Too Close to the Sun (15 page)

ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1914,
the light cruiser
Königsberg
destroyed the HMS
Pegasus
off Zanzibar. Back in London, the affronted Admiralty now made capturing the
Königsberg
its highest priority. British vessels, hurriedly repainted from civilian white to wartime gray, tracked her to the Rufiji Delta south of Dar. The dreadnoughts were unable to enter the shallow waters, and the
Königsberg
remained concealed within mazy miles of mangrove swamp. While Denys and the Somalis patrolled the border three hundred miles to the north, the
Königsberg
was blockaded in the Rufiji for 255 days in one of the most protracted naval engagements in history—one that occupied twenty-seven British ships and burned 38,000 tons of coal. The ship and her company literally decayed in the pestilential palm groves, but when she was eventually sunk, 120 survivors were able to join the land campaign, and even the ten guns that had been thrown overboard were salvaged. Six weeks later, an even greater disaster unfolded when a four-thousand-strong Indian expeditionary force consisting of British officers and their sepoys made an amphibious assault on Tanga, the ocean terminus of one of the German railways and the country’s second port. It was a pretty town laid out with the neat, whitewashed houses of German settlers, but horribly humid in November. The Indian troops were poorly trained and equipped, and the story of the battle reads like one of the infamous cock-ups of the Light Brigade kind that litter British military history. Secrecy was overlooked to the extent that Nairobi newspapers reported the attack before it took place, and, unknown to army commanders, the Royal Navy had already signed an unratified truce with the German authorities in Tanga. When the fighting finally began, hundreds of thousands of bees joined in when machine-gun fire shattered their hives. The battle plan, conceived in London, was ill-suited to the terrain. The Indian divisions were visibly terrified. British casualties reached 817; the day after the failed invasion, hundreds of corpses lay in heaps, putrefying in the sun. The Germans had been outnumbered eight to one, but besides winning outright they also captured enough weapons, telephone equipment, and clothing to last a year. German settlers mobilized behind von Lettow. “The success at Tanga called forth and revived the determination to resist all over the Colony,” he recalled. It would not, after all, be over by Christmas. The settlers realized they might lose all they had built up. Sitting it out up in Gilgil, Galbraith noted, “This reverse will increase the difficulty of our taking GEA a hundredfold.” In Europe the western front, locked into the trench system, settled into self-destructive stalemate.

THE YEAR 1915
was a bad one for the Allies in East Africa. There were no major land battles, just a slow guerrilla war of attrition. The Germans had been cut off from supplies and reinforcements by a naval blockade, and von Lettow realized that he could not win a conventional war. Instead, he had to husband his ammunition and equip his forces for the long haul. He decided to encourage the enemy to attack, and thereby tie up as many Allied troops as possible for as long as possible. To this end, he quickly developed a small, flexible field force with units capable of waging guerrilla warfare for as long as it took. Every month, the
Schütztruppe
became more efficient. Von Lettow was a brilliant guerrilla strategist, and his
askaris
were to enter military folklore. Resourceful German colonists applied themselves to producing supplies, even extracting their own quinine to combat malaria. Up in Nairobi, the papers had little to report except casualties until June 26, when, after months of waiting, news came through that a combined military and naval force had captured Bukoba, a German settlement on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. This was the first real good news for the settlers. “Now the scene should change, and the thermometer of our spirits and hopes rise rapidly,” the
Leader
reported. But the mercury continued to fall.

The sulfurous British intelligence chief Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen was consistently critical of Allied commanders. He was present at Tanga, and later stated in print that it was “the best example I know of how a battle should not be fought.” A pipe-smoking ornithologist with a small mustache and dark hair that he wore slicked over his head, before the war Meinertzhagen had served in Kenya with the Third Battalion of the King’s African Rifles. In a famous incident in 1905, he met the Nandi
Laibon
(chief) to negotiate a truce. As the pair were shaking hands, Meinertzhagen shot the man dead. He was recommended for a Victoria Cross. “On the whole,” he confided in his diary that evening, “I am feeling rather pleased with myself.” His Teutonic name, it was now said, was regrettable.

Meinertzhagen ranted about the Allied commanders who strutted around their cars dressed in tight knee-high boots, thigh-baggy trousers, pith helmets, and belted bush jackets slung with field glasses, and he judged that none were of the caliber of von Lettow.
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Whether they were as bad as he suggested or not, they were certainly handicapped by lack of manpower, despite the arrival of the Loyal North Lancashires (the only regular British unit to serve in the campaign). In the war rooms of Europe, the invasion of South-West Africa was considered the only significant action on the continent, and East Africa remained a low priority. Politicians had plenty to occupy them elsewhere: as the bees were stinging at Tanga, bombs had already fallen on England and twenty-four thousand Tommies on a shilling a day had been slaughtered at Ypres. Throughout 1915, Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, considered that as East Africa was strategically worthless, it needed only to be defended, and he sent his manpower to other fronts, especially as the losses in France mounted. But Rhodesian forces landed at Mombasa in 1915, and so did the Legion of Frontiersmen, officially gazetted as the Twenty-fifth Battalion of Royal Fusiliers. Personnel included Arctic seal poachers, a Buckingham Palace valet, and Northrup McMillan, the twenty-two-stone Canadian American.

