, unless he can attack or sustain attack in circumstances specially favourable to himself, possesses throughout the immense advantage of the initiative. If he elect to retreat, the pursuer must plod after him, whither he knows not, through country which is not of his choice, and with the character of which he has had no opportunity of rendering himself familiar. If the enemy resolves to make a stand, it is almost invariably in a position which he has selected on account of the advantages which it affords to him; and when in due course he has been ejected from it, the pursuit through the Unknown of an elusive and usually invisible enemy begins ab novo, in circumstances which the apparent success has done nothing material to improve. These facts combine to render a campaign in the bush a heart-breaking and nerve-racking experience, even when the enemy is an undisciplined native levy armed with more or less primitive weapons. In the Kameruns, however, and to a much greater degree in East Africa, the enemy was composed of well-trained native soldiers, with a good stiffening of Europeans; he was armed with machine-guns and magazine-rifles; he was supplied with native guides intimately acquainted with every yard of the country; and he was led with extraordinary skill and energy by German officers. It was bush-fighting on a scale never hitherto experienced, with all the advantages which such fighting confers upon the pursued, and the corresponding disadvantages inherent to the pursuit, exaggerated to an unprecedented degree. Yet the men of the Gold Coast Regiment, who in the Kameruns had already had more than a taste of its quality, celebrated the fact that they were once more to engage in such a campaign with war dances and clamorous rejoicings.

By the evening of the 5th July, 1916, the Gold Coast Expeditionary Force had assembled at the port of Sekondi. It consisted of four Double Companies—A, B, G, and I—with a Pioneer Company, and a Battery of two 2·95 guns, and 12 machine guns, and a number of carriers. Its strength was 36 British officers, 15 British non-commissioned officers, 11 native clerks, 980 native rank and file, 177 specially trained carriers attached to the battery and to the machine guns, 1 store-man, 204 other carriers, and 4 officers of the Royal Army Medical Corps—in all 1428 men—under the Commanding Officer of the Gold Coast Regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel R. A. de B. Rose, D.S.O.

The present writer, who at that time was Governor of the Gold Coast Colony and its Dependencies—Ashanti and the Northern Territories—had come round by sea from Accra to wish the Regiment God-speed. On the evening of 5th July, Colonel Rose and all the officers who could be spared from duty, were entertained by me at a banquet, given in the Court House, at which all the leading officials and the most prominent members of the European and African unofficial community of Sekondi were present.

Officers and men, who at that time had been fighting almost continuously since the 4th August, 1914, save for the brief rest which they had recently enjoyed at Kumasi, presented on this occasion a very smart and workmanlike appearance. They were thoroughly well-equipped and thoroughly seasoned troops, with achievements already to their credit of a kind that had filled the Colony to which they belonged with pride.

By midday on the 6th July the embarkation of this force with all its stores and equipment, on board the transport Æneas, was completed. The men were transported in lighters to the ship’s side, and thence were slung inboard in batches of half-a-dozen or more in the sag of a canvas sail—a rough and ready, but very effective, expedient, which delighted the struggling groups of men as the sling bore them aloft and deposited them, screaming with laughter, in inextricable knots upon the deck. At about 2 p.m. the transport got under way, taking a southerly course at right angles to the coast, which here runs east and west. The phenomenon was witnessed by excited groups of natives from the beach at Sekondi, for never within living memory had any ship bearing their countrymen steered a course that was not parallel to the shore; and when the vessel at last disappeared below the skyline something like consternation prevailed. It was as though she, and all aboard her, had dropped suddenly into the depths of some unknown abyss. Superstitious fears were further stimulated by the fact that an eclipse of the sun occurred on that day, and much discussion arose among the men as to whether the omen should be regarded as of favourable or of evil portent.

The voyage round the southern extremity of the African continent, and up the east coast to the neighbourhood of Mombassa, was uneventful. The Æneas called at the Cape and at Durban. At the latter place the whole of the Regiment was allowed ashore, and was taken en masse to see the “movies,” a new experience which astonished and delighted them. They were also paraded, inspected, and addressed by the Mayor—a stimulating ordeal which, however, in the popular estimation took a second place when compared with the miracles beheld at the cinematograph. Cold weather was met with when rounding the Cape, but the men appeared to feel it very little; and the force was in fine fettle when, on the 26th July, the Æneas arrived at Kilindini, the port of Mombassa, after a journey that had occupied exactly three weeks.

Kilindini is a land-locked harbour, and the town, which is a somewhat incongruous modern adjunct to ancient and picturesque Mombassa, consists mainly of sheds, warehouses, and wharfs.

Disembarkation was effected by lighters, which were towed alongside a jetty, and here a stroke of ill-luck greeted the Regiment at the outset of its career in East Africa. For weeks not a drop of rain had fallen at Kilindini, but now, when the disembarkation was in full swing, a sudden tornado blew up from the sea, bringing a downpour by which officers and men were speedily soaked to the skin. There was no alternative, however, but to carry on, and drenched and rather woe-begone, the force was presently landed. Two trains were awaiting the Regiment at a point distant about a couple of hundred yards from the jetty; but the day being a Sunday, the Sabbatarian principles of the local porters, which may have owed their inspiration either to indolence or to piety, forbade the natives of Kilindini to engage in servile work. In pouring rain, therefore, the men set to, and in a creditably short time all the baggage, stores, and equipment had been transferred from the lighters to the railway waggons; and at 4 p.m. the first train started upon its journey up-country. This train consisted of passenger carriages, but that which followed it some six hours later was mainly made up of covered trucks. The men, with the steam rising in clouds from their brown knitted jerseys, were packed in batches of ten into the carriages and trucks; and in this fashion the journey up the main line toward Nairobi was begun.

While daylight lasted the way led mostly through open grass country apparently very sparsely inhabited, which was succeeded later by what looked like dense thorn-jungle, and the junction at Voi was reached by the first train at about midnight. From this point the military authorities had constructed a loop-line, which runs in a south-westerly direction through the mountain range, of which on the north-west Kilima-Njaro is the stupendous[stupendous] culmination, until it effects a junction with the German railway from Tanga to Moschi at a point some twenty miles south of the last-named place. At dawn, therefore, the men of the Regiment, shivering for their skins, looked out upon wide expanses of mountain scenery—a vast sweep of hillsides, rounded summits and undulations, covered with short grass, and strewn with gigantic boulders of rock. In the distance Kilima-Njaro was frequently visible, with its crest covered by perpetual snow. The line ran from Voi to the junction with the Tanga-Moschi railway at heights varying from 6000 to 9000 feet; and the men of the Gold Coast Regiment, who are accustomed to regard 60° F. as registering a temperature which is almost unbearably cold, and who were still damp from the drenching they had received at Kilindini, suffered seriously from the low temperature. The fact that nearly half of them were accommodated in trucks, which though roofed had only half walls, rendered the exposure all the more severe. A few halts were allowed in order to enable the men to stretch their legs; but time did not admit of much cooking being done, and for the most part the, to them, unnatural foods of bully beef and biscuit, and draughts of ice-cold water, were all that they had to restore the natural heat of their bodies. It was an extremely trying experience for troops recruited in the Tropics, and many cases of pneumonia subsequently resulted, not a few of which proved fatal.

From the junction the trains bearing the Regiment proceeded eastward down the captured German railway, in the direction of the sea and Tanga, to Ngombezi, which is distant some forty miles from that terminus. Here they arrived on the 29th July, having been joined on the preceding day by Captain H. C. C. de la Poer, as special service officer. Captain de la Poer had long been resident in East Africa, possessed much local knowledge, and spoke Swahili fluently. Ngombezi is situated at a height of some 2000 feet above sea-level; and on detraining, the Regiment went into temporary camp, the officers and men bivouacking under shelters fashioned from blankets and water-proof sheets.

On the 30th July the Regiment was inspected by General Edwards, the Inspector-General of Communications. The service kit of the Force consists of a green knitted forage cap, a khaki blouse, shorts and putties of the same material, with the leather sandals which are known in West Africa as chuplies. The men of the Regiment, all of whom at this period were recruited from the people of the far interior which lies to the northward of Ashanti, are for the most part sturdy, thick-set fellows, with rather blunt but not pronouncedly negroid features, which show traces in some instances of a slight admixture of Arab blood. They are at once strong and active. They possess great pluck and endurance and are very amenable to discipline; and their fidelity to, and confidence in, their officers have become a by-word. For the rest they are as tough and business-like looking a body of men as any judge of good fighting material need desire to see.

General Edwards, at the end of his inspection, expressed himself very much struck by the physique of the men, and by their smart and soldierlike appearance. He emphasized the fact that no other unit which he had inspected had arrived in the country so well and efficiently equipped—a fact which caused great satisfaction on the “Home Front” in the Gold Coast when his opinion was duly repeated to the Colonial Government; and he forthwith wired to the Commander-in-Chief reporting that the Regiment was fit to take the field immediately.

This was the first sprig of laurel won by the Corps after its arrival in East Africa. It was destined in the course of the long campaign upon which it was about to embark to garner others wherefrom to fashion the substantial crown which it eventually brought back in triumph to the Gold Coast.

CHAPTER II
THE ADVANCE ON THE DAR-ES-SALAAM—LAKE
TANGANYIKA RAILWAY

The military situation, at the moment when the Gold Coast Regiment received its orders to take the field, was approximately as follows. Tanga, the coast terminus of the more northerly of the two German railways, had fallen some time before, and the whole line from Moschi to the sea was now in the hands of the British. A column of Indian troops was moving down the coast with Sandani at the mouth of the Wami river, Bagamoyo at the mouth of the Kingani, and Dar-es-Salaam, the terminus of the principal railway, as its successive objectives. The enemy had been driven, not only away from the Tanga-Moschi railway, but to the south of the Pangani-Handeni-Kondoa-Irangi road; and General Smuts had established General Headquarters on the left bank of the Lukigura River, which falls into the Wami on its left bank at a point distant some sixty miles from its mouth.

The Commander-in-Chief had with him here the First Division under Major-General Hoskyns, consisting of the 1st and 2nd East African Brigades under the command respectively of Brigadier-General Sheppard and Brigadier-General Hannyngton. With the exception of a machine-gun detachment of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, which was attached to the 2nd East African Infantry Brigade, both these brigades were composed of Indian troops. The Gold Coast Regiment was about to join up with the 25th Royal Fusiliers, and with it to form the Divisional Reserve.

On the right, the Second Division, which was composed of South African Infantry and mounted troops, under Major-General Van der Venter, had its advanced base at Kondoa-Irangi and for its objective Dadoma, on the main railway which runs from Dar-es-Salaam to Kigome, near Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika.

Between the Second Division and General Smuts’ troops, a force composed of South African mounted men, under the command of Brigadier-General Brits, was operating independently, with Kilossa on the railway as its objective. It was General Smuts’ intention to attack the railway with the First Division at Morogoro, a mission station, which lies not quite fifty miles due east of Kilossa.

It had not yet been found possible to establish a main base at Tanga; and at the moment all supplies were being landed at Kilindini, and were conveyed thence, by the railway route which the Regiment had followed, to Korogwe on the Tanga-Moschi line. An advanced base had been formed at Handeni, five-and-thirty miles to the south-east of Korogwe; and for six weeks General Smuts had been compelled to remain inactive in his camp on the Lukigura River, while sufficient stores, etc., were being accumulated to render a further and continuous advance possible.

His plan, as will be seen by the disposition of his forces, was to attack the main German railway line, as nearly as possible simultaneously, at Dar-es-Salaam on the coast, at Morogoro, at Kilossa and at Dadoma. This would have the effect of depriving the enemy of the use of the line and of driving him to the south of it; after which an attempt would be made to expel him from the country north of the Rufiji River.

The Regiment had been inspected by General Edwards on the 30th July, and on the 4th August, leaving the Depôt Company to establish itself at Korogwe, they left their temporary camp at Ngombezi and began their march to Msiha, the headquarters of the First Division on the banks of the Lukigura. It was now that their troubles began, and the nine days of that march live in the memory of officers and men as perhaps the most trying period of the whole campaign.

Though the altitude was not great, the climate was cool even at midday; but while the Europeans belonging to the force found it wonderfully bracing, the men missed the genial warmth of their native land, and at night suffered greatly from the cold.

The line of march led along an unmetalled track, over which motor-lorries had been ploughing their way for weeks, and the surface had been reduced to a fine powder some six to eight inches in depth. The constant passage of lorries, and now the first-line transport of the Regiment—which consisted of mule-carts and of the carriers who had accompanied the force from the Gold Coast—and the plodding feet of the men on the march stirred up this loose deposit into a dense fog of a dull-red hue. As the day advanced, each man became plastered with particles of this fine red dust, which seemed to possess peculiarly penetrating properties, till one and all resembled so many figures fashioned from terra cotta. Eyes, nostrils and mouths became filled with this stuff, occasioning acute thirst; but the way was waterless, save for a few foul holes half filled with brackish water.

The lot of the rear-guard was the hardest, for the second-line transport, locally supplied to the Regiment, consisted of South African ox-wagons, each of which was drawn by a team of sixteen oxen driven by Cape boys. The imported cattle had many of them become infected by trypanosomæ, and not a few were literally on their last legs. The exigencies of the situation, however, rendered it necessary for these luckless brutes to be driven as long as they could stand; but progress was incredibly slow, and frequent halts were occasioned to unyoke some miserable ox, which had fallen never to rise again, and thereafter to rearrange his yoke-fellows. At the best, as they crept forward, the floundering wagons with their straining teams churned the dust into impenetrable, ruddy clouds, which, mingling with the fog already caused by the passage of the infantry, well-nigh smothered the men who formed the rear-guard. Though the actual length of each day’s march was fairly short, the last man rarely reached the camping-place until long after dark.

The physical trials to which the rank and file were exposed—the choking dust, the raging thirst which it occasioned, the inadequate supply of brackish water, met with at long intervals, which seemed powerless to appease even when it did not aggravate their sufferings, the nauseating stench arising from the putrifying carcases of dead horses, mules and oxen, with which the line of march was thickly strewn, the bitterly cold nights, and the ominous way in which man after man succumbed to pneumonia—were rendered almost unbearable by reason of the superstitious fears by which the men were haunted. The memory of that long railway journey, which half of them had made in open trucks, through the freezing cold of the nights and early mornings high up in the mountains, was still fresh in their minds. They had seen many of their comrades suddenly stricken by pneumonia—to them a by no means familiar disease—and killed thereby after a few days or hours of painful struggle for life. Now they found themselves in an unknown land, separated from their homes by immeasurable distances, with wide expanses of sour scrub spreading around them, and holding for them no promise of finality; while day after day, they plodded, parched and choking, along that interminable road, saw their fellows succumb at every halting-place, and learned presently to believe that the water with its salt-taste, which was alone available to allay their thirst, and of which they could never obtain enough, was a poisoned draught that was killing them. This was a devil’s country to which their officers had brought them—a land of evil spirits out of which they could never hope again to win their way. The Europeans—officers and non-commissioned officers alike—sought ceaselessly to cheer and hearten-up their men; but for the first time in the memory of any of them, their efforts met with no response. The men had become unrecognizable. Usually the most cheerful and light-hearted of mankind, they wore now a sullen, hang-dog air. They were sulky, suspicious and resentful. For the first time in the history of the Regiment their confidence in their officers—which to these men has become a religion—had been strained almost to the breaking-point. And their officers knew it. “You could not get a grin out of them at any price,” said one who had seen his men in many a tight place, and had never known them to show even a passing sign of discouragement or depression; and when you cannot conjure a grin out of the gnarled features of a man of the Gold Coast Regiment, something very like the Trump of Doom has sounded for him.

The Regiment, after resting on the 8th August at Handeni, and drawing a fresh supply of rations, pushed on for another four days to Mahazi, where it duly reported its arrival to the headquarters of the First Division.

The front had now been reached, the enemy was close at hand, and there was a river of running water to delight the hearts of the parched and dust-coated men. The reaction was immediate. There was no lack of grins now; and these found their reflections in the faces of a band of anxious officers, as they listened to the cheerful babble resounding from their new encampment. It is a music that is discordant enough at times, but now it was more than welcome after the sullen silence of suspicion and distrust that had brooded over the camp and the line of march for more than a week.

On the 13th August the Regiment moved forward on the road to Turiani. The country in which they found themselves was no longer grey or powdered red with dust, but actually green, though it was still, for the most part, covered by waist-high scrub and grass, and the folds of the undulating plain rendered any extended view impossible. The proximity of the enemy, as is usual in warfare of this type, was more certain than his whereabouts, and all military precautions were henceforth taken during the day’s march to Turiani, and during the subsequent advance.

On the 15th August the Regiment moved to Chasi, and on the 16th August, after working all day at the construction of two bridges, the camp was advanced to Kwevi Lombo, near the Makindu River, and established at about 11 p.m.

On the 17th August the Regiment received orders to move forward in the early afternoon to Dakawa, where fighting had been in progress all day. The men, resting in camp after their hard day and late night, had listened all the morning, like a pack of terriers quivering with excitement, to the familiar sounds of machine-gun and rifle-fire; and after a march of four and a half hours they reached Dakawa at 7 p.m. Here General Smuts had established his headquarters, and Colonel Rose personally reported to him the arrival of the Regiment. General Smuts ordered the Regiment to sit down and rest until the rising of the moon, and then to proceed to a ford two and a half miles west of the main road. At dawn, if the enemy was still in position, they were to cross the river and join General Enslin’s Brigade, which belonged to the force operating independently under Major-General Brits.

These orders were duly carried out, the Regiment being guided to the ford by the celebrated scout, Lieutenant Pretorius, a way for the infantry having been beaten down through the tough high grass by a body of South African mounted men. This movement was carried out by the Regiment with the least avoidable noise. The enemy, however, becoming aware that the ford was occupied, drew off during the night; and next morning, therefore, the Regiment returned to its own division, and camped near a broken bridge over the Mkundi River, a left affluent of the Wami. Here it remained until the 23rd August, when it moved forward eight and a half miles to Kimamba, and thence, on the 24th August, to a camp on the banks of the Ngere-Ngere, a small stream which falls into the Ruwu on its left bank a few miles above Mafisa.

This latter day’s march calls for a word of description. The Regiment, which was now acting as part of the reserve to the 2nd East African Brigade, marched last of the fighting troops, with the heavy transport and the actual rear-guard still further behind it. The country traversed was a flat plain broken by frequent undulations, and grown upon by shortish grass, brittle and wilted by the sun. Mean-looking trees were spattered all over the plain, but were usually wide enough apart to permit of the easy passage of armoured motor-cars. Of these a number, under the charge of naval officers, accompanied the marching men, scudding up and down the column and searching the country in the immediate neighbourhood of the line of march, much as a dog hunts on all sides of a path along which its owner is walking. Occasionally, a deep donga would be met with, which could not be negotiated by a motor-car; and then the marching men would turn to with their picks and shovels, fill in a section of the dried-up watercourse, and so fashion a temporary road across it which enabled the cars to pass. This was accomplished over and over again with great ease and rapidity; and for the rest, the country presented no serious obstacle to the use of these armoured vehicles.

August, in East Africa, is of course the height of the dry season, and in all tropical regions of this continent the dry season means a fierce heat, beating down during all the hours of daylight upon a parched and thirsty earth, and refracted from the wilted vegetation with an almost equal intensity. It means that every stream has run dry, and that even many of the larger rivers have shrunken into mere runnels. It means that sun-dried grass and scrub and the very leaves upon the trees have become brittle and inflammable as tinder; and that the bush fires, for the most part self-generated,—such as those which of old so greatly affrighted Hanno and his Carthaginian mariners on the West Coast of Africa—are ubiquitous,—are columns of smoke by day and pillars of fire by night. Any sudden change of wind at this season of the year may cause the traveller to be unexpectedly confronted by a wall of flame, raging almost colourless in the fierce sunlight, advancing on a wide front with innumerable explosions like the rattle of musketry, and with a rapidity which is apt to prove highly embarrassing.

During this day’s march the natural heat was intensified by these constant conflagrations, above which the agitated air danced in a visible haze, and from which there came a breath like that from a furnace, bearing in all directions innumerable charred and blackened fragments of vegetation. Through this heated atmosphere the marching troops plodded doggedly onward, parched with thirst, and playing an eternal game of hide and seek with the attacking bush-fires. Many narrow escapes occurred, and the first-line transport of the Gold Coast Regiment was once fairly caught, the casualties including 6 oxen, an army transport cart, 2 wagons, 10,800 rounds of small arm ammunition, 20 picks, 42 shovels, one rifle, some private kit, and a quantity of rations, all of which were burned to a cinder. Eighteen other oxen were so badly burned that they had to be slaughtered, their meat being issued as rations to the Divisional Reserve.

Another element besides fire, however, seemed to conspire this day against the advancing force; for the exact position of the Ngere-Ngere could not be located, and when the Regiment arrived at the place where it was to bivouac for the night, there was no water to be found in its vicinity. Water had, however, been discovered some miles further on, and carts were dispatched to fetch it. Darkness had already fallen, and the outlook was sufficiently depressing; but an officer of the Gold Coast Regiment, who happened to push his way into a patch of thick bush adjoining the camping-place, quite accidentally discovered the river by the simple process of pitching headlong into it. The Ngere-Ngere is a very winding stream, and though its neighbourhood was indicated by a belt of thick bush, the greenness of which could only be due to the proximity of water, the leading troops had missed this point on the road, to which the river happened to approach to within a distance of a few yards, and owing to an abrupt bend, which the bed of the stream takes at this place, the nearest point at which its banks were again struck was about a mile distant.

At once the glad tidings were given, and the men speedily obtained all the water they required. The Gold Coast Regiment had bivouacked for the night near the scene of its discovery; but though a start had been made that morning at 5.30 a.m., it was a late hour before the last troops struggled into camp.

Shortly after the Dar-es-Salaam railway had been crossed at Massambassi by the main force, B Company was placed at the disposal of Colonel O’Grady—an officer of the Indian Army, who had won for himself in the Himalayas a great reputation as an Alpine climber—and proceeded with him and a remnant of the East African Mounted Rifles into a clump of fertile, well-watered and hilly country, which was comparatively thickly populated, and where a number of German foraging-parties were believed to be at work. The tracks leading through these hills were wide enough for two to march abreast, but after the manner of native paths all the tropics over, they took no account of gradients, but led straight up each precipitous ascent till the summit was reached, and thence plunged down the opposite slope to encounter a fresh rise when the valley level was reached. It is inevitable that all paths in hilly country, which are made by folk who habitually go bare-footed, should deal with ascents and declivities in this switchback fashion; for roads scarped out of the hill’s face, unless they are constructed on scientific engineering principles, are speedily worn away by the annual torrential rains. This renders them agonising to men who do not use boots, for though the act of walking on the side of the foot is uncomfortable enough even for men who are well shod, it is excruciating to those who go bare-footed; and in their estimation any strain on the lungs and on the back-sinews, which the constant climbing and descent of hills entail, is preferable to this much more painful means of progression.

Through these hills went Colonel O’Grady, the handful of white men composing the detachment of the East African Mounted Rifles—some dozen survivors of that gallant corps which had seen such hard times and had done such splendid work during the earlier phases of the campaign—and B Company of the Gold Coast Regiment. The valleys were thickly planted with native food-stuffs of all descriptions, including such luxuries as sugar-cane bananas, etc.; and eggs and fowls were also obtainable in moderate quantities. Patrols were sent out in all directions at once, to forage for the little force and thoroughly to search the surrounding country for German forage-parties. One of these—a body of eleven Germans, genially intoxicated to a man on native beer, and quite incapable of resistance—was brought in by the East African Mounted Rifles, and a few Askari,[^[1]] who were also engaged in foraging, were captured by B Company. When this group of hills had been thoroughly searched, Colonel O’Grady released B Company, which at once rejoined the Regiment. The latter, meanwhile, had been following in the track of B Company, and at daybreak on the 3rd September, the whole corps entered the mission station at Matombo.

[1]. Askari = Native soldier.

These mission stations are a feature of erstwhile German East Africa. They are, for the most part, charmingly situated, generally upon the crest of a hill, whence a magnificent view of the surrounding country can be obtained. They consist, as a rule, of one or more substantially built two-storeyed buildings constructed of mud, or of locally made bricks, lime-washed, and roofed with red tiles, which are also manufactured on the spot. The church, which usually flanks them, is built of rough blocks of stone, as is that at Matombo, or of bricks or mud, as the case may be; and it is often surmounted by a tapering, red-tiled spire. The eminences upon which these stations have been established, and the land around their feet, are set with gardens, groves of fruit trees, and patches of cultivation, all of which obviously owe their existence to European initiative and supervision.

The native congregations ordinarily occupy a number of scattered hovels—built much further apart from one another than is the native habit in West Africa—thatched with grass, and placed at a respectful distance from the buildings occupied by the missionaries. The latter in German East Africa, unlike their prototypes on the West Coast, apparently did not welcome the too close proximity of their proselytes.

The mission buildings at Matombo were found to contain a number of Germans, who were supposed to be too old for active service, and a good many of their women and children. The church, which had been converted into a hospital, was full of German sick and wounded, who had been left in charge of a medical man of their own nationality. This interesting individual was allowed to continue his ministrations, and it was always believed—whether rightly or wrongly it is impossible to say—that he subsequently made use of the liberty thus accorded to him to signal the movements of the Regiment to his compatriots posted in the Uluguru mountains, the entrances to which the British were now engaged in forcing.

The whole of this hilly area was thickly populated by people clothed only in a kind of kilt made of grass, who, though many of them had been impressed by the Germans to serve as carriers, appeared to take no very close interest in the movements of either of the opposed forces. The Uluguru mountains were their home—the only world they knew; and these hapless folk had no alternative, therefore, but to remain where they were, watching with the philosophical resignation so characteristic of a tropical population this strife of gods or devils which had temporarily transformed the quiet countryside into an inferno. It was only occasionally that their equanimity was ruffled for a space by the chance explosion of a shell in close proximity to their dwellings.

General Smuts’ drive had so far proved successful, and the Germans, fighting a more or less continuous rear-guard action, but offering no very stubborn or prolonged resistance at any given point, had been forced back, first on to the line of the Dar-es-Salaam-Lake Tanganyika railway, and then across it into the mountainous country which lies between the railway and the low-lying valley of the Rufiji River.

The Gold Coast Regiment had itself crossed the railway line at a point some miles to the east of Morogoro, and had thence penetrated into the hilly country to the south for a distance of some fifteen miles, camping on Sunday, the 3rd September, in the neighbourhood of the mission station at Matomba. This place is situated on the northern edge of the Uluguru Mountains—highlands which occupy an area measuring approximately a hundred miles square—out of which it was now the task of the First Division to endeavour to drive the enemy, who had sought refuge in them.

It was on the 4th September, 1916—the day on which the mission station at Matomba was quitted—that the Gold Coast Regiment was fated, for the first time, to take a more active part in the East African campaign.

CHAPTER III
THE PASSAGE INTO THE ULUGURU MOUNTAINS—THE
BATTLES AT KIKIRUNGA HILL AND AT
NKESSA

The task which the First Division had before it was to force a passage into the Uluguru Mountains, the main entrances to which the enemy was preparing stoutly to defend. The principal highway lay some distance to the east of the Matomba mission-station, and here the main battle was in progress; but commanding the road, along which the Gold Coast Regiment marched when it moved out of its camp at Matomba, the enemy had occupied a very strong position, and was using Kikirunga Hill—a sugar-loaf-shaped mountain crowned with a clump of trees and underwood, rising clear above its fellows to a height of perhaps 3000 feet—as an observation point. The Regiment was ordered to expel him, if possible, from this hill.[hill.]

At 7 a.m. on the 4th September the Regiment moved out of camp, and about two hours later the enemy opened fire with a couple of howitzers, upon the road a little ahead of the marching troops. No casualties were inflicted, but the Regiment was halted, moved off the road, and took up a sheltered position on the right side of it, in a gut between two hills.

Captain Jack Butler, V.C., D.S.O.—who had won both these distinctions while serving with the Gold Coast Regiment in the Kameruns—was then sent forward with the Pioneer Company to reconnoitre the enemy’s position.

Captain Butler and his men advanced up the road, which climbed steeply, with many windings and sinuosities, towards the head of the pass—leading into the Uluguru Mountains—which was situated near the foot of the hills of which, on the left side of the road, Kikirunga is the culminating point. This road ran, from the spot where the Regiment was halted, up a sharp ascent and along a narrow valley, on either side of which kopjes of gradually increasing height rose at frequent intervals. The first of these, situated about a mile and a half from his starting-point, and lying to the left of the road, was occupied by Captain Butler and the Pioneer Company, and a picket was sent out to take up a position at a spot where, a little further on, the road took a deep U-shaped bend toward the left.

KIKIRUNGA HILL

From the kopje occupied by the Pioneers a general view of the enemy’s position could be obtained. On the left front, about a mile away as the crow flies, Kikirunga arose skyward from the huddle of lower hills in which it has its base, and from one of the slopes of these, somewhat to the right of the peak, an enemy machine-gun opened fire upon the position which Butler had occupied. The beginning of the U-shaped bend which the road took to the left lay beneath and slightly to the right of Butler’s kopje; and on the far side of this loop, where the road, which throughout ran between an avenue of mango trees, wound back towards the right, another kopje, about a hundred feet higher than that upon which the Pioneers were posted, ran steeply upward to a crest which was held by the enemy, and from which presently another machine-gun also opened fire.

The road, still climbing steeply, wound round the foot of this kopje, and between a succession of similar hills; and from the right of it a big clump of mountains, some 2500 feet above valley-level, rose in a great mass of grassy and boulder-strewn slopes. All these hillsides were covered with shaggy, sun-dried grass about two feet in height, broken by many outcrops of rock, a few trees and patches of scrub, with little copses and spinneys in the valley-hollows between hill and hill. In the middle distance a great dome-shaped peak, some miles further away than Kikirunga, rose majestically, dominating the landscape and presenting a wide facet of precipitous grey cliff to the eye of the observer. The view obtained from the kopje which Butler had occupied was a splendid example of tropical mountain scenery; but from the standpoint of the leader of an attacking force its strength was even more impressive than its beauty. The enemy had had ample time in which to choose his ground, and he had availed himself to the full of his opportunity.

It was not till nearly five o’clock in the afternoon, however, that the Pioneer Company became heavily engaged; and Captain Butler presently went forward to the picket which he had placed near the bend of the road to see how things fared with them. It was while he was lying here on the road beside his men that he and several of the picket were wounded by a sudden burst of machine-gun fire from the kopje immediately in front of him. In all, twelve men of the Pioneers were wounded during the afternoon, but the Company held firm, and maintained its hold upon the kopje which Butler had occupied. Late in the afternoon B Company, under the command of Captain Shaw, was sent forward to reinforce the Pioneers, and to make good the ground which had been won. This was successfully accomplished, the wounded were evacuated to the rear, and the men dug themselves in, and dossed down for the night in the excavations they had made.

Captain Butler died that evening of the wounds which he had sustained during the afternoon. A young officer possessed of at once a charming and forceful personality, of an absolutely fearless disposition and of more than ordinary ability, Captain Butler, V.C., D.S.O., had won for himself a conspicuous place in the Gold Coast Regiment, and had earned the devotion and affection of the men in a very special degree. His death, in this the first action in which the Regiment had been engaged since its arrival in East Africa, was felt to be a specially malignant stroke of ill-fortune, and was mourned as a personal loss by his comrades of all ranks.

During the night, orders were sent to Captain Shaw, who was now commanding the advanced companies, to push forward at the earliest opportunity. This he did at dawn, creeping in the darkness to the point of the road where Captain Butler had been wounded, and thence up the grassy hill to the road above it. Here the charge was sounded, and the men with fixed bayonets rushed up the kopje, which was captured after a few shots had been fired. In this charge Acting-Sergeant Bukari of B Company displayed conspicuous bravery, which was subsequently rewarded by a second Distinguished Conduct Medal. This fine soldier was promoted to non-commissioned rank on the field, and awarded a D.C.M. for conspicuous gallantry when fighting in the Kameruns. Now, in this his first fight in East Africa, he again won that coveted distinction; but his subsequent history was a sad one. Evacuated to the rear suffering from only a slight wound which, during the long journey to the base at Korogwe, on the Tanga-Moschi railway, was allowed to become septic, he died in hospital before ever he had learned of the second reward which his dash and courage had earned for him.

During the rest of the day the force under Captain Shaw’s command continued to fight its way from kopje to kopje up the road, the Pioneers under Lieutenant Bray and B Company under Captain Shaw alternately advancing under the protection of the other’s fire. In this manner, by evening, a point distant about 400 yards from the head of the pass was reached and secured.

Meanwhile, the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles was advancing up the northern slope of the big clump of mountains, which have been described as rising on the right side of the pass. As soon as this was observed, a gun of the Gold Coast Regiment was brought into action to assist the advance of the newcomers. The enemy was heavily shelled, but owing to the commanding positions which he occupied, it was not found possible to push home the infantry attack, the King’s African Rifles not having yet won possession of the crest of the mountains. None the less, considerable progress was made during the day, and B Company succeeded in capturing the highest point of the spur round which the road ran.

At dusk on the 5th September Captain Wheeler with A Company relieved B Company, and took over from it the ground which it had won, B Company forthwith going into reserve. During the day, moreover, Major Goodwin made a reconnaissance with half of I and half of G Company for the purpose of finding out whether a flanking party could be sent over the hills to join up with the King’s African Rifles. He was able to report that this could be accomplished.

During the night of the 5th-6th September, the enemy received reinforcements, and shortly after dawn he opened a violent machine-gun fire upon the advanced positions occupied by the Gold Coast Regiment. Two guns of the Battery were brought up, and all the commanding heights held by the enemy were heavily shelled by them, assisted by two guns belonging to the 5th South African Battery. By noon the enemy’s fire slackened, and the King’s African Rifles began to make their presence felt on the summit of the mountains to the right of the pass, which they had now succeeded in occupying. G Company, under the command of Captain Poyntz, had been sent early in the morning to join up with the King’s African Rifles by the path discovered the day before by Major Goodwin, and this junction was effected by about 2 p.m. An hour later the enemy’s fire ceased, and by 4 p.m. Kikirunga Hill, the capture of which was the task that had been set to the Gold Coast Regiment, was duly occupied.

The casualties during this two and a half days of fighting numbered 42 in all, including Captain Butler and 6 rank and file killed, 3 men dangerously, 13 severely, and 19 slightly wounded. Among the latter was Colour-Sergeant Beattie. The doctors and their staff of stretcher bearers, etc., had a heavy time during these few days, as they not only attended to the wounded and evacuated them to the rear under fire, but also conveyed all the more serious cases back to the mission station at Matombo.

On the side of the enemy the casualties suffered were difficult to ascertain, but he lost three Germans and three native soldiers killed, and there were numerous signs of considerable damage having been inflicted upon him, while a number of rifles and some ammunition were picked up in the positions from which he had retired. In the type of warfare in which the Regiment was now engaged, however, it almost invariably happens that the fugitive force is able to inflict more casualties upon its pursuers than it is likely itself to sustain. As has already been observed, it enjoys the advantage which the selection of the ground confers, and can always occupy positions from which it can do the greatest damage to an advancing enemy with a minimum of risk to itself. It is also able to break off an engagement at the precise moment that best suits its convenience and advantage; and the possession of machine-guns further enables it to fight a delaying rear-guard action, and to mask the fact of its retirement, to the very last moment. It rarely happens in fighting of this class that the holding of a given position is a matter of any special importance to a fugitive force. The latter therefore hold it as long as it pays to do so, and thereafter can abandon it without danger or embarrassment, as soon as its defence threatens to become inconvenient. The pursuing force, on the other hand, has only one course open to it—to attack the enemy whenever and wherever he can be found, to inflict upon him as much injury as circumstances permit, but above all, to keep him on the move and to allow him as little rest and peace as possible. It is an expensive business, and it becomes increasingly difficult as lines of supply and communication progressively extend. It is, however, the only method whereby bush-fighting can be efficiently prosecuted; and expense and difficulty are qualities inseparable from this kind of warfare.

The following telegram was received by Colonel Rose from Brigadier-General Hannyngton, commanding the 2nd East African Brigade, on the evening of the 6th September:—

“Please tell your Regiment that I think they all worked splendidly to-day, and I wish to thank them for their good work.”

On the 7th September, while the King’s African Rifles advanced, the Gold Coast Regiment rested and reorganized. On the 8th September, however, it pushed forward along the road which it had opened for itself under the lee of Kikirunga Hill, and made its way viâ Kassanga into the heart of the Uluguru mountains. These are a clump of high hills, covered with grass and patches of scrub, and strewn with boulders, and the road was scarped out of the hillsides, with a steep slope running skyward on the one hand, and a khudd—over the edge of which, from time to time, a transport mule toppled—falling away no less steeply on the other. The view of the marching men was for the most part confined to the grassy slope on one side of them, to the valley tilted steeply downward on the other, and across it to the rolling, boulder-strewn hills, smothered in long shaggy grass, green or sun-dried, with the blue of a tropical sky arching over-head. No signs of life were visible, save an occasional deserted village, composed of scattered mud huts, with grass roofs in the last stages of decay and dilapidation; but from the vantage ground all about them the marching men could, of course, be seen from many miles away.

On the 8th September the Regiment caught up with the King’s African Rifles, which had dispersed a small party of the enemy. On the 9th September the former, which was still leading the advance, surprised and scattered the 22nd German Company at a place called Donho; and that night, after a very hard day’s marching the Gold Coast Regiment camped at Kiringezi at about 4.45 p.m. On the 10th September the Regiment came out upon the main road which connects Tulo and Kissaki, and a stray German Askari was killed by the men of G Company, who also captured a few rifles. The 2nd East African Brigade was found to be some five miles ahead, and in the afternoon the Regiment overtook it, and once more joined the reserve.

The advance troops had succeeded in keeping more or less constant touch with the enemy, and as he now showed a disposition to make yet another stand, A and B companies, under Major Goodwin, were sent off at 4 p.m. on the 11th September to reinforce and prolong the extreme right of the British line, which was being held by the King’s African Rifles. Meanwhile half of I Company had been sent to the eastern or extreme left of the line in order to form an escort to the Machine Gun Company of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. Just before dark half of G Company received orders to advance and take up a position on the left of half I Company. At 8 a.m. on the 12th September further orders were received, and the rest of the Regiment—viz., the Pioneer Company, half of I Company and the Battery—moved up the road toward Nkessa and held itself in readiness to reinforce the left. This the Pioneer Company and half I Company did at 11 a.m., the former taking up a position on the extreme left of the line; and shortly afterwards the Battery advanced to a point immediately in the rear of these companies.

At 2.30 p.m, an advance from the left in a generally south-south-westerly direction was ordered, and the Pioneer Company and half I Company pushed forward to a distance of from 500 to 600 yards, when they were held up by the enemy who were strongly posted in a village ahead of them. Here the men dug themselves in. Captain Poyntz, who was in command, held on to this position for some time, but he was eventually compelled to retire, as he found that all touch with the company on his right had been lost, and as he heard heavy firing from his right rear, he feared that his detachment might be surrounded and cut off.

Meanwhile, G Company, under Captain Macpherson, had barely advanced a hundred yards before it was forced to halt, a very heavy fire being opened upon it from a salient in the enemy’s line on the right flank. The fire was so close and continuous that one gun of the Battery had to be retired; and when, subsequent to the action, the grass was burned off and the true position revealed, it was found that the contending forces had here been within fifty or sixty yards of one another.

The enemy’s position was astride of the Tulo road, to which his trenches and rifle-pits ran at right angles for a distance of about four and a half to five miles, his extreme right being thrown slightly forward in the neighbourhood of the village against which the Pioneer Company and half I Company, under Captain Poyntz, had advanced. The country was for the most part grass and thick scrub, with trees interspersed among them; but in the centre of his position on the side of the road opposite the British left, where a patch of young cotton trees afforded him excellent cover, he had pushed forward the salient of which mention has been made above.

Orders were sent to Captain Poyntz to fall back; but his own appreciation of the situation had already shown him that retirement was necessary, and he presently lined up alongside G Company, which maintained its position.

Reinforcements were asked for by telephone, and a reply was received from Brigade Headquarters that the 29th Punjabis were being sent up by a road which had recently been constructed to a neighbouring water-supply. A later telephone message stated that the 29th would advance to the relief of the Gold Coast Regiment viâ the main road.

Meanwhile, on the right flank, A and B Companies had been sent by Major Goodwin to occupy a position on the extreme right of the British line, with the King’s African Rifles on their left. At 8.45 a.m. a brisk action began, but the advance achieved was slow. By 1.30 p.m., however, two hills overlooking Nkessa had been occupied. The edge of this village opposite to A and B Companies was strongly held by the enemy, and though the fight continued while daylight lasted, no further advance was made. At 6 p.m., therefore, outpost positions were taken up for the night, and the men slept in the rifle-pits which they had dug. Intermittent firing continued during the night.

On Wednesday, 13th September, patrols were sent out at dawn, and it was eventually established that the enemy had retired from the positions which he had held overnight. A company, under Captain Wheeler, was sent from Major Goodwin’s force on the right to rejoin the Regiment on the left of the line; and early in the morning the half of I Company, which had been with the guns of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, was relieved by the 29th Punjabis, and rejoined the other half of the Company, which was posted between the Pioneer Company on the extreme left and G Company.

The Regiment then advanced, the Pioneers entering the village which they had attacked the day before, without opposition, where they were later joined by I Company. G Company, which had to advance through very dense elephant grass, lost touch with the rest of the force, as can so easily happen in country of this description, and communication with it was not re-established until the afternoon.

From the village which the Pioneers had occupied, patrols were sent out to locate the river, and this accomplished, the Pioneers, leaving I Company in occupation of the village, crossed the stream, which was only a few feet in width, and advanced in the direction of Nkessa, holding both banks. At first only a few snipers were encountered, but eventually the enemy was found to be in occupation of a position, with his left resting on a village on the river’s bank, and his right thrown slightly forward. The enemy promptly attacked, and Captain Poyntz retired the Pioneers about 200 yards, and having dug himself in, held on to his rifle-pits for the rest of the day. At about 1.30 p.m. one section of A Company, which had been sent to reinforce the Pioneers, came up on their left on the southern side of the stream; and an hour and a half later I Company with two machine-guns and the Battery came into action and bombarded the villages held by the enemy on the left and right fronts.

At 4 p.m. an advance was ordered, and after an hour’s fighting, B Company and three sections of A Company reinforced the left of the Regiment, and, night coming on, were halted and dug themselves in. The thick elephant grass in which these operations were conducted rendered the exact location of the enemy’s position a matter of great difficulty during the whole of this day.

On the morning of the 14th September, the enemy was found to have once more evacuated his positions, and the Gold Coast Regiment, having been relieved by the King’s African Rifles, marched into Nkessa, where the brigade camp had already been formed.

The casualties sustained by the Regiment between the 11th and the 13th September numbered four killed and thirty-three wounded, including Captain Greene, Lieutenant Bray, Colour-Sergeant May, and Lieutenant Arnold. The last named died in Tulo hospital on the 16th September of the wounds which he had received on the 12th September. Lieutenant Isaacs, who had been sent forward to reconnoitre, stumbled into an enemy patrol, and was captured.

On the 19th September the Battalion moved to a spot on the banks of the Mgeta River, where a camp was formed. The Mgeta is a branch of the Ruwu, which falls into the sea at Bagamoyo, opposite to the southern extremity of the island of Zanzibar. Here the patrols and outposts of the Regiment were in frequent touch with the enemy, and a good many casualties were sustained; and on the 22nd September the Battalion returned to the brigade camp at Nkessa. On the 30th the Regiment moved to a new outpost camp, between the Mgeta and Nkessa; and while here a section of I Company, under Lieutenant Berry, was sent out to demolish a wooden bridge over the Mgeta. Just as the work was nearing completion, this small force was suddenly fired upon by an enemy patrol posted in thick bush, while many of the men were standing waist-deep in the stream, five soldiers being killed and four wounded.

The following day the Battalion, having been relieved by the 130th Baluchis, was moved to Tulo, whence a couple of days later it was sent back to Nkessa, an attack upon that place being anticipated. Here the outposts had frequent casual encounters with the enemy, and on the 16th October two different patrols found mines on the Kissaki road, which had been laid as a trap for troops advancing by that route. These were constructed by embedding a four-inch shell in the earth at the depth of a few feet, with a friction-tube attached to one end of a plank, the other end of which slanted upward to just below the surface of the road. This plank, at a spot about one-third of its total length, measuring from the shell, was supported upon a fulcrum in such a manner that, when any weight was imposed upon the portion near the surface, the lower end jacked up and caused the shell to explode.

On the 17th October the Battalion was once more moved to Tulo, where it remained until the 7th November, upon which date the Second Brigade broke camp and began a march to the coast at Dar-es-Salaam. The way led to the banks of the Ruwu River, of which the Mgeta[Mgeta] is a right affluent. and from Magogoni, the point at which the stream was struck, down its valley to Mafisa. The country traversed—a green and fertile valley, dipping gently toward the coast—was perhaps the most attractive area seen by the Regiment in the lowlands of East Africa during the course of the whole campaign. The rivers, of course, were shrunken to their lowest levels, and many of the tributary streams were dried up; but water was obtainable along the whole line of march, and in spite of the tropical heat, which increased in intensity as the coast was approached, the nine days occupied by the journey to Dar-es-Salaam were less trying than were most of the marches undertaken by the Regiment during this campaign.

At Mafisa the main road, which runs from Kidugato on the railway to Dar-es-Salaam, was struck; and here the valley of the Ruwu was quitted, the Brigade marching in an easterly direction, almost parallel to the railway, which was struck in its turn at Kisserawe on the 15th November. Although this line had now been for some time in the hands of the British, so much damage had been wrought to it that it was not yet open to traffic; and the Brigade, to which the Regiment was still attached, accordingly continued its march to Dar-es-Salaam by road. The last-named place was reached on the 17th November, and the Regiment forthwith embarked on the steam transport Ingoma, the men, with their baggage, stores, etc., and a number of carriers being conveyed from the landing stage to the ship’s side in lighters. All were got on board by 6.30 p.m., and a rather comfortless night was spent, the Ingoma being crowded to the gunwales with the men of the Regiment, their carriers and details belonging to other units. Very early in the morning of the 18th November the ship got under way, and set off on her two-hundred-mile journey down the coast to Kilwa Kisiwani.

CHAPTER IV
IN THE KILWA AREA—GOLD COAST HILL

The reason for the transfer of the Gold Coast Regiment, from the region lying to the north of the Rufiji to a scene of operations situated to the southward of that river, can be explained in a few words.

The enemy having been driven, in the course of the 1916 campaign, first across the Dar-es-Salaam-Lake Tanganyika railway, and thereafter through the hilly country to the south of that line to the southernmost fringe of the Uluguru Mountains, it was the object of the British command to confine him, if possible, to the lowlying valley of the Rufiji during the coming wet season. He, on the other hand, it was thought, would try to establish his winter quarters in some convenient spot on the southern side of the valley, and it was believed that two of the places which he had selected for this purpose were the mission stations of Kibata and Mtumbei Juu, which are charmingly situated among the group of mountains that rises from the plain within a mile or two of the sea-shore between the Rufiji and Matandu rivers. In order to frustrate any such intention, Brigadier-General Hannyngton had been dispatched some weeks earlier to conduct the operations in the area above described, and it was for the purpose of acting as a reserve to General Hannyngton’s Force that the Gold Coast Regiment was now being dispatched to Kilwa Kisiwani. Another factor in the situation was the great difficulty which the supply of the troops operating to the north of the Rufiji would present during the rainy season. It had become evident that their number must be reduced, and that even when this had been effected so far as safety allowed, the maintenance of the remainder, in a country which ere long would become water-logged, would be no easily solved problem.

The Regiment arrived at Kilwa Kisiwani on the 19th November, and disembarking during the afternoon, marched to Mpara, where it encamped. Here on the following day the Battalion was joined by the Depôt Company, which had hitherto remained at Korogwe, on the Tanga-Moschi Railway under Major Read; but owing to the difficulties of transport, its stores did not arrive with it. On the 24th November the Regiment marched up the coast, along a sandy track within sight of the sea, to a camp situated four miles to the west of Bliss Hill near Kilwa. Arrangements were made for forming a Depôt Company and store accommodation at Mpara as a regimental base, and G Company was broken up, the men composing it being posted to other companies.

On the 25th November the Regiment began its march along the road which leads in a westerly direction from Kilwa to Chemera, but owing to the late arrival of the transport-carriers and water-carts a start was not made until the afternoon. The Regiment halted for the night in the bush, six miles from their starting-point and a like distance from Nigeri-geri[Nigeri-geri], about six miles down the road; and on the following day it moved on to a camp about two and a half miles to the east of Mitole.

The line of march this day led across a villainous arid flat, covered with mean and dusty scrub and coarse rank grass, wilted and sun-dried. There was not an atom of shade to be found during the whole day’s march; the heat from on high was great, and was vied with in intensity by the heat refracted from the ground; and across this weary expanse officers and men plodded painfully, ankle-deep in the sandy surface of the road, and racked with unappeasable thirst. In spite of the assurance given to the Regiment that water would be procurable along the route, not a drop was to be obtained until the camp was reached late in the afternoon. The Gold Coast soldier is a toughish fellow, and as a rule is not greatly affected by extremes of heat. Like all Africans, however, he is blessed with very open pores, and an insufficient supply of drinking-water hits him peculiarly hard. On this day no less than forty men fell out, and sank exhausted on the line of march, and it would have gone hard with them had not some motor-drivers hurried to the rear and returned, after an absence of some hours, with a supply of water. Many of these exhausted men did not get into camp until the following day, and all of them, together with eight officers—for they, too, were “foot-slogging it” with their men—had forthwith to be sent to hospital as the result of this one day’s march.

None the less, on the 27th November, the Regiment shifted camp to a spot lying three miles to the west of Mitole; and on the following day it moved on to Chemera, where it relieved the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles. As soon as this had been effected, I Company with 2 officers, 1 British non-commissioned officer and 182 rank and file, marched off to Namaranje to occupy an outpost position at that place.

The strength of the Regiment at this time was already very considerably reduced, as the breaking up of G Company and the distribution of its personnel among the remaining Companies indicated. The field-state on November 28th—the day upon which the Regiment went into camp at Chemera—showed that only 19 British officers were present, as against the 36 who had started from Sekondi at the beginning of the preceding July, and that during the intervening period, the number of British non-commissioned officers had been reduced from 15 to 10, and that of the rank and file from 980 to 715. The principal battle casualties have been noted in the course of this narrative, but much greater havoc had been wrought to the personnel of the force by ill-health occasioned by exposure, over-exertion, bad food, and water insufficient in quantity and often vile in quality.

It was hoped that on its arrival at Chemera a period of rest would be enjoyed by the Regiment, but before it had been in camp a week word was received that a force composed of a battalion of the King’s African Rifles and the 129th Baluchis, which was in occupation of the mission station at Kibata, was being very hard pressed by the enemy, and ran some risk of being surrounded.

On the 9th December, therefore, the Regiment left Chemera and marched in a northerly direction to Mtumbei Chini, and thence on the 10th December to Kitambi at the foot of the mountains, in the heart of which the mission stations of Mtumbei Juu and Kibata are situated. It should be noted that the words “chini” and “juu,” which will be found so frequently to occur in place-names in East Africa, signify respectively “low” and “high.” Thus “Mtumbei Chini” means “Mtumbei on the Plain,” and “Mtumbei Juu” means “Mtumbei on the Hill.”

A mile from Kitambi a river was met, through which the advanced guard, under the command of Captain Harman, had to wade with the water up to their necks. The officer commanding the rear-guard reported that when he crossed it, the river was only knee-deep; while Captain A. J. R. O’Brien, R.A.M.C., who passed the same place next morning, found no river at all, but only a partially dried-up river-bed—rather an interesting instance of the eccentricities of tropical watercourses. They, indeed, can rarely be relied upon for very long together, either to furnish drinking-water or to refrain from impeding transport.

From Kitambi onward only mule-transport and head-carriers could be used, the path up which the Regiment was climbing being at once too narrow and too steep for the passage of motors. The precipitous track was difficult for the men, and still more difficult for the pack-animals; and though the distance from Kitambi to Mtumbei Juu mission station was only eight miles, the mule transport took three-and-twenty hours to make the journey, and in the course of the day three mules were lost by falling over precipices.

The position at Kibata mission station—which lies a few miles to the east and slightly to the north of Mtumbei Juu, and is separated from it by a fairly deep valley—was approximately as follows at the time when the Gold Coast Regiment arrived at the latter station. One battalion of the King’s African Rifles and the 129th Baluchis had occupied Kibata, which is situated upon a prominent hill surrounded by an amphitheatre of commanding mountains, and this force had forthwith become the object of very severe bombardment. The Germans had brought up one of the 4·1 naval guns, rescued by them from the Koenigsberg, and having placed it in a position on the other side of the mountains at some spot slightly to the north-west of Kibata, were shelling the mission station heavily. They evidently had an excellent observation point concealed somewhere on the surrounding mountains, for they were making very good practice; and the enemy had also established himself upon the slopes overlooking Kibata in a roughly semicircular position, with his left to the east and his right to the west of the mission station. A ridge, which runs parallel upon the east to the hill upon which the mission station stands had been occupied by the garrison; and it was from this point alone that they were able in any degree to retaliate upon the attacking force. For the rest, the King’s African Rifles and the Baluchis, who had no means of locating the position of the 4·1 gun, and who, even if they had done so, possessed no artillery with which to make an adequate reply to its fire, could only endure the punishment they were receiving with such patience as they might command. The position, in fact, was rapidly becoming untenable; and on the afternoon of the 13th December General Hannyngton made a careful examination of the ground from a height in the neighbourhood of Mtumbei Juu, and decided to attempt to turn the enemy’s right flank.

Between Mtumbei Juu and Kibata, at a point near the base of the valley which divides the hill upon which the mission station stands from that occupied by the Kibata mission buildings, a hill slopes upward in a long spur, trending in a northerly direction. Its surface, covered with grass and strewn with outcrops of rock, is broken by many minor crests, till the summit is reached at its most northerly extremity. Near the top a spur juts out to the east and south, shaped somewhat like the flapper of a seal, its slopes separated from the main hill by a semicircular valley. The crest, on which there are a few trees but no cover of any kind, to-day bears the name of Gold Coast Hill. The outlying spur is called Banda Hill. From a point near Mtumbei Juu mission station and almost directly to the north of it, a ridge of mountains runs first north and later with a curve to the east overlooking and commanding Gold Coast Hill. It was General Hannyngton’s hope that if the latter could be captured while this ridge still remained unoccupied, it would be possible thence to get round behind the enemy and so to outflank his right. The task of capturing this hill was assigned by him to the Gold Coast Regiment.

Accordingly, at 6 a.m. on the 14th December, B Company, under Captain Shaw, was sent forward along the mountain track which connects Mtumbei Juu with Kibata, to get into touch with the force at Kibata, which a day or two earlier had been reinforced by another battalion of the King’s African Rifles, and which was now under the command of General O’Grady. He reported that the road between the two missions was open, and at dusk the rest of the Battalion moved along the road for a distance of two to two and a half miles, and there camped for the night.

At dawn on the 15th December, the disposition of the Regiment was as follows:—

The main body lay encamped about two miles along the Mtumbei Juu-Kibata road, with an outpost line, consisting of 50 rifles and one machine-gun, of B Company, under Captain Kelton, thrown out about a mile to the east. Captain Wheeler, with half A Company and one machine-gun, was posted on a line immediately in front of the main body, with a picket on the main road, and another on Harman’s Kopje—a small hill to the north-west of the camp. The other half of A Company, under Captain Harman, with one machine-gun, was in occupation of a hill about 1000 yards north of Harman’s Kopje, with an outpost on a small hill to the left of a path which led to Kibata, and another picket some 600 yards along this path at its point of junction with a track leading west.

At 5 a.m. the Pioneer Company, under the command of Captain Poyntz, moved forward out of camp, and three-quarters of an hour later, Captain Biddulph, at the head of the advanced guard, passed the post which was being held by half A Company, under Captain Harman, and came under fire from the outlying spur on the right which bears the name of Banda Hill. Captain Biddulph was dangerously wounded, and Lieutenant Duncan was killed; and the vanguard then withdrew to the main body, while the Battery came into action from a hill to the north of Harman’s Kopje, loosing off a dozen rounds across the valley at Banda Hill, whence the enemy’s fire had come.

At about 8 a.m. Captain Poyntz continued his advance, and working round the small hills on the left of the main road, reached Gold Coast Hill, the summit of which was the main objective of the Force, at about 11 a.m. During this advance he encountered no further opposition, though he occupied Banda Hill and another eminence situated somewhat to the north-west of it, and left small detachments to hold each of these points.

While this advance was in progress, the enemy brought his big naval gun into action, shelling very heavily the main road, behind the hill whence the Battery had opened fire. During this bombardment, one of his shells pitched almost at the feet of Colonel Rose, who was sitting under the lee of the hill with the Adjutant, Captain Pye, by his side, and with an orderly standing near. Both Captain Pye and the orderly were killed instantly, and Colonel Rose was flung backward from this seat to a considerable distance, but was otherwise unharmed.

At one o’clock a heavy counter-attack began on Gold Coast Hill, and upon a small ridge in advance of that position, which was held by Lieutenant Shields with 30 rifles and one machine-gun; and the violent shell, howitzer, rifle and machine-gun fire concentrated upon these points quickly caused many casualties.

By this time the remaining companies of the Regiment, under the command of Major Goodwin, were in reserve upon Banda Hill, and upon the hill to the north-west of it, which had originally been occupied by Captain Poyntz in the course of his advance; and half of A Company, led by Captain Wheeler, was sent forward in support of the Pioneers. They were shortly followed by Lieutenant Piggott with one of B Company’s machine-guns, who took up a position on the right flank of the crest of Gold Coast Hill. Lieutenant Piggott was almost immediately wounded, but he contrived none the less to continue in the firing-line.

At 2.30 p.m. Captain Poyntz was dangerously, and Captain Wheeler severely wounded, leaving Captain Harman—who had himself been slightly wounded—alone to command the main position, with Lieutenant Shields and Lieutenant Piggott, the one on the ridge in advance, the other on the right flank of the crest of the hill.

Shortly afterwards Lieutenant Kinley with one machine-gun and Lieutenant Taylor with the rest of A Company came up in support; but Lieutenant Taylor was severely wounded almost at the moment of his arrival on the crest of the hill.

About 3 p.m. the enemy again opened heavy shell fire upon Gold Coast Hill, once more causing many casualties; and Major Goodwin went forward with the remainder of the reserves—about 50 rifles of B Company, under Captain Shaw—who took up a position to the right of Lieutenant Piggott’s machine-gun post.

For two and a half more hours the Gold Coast Regiment clung to the position which it had occupied, and in which it had sustained such heavy and continuous losses since 11 o’clock in the morning; but at 5.30 p.m. the 40th Pathans began to relieve it. The relief was effected without serious loss just before darkness fell, and the Gold Coast Regiment took up outpost positions for the night between the hill, which ever since has been known by its name, and the main road from Mtumbei Juu to Kibata.

It was estimated that the enemy fired 180 high explosive shells from his naval gun from the time the hill was occupied until dark; and the men were throughout terribly exposed, as the concentration of his rifle and machine-gun and occasional howitzer fire was such that they were unable to dig themselves in. Effective retaliation was impossible, yet the behaviour of the men throughout the day was magnificent. Those who were in occupation of the hill clung to it during more than six hours with dogged resolution. Those who successively advanced to their support, moved forward with alacrity, and never showed a trace of wavering or hesitation. It was about as severe a test as any to which a body of native troops could be subjected, but the Regiment passed splendidly through the ordeal, the severity of which may be judged from the following casualty list.

During this day—December 15th, 1916—the Regiment sustained no less than 140 casualties. It lost 2 officers killed and 7 wounded; 1 British non-commissioned officer wounded; 26 soldiers killed and 87 wounded; and 5 gun and ammunition carriers killed and 12 wounded,—approximately 15 per cent. of the men engaged, and nearly 50 per cent. of the officers.

On the 16th December the Regiment remained in camp reorganizing its shattered forces; on the 17th and 18th December it was held in reserve; and though during the 17th detachments were moved forward in support of the 40th Pathans, who had been retired from Gold Coast Hill to the kopjes near its foot, they did not come into action. On that day, too, Captain Kelton, with 75 rank and file of B Company, were sent back to Kitambi. On the 19th December the Regiment was withdrawn, and went into camp at the foot of Mtumbei Juu Mission Hill. On the 21st of December the Regiment took up positions upon a roughly semicircular ridge on the left of the road to Kibata and lying to the north-east of the mission, and here it remained for some days, occasionally using the Battery to support the 40th Pathans on Harman’s Kopje, and sending out patrols, some of which had slight brushes with the enemy. On the 24th Captain Kelton, Captain D’Amico, R.A.M.C., Lieutenant Percy, Colour-Sergeant Beattie, and 78 rank and file, with other details, rejoined the Regiment from Kitambi; and on this day intelligence was received that Military Crosses had been awarded to Captain Shaw and to Captain A. J. R. O’Brien of the West African Medical Staff, which they had earned at Kikirunga Hill.

On the 27th December Captain Kelton, with 80 rank and file, took over Harman’s Kopje from the 40th Pathans, and on the 29th December, a German camp having been located on the northern slope of Gold Coast Hill, the Battery opened fire upon it at 11 a.m., but found the target beyond its range. The enemy replied, and quickly found the position of the Battery, which Captain Foley at once removed to another prepared position. This movement had hardly been completed ere a shell burst within seven feet from the spot which had been vacated only a few moments earlier—a striking illustration of the excellence of the enemy’s observation and of the accuracy of his fire.

At 9 a.m. on this day Captain Wray arrived in camp with welcome reinforcements from Kumasi and a party of Volunteers from Accra in the Gold Coast. These reinforcements consisted of 160 men of D Company, who were all Fulanis, and 90 Jaundis, who had originally been recruited in the Kameruns, under Captain Wray and Lieutenant Downer, 150 men of the Gold Coast Volunteers under Captain Hellis, and 200 Sierra Leone carriers.

At 1.35 p.m. Captain Biddulph died from the wounds which he had received, when in command of the advanced guard, early in the morning of the 15th December.

On the 29th the reinforcements were paraded and allocated to the various companies; and on the following day General Hannyngton held a parade of details from all companies that could be spared from the firing-line, and decorated 3926 Regimental Sergeant-Major Manasara Kanjaga, 4388 Battery Sergeant-Major Bukari Moshi, and Sergeant Palpukah Grumah with Distinguished Conduct Medals which had been awarded to them for services rendered in the Kamerun Campaign.

The strength of the Regiment on the 31st December, 1916, after the reinforcements above mentioned had been received, amounted to 19 officers, 14 British non-commissioned officers, 10 clerks and dressers, 860 rank and file, 444 gun, ammunition, and transport carriers, 34 servants, and 48 stretcher-bearers, making a total of 1429 officers and men of all ranks.

During the first week of January, 1917, the Regiment continued to occupy the ridge to the north-west of the Mtumbei Juu mission station, and on the left of the road leading to Kibata, sending out frequent patrols, which collected some useful information, and came on more than one occasion into touch with the enemy. The latter, meanwhile, had sustained a fairly severe check at the hands of General O’Grady’s force, which, from the ridge occupied by it to the eastward of the Kibata mission station, had delivered a very successful night attack upon the extreme left of the enemy’s position.

On the 8th January, information having been received that large bodies of the enemy had left and were leaving the area by the road to Mwengei—a village over the hills directly to the north of Kibata—Colonel Rose decided to make a reconnaissance in force in order to try to reach this road, and to retake Gold Coast Hill. At an early hour of the day, therefore, he proceeded with 250 rifles from A and B Company, with the Battery and with the 24th Mountain Battery, along the high ridge overlooking Gold Coast Hill, of which mention has already been made, starting from the north-westerly extremity of the ridge which the Regiment had been holding. Owing, however, to the extremely difficult character of the country through which his way led, he was not able to reach a suitable place from which to begin operations until late in the afternoon.

At 6.30 on the following morning Major Goodwin began to push forward along the ridge which commanded Gold Coast Hill from the north-west. No opposition was met with, and a patrol which was sent out to reconnoitre Gold Coast Hill reported that it had been evacuated by the enemy. This was later confirmed by Lieutenant Downer, who had reached Gold Coast Hill by the old route from Harman’s Kopje, which the Regiment had followed on the 15th December.

Other patrols were sent forward and reached the Mwengei road, effecting a junction with the 2nd King’s African Rifles and the 129th Baluchis, who had been operating from Kibata. The fact of the enemy’s retreat was now established, the whole area being clear of hostile forces; but the day being far advanced, Colonel Rose camped for the night at One-Stick Hill, so named from a conspicuous white palm-tree on its crest, in a position of extraordinary strength which had been established by the Germans, and from which it was obvious most of the heavy howitzer, rifle, and machine-gun fire poured upon Gold Coast Hill on the 15th December had come.

On the 10th January the reconnoitring party returned to Regimental Headquarters viâ Gold Coast Hill and the main road from Kibata to Mtumbei Juu Mission, while active patrolling of the Kibata-Mwengei road began.

On this day word was received that Captain Poyntz had been awarded the Military Cross, Colour-Sergeant Campbell the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and Lance-Corporal Sully Ibadan the Military Medal for their meritorious services in the engagement on the 15th December.

During the next few days points of strategic importance were occupied, and patrols were sent out in various directions. By one of these, which was furnished by the 40th Pathans, two white German prisoners were brought in, one of whom was a certain Major von Bompkin, and the other a gunner from the Koenigsberg, decorated with the Iron Cross. Major von Bompkin had been second-in-command to von Lettow-Vorbeck, but after the British had forced their way into the Uluguru Mountains at the beginning of the preceding September, he had headed a deputation to the German Commander-in-Chief, representing to him that enough had been done for honour, and that further resistance was useless and a mere waste of human lives. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s reply was forthwith to degrade him to the rank of a mere patrol commander; and at the time of his capture von Bompkin was in charge of a party of only six men. He had apparently taken the harsh treatment meted out to him in a fine soldierly spirit, and as a patrol leader had shown great daring and enterprise. For instance, on one occasion he had passed the greater part of the night in the middle of the camp occupied by the 40th Pathans, sheltering himself from the rain in the officers’ latrine. At dawn he had run into a very sleepy officer of the regiment, who failed to recognize him as an enemy in the uncertain light, and he had thereafter made good his retreat, carrying with him the detailed information of which he had come in search.

On the 20th January the Regiment moved down the mountain by the main road to Kitambi, Colonel Rose returning to Mtumbei Juu mission station in the afternoon. He came back to Kitambi on the following day with the staff of the 3rd East African Brigade, to the command of which he had been temporarily appointed; and on the 22nd January he left for Ngarambi Chini, a place situated some twenty miles due west of Kibata. Major Goodwin took over the command of the Gold Coast Regiment with effect from the 21st January.

CHAPTER V
IN THE KILWA AREA—IN THE SOUTHERN VALLEY
OF THE LOWER RUFIJI

On the 26th January, 1917, the Regiment, under the command of Major Goodwin, left Kitambi for Ngarambi Chini, and reached its destination next day, after camping for the night on the road at Namatwe, a spot distant fourteen and a half miles from the former place. From this point the roads in the neighbourhood were regularly patrolled; and on the 31st January the Regiment moved to Kiyombo—a place some six miles north of Ngarambi Chini—where the brigade camp was established. From the 29th January to the 6th February A and B Companies were detached from the Regiment, and were stationed first at Namburage and later at a place on the banks of the Lugomya River, to which the name of Greene’s Post was given. From all these points, the work of patrolling the roads in the vicinity was regularly carried out; and on the 3rd February Lieutenant Shields, with Colour-Sergeant Nelson, 50 rank and file and 1 machine-gun, were sent out on this duty from Njimbwe, where the Pioneer Company was then on a detached post, along the road leading to Utete. It should be noted that the Utete here mentioned is not the largish town on the right bank of the Rufiji River which bears that name, but a much smaller place situated about eleven miles north of Kiyombo.

KIBATA AND NGARAMBI AREA

The patrol under Lieutenant Shields had orders to meet a patrol of the King’s African Rifles from Kiwambi at a point some nine miles from Njimbwe, but he had proceeded along the road leading to Utete for a distance of only about a mile and a half when the advance point sent back to report that they had seen a group of about ten German Askari on the eastern or right side of the track. It was a favourite trick of the Germans at this time to dress themselves and their native soldiers in kit belonging to the British which had fallen into their hands, and thus to occasion confusion as to who was friend and who was foe. The country through which Lieutenant Shields was patrolling was for the most part of a fairly open character, though it was covered with rank grass, set pretty thickly with trees, and studded here and there with patches of underwood. The party of the enemy had only been glimpsed for a moment, but as Lieutenant Shields went forward at once, followed or accompanied by Colour-Sergeant Nelson, a white man, dressed like an officer of the King’s African Rifles, appeared at a little distance ahead of the advance point, crying out in English, “Don’t fire! we are K.A.R.’s.” Lieutenant Shields, who was very short-sighted, taken in by this treacherous ruse, bade his men not fire, and the enemy, who appear to have been about 200 strong with many Europeans among them, thereupon poured a volley into the patrol from the bush at very short range. This was followed by the blowing of bugles and an assault. Lieutenant Shields and Colour-Sergeant Nelson were both shot, as also was the corporal in charge of the machine-gun while trying to bring his piece into action. A German who attempted to approach Shields as he lay on the ground was shot by a man of the Gold Coast Regiment, and the rest of the machine-gun team managed to get their gun away safely. The patrol, however, had to retire in disorder, and in addition to the casualties already enumerated 8 rank and file were missing and were afterwards ascertained to have been killed, while 2 stretcher-bearers were wounded, and 1 machine-gun carrier, 1 transport-carrier and 2 stretcher-bearers were also missing. The patrol further lost 3 boxes of small-arm ammunition, 6 machine-gun belts, 2 stretchers and a medical haversack.

It was Lieutenant Shields, it will be remembered, who held the advanced post on the ridge beyond the summit of Gold Coast Hill during those soul-searching hours between 11 a.m. and dusk on the 15th December. It seemed a tragedy that this gallant young officer, who had come unscathed through the ordeal of that day, and who had earned for himself a high reputation for coolness and courage, should lose his life in the paltry wayside ambush above described.

George Hilliard Shields was at the outbreak of war a member of the Education Department of the Gold Coast, and held the post of headmaster of the Government Boys’ School at Accra. He had earlier filled a scholastic post in Raffles’ Institute at Singapore: and in the Gold Coast he distinguished himself by passing the very difficult interpreter’s examination in the Ga language. Like so many Gold Coast civilians, Mr. Shields early volunteered for active service, but it was not found possible to release him from civil employment until the Regiment was ordered to East Africa in the middle of 1916. He will long be remembered in Accra for the excellent and manly influence which he exerted over the boys who were under his tutelage.

At 1.30 p.m. a standing patrol was sent forward to the Kibega River on the Unguara road, where it entrenched itself. Shortly afterwards a small enemy patrol appeared on the road to the south of this post and was fired upon. The men composing it bolted into the bush, their porters dropping their loads, which turned out to be part of the small-arms ammunition lost by Lieutenant Shields earlier in the day. Later in the afternoon the enemy returned and, supported by three maxims, attacked the post. The patrol of the Regiment held on for a while, but finding itself outnumbered, retired through the bush to the camp at Njimbwe, losing one man.

On the 4th February, the Regiment left the camp at Kiyombo and moved forward to Njimbwe, which lies about five miles to the north, where the 40th Pathans presently joined them; and from here, as usual, small patrols were daily sent out along the roads in the neighbourhood.

On the 5th February the Pioneer Company and the Battery left Njimbwe at 5.30 a.m., in the midst of a terrific[terrific] thunderstorm, for the purpose of supporting the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles, who were about to deliver an attack upon two German camps, both of which overlooked the Ngarambi-Utete road. They came in contact with an enemy post, which was quickly dislodged, and they subsequently joined up with the King’s African Rifles, only to learn that the elusive enemy had abandoned his camps.

The detachment camped for the night with the King’s African Rifles at the junction of the road to Utete with another track; and as a token that the dry season was now fairly over, heavy rain fell with melancholy persistency during all the hours of darkness. The men, of course, had no shelter save such as they had been able to improvise for themselves on the preceding evening; and there are, perhaps, few more dreary or depressing experiences than that of lying out all night under the relentless beat of a steady tropical downpour. The cold felt has little in common with the brisk, keen cold of a frosty day or that met with at a high altitude; but it has certain raw and penetrating properties, and the discomfort becomes hourly more acute, while at every moment the puddles suck and squelch beneath you, and fresh streams of colder water flow in from unexpected directions to chill you to the bone.

At 8 a.m. on the following morning—February 6th—the detachment left its comfortless bivouac, and marched and waded back to Njimbwe over a shockingly bad track, which the heavy rain of the night before had reduced to a quagmire and in places had flooded to a depth of two feet. The detachment had hardly got into camp when some carriers, who had been out searching for fuel, ran in with the news that the enemy was approaching. An attack quickly followed, the enemy taking up a line from south-east to west, and approaching in places to within 200 yards of the camp. The surprise was complete, and some of the men of the 40th Pathans, who were outside the perimeter when the attack began, were unfortunately injured by their own machine-gun fire. The enemy, however, was not in any great strength, and he had evidently not realized that he was attacking so large a force. When he discovered the situation he drew off somewhat hastily, and was hotly pursued for over a mile. Only a few of the attacking force were seen, but among them an European was observed wearing a King’s African Rifles hat and flash, and two Askari, one with a turban and one with the green knitted cap which is part of the service kit of the men of the Gold Coast Regiment. The casualties sustained by the latter were 1 man killed, 3 wounded, 1 gun-carrier and 5 transport-carriers wounded, and 1 Gold Coast Volunteer missing, of whom nothing was ever subsequently heard. The 40th Pathans lost 6 men killed and 18 wounded, while the known enemy losses were 10 men wounded, including 1 European. Immediately after this incident, Captain Harman took out a patrol to repair the telephone-line, which had been cut, while for some time previously it had been frequently tapped by the enemy.

The next few days were occupied in patrolling the roads in the neighbourhood of the camp; and on the 9th February the bodies of Lieutenant Shields, Colour-Sergeant Nelson, and of eight soldiers, who had been killed on the Utete road on the 3rd February, were discovered. A burial party was sent out, and the bodies of Lieutenant Shields and Colour-Sergeant Nelson were brought back to the camp, where the burial service was read by the Rev. Captain Nicholl, and Holy Communion was celebrated.

For some weeks past the men of the Regiment had been suffering very acutely from lack of sufficient food. Not only was the supply inadequate, but much of the stuff sent up had to be condemned as quite unfit for human consumption. Many of the men were terribly emaciated, and some eighty of them were subsequently sent to hospital suffering from starvation. Had the Regiment not had the good fortune to find a few food plots planted with cassava, things would have been even worse than they were. The officers would have fared no better had not some of them chanced to possess a slender stock of European provisions, which they shared in common; but the officers of a neighbouring mess had to live for weeks upon nothing but mealie porridge, which they consumed at frequent intervals throughout the day, as they found it impossible to eat at a sitting enough of this filling but unsatisfying stuff to allay their hunger for more than a few hours.

The discipline of the men of the Gold Coast Regiment under this prolonged and trying ordeal was beyond all praise. They had followed their white officers across the sea to this unknown land, where they had endured cold such as they had never dreamed of, where they had been grilled by the sun and parched by unappeasable thirst. They had plodded manfully up hill and down dale, across barren, arid flats, and had waded through a water-logged country. Whenever and wherever they had met the enemy they had fought him like the fine soldiers they are, until the saying, “The green caps never go back,” had passed into a proverb in the German camp. Now in the heart of a dismal swamp, they were slowly but surely starving. Yet never once did they murmur or blame their officers.

During the next fortnight the Regiment remained in the camp at Njimbwe, sending out patrols, some of which had difficulty in preventing themselves from being cut off by the suddenly deepening swamps, when a more than usually heavy downpour flooded the low-lying land; squabbling with enemy forage-parties for possession of the rare patches of cassava; taking an occasional prisoner; and sustaining a few attacks upon its outposts. During one of the latter incidents, on Valentine’s Day, Machine-gun Corporal Tinbela Busanga behaved with great gallantry, working his gun, after he had been badly wounded in the arm, until he was too faint with loss of blood to carry on. On this day, though the enemy was driven off without difficulty, two men of B Company were wounded. On another occasion, a patrol of six men, under Corporal Amandu Fulani 4, was ambushed and killed to a man, though not until they had made a hard fight of it. Amandu Fulani, who was a very smart and gallant young soldier, had been orderly to the Governor at Accra, but when D Company was ordered to East Africa, he insisted upon accompanying “his brothers.” When his body was found, it had been stripped of his uniform, but a gunshot wound in the abdomen had been bound up with his kamar-band. Though the enemy had removed his casualties, there were abundant signs that the little patrol had sold their lives dearly.

And during all this time the entry in the War Diary of the Regiment, “Half Rations,” sounds its reiterated and despairing note.

On the 23rd February the Gold Coast Regiment moved out of Njimbwe camp at daybreak, marched to Ngarambi Chini, which was reached at 2 p.m., and where an hour’s halt was called. The march was continued till 6 p.m., at which time Namatewa was reached. The distance traversed was a good twenty miles, which at any time is a tough bit of work for a body of marching men, but though a few swamps were met with the road was drier than might have been expected. None the less, the men, in their then half-famished condition, arrived very tired, and were glad to find that the Pioneer Company, which had gone on in advance, had got a comfortable camp ready for their reception, and had succeeded in finding excellent water. This latter feat had been performed, not for the first time, by Corporal Musa Fra-Fra, a native of the North-Eastern Province of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. This man seemed to possess some strange instinct which enabled him unerringly to discover water if such were to be obtained anywhere by digging or otherwise; and though he obstinately refused to reveal his secret or to show any one how to perform similar miracles, frequent use was made of his strange faculty by the officers of the Pioneer Company during the campaign in East Africa.

From this point the Regiment marched by fairly easy stages to Kitambi, at the foot of the hills, to Mtumbei Chini, Chemera, and Mitole, where it arrived on the 27th February, and went into camp to reorganize and recuperate. The men had richly earned a period of rest, for they had been continuously on the march or on active service ever since their arrival at Kilindini, in British East Africa, exactly seven months earlier.

Colonel R. A. de B. Rose, D.S.O., who had actively commanded the Regiment ever since the end of August, 1914, who had served with it throughout the Kameruns campaign before bringing it to East Africa, and who since January 20th had been in command of a column, was made a Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel with effect from the 1st January, 1917, to the great satisfaction of the officers and men.

This pause in the Regiment’s activities, though it was not destined to prove of any long duration, may be taken as providing a convenient opportunity briefly to review the general military situation as it stood at the end of the wet season of 1917. The rains in the lower valley of the Rufiji River began this year early in February, and in the ordinary course they might be expected to last until late in May, the commencement of the dry season in tropical East Africa usually synchronizing more or less accurately with the breaking of the south-west monsoon upon the shores of Ceylon on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

As we have seen, the drive from north to south, which had been begun in earnest in the preceding August, and for participation in which the Gold Coast Regiment had arrived just in time, had had the effect of expelling the enemy first from the country between the Tanga-Moschi and the Dar-es-Salaam-Lake Tanganyika railways, and later from the country between the last-named line and the Rufiji. Once across this river, a further retreat to the south became for the enemy almost a necessity; and when he found that he could not establish his winter headquarters in the highlands about Kibata mission station, he seems to have broken his forces up into comparatively small parties, and while keeping in touch with the troops on the southern side of the Rufiji, who were under General Hannyngton’s command, to have worked steadily south, living on the country as far as possible, and gradually making his way out of the water-logged areas amid which he had been overtaken by the break-up of the dry weather early in February.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German Commander-in-Chief, who throughout was the living soul of the resistance offered to the British, was not a man who believed in doing things by halves, and when he found that the valley of the Rufiji was untenable, he established his main headquarters nearly two hundred miles further to the south of that river, at a place lying within thirty-five miles of the Rovuma, which is the boundary between erstwhile German and Portuguese East Africa. The spot chosen was the mission station at Massassi, which is pleasantly situated at a height of 1500 feet above sea-level, and is a point at which the principal roads running through the south-eastern portion of the territory cross one another. The main road from the port of Lindi, which runs in a south-westerly direction to Makotschera on the Rovuna, and there effects a junction with the main road which skirts the northern bank of that river from Sassaware to its mouth, crosses at Massassi the main road from Newala on the south-east, which runs in a north-westerly direction to Liwale, and thence almost due north to the Rufiji River at Mikesse. From Liwale, moreover, another main road runs in a north-easterly direction to the sea at Kilwa Kivinje, and west by south to Songea—itself a point of junction of an elaborate road-system—and thence due west to Wiedhafen on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

Even in this campaign, it should be noted, the influence of British sea-power made itself felt, for though some supplies are known to have reached the enemy in spite of the naval blockade, the command of the sea had enabled General Hannyngton’s force to be slipped in behind the retreating Germans viâ Kilwa, and had shown to von Lettow-Vorbeck the danger he ran of being cut off or surrounded by troops rapidly transported by sea to some spot south of the scene of his land operations. Apart from the commanding position which Massassi occupied as the key-point of the main lines of communication by land in this part of the country, and from its convenient proximity to the German-Portuguese boundary, its selection as von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main headquarters during the 1917 campaign was probably due to the fact that it could not easily be outflanked by troops conveyed further to the south by sea. With his main headquarters established at this point, moreover, and with all the principal highways in this part of the country at his immediate disposal, he could freely raid the districts to the north in which the scattered British forces were strongly established, and could occupy and hold, as long as it paid him to occupy and hold them, points of vantage such as Liwale, which could conveniently be used as his advance bases.

The German troops must have suffered considerably during the months immediately following their expulsion from the country north of the Rufiji, though it is doubtful whether they were called upon to endure a greater measure of physical discomfort or more acute starvation than that which fell to the lot of the Gold Coast Regiment and the 40th Pathans in their water-logged camp at Njimbwe, or to that of the Nigerian Brigade—which had now arrived in East Africa—and which, while holding with other troops the northern bank of the Rufiji during all that dismal rainy season, went lamentably short of everything save water, of which there was always an odious superfluity.

The fidelity of the German native soldiers at this period, and the fact that so few of them voluntarily surrendered to the British, have been quoted in certain ill-informed quarters as providing a striking testimony to the affection which the Germans are alleged to have inspired in the native population of East Africa. Subscription to any such opinion argues a complete misunderstanding of the military system which the Germans erected in their African colonies. It had for its basic principle the establishment among the native population of an isolated caste, whose members were not only allowed, but were actively encouraged, to assert their superiority over the rest of the inhabitants of the country, who, where a soldier was concerned, ceased to have any rights of person or of property, and could look for no redress when it was an Askari who had maltreated them. It will be remembered that in the German mind, as it was revealed to a disgusted world in August and September, 1914, there existed a strange confusion of thought, which drew no distinction between fear of physical violence and the respect inspired by noble qualities. Thus it was openly declared by the German High Command that the organized bestialities practised in Belgium would cause the whole world “to respect the German soldier.” It was this characteristic confusion of ideas which led the Germans in their African colonies to seek to inspire the native population with a proper spirit of “respect” for their white rulers, by placing every ruffian who wore the Kaiser’s uniform above the law, and by bestowing upon him a free hand in so far as the treatment of the rest of the native population was concerned. An example may be cited, which is drawn from the personal knowledge of the present writer. In September, 1913, a German native soldier in the employment of the Togoland Government shot an old woman—a British subject—for an unwitting breach of quarantine regulations, and having shot her, proceeded to club her to death with the butt-end of his rifle Protests were duly made to the then Governor of Togoland, Duke Adolf Freidrich of Mecklenburg, and assurances were given that suitable notice had been taken of the incident. Yet when the British occupied Lome, the capital of Togoland, less than a year later, the culprit was found not even to have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment.

During the earlier part of the campaign, and as far as possible up to the very end, everything was done to mark the superiority of the Askari over the rest of African mankind. They were provided with carriers who were, to all intents and purposes, their bondsmen and body-servants, their very rifles being carried for the soldiers when on the line of march and at a secure distance from the enemy. For their use a commando of women, under military escort, was marched about the country—a luxury with which the German officers also were for the most part plentifully provided; and, in fact, no stone was left unturned to impress upon the men themselves and upon the rest of the native population that the Askari were a Chosen People in whose presence no dog must presume to bark.

The inevitable effect of this system was that the hand of every civilian native throughout the German colonies in Africa was against the Askari, and when war broke out these native soldiers were unable, even if they had been willing to risk so hazardous an experiment, to melt back into the native population from whom they had been completely differentiated and isolated, and whose undying hatred they had earned in good measure, shaken together, pressed down, and running over. Their only safety lay in holding together, and in maintaining as long as possible the tottering military system to which they owed alike their past privileges and their present imminent danger of death at the hands of an enemy, or of still worse things if they fell into the clutches of their outraged countrymen. Toward the end of 1916 a number of captured Askari were sent back to British East Africa, and were there incorporated in a battalion of the King’s African Rifles. The reputation which they there won for themselves is instructive—excellent on parade, but a most violent and undisciplined crew when off duty, who in their relations with the native population respected the laws neither of God nor of man.

It was due to the German system, it is true, that the Askari remained faithful to their white masters, but the reasons which inspired this fidelity are to the last degree discreditable to Germany and to her conception of the manner in which an European nation should “co-operate in the work of civilization”[^[2]] among a primitive people in a distant land.

[2]. It was a British Prime Minister who declared, speaking during the early eighties of the nineteenth century, that if Germany desired colonies, “Great Britain would welcome her co-operation in the work of civilization.”

CHAPTER VI
IN THE KILWA AREA—MNASI AND RUMBO

During the month of March, 1917, the main body of the Regiment lay in camp at Mitole, undergoing company training, and sending out frequent small patrols along the roads in the neighbourhood. The Depôt Company still remained at Mpara, between Kilwa Kivinje and Kilwa Kisiwani, the latter being the port at which the Regiment had landed when it was transported south by sea from Dar-es-Salaam in the preceding November. B Company was dispatched to hold a post at a place variously called Kirongo and Nivanga, which lies almost due west from Mnasi a few miles up a track that leads from the main Kilwa Kivinje-Liwale road, to Njijo, whence the main road from Kilwa Kivinje runs northward to Kitambi. A post consisting of one officer and twenty men of the Pioneer Company was also established at Nigeri-geri, near the junction of the main roads from Kitambi and Liwale, and on March 26th the whole company was sent there. On the 25th March the post at Nivanga, which was protecting a party working on the Chemera road, was attacked by an enemy patrol, which was driven off without difficulty, but two men of A Company were wounded.

On the 3rd April, the Regiment left Mitole, and marching across country along a vile track till the main highway leading from Kilwa Kivinje to Liwale was encountered, reached Mnasi on the following day, and proceeded to establish a camp there. Mnasi lies on the main road above mentioned and is distant about three-and-twenty miles from Kilwa Kivinje. Here two wells, dug by the Germans and cased with brick, were found, but they contained no water. B Company was separated from the rest of the Regiment at this time, being still stationed at Kirongo.

Very early in the morning of April 11th, a bush native came into camp and reported that another native, who had come into Makangaga from the south on the preceding evening, had brought word that the enemy was at Likawage, rather more than thirty miles to the south of Mnasi, and that two companies, over two hundred strong, were marching down the road to that place. Makangaga lies south-east of Mnasi and is distant barely four miles from that place. Accordingly Lieutenant Kinley, with seventy-five rank and file and one machine-gun, was at once dispatched to make an attempt to ambush the advancing enemy.

This little band proceeded up the road to Makangaga, and passing through that village, sought some point of vantage from whence to attack the enemy as he marched down the road. For once men of the Gold Coast Regiment, whose patrols had so often been harassed by an elusive and invisible enemy, were to have a chance of subjecting a German force to a similarly unpalatable experience.

The country, however, was for the most part a dead flat, broken only by gentle undulations, and now, toward the end of the rains, it was covered with a new growth of tall grass, very thick and lush. In these circumstances, it was not possible to find any spot which actually overlooked the road and was at the same time securely concealed from the observation of the enemy’s advanced points. Lieutenant Kinley, however, took careful note of the lie of the land, and led his little force into the high grass, where he drew it up in as compact a line as possible in a position parallel to the highway, and distant some sixty or seventy yards from it. Here the machine-gun was set up, and the men, breathless with expectation and excitement, lay down and waited.

Presently the sound of a large body of men marching down the road became audible; and Lieutenant Kinley, reserving his fire until he judged that the main body of the enemy was in his immediate front, let the Germans have it with rifle and machine-gun for all his little force was worth. An indescribable uproar ensued, while enemy bullets whistled in every direction above the heads of Kinley’s men; and presently it became obvious that the Germans were rushing into the long grass upon a wide front to counter-attack their assailants.

Fearing to be enveloped by the greatly superior force which he had had the hardihood to ambush, Lieutenant Kinley ceased fire, rapidly moved his men to the rear and toward one of the enemy’s flanks, and from thence repeated his former tactics. Another wild hooroosh was the result, and for perhaps a quarter of an hour, the Germans and the little band of Gold Coasters played an exciting game of hide and seek, each being completely hidden from the other by the ten-foot screen of grass, and being compelled to trust purely to the sounds that reached them to determine the direction of their fire. At the end of that time a luckless band of Germans, composed of Europeans and natives, wandered into view, walking along a path within a few yards of a spot in which Lieutenant Kinley and his breathless men were lying. Very few of the enemy survived this encounter; and Lieutenant Kinley considering that he had now done as much damage as he would be able to effect without running too great a risk of himself being enveloped and cut off, extricated his small force with considerable skill, and led it back to the camp at Mnasi.

In this brilliant little encounter six men of the Gold Coast Regiment were killed, six were wounded, and one fell into the hands of the enemy. The latter lost three white men and fifteen Askari killed, and over thirty wounded; and the Gold Coast Regiment, remembering the fate of Lieutenant Shields and Colour-Sergeant Nelson and their men, had the satisfaction of feeling that, to use the phrase of the officers’ mess, “they had got back some of their own.”

On the 13th April the enemy sent in a flag of truce, and restored to the Gold Coast Regiment four of the men who had been wounded during Lieutenant Kinley’s action on the 11th April. The bearer of the flag of truce admitted the heavy losses which the enemy had sustained on that occasion. For his daring little exploit, Lieutenant Kinley was recommended by Colonel Rose, who was still commanding the 3rd East African Brigade, for a Distinguished Service Order.

On the 15th April, the Regiment made a nine hours’ march over a villainous track to Migeri-geri, which is situated on the main road thirteen and a half miles from Kilwa, where a new camp was established; and on the 17th of April Lieutenant Beech with a patrol of fifty rank and file and one machine-gun marched along the Mnasi road to investigate the cutting of the telegraph wire. He met a patrol of B Company, with whom was the agent of the Intelligence Department, and they shortly afterwards had a brush with an enemy patrol, B Company losing one man killed and one wounded; but the enemy was driven off and the telegraph line repaired.

On the same day, Captain Foley with the Battery and an escort of thirty rank and file of A Company, joined a force, commanded by the Colonel of the 40th Pathans, which was operating in the direction of Mnasi; the Gold Coast Regiment took over the outposts hitherto held by the Pathans; Captain Greene and the Pioneer Company joined the Regiment in camp; and at 7 p.m. a cable party was sent out to restore communication with the Officer Commanding the Pathans at Rumbo, a place about five miles south by east of Migeri-geri.

On the following day the Battery and its escort, under the command of Captain Foley, came in for a pretty hot engagement at Rumbo, where they were in action with the 40th Pathans and 150 men of the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles. It was the 40th Pathans, it will be remembered, who took over Gold Coast Hill from the Regiment at dusk on the 15th December, and throughout the campaign they had fought with steadfastness and courage. Their casualties, both in the field and from sickness, had been very severe, however, and their numerical strength had recently been made up by large drafts of raw recruits from India, the bulk of whom were not drawn from the strata of the population which, in the past, have always supplied men for the 40th Pathans. Precisely what happened on this day does not concern us here. That the veterans of the 40th Pathans fought gallantly is attested by the fact that of one of their machine-gun teams every man was killed at his post, but the rest of the story can best be confined to the experiences of the Battery of the Gold Coast Regiment and of its commander.

On the 18th April Captain Foley got his guns into position, in order to cover and support the infantry advance, at a point across the Ngaura River in the neighbourhood of Rumbo. The stream, in which the water was on that day nearly chin-deep, was behind him, and the camp of the force which Colonel Tyndall of the 40th Pathans was commanding lay in the bush on the further bank. The country was covered by pretty dense trees and scrub, and all that the guns could do was to shell the area in which the enemy was believed to be concealed. After this had been going on for some time, the Battery trumpeter, Nuaga Kusasi, approached Captain Foley and reported that there were no British soldiers in front or on the flanks of the Battery, and that the men moving in the bush, barely thirty yards ahead, were the enemy. Captain Foley was incredulous, but Nuaga Kusasi insisted, and stating that he could see a German officer, put up his rifle and fired at him. Immediately the bush ahead of the guns was seen to be alive with enemy Askari.

The men of the Battery, and the thirty men of A Company which formed its escort, behaved admirably, and Bogoberi, one of the gun-carriers, drew his matchet and declared that he and his fellows would charge the enemy with those weapons before the guns should be touched. His example was followed by all the other gun-carriers, who were enlisted men drawn from the same tribes as the soldiers.

These things happened in the space of a few seconds, and already Captain Foley had taken complete charge of the situation, his fluency in Hausa making it easy for him to give his orders clearly and rapidly. He bade the Battery Sergeant-Major retire the two guns and all the ammunition across the river, and then dividing his small force, which was composed of the thirty men of A Company and about a dozen men of the Battery, he placed half under the Sergeant-Major of A Company and the rest under Sergeant Mahmadu Moshi of the Battery. These non-commissioned officers successively led charges into the bush, whence, barely twenty yards away, the enemy were firing upon Foley’s men. This had its immediate effect, and Foley next retired half his little party a few yards to the rear, while the rest emptied their magazine rifles into the bush occupied by the enemy. The party in advance then retired at the double through the men behind them, and in their turn took up a position from which to cover the retreat of their fellows. In this manner the enemy, who were in greatly superior force, were successfully kept at bay, while Sergeant-Major Bukare Moshi retired the two guns to the further bank of the river, an operation which was so successfully conducted that, in spite of the deep water, it was performed with the loss of only one box of ammunition. One gunner and three men of A Company were killed, and three gun-carriers were wounded; but the guns were saved, and the great coolness and skill with which Captain Foley handled his men, and the pluck, steadfastness, and resource which the latter showed, won the special praise of Colonel Tyndall of the 40th Pathans. The action of the Battery on this occasion did much to avert what at one time threatened to be a serious disaster. Later in the day Captain Shaw, with two hundred men of A and B Companies, marched to Rumbo to reinforce the 40th Pathans.

The feat thus accomplished was one of quite extraordinary difficulty. The river-crossing at this point, even in the dry season, is by no means easy, for the banks, which are some ten feet in height, rise sheer from the bed and had been worn smooth by the passage of much running water. On this particular day, however, the stream was a raging torrent and the steep banks were as slippery as ice. That, in these circumstances, the passage of the guns and ammunition should have been effected with such expedition and success shows what human effort is capable of achieving in moments of intense excitement.

During the action just described, Lieutenant Murray, R.N., who was in command of a naval Lewis gun section, had all the men of his team either killed or wounded. He then attached himself to Captain Foley, rendering him valuable assistance, and refusing himself to cross the stream until the last of the Battery had passed over in safety.

Captain Macpherson, in command of I Company, was also in action during this day at a place called Beaumont’s Post, which was situated near the banks of the Magaura river, on a track that runs parallel to the coast, but well out of sight of the sea, to the east and a little to the south of Rumbo. This post, though of great strength, was very close to the enemy, and it and the patrols sent out from it were frequent objects of his attack. On this occasion Captain Macpherson lost two men killed, two wounded, and two local porters killed.

On the 19th April the rest of the Regiment marched to Rumbo, and there relieved the 40th Pathans; and during the afternoon the enemy, under a flag of truce, sent in five men who had been wounded during the action of the preceding day, and who had fallen into his hands. The bearer of the flag of truce admitted that the enemy had himself lost thirty men in that action, so the veterans of the 40th Pathans and the Battery of the Gold Coast Regiment and its escort had not put up their rather desperate little fight in vain.

During the next two days the surrounding country was patrolled, and the defences of the camp at Rumbo were improved; and on the 22nd April the Brigade Headquarters were established there, and the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles arrived in camp. Patrolling continued, and on the 25th April Captain Macpherson reported from Beaumont’s Post that he had been engaged with the enemy on the 18th April and again on the 20th April; that he had lost in all four men killed, four wounded, and one missing; and that among the killed was Company Sergeant-Major Hassan Bazaberimi.

It was while the Regiment was in camp at Rumbo that von Lettow-Vorbeck planned and carried out one of those daring little ventures which, even though they might have no special military value, helped no doubt to keep up the spirits of his people, and certainly appealed very strongly to his opponents’ instinctive love of a good sportsman. He sent a small raiding party through the bush to a point overlooking the harbour of Kilwa Kisiwani, and having got a gun on to a hill in the vicinity, opened fire upon a British transport which was lying at anchor. He actually scored three hits, and, the surprise being complete, this unexpected attack upon the British sea-base caused for the moment a certain amount of apprehension. Even the Depôt Company of the Gold Coast Regiment at Mpara was mobilized under Major Read, and was posted along the northern shore of the harbour; but the Germans were not in a position to deliver any serious attack, and when a British cruiser appeared on the scene they prudently withdrew.

For the rest of the month the Regiment remained at Rumbo, daily patrolling the country, improving the defences and the water-supply of the camp, and having frequent slight brushes with the enemy, in the course of which a few casualties were sustained.

The strength of the Regiment on the 1st May 1917, was only 9 officers, 6 British non-commissioned officers, 7 clerks, 2 dressers, 786 rank and file, 381 carriers, 18 servants, and 41 stretcher-bearers, or 1250 men of all ranks. As compared with the personnel of the force which had left Sekondi for East Africa on the 6th July, 1916, only one-fourth of the cadre of officers was now available; the British non-commissioned officers were reduced by 9; the rank and file by 194; and this in spite of the reinforcements from the Gold Coast which had reached the Regiment on the 27th December. Notwithstanding the prolonged and trying experiences to which the men had been subjected, they were as keen and as staunch as ever; but the strength of a native force must ever depend in a great degree upon European leadership, and now there were only 7 company officers and 2 British non-commissioned officers all told, to be distributed between the Battery and the four Companies of the Regiment, two of the other British non-commissioned officers being members of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and one being in charge of the transport. It may be accounted no less than marvellous that, in these circumstances, the corps continued to exhibit so great a measure of energy and vitality.

During the whole of May, however, the Gold Coast Regiment remained in camp at Rumbo, making the usual daily patrols, and on one occasion taking part in a reconnaissance in force, in conjunction with the garrison at Mnasi and I Company at Beaumont’s Post, on a thirty-two-mile front, during which, however, the enemy was not brought to action. A few casualties continued to occur during the month to men belonging to the detachment at Beaumont’s Post; but by the end of May there were eleven combatant and two medical officers with the Regiment,—a material improvement, but still little more than one-third of the proper establishment. The combatant British non-commissioned officers still numbered only four. During the month news was received that Lieutenant Kinley had been awarded the Military Cross for his action on 11th April, and that a similar distinction had been conferred upon Captain Foley, commanding the Battery, for services rendered in the engagement at Rumbo, when supporting the 40th Pathans, on the 18th April. A Distinguished Conduct Medal, and four Military Medals were also awarded to the Battery and to the sections of A Company which supplied its escort for the fight they had put up on that day.

On the 29th May, half the Pioneer Company, under Lieutenant Bray, went to Migeri-geri to form part of the garrison at that place.

On the 1st June, 1917, Major Goodwin was appointed an Acting Lieutenant-Colonel, and was also awarded the French Croix de Guerre. Intelligence was also received that Lieutenant Piggott had been awarded the silver medal of the Italian Order of San Maurico.

During the first nine days of the month nothing occurred beyond the usual patrols, and an occasional interchange of shots with the enemy; but on the 10th June, the Pioneer Company reliefs, returning from a post two and a half miles west of the camp, were ambushed at about 7.30 a.m. by a party of the enemy of great numerical superiority. The returning patrol extended in the bush, opened fire on the enemy, and compelled him to retire. The body of one German Askari was left on the ground, and some blood spoor was seen in the bush. The Pioneers lost one man killed and one wounded.

On the 11th June information was received that, on the occasion of His Majesty’s birthday, the Distinguished Service Order had been conferred upon Lieutenant-Colonel Goodwin and upon Captain Harman, the Military Cross upon Lieutenant Piggott, and the Distinguished Conduct Medal upon Sergeant-Major Medlock.

On the following day, Captain Macpherson with three of the sections of I Company which, with a company of the 33rd Punjabis, had been occupying Beaumont’s Post, where they had had so many brushes with the enemy and had sustained such frequent casualties, rejoined the Regiment at Rumbo. Lieutenant Biltcliffe, with another detachment of I Company, remained at Beaumont’s Post, and on the same day he reported that a mixed patrol, composed of his men and of the 33rd Punjabis, had been ambushed by the enemy, and that one man of the Regiment had been killed and seven others wounded. The Punjabis lost one European officer and six Indian soldiers killed. On the 13th June Lieutenant Biltcliffe returned to Rumbo from Beaumont’s Post with the rest of I Company, after patrolling the Magaura[Magaura] River, a small stream that empties itself into the inlet of the sea which forms a deep and narrow bay slightly to the north and west of Kilwa Kisiwani.

On the 15th June 987 men of the Sierra Leone Carrier Corps came into camp and were attached to the Gold Coast Regiment, whose officers, with a sigh of relief, saw these sturdy West Africans replace the much less efficient and reliable local porters.

Captain Shaw was appointed Acting Major, and second in Command of the Gold Coast Regiment on the 16th June, and on the 28th June he was appointed Acting Lieutenant-Colonel, and took over the command, Major Goodwin having been invalided to the base. Shortly before Colonel Rose had been struck down with dysentery and had also been invalided to Dar-es-Salaam, the command of the 3rd East African Brigade being taken over from him by Colonel Orr. General Beves had succeeded General Hannyngton in the command of the Division.

A camp on Lingaula Ridge, a few miles to the south of Rumbo, which had been evacuated by the enemy, was occupied by Lieutenant Bray with I Company on the 28th June; and the same day the Regiment received orders to move on the morrow to Ukuli, a place to the south and only slightly to the east of Rumbo, whence it returned on the 30th June, without having succeeded in bringing the enemy to action. On this latter date the detachment at Lingaula[Lingaula] Ridge was attacked by an enemy patrol, which was driven off with the loss of one European killed, I Company having two men wounded.

Thus ended the month of June, 1917. The dry season might now be regarded as fairly established, and the country, covered by a luxuriant growth of elephant grass and of fresh green bush into which the recent rains had infused a new life, was already beginning to dry up. The cadre of officers was still far below strength, but it now numbered thirteen combatants, with two medical officers and three officers attached to the Sierra Leone Carrier Corps. The rank and file only totalled 771 men; but the little force now possessed 1264 sturdy West African carriers, 42 stretcher-bearers, and five interpreters, and was perhaps more really mobile than it had yet been since its arrival in East Africa. In all Colonel Shaw had under his command 2156 men; and after the comparative stagnation and the constant harassing patrol work of the past six months, the Regiment looked forward with eager anticipation to the resumption of more active campaigning.

CHAPTER VII
IN THE KILWA AREA—NARUNGOMBE

General Beves was now preparing to take the offensive, his plan being to divide his force into three columns which, working southward, but describing segments of a circle on the west and on the east, might perhaps get in behind the enemy and contrive to envelope him. As usual the difficulties of maintaining sufficient supplies of provisions, ammunition and water obtruded themselves from the outset; but the force was well equipped with motor transport, and it was hoped that, by cutting tracks eight feet wide through the bush, a passage might be made for these vehicles in the rear of the advancing columns.

In order to deceive the enemy as to the main line of his advance, Colonel Orr decided to make a feint along the road past Lingaula Ridge due south of the camp at Rumbo, and this duty he assigned to a company of the Gold Coast Regiment. Colonel Shaw selected B Company for the purpose; and when at 10 p.m. on the 4th July the Regiment left Rumbo with the No. 1 Column, B Company, under the command of Lieutenant Eglon, remained behind at Linguala[Linguala] Ridge.

There was an eclipse of the moon on the night selected for the start, and the darkness was intense, and it was not till noon on the 5th July that Beaumont’s Post was reached. No. 1 Column, which was commanded by Colonel Orr, consisted of the Gold Coast Regiment, the 33rd Punjabis, the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles, the famous Indian Mountain Battery from Derajat, which goes by the name of the “D. M. B.,” and the 8th South African Infantry, which joined the Gold Coast Regiment at Beaumont’s Post. No. 1 Column was to make the sweep southward on the left of the advance. No. 2 Column was composed of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 3rd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles, the 7th South African Infantry, and the 27th Mountain Battery, under the command of Colonel Grant. Its sweep was to be made on the right of the advance. A third column was operating still further to the left of No. 1 Column. This column consisted of the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd King’s African Rifles, and the 40th Pathans. On the day before the engagement at Narungombe it was reinforced by one and a half companies of the 8th South African Infantry from No. 1 Column. No. 3 Column was under the command of Colonel Taylor. The 129th Baluchis were in reserve at Makangaga.

No. 1 Column left Beaumont’s Post at 7 p.m. on the 5th July for Ukuli, and at midnight the men bivouacked in column of route. At dawn the march was resumed, and at 4 p.m. the Gold Coast Regiment took over the advanced guard from the King’s African Rifles, who had been heavily engaged all day, and had succeeded in dislodging the enemy from a prepared position.

As soon as this relief had been affected, the Pioneer Company advanced and engaged the enemy’s rear-guard, which it found some 300 yards up the road, and which it drove back to a distance of about a mile. Here the Pioneer Company bivouacked, remaining all night in its advanced position as outpost company, the rest of the Regiment rejoining No. 1 Column in camp. One man was killed and one wounded in the advance by the Pioneer Company.

On the 7th July, the Gold Coast Regiment marched as advanced guard to the column which was now heading in the direction of Ngomania. This place was occupied by the Regiment, after encountering slight resistance, and the rear-guard of the column came into camp there at about 3 p.m.

On this day, however, No. 2 Column had a serious engagement with the enemy in which many casualties were sustained on both sides.

On the 8th July, the Gold Coast Regiment, which had received orders to march to Mnindi, there to join up with No. 2 Column, left Ngomania at 4.30 a.m. It was accompanied by a section of the D.M.B., and the little force marched to Makangaga—the scene of Lieutenant Kinley’s exploit—where at 9 p.m. it bivouacked for the night.

Meanwhile B Company, which had been left behind at Lingaula Ridge under the command of Lieutenant Eglon, had carried out the duty entrusted to it with great dash and brilliancy. On the 7th July Lieutenant Eglon, pushing southward down the road from his camp at Lingaula Ridge, found no less than three companies of Germans in front of him, and promptly attacked. Though the enemy hopelessly outnumbered the men under his command, Lieutenant Eglon managed to drive them from three successive positions, making as great a display of B Company as possible, and evidently impressing the Germans with the idea that they were about to be attacked in force. During these operations Lieutenant Scott was seriously wounded, Sergeant Awudu Arigungu, who had had long service both with the Northern Nigeria Regiment and with the Gold Coast Regiment, was killed, and eight other men of B Company were wounded.

Having effected his purpose, Lieutenant Eglon, in accordance with his instructions, fell back to Lingaula Ridge, and on the 9th July rejoined the Regiment at Makangaga.

From this place No. 2 Column cut across country, almost due west, to Kirongo, on the main Liwale-Kilwa road, leaving Makangaga at 6.30 a.m. on the 10th July, Colonel Shaw commanding the column on the march. Kirongo was reached at 1.30 p.m.; and on the following morning at 6 a.m. the column pushed on five miles to some water-holes in the dried-up bed of a stream called Kirongo-Ware, where it camped at 1.30 p.m. On this day Colonel Ridgeway assumed the command of No. 2 Column.

At 6 a.m. on the 12th July No. 2 Column resumed its march down the track leading in a south-easterly direction to Kilageli, and at 10 a.m. its patrols came into touch with enemy scouts, with whom a few shots were exchanged. An enemy camp at Kilageli, ahead of the column, was located and bombarded by the D.M.B., and the column deployed and occupied this camp without resistance at about 4 p.m. Here the column rested for the night, and on the 13th July at 1.30 p.m. it continued its advance, and at sundown reached Minokwe, which lies four miles further along the road south by west of Kilageli. At 4 a.m. on the 14th July, the column again moved forward in the direction of an enemy position some six miles to the west of Mtanduala, from the advanced trenches of which a hot fire was opened upon it. The D.M.B. came into action and shelled the enemy position, and the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the King’s African Rifles and the 7th South African Infantry joined in the fight, in which the Gold Coast Regiment also engaged at about 11 a.m. The enemy, fighting a rear-guard action, retired, and two hours later the engagement came to an end. The casualties were few, and the column bivouacked for the night in the prepared position from which the Germans had been ejected.

On the 15th July, the column marched in a south-westerly direction to Kihendye and thence to Rungo, a few shots being exchanged during the day between the King’s African Rifles[Rifles] and enemy scouts. The former lost one man killed and three wounded.

During this day the work of cutting a path, designed for the use of motor-lorries, across country and through the thick, tall grass began, two companies of the Gold Coast Regiment being sent forward for this purpose; and during the whole of the next two days this work was continued. It was a very toilsome job, hacking an eight-foot track through elephant-grass and occasional patches of thorn-thicket, with a merciless sun smiting down from above, with nought to breathe save the stuffy overheated and used-up air peculiar to big grass patches in the tropics, with only a few dry biscuits for food, and a constant, agonising insufficiency of water. The men stuck to it manfully, but one poor fellow died during the day of exhaustion and heat-apoplexy; and in the end this vast expenditure of labour was all in vain. The track had been cut on a compass-bearing, but the only surveys in existence were very roughly approximate, and the path through the grass was eventually brought to a standstill by encountering a steep cliff up which no motor-lorry could conceivably find a way. A little further on, a large main road which runs north and south was struck, and No. 2 Column presently found itself in junction with No. 1 Column, which had advanced down this road to Kipondira. Here the Gold Coast Regiment was retransferred to No. 1 Column.[to No. 1 Column.]

On the 18th July No. 1 Column left Kipondira at 10 a.m., the Gold Coast Regiment being stationed towards the rear of the force, which was in action with the enemy until about 2.30 p.m., when the Germans retired, and the column camped for the night at Kihumburu. Two miles further down the road from this place the main body of the enemy operating in this part of the country had taken up a strongly entrenched position at Narungombe. The plan for his envelopment had miscarried, as was almost certain to befall in a country such as that through which the columns were operating, where movements of troops were inevitably slow, where difficulties hampered supply, where scarcity of water presented a constant menace to the very existence of the forces in the field, and where a few scouts, used with even a modicum of skill, could easily keep the enemy informed of the direction which any hostile unit was taking. No. 3 Column had carried out the task entrusted to it very successfully, for the wide sweeping movement which it had made had enabled it to cut in behind the enemy, who was in occupation of a scarp at Mikikama, where he would have presented a formidable barrier to the advance of No. 1 Column. This was a service of considerable importance; but now all three columns, though their convergence in front of Narungombe had not been intended, were assembled in the vicinity of the main road a few miles to the north of that place. This well illustrates the extreme difficulty of concerted operations when carried out in thick bush or high grass, as soon as ever the roads or paths running through it are quitted.

The 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles, who had borne the brunt of this day’s fighting, had rendered a tremendous service to the columns by expelling the Germans from a water-hole at Kihumburu, and thus making it available for the troops. It was evident, however, that the supply so obtained was quite insufficient for the needs of the force for more than a very limited space of time; and it thus became a matter of vital importance that the enemy should be dislodged from the very strong position which he had taken up at Narungombe, where a much larger set of water-holes was known to exist. Orders were accordingly given for an attack to be delivered upon Narungombe early on the following morning.

The position which the enemy had prepared and occupied consisted of a series of breastworks some two and a half feet in height, built of earth stoutly faced with sticks driven deep into the ground and bound together with lianas, with a number of small redoubts and strongly constructed machine-gun emplacements, and a specially strong defensive post for the accommodation of the high command. These works, drawn along the upper slopes of two hills, between which the high-road passes, extended in an irregular but continuous line, with many slight protrusions and salients, for a distance of two and a half miles. The defensive position was particularly strong at the left extremity of the enemy’s line. From the British camp at Kihumburu the main road runs due south and almost straight to the centre of the German position, dipping into a valley a few hundred yards in advance of the British camp, and thereafter rising gradually in a long glacis to the hills upon which the enemy was entrenched. The country hereabouts is undulating, and covered throughout with high grass, and patches of thorn-scrub set fairly thickly with rather mean-looking trees; but immediately in advance of the enemy’s position, the grass had been cut, leaving stalks about two feet six in height, for a distance of some three hundred yards, and thus depriving the attacking force of any cover. The enemy had four companies in the firing-line, with four more companies in reserve, which, however, arrived too late to take part in the battle. He had two guns of about 2·95 calibre and at least six machine-guns; but above all, he had, as usual, been able to select his own defensive position, and could rely upon making the task of his ejectment an extremely expensive undertaking.

On Thursday, the 19th July, the British advance began at 6 a.m., No. 1 Column leading with the Gold Coast Regiment in the centre. It had been reported that no enemy post existed at a point nearer than 1000 yards along the road from the British camp; but before the Regiment had traversed 300 yards, and while they were still in column of route, fire was opened upon them, and two men were killed and three wounded ere ever they had time to deploy. An advance in extended order through high grass is necessarily a rather slow operation, and while the Gold Coast Regiment was working forward, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles was sent forward out of reserve, and in order to protect the Regiment’s advance, occupied a ridge on their right flank which lay to the south-west of the British camp,

At 8.15 a.m. the advance-guard of the Regiment became heavily engaged, Lieutenant Eglon having led B Company to within a short distance of the enemy’s well-entrenched and strongly held position. Here this gallant young officer, who had done so well a few days earlier when attacking from Lingaula Ridge, was killed, and B Company suffered many casualties. Colonel Shaw had taken up an advanced position along the road behind a mound, from which he was able throughout the day closely to observe the operations he was conducting; and he now sent I Company to prolong the line on the right of the attack. A few minutes later the Pioneer Company was also sent forward to prolong the right; and at 9.30 a.m. the 33rd Punjabis, who had been held in reserve, were also sent yet further to prolong the right, while the 7th South African Infantry deployed on the left of the Gold Coast Regiment.

At this juncture orders were given for No. 3 Column to attempt a wide turning movement on the right of the enemy’s position, the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd King’s African Rifles and the 40th Pathans leading the advance, with certain water-holes as their objective. No. 2 Column was ordered at the same time to carry out a similar turning movement on the left. At 10.30 a.m. these troops began to get into position, and at noon No. 3 Column became heavily engaged. The 3rd Battalion of the 3rd King’s African Rifles and the 40th Pathans had been pushed forward, without any preliminary scouting, into a valley on the British left, where they presently came under a devastating rifle and machine-gun fire from both forces. By this time the enemy’s fire had grown intense along the whole line; and the 8th South African Infantry, the bulk of whom still formed part of No. 1 Column and occupied ground on the left of the Gold Coast Regiment, attempted to advance, but were enfiladed by machine-gun and rifle fire from salients in the enemy’s line. They maintained their position for a while, but the troops upon their left failed to make good, and the grass all round them was set on fire by the British shells.

This failure on the left placed the Gold Coast Regiment in a highly perilous position, as its flank was now completely in the air. Moreover, by this time, the grass was well alight along the whole of the front. The men, however, were steady as a rock, and showed no signs of giving way as had the South African and Indian troops on their immediate left. As for the blazing grass, that was a phenomenon to which they had all their lives been accustomed, and they manfully stamped the flames out, in spite of the heavy fire to which they were exposed, and stolidly resumed the fight. On the left of the line, where the danger was most imminent, Colour-Sergeant Campbell very specially distinguished himself, and did much to encourage and confirm the spirit of the men, only too many of whose officers were already hors-de-combat. He fought his machine-gun until practically all its team had fallen, and in the end brought it safely out of action.

Meantime the right flank had advanced 800 yards, but at 3.30 p.m. they were strongly counterattacked by the enemy, and two platoons of the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles were sent to prolong the right and to get into touch with No. 2 Column, which so far had failed to make its appearance. And all this time the enemy maintained from his defences an intense and relentless fire.

A general advance had been arranged to take place at 2.30 p.m., but the position on the left had by that time become so critical that the movement could not be carried out at the hour fixed; and at 4 p.m. orders were sent to the Gold Coast Regiment not to attempt any further advance. These orders arrived too late, and the Gold Coast Companies on the right, with the 33rd Punjabis and the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles, charged and took certain of the enemy’s trenches, but were unable to hold on owing to their left being unsupported and to their ammunition running short. They were accordingly retired, but only to a distance of 100 yards from the enemy’s trenches, where they dug themselves in and held on. The 2nd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles remained on the enemy’s flank in a patch of thick bush, and succeeded thence in getting into touch with No. 2 Column. Darkness was now falling, and the Gold Coast Regiment and the troops on its right bivouacked for the night in the rifle-pits which they had dug for themselves.

Meanwhile, the troops on the left had again been led forward into action by Major Hill of the South African Infantry and by the Commander of the Stokes Battery, thus reconsolidating the line on the left of the Gold Coast Regiment.

At dawn on the following day it was found that the enemy had evacuated his position. He had effected his object, and had made the attacking force pay a heavy price for the possession of the water-holes of Narungombe. Now, before he could be enveloped or cut off, he beat a hasty retreat toward the south. The position from which he had inflicted so much damage upon his pursuers had served its purpose, and he had nothing more to gain by attempting longer to hold it.

The casualties suffered by the Gold Coast Regiment, having regard to its strength at this time, were very heavy. Of the greatly reduced cadre of officers and of British non-commissioned officers, Lieutenant Eglon was killed, Captain A. J. R. O’Brien, M.C., of the West African Medical Staff, was severely wounded, as also were Captain Leslie-Smith, Colour-Sergeant Baverstock and another colour-sergeant. Lieutenant Bray was slightly wounded. B Company lost its sergeant-major—Awudu Bakano—a very fine soldier, and of the rank and file, 37 were killed and 114 were wounded. The total casualties were thus 158 out of about 790 men engaged, or 20 per cent. of the whole combatant strength of the corps.

Never had the men of the Gold Coast Regiment shown more grit than on this day at Narungombe. They went into action early in the morning of the 19th July after having been marching and fighting, or painfully cutting paths through the bush and high grass—labouring practically without cessation—since the evening of the 4th of that month. They were hotly engaged with the enemy during the whole day, exposed to a fierce sun, with very poor cover, with little to eat and with less to drink, and were exposed throughout to gun, rifle and machine-gun fire, mostly at fairly short range, from 8 a.m. to nightfall. In addition to the enemy, they had constantly to fight the blazing grass, which rendered their position more and more exposed; yet these Africans never wavered, but continued stubbornly to hold their positions, though more than one company had been robbed of all its European leaders and was being commanded solely by its native non-commissioned officers. When towards the end of the day, they had occupied the enemy’s trenches on the right, and running short of ammunition and being unsupported on their left, were unable to hold on, they retired only a hundred yards in obedience to orders and with perfect steadiness, and from their new position forthwith resumed the fight. It would be difficult to devise a test more searching that could be applied to native troops, and the triumphant manner in which on this occasion the “green caps” maintained their reputation as men who “never go back” is a striking proof of the Regiment’s high quality as a fighting unit.

For the services rendered by him while in command of the Regiment on this day, Lieutenant-Colonel Shaw was subsequently awarded a bar to the Military Cross which he had already earned.

CHAPTER VIII
THE HALT AT NARUNGOMBE

Although the Germans had abandoned their position at Narungombe, the severe losses which they had inflicted upon the British were out of all proportion to any advantages which the latter could claim to have secured. The check, too, impressed the British command with the difficulty of dealing with the enemy unless the pursuit could be rendered not only rapid but continuous, and above all with the fact that an adequate supply of water was the hinge upon which all future operations must turn. At Narungombe the very machine-guns of the Gold Coast Regiment had for a time been put out of action through lack of water wherewith to cool the jackets, and the men in the firing-line had been cruelly tortured by thirst during the greater part of that day. After the fight at Narungombe, therefore, the column under General Beves’ command remained in camp at that place to refit. There reinforcements speedily arrived, and General Hannyngton, returning from sick-leave, presently resumed command of the force. A large fortified camp was established; a space to the north of it was cleared and made into an aerodrome; supplies of every description were accumulated; and all things were made as ready as circumstances permitted for a renewed advance. Meanwhile no forward movement was attempted from July 20th to September 17th, a delay during two precious months of the dry season which unfortunately gave the enemy also time to rest and reorganize, to complete his preparations for further resistance to the advance, and to accumulate supplies at his advanced bases and depôts. It was desired, however, that General Hannyngton’s new advance should form part of a much larger scheme; and its timing, so as to ensure co-operation with another column whose movements will be described in the following paragraph, imposed perhaps a longer period of inactivity than was necessary merely for the purpose of refitting.

The Nigerian Brigade, which had arrived in East Africa some months after the Gold Coast Regiment, had endured unspeakable things during the wet season of 1916-17 in its camp on the northern bank of the Rufiji. Here the Brigade had suffered from an insufficiency of supplies and the difficulties occasioned by a water-logged countryside. Now three battalions, under General Cunliffe, had been brought round by sea to Kilwa Kisiwani, and were about to operate as a separate column on the right of General Hannyngton’s force, at present encamped at Narungombe. The task of these columns would be to endeavour to drive the enemy southward into the Lindi area; and meanwhile a large force, of which the remaining battalion of the Nigerians formed a part, had been landed at Lindi, and was trying to slip in behind the enemy for the purpose of helping to encircle him.

Meanwhile, Belgian troops from the Congo were advancing in a south-easterly direction, with Mahenge as their immediate objective,—Mahenge being an important place, two hundred miles due west of Kilwa, on the main road which runs north and south from Songia to Kilossa on the Dar-es-Salaam-Lake Tanganyika railway. Simultaneously, General Northey’s force, which had worked through from Northern Rhodesia and had had a certain amount of fighting in the neighbourhood of Lake Tanganyika, was advancing, in a north-easterly direction, upon Mpepo, a place that lies fifty miles south-west of Mahenge. The object of both these forces, and of a third which was advancing southward with its base at Dadome on the Dar-es-Salaam railway, was the envelopment or dislodgment of the German European and native troops which, under the command of Major von Tafel, were operating in the western part of the territory, mostly to the south of the Ulanga, which is an upper branch of the Rufiji River.

The position at Narungombe, which as we have seen is situated on a main road that runs north and south some thirty miles to the east of the highway that leads from Kilwa Kivinje to Liwale, was as follows. The enemy had retired down the former of these roads to Mihambia, which is distant only twelve miles from Narungombe, and where there are another set of water-holes; and he had established here his main advanced position. From the high-road at Mihambia, a footpath leads west to a place called Kitiia, three miles away, where four tracks meet. One of these runs for five miles in a westerly direction till a ravine, which bears the name of Liwinda, is struck; one runs south-east to rejoin the high-road at Mpingo five miles south of Mihambia, and northward to Mikikole, which is some five and a half miles off. At Mikikole the Gold Coast Regiment had an outpost; and from this place footpaths lead, one north-west to Narungombe; one east to a point on the main road four and a half miles south of Narungombe, occupied by the company of the 2nd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles, to which the name of Gregg’s Post was given; and a third in a south-westerly direction, crossing Liwinda Ravine, and running on to some water-holes nine miles further off near the native village of Mbombomya, and thence to Ndessa. This latter place and Mnitshi on the high-road, some ten miles south of Mihambia, were at this time the principal advanced bases and supply depôts of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces in this portion of the territory, though at neither of them had any fortification been attempted. On a hill near Mpingo, however, the enemy had established a signal-station.

The country hereabouts is for the most part a wide expanse of undulating flat, studded with frequent trees, smothered in thick, and often tall grass, and broken here and there by patches of dense bush. At this season of the year it was waterless, save for a few ponds spattered very sparsely over the face of the land. Bush-fires had been raging intermittently for weeks, and in many places the country was bare and blackened. Though now and again glades occur among the trees, it is rarely possible to obtain an extended view in any direction; and though the vegetation did not impede the movements of troops so completely as it does in real tropical forest country, the character of the locality gave great advantages to a force whose main object was to fight a delaying campaign, and presented proportionate disadvantages to the force that aimed at enveloping its enemy. The British were further hampered by their ignorance of the district, and above all by the scarcity of water. Aeroplanes were being used, and by them bombs were frequently dropped upon the German camp at Ndessa; but for the most part the efforts of the airmen illustrated the eternal triumph of hope over experience. Even when to the landsman’s eye the country appeared to be fairly open, the whole area, seen from above, was revealed as one continuous expanse of grass and tree-tops, devoid of all distinguishing landmarks. It was difficult, in such circumstances, to pick out even well-known localities, while the detection of small posts established by the enemy in the bush, and carefully screened from observation, was for the most part impossible. The infantry patrols had generally to smell out such danger-points for themselves.

A peculiar feature of this district is the Liwinda Ravine, of which mention has already been made. It consists of a natural hollow, some two hundred feet in depth and from four hundred to eight hundred yards in breadth, which traverses the country for many miles from the north-west to the south-east. The ground along its edges differs in no way from the rest of the surrounding areas of bush and orchard-country, except that it is somewhat more elevated than most of them.

Throughout this district ant-bears abound, and their holes, which are ubiquitous, are often large enough to admit of the entrance of a man.

On the 21st July, two days after the engagement at Narungombe, Lieutenant-Colonel Rose rejoined the Regiment and took over the command. He was accompanied by Captain Hornby, who until he had fallen ill had long filled the post of Adjutant, and by four new officers—Captains McElligott and Methven, M.C., and Lieutenants Lamont and S. B. Smith—all of whom were joining the Gold Coast Regiment for the first time. Captain Hornby resumed his work as Adjutant which, during his absence on sick leave, had been successively performed by Lieutenant Downer and by Colour-Sergeant Avenell, both of whom had discharged the difficult duties assigned to them with marked success.

On the 22nd July the Regiment was for the first time supplied with Lewis guns, and the work of training teams for them was forthwith put in hand. On the 28th July, Captains Briscoe, Hartland and Brady, and Lieutenants Baillie, Willoughby and Maxwell joined the Regiment with reinforcements consisting of 354 rank and file and 7 machine-gun-carriers from the Gold Coast. On the 29th July 50 rifles of B Company, under Lieutenant Baillie, with Colour-Sergeant Campbell, joined the detachment of the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd King’s African Rifles at Gregg’s Post; and a detachment composed of men of B Company, under Captain Methven, was sent out to occupy an outpost at Mikikole.

During the whole of August the Regiment lay in camp at Narungombe, its duties being confined to vigorous training, more especially of the new drafts, and daily patrolling of the roads from the camp and from the outposts at Mikikole and Gregg’s Post. A few more men rejoined from sick leave during the month, and on the 31st August the Regiment was more nearly up to strength than it had been at any time since the very early days of the campaign. There were present 29 officers, including 2 doctors, and 2 officers attached to the transport; 17 British non-commissioned officers, including 1 non-commissioned officer of the Royal Army Medical Corps and 4 belonging to the Transport; 7 clerks, 957 rank and file, 133 enlisted gun and ammunition-carriers, 34 servants, and 1 European and 4 native interpreters—a total of 2130 of all ranks.

On the 7th September orders were sent to Captain Methven to move to Liwinda Ravine with 70 rifles of B Company, leaving a picket of 1 European and 20 rifles at Kitiia en route. His instructions were to dig for water on his arrival at the Ravine; to take every precaution to prevent the existence of his camp becoming known to the enemy, and to make systematic reconnaissances throughout the neighbourhood, including the roads leading to the fortified enemy post at Mihambia and to Mnitshi.

Liwinda Ravine was reached without incident, but though pits were sunk to a depth of 20 feet not a drop of water could be found. The establishment of a water depôt at this place formed, however, an essential feature of General Hannyngton’s plan for the advance which he was about to undertake; and on the 10th September big water-troughs fashioned of rubber, measuring some 20 feet in length, 3 feet in width, 15 inches in depth, were sent to the Ravine on the heads of carriers. Water was also conveyed thither in the long tins to which in India the name of pakhal is given, each of which is a load for two men. Only two of the troughs reached their destination in a water-tight condition; and this attempt to establish a water depôt proved a laborious job which only met with a qualified measure of success.

Meanwhile Captain Methven, with a patrol of twenty men, had gone on a scouting expedition to the south-east, in order to try to ascertain the exact position of the enemy’s camp and supply depôt at Mnitshi. This, and two subsequent patrols in the direction of the main road, undertaken by Lieutenant Woods, were perilous little reconnaissances penetrating deep into the country occupied by the enemy, and they were very far from commending themselves to the native headman, who was impressed to act as guide. He was an ancient African, very wizened and emaciated, who in camp sported a soiled Mohammedan robe, to which as a Pagan he had no right, with an European waistcoat worn buttoned-up outside it. In the bush he reverted to a dingy loin-cloth wound sparsely about his middle. His anxiety to preserve his skin intact, amid admittedly adverse circumstances, altogether outstripped his regard for truth; and when he had guided Captain Methven to an eminence overlooking Mpingo, he unhesitatingly declared that place to be Mnitshi, which, as a matter of fact, lies five miles further to the south along the main road which leads from Mihambia to Mpingo. This had for him the satisfactory effect of shortening the distance to be covered by the patrol, and of proportionately diminishing its dangers; but Captain Methven reported to Headquarters that he was uncertain how far his guide was to be relied upon, and expressed doubt as to whether the place identified as Mnitshi was indeed that enemy supply depot.

On the 13th September Lieutenant Woods took a small patrol through the bush to a point on the main road south of Mihambia, and on his way back he came across water-holes near Mbombomya. As Captain Methven considered it important that a more detailed examination should be made, Lieutenant Woods returned to these water-holes next day. As he approached them, however, and when he and his patrol and the ancient guide were in a patch of grass that was not more than waist-high, the enemy suddenly appeared from a camp which he had in the interval constructed in a cup-like hollow on the top of a piece of rising ground overlooking the water-holes.[water-holes.] Shots were forthwith exchanged, and Woods, seeing that his small party was in a fair way to be surrounded by the enemy, who were at least one company strong, shouted to his men to disperse and to get back to their camp as best they might. Meanwhile, he himself very pluckily ran at top speed and in full view of the enemy, as straight as he could go for the water-holes and the German camp, secured a good view of both, and then plunged into a patch of thick bush, in which he succeeded in eluding his pursuers. He and all his patrol eventually made their way back to the Ravine, one man and one stretcher-bearer only being missing. Of the soldier nothing more was heard, but the stretcher-bearer was picked up many days later, very emaciated and with a bullet-wound in his leg, having crawled through the bush nearly as far to the south and west as Ndessa. The ancient African, who had vanished the moment the enemy appeared, had slipped into an ant-bear’s hole, and had there passed the night. He returned to the camp in the Ravine on the following morning.

On the 14th September a patrol from Kitiia, which had crept to within hearing distance of the enemy camp at Mihambia, had a brush with a hostile patrol as it was returning to its post.

Some native porters, who had deserted from the German Force at the water-holes, also came into camp, and from them a good deal of more or less reliable information was obtained by Captain Methven on the subject of the enemy’s numbers and disposition. From this source it was learned that Hauptmann Kerr, with 9 Europeans, 200 Askari, and 4 machine-guns had passed through the camp at the water-holes near Mbombomya on the 14th September, from Ndessa, on his way to Mnitshi; that the force at the water-holes consisted of 5 Europeans and 150 Askari with 2 machine-guns; that there were at that time only 5 enemy companies encamped at Ndessa; and that the main road and the track to Ndessa had both been mined. It was also stated by the porters that the enemy were short of food and that the Europeans were living on rations of rice and millet.

On the 18th September the main body of the Gold Coast Regiment moved out of camp at Narungombe, where they had been now for almost exactly two months, and marched along the footpath to Mikikole, and thence to the water depôt which Captain Methven had established at Liwinda Ravine. The men started with full water-bottles, and each carried a little canvas bag of water of the kind known in India as a chaqual, with which, moreover, every spare carrier was also loaded. The camp at Liwinda Ravine was reached without incident.

The orders issued to No. 1 Column, to which the Regiment was attached, were that Mihambia should be attacked on the morning of September 19th by the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles, with one and a half companies of the Gold Coast Regiment, the 27th Mountain Battery and the Stokes Battery. In order to prevent reinforcements reaching the enemy at Mihambia, a force under Colonel Rose, consisting of the Headquarters, the Battery, and two companies of the Gold Coast Regiment, was to proceed on the morning of the attack to the junction of the track from Ndessa and the water-holes, near Mbombomya, with that from Mnitshi, at a spot situated about two and a half miles to the south of the camp at Liwinda Ravine. It was also intended that while, on the 19th September, No. 1 Column was attacking the enemy on the Mihambia-Mbombomya-Mnitshi area, No. 2 Column should take up a position on the right from whence to deliver an attack upon Ndessa on the morning of September 20th, for the purpose of cutting off his retreat toward the south, and this operation would be supported by the reserve of “Hanforce,” as the force under the command of General Hannyngton was always called.

The Nigerian Brigade, operating further on the right, was to move to Ruale, a few miles south-west of Ndessa, on the 19th September.

These concerted movements were designed to drive the enemy from his fortified position at Mihambia, from Mnitshi and from Ndessa, and if possible across the Mbemkuru River into the arms of the forces thrusting west, from their base on the sea at Lindi, along the road which leads thence to Liwale.

CHAPTER IX
THE ADVANCE TO MBOMBOMYA AND BEKA

On the morning of Wednesday, the 19th September, the Gold Coast Regiment quitted its camp at Liwinda Ravine. At 6 a.m. A Company and half the Pioneer Company, with which was the 27th Mountain Battery, set out for Kitiia, under the command of Major Shaw. Kitiia, as has been mentioned, lies five miles to the east of the camp at Liwinda Ravine, and three miles to the west of Mihambia, and is connected with both by a footpath leading through the grass, tree-set scrub, and occasional bush. It was the function of this little force, as soon as it had obtained touch with the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the King’s African Rifles, which was advancing upon Mihambia along the main road from Gregg’s Post, to move off the footpath into the high grass and bush, and to endeavour to fall upon the left flank and rear of the enemy’s position. Major Shaw also had instructions to send sixty rifles from Kitiia to act independently, with the German porters’ camp, which was situated to the south of their fortified position at Mihambia, as its objective.

Major Shaw’s force reached Kitiia without incident, and shortly afterwards got into touch with the right of the King’s African Rifles. It then quitted the track, and working its way through the grass and scrub and between the trees on a compass bearing, advanced toward Mihambia. In traversing country of this description, where no extended view in any direction is obtainable, it is always a matter of great difficulty to strike the exact objective aimed at; and on this occasion, when Major Shaw arrived in the vicinity of Mihambia, it was to find himself in front of the enemy’s left, instead of on his flank or to his rear. A Company and half the Pioneers, however, forthwith attacked, and the 27th Mountain Battery came into action. Simultaneously, the King’s African Rifles joined in the attack.

The enemy’s position at Mihambia very generally resembled that which he had taken up two months earlier at Narungombe. Here, however, the water-holes were in the valley, and the enemy’s fortifications were drawn along the crest of the hill which sloped up from them, and lay astride the main road leading from Narungombe. On his left there rose an isolated hill which did not appear at this time to be occupied.

The attack was delivered with vigour, and the water-holes passed at once into the hands of the British. The enemy, moreover, did not make a very stout resistance; and as he began to fall back, Major Shaw sought permission to occupy the isolated hill on the right of the attack, of which mention has already been paid, which commanded the main road. Some delay occurred before leave to execute this movement could be obtained, and when at last the occupation of this eminence was attempted, the enemy was found to be holding it in great strength, and the whole of the rest of the day was spent in vain attempts to dislodge him. So stout a resistance did he offer, indeed, that the British advance was definitely arrested, the troops being forced to dig themselves in, and it was not until an hour or two before dawn on the 20th September that the enemy eventually retreated down the main road in a southerly direction.

Meanwhile Colonel Rose, with the remainder of the Gold Coast Regiment, had marched from the camp in the Liwinda Ravine in a southerly direction, and had occupied Nambunjo Hill, overlooking the main road between Mpingo and Mnitshi, and situated some two and a half miles to the west of it. An hour after the Regiment left Liwinda Ravine telegraphic communication with Gregg’s Post, and consequently with Colonel Orr, who was commanding No. 1 Column, was interrupted.