Still camped north of Kilimanjaro, Denys and his unit were experiencing difficulties of their own. The Somalis may have enjoyed drilling, but they found aspects of army discipline unacceptable and eventually mutinied. For three days, Berkeley reported to his brother, “it was touch and go,” and the officers believed their throats would be slit at any moment. But disaster was averted, and most of the Somalis were deported. Berkeley was put in charge of a hundred mounted infantrymen from the Loyal North Lancashires and a company of Gurkhas with a Maxim gun, Cranworth took over the remaining Somalis, and they amalgamated in a new unit called Cole’s Scouts. Denys and Tich joined them, along with Denys’s Somaliland companion Baron Blanc, now employed as an intelligence officer. They were using Somali horses and transport donkeys; Cranworth got hold of iodine to paint his mounts black-and-white so they looked like zebras. Under orders to patrol the border along the southern game reserve, the Scouts found themselves in scrubby country that gently rose and fell around the water holes. There was little action. “We spent long hours mounted and dismounted, and especially at machine-gun work, surely the dullest of all human occupations,” Cranworth wrote. One evening, the lions beyond camp seemed especially numerous—and to be closing in. When the roaring (actually somewhere between a grunt and a growl) shook the glasses on the officers’ table, Denys grabbed a torch and went out, taking Cranworth with him, though the latter at least picked up a loaded rifle. “Steadily the roars approached till they seemed all around us and I broke into a cold sweat,” Cranworth recalled. “There came a minute’s pause and then the awe-inspiring sound boomed off right against us and the hair rose on my head. Denys switched on his torch and focused it full on a great tawny brute, certainly not ten yards away. ‘You can stay and be eaten if you like. I’m off to the mess,’ I said. Denys laughed and came with me only with the utmost reluctance.” For Denys, there was always one more roll of the dice.

By July, the Scouts had moved southwest to join the main advance camp at Maktau on the Voi-Taveta Road. The Germans had been driven back across the border and were camped fifteen miles away at their advance base on Mbyuni, a low hill in one of the corridors between the colonies. The Allies were about to attack under the command of Brigadier General Wilfrid Malleson. Everybody except him was baffled by the decision to attack Mbyuni; even if the Allies had won the position, they would have been obliged to retreat to Maktau, whence they had come. “Presumably there was some reason for the enterprise, but it was never disclosed to us before or after,” Cranworth noted. He had been obliged to ride a mule all the way from Maktau; his black-and-white-striped horses had died, presumably of iodine poisoning. Cole’s Scouts led the flanking column and approached the German position in darkness. Machine-gun and rifle fire from rock and sand emplacements foiled the main attack, and no one among the Allies knew what they were supposed to be doing. At one stage the Scouts lay in the bush for hours, awaiting orders and under fire from a concealed sniper. Denys went to sleep under a thorn tree. But it was a costly muddle. A junior officer grappling with a heliograph in long grass remembered the endless moaning column of wounded streaming past him. “The damaged, dusty gory men reminded me of broken tools,” he said. When the command came to retire, British casualties numbered two hundred, German twenty-seven, and whorls of vultures hovered over the abandoned dead. “We have lost the initiative,” Meinertzhagen commented sourly. “If only they [the Germans] would capture Malleson it might be an advantage.”
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“If the initial attempt of the expeditionary forces had been successful,” Denys wrote home to Pussy in the surviving note, “the Germans would have probably given in very soon, but unfortunately, as you know, it was a fiasco owing to over-confidence. As it is now, they are rather pleased with themselves and are giving as good as they get. They have the advantage that most of their troops are African and know the country, whereas the bulk of our forces are Indian, are unused to this country, and go sick very easily.” Cole’s Scouts was now disbanded—perhaps inevitably, the blustering commando units of the early days had been subsumed into the large and strictly conventional East African Mounted Rifles (EAMR). Denys went back to Nairobi to arrange a scouting job in a different area. While he was there, he saw the photographs and films of Belgium that were being shown on the bioscope at the Theatre Royal. Denys was sick of war, but did not want it to end “before the Germans have had a taste of what they have given Belgium and France.”

He collected his letters from the main post office, among them a long one from Pussy. She had married and had three children in rapid succession; when a fourth appeared in January 1915 she called him Denys, and now wrote to ask the other Denys to be godfather—his second namesake. He replied with a gracious acceptance, declaring that he wanted to present his godson with a German scalp to commemorate his birth. But his lighthearted letters from Pussy were anomalous. Most of his mail was unfathomable in its horror, a raid on the inarticulate. His friends were all being killed. (“Jesus, make it stop,” the poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote from the trenches.) Charles Lister, the trade-union-supporting son of Lord Ribblesdale, had perished on a hospital ship off Cape Helles in August 1915 after being wounded three times at Gallipoli. Julian Grenfell had won a DSO at Ypres. He went home on leave, returned to the front with his three greyhounds, and was killed in May 1915. His brother Billy died two months later, within a mile of where Julian was hit. The marmalade-headed Patrick Shaw Stewart wrote to his lover, their mother, Ettie Grenfell, on the loss of her boys: “Darling, if I could only give up my life to you and be a thousandth part of what you have lost.” But the war hadn’t finished with Ettie. Shaw Stewart, who had distinguished himself at Gallipoli, was to die at Cambrai in 1917 while temporarily commanding a battalion. Going around his line at dawn, he was hit in the face by shrapnel and killed instantly. He was twenty-nine. Among his papers they found a poem in his hand: