Too Close to the Sun (17 page)

MEANWHILE, OVER ON
the Indian Ocean, the first batch of South Africans disembarked at Mombasa followed by another contingent of Indians. Meinertzhagen interviewed many of the South African officers and noted that “they all seem quite confident that they will finish the campaign in a couple of months.” He knew better. And so did von Lettow. Smuts himself arrived on February 19, 1916, a dapper little man with steel-blue eyes who toured Allied positions in an open gray Vauxhall and immaculate khaki drill. He was determined to start his convergent offensive as soon as possible, before the long rains began in April. Within a month his troops had finally breached the Taveta Gap and marched through the funnel into German East Africa. Capturing the German headquarters at Moschi on March 16, a Loyal Lancastrian trooper reported to a staff official, “When we arrived at the place it resembled Blackpool Winter Gardens more than anything else as far as tropical scenery went.”

Denys had been transferred to the General Staff of the First East Africa Division, the latter at this stage consisting of Indian, Rhodesian, and British troops spread over two brigades and an artillery group, with KAR and EAMR detachments. Smuts now sent them farther south. The bulk were to march through the slender forest belt that marked the course of the Pangani River, which itself more or less followed the northern railway from the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro to the coast at Tanga. As they started out, a Reuters cable reached their camp with news that the battle of Verdun had begun.

The march down the Pangani was among the most murderous maneuvers in the whole of the Allies’ endless push south in pursuit of von Lettow. Entire battalions hacked through shoulder-high razor grass while the temperature hovered at a sluggish 100 degrees. Europeans were prone to collapse with heatstroke in the still furnace of midday, even as their colleagues were freezing in the silvered Flanders trenches. On March 14, the first rain fell. The mules, which carried most of the supplies, began to sicken. Denys, moving with general headquarters behind the main columns, camped at a rubber plantation. “It is hot, and the camp is infested with every manner of noxious insect, but one cannot help enjoying the pleasure of camping on enemy territory after so many weary months on our own,” wrote Meinertzhagen, who was with them. Smuts had ordered his commanders to surround the Germans at the railway and therefore block their retreat. But troops failed to reach the railway in time. They had succeeded in pushing von Lettow south, but they had not captured him. Brigadier General Sir James Stewart, a balding figure with a toothbrush mustache, was held responsible. (He was “a hopeless, rotten soldier,” according to Meinertzhagen.) “If General Smuts considers that I am responsible for unnecessary delay, I wish to resign my command,” Stewart wired from Taveta. Smuts did blame him, and Stewart did resign. Denys had a different perspective from Meinertzhagen. He had seen decency in Stewart and did not judge him only as a soldier. He regretted Stewart’s departure and was bitter at the injustice of the military machine that destroyed the reputations of honorable men while inflating those of arrogant fools such as Brigadier General Sheppard—known as Ha Ha Splendid, the phrase he yelled whenever a fight was imminent. A month later, Denys wrote warmly to Stewart at his new post in Aden (“I still have those six bottles of Muthaiga Club champagne with me here!” the general replied cheerfully). Denys did not have the stomach for the political maneuvering that was inseparable from military command. But he now began serving under a remarkable soldier who was to play a decisive role in his army career.

Smuts had summoned Lieutenant General Reginald Hoskins from France to command the First Division. The forty-five-year-old Hoskins knew East Africa—he had been inspector general of the KAR before the war. According to Cranworth, he was “perhaps the most gifted soldier of the campaign, and certainly the most popular.” He wore a sweater rather than his regulation tunic, which Denys liked. The regard was evidently mutual: Hoskins chose him as one of his aides-de-camp, an appointment that led to Denys’s promotion to temporary lieutenant. From then on, he accompanied Hoskins and the other chiefs wherever they went, shuttling about with a map in one hand and field glasses in the other, sleeping four or five hours a night if he was lucky. He sat around tables cluttered with candles, black-boxed field telephones, soda bottles, revolvers, and papers, relaying news flashed in by heliograph and leaning back against stacked cases of rations to deliver his own strategic advice. “Never in my experience did anyone in this comparatively lowly position achieve such influence, more perhaps than that of any other member of the staff,” Cranworth wrote. Charisma is mesmerizing. People wanted to absorb themselves in Denys. “Such was his charm that I never heard a grumble at his ascendancy,” Cranworth concluded.

Much of the First Division had moved north back up the Pangani to wait out the long rains in a relatively dry camp. Hummocked bunches of blue and green bananas arrived on porters’ heads, and pyramids of hay pursued lines of ammunition crates deep into the bush. At night, cooking fires glimmered in the crowded porters’ camp that stretched behind rows of tents, where turbaned
naiks
from the Twenty-ninth Punjabis, black-fez-wearing
askaris
from the Northern Rhodesia police, and sepoys from the Second Jammu and Kashmir Rifles polished their
kukris
and cleaned their barrels, and waited. Smuts, they knew, was planning simultaneous attacks on other fronts: a British Ugandan column was coming south from Lake Victoria, another British force was moving up from Northern Rhodesia, troops were landing on the coast, and Belgians were to march into Rwanda and Urundi and on to Tabora, an important settlement in the western heartlands of German East Africa. Many figures were bandied around, but the truth was that by April the Allies were far superior in numbers: about forty-five thousand against the German sixteen thousand. The Allies were encouraged by the Portuguese declaration of war on Germany the previous month. Meinertzhagen, however, reported the first Portuguese attack as follows: “Their boats ran aground, they forgot to bring with them any food, they landed at a spot where there was no fresh water, they commenced the operation in the evening, having spent the whole day in full view of the enemy trying to make up their minds, and finally they were decimated by enemy machine guns of which I warned them and the whole force was killed or captured.” Von Lettow was more mobile than the Allies, as he had far fewer men and was operating in his own country. Smuts’s plan to surround the retreating enemy was consistently foiled as the Germans refused to stay still and allow themselves to be enveloped, time and again slipping away before the outflanking force could work around to their rear. “It is like looking for a needle in a haystack to try finding Huns in the jungle if they don’t want to be found,” one officer wrote.

While the Allies kept pushing south in pursuit of their German needles, in the middle of May Denys was still camped with Hoskins behind the lines at Kahe, west of Lake Jipe and close to the border. The rains had stopped, and the country sang. Lizards ran in peace, sap rose in the crop-headed willows, and each morning arrived amiably, as if there were no war. But the men resting at Kahe soon had to rejoin the big southern attack. On May 21, Smuts ordered Hoskins to command his division down the Pangani in three columns. Lumbering lines of men, oxen, horses, cycles, heavy guns, and wagons crawled through clouds of red dust kicked up by the animals. They had insufficient water and inadequate rations, and supply vehicles could not follow until trees were felled to form a makeshift road. Men marched for fifteen hours without food, then lay on the ground to sleep without blankets. Many contracted amoebic or bacillary dysentery, or both; others had blackwater fever, which turned their urine black and almost always ended in death. Fleas and jiggers accompanied everyone everywhere, and on the long march down the Pangani thousands of toes were amputated. Jungle sores as big as fists suppurated unchecked. The knee-length shorts and short sleeves worn by British forces left them vulnerable to mosquitoes bearing malaria (
Schütztruppen
had long sleeves and puttees), which often caused cardiac failure and insanity, as well as the better-known symptoms. The rivers they crossed were infested with crocodiles, and on the banks they all sank to their waists in mud. The crisis in the supply system worsened as they moved farther from headquarters. The exhaustion was bone-deep. It wasn’t the troglodyte world of the trenches, but it was another kind of hell. The war in East Africa—virtually unknown to the outside world—was, in its safari through purgatory, a negative metaphor for the Kenyan paradise of the epoch handed down in literature and myth. And the campaign remains buried under the weight of history, whereas Karen Blixen’s luminously famous first line—“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills”—has irreversibly enshrined the lyrical romance of the same landscape.

DENYS AND MOST
of the division stopped for a week at Buiko, a dusty railway village where the Pare Mountains ended and the Usambara chain began. They were now fifty miles inside enemy territory, but the goal of capturing von Lettow, forcing his troops to surrender, and occupying the country seemed as elusive as ever. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the Buiko station, blowing up the offices, the points system, and the water tower, and they had driven away all the inhabitants except one Indian trader, who, in a shed with a little square window that served as a counter, sold soap, cigarettes, and Sanatogen. The soap, which was blue, cost a rupee and did not lather. But lather or not, it was wonderful to rest in the Buiko dusk after so many dismal marches. In the mornings the men swam in pools, hard soldiers’ bodies breaking the dark surface and carving through the water as the dawning sun gilded their indolent guns on the bank. A woundless tranquillity settled on Buiko. On June 4, 1916, Denys, Cranworth, Sir John Willoughby, who was commanding a unit of armored cars, and Colonel Robert Lyall, in charge of the Second Kashmir Rifles, all Old Etonians, gathered to celebrate the school’s foundation. Each brought a tin of food, and Denys, typically, managed to get hold of a bottle of champagne. “Never did
floreat etona
go down better,” Cranworth remarked.

The division followed the railway down to Mombo, a small German settlement fifty-five miles west of Tanga and the coast. The air was dark with tsetse. An officer rode into camp from the signal station carrying a Reuters dispatch about the battle of Jutland. It was difficult, in the tropical radiance of East Africa, to picture rows of gray battleships disgorging black smoke over the North Sea. “When we had read it,” one officer wrote, “our minds were filled with a torturing uncertainty which shadowed the whole of that day…. It made us anxious to be done with thissideshow, to have it finished once and for all, so that we might help to get to the root of the whole tragedy, at home in Europe.” Shortly afterward, they learned about the sinking of the
Hampshire
and the loss of Kitchener. Up on the plains outside Nairobi, a group of white farmworkers sat hunched over a wireless. “Suddenly, the news came through, ‘Kitchener is dead,’” one of them recalled. “There was a hush. Everyone spoke in whispers, ‘Surely this is the end of all things?’” But nothing had ended in the East African jungle. The Germans were retreating south toward Handeni, the terminus of the narrow-gauge tramway that connected with the northern railway at Mombo. This was about a hundred miles from the Kenyan border. On June 30, Denys was driving along a stony track not far from the main German column with Hoskins and his other aide-de-camp, Lieutenant E. R. Macmullan. They were traveling without an escort. Suddenly shots crackled over the thorn trees. Snipers had ambushed the car with rifle fire. Macmullan died instantly, a spurt of dark blood arcing from his neck over the top of the filthy windshield and landing with an innocent patter on the dry rocks. The shots went on. Denys almost took a hit; there was nowhere to drive. It seemed a pointless way for a general to die. But Denys faced off the attackers with gunfire and they disappeared back into the bush. He had saved the life of Hoskins, his hero. Later, the general recommended him for a Military Cross, which he was duly awarded. It was a comparatively rare honor in 1916.

By June 20, the Allies had occupied Handeni. Smuts had other troops moving in from the east and south; it seemed he finally had the enemy on the run. On the twenty-third, Hoskins himself led a picked column to attack a German encampment on the Lukigura River. Denys marched through the night. The track was impassable by wheeled transport, so they loaded the guns onto the mules. After twenty hours on foot, they opened fire on Germans positioned on the opposite ridge of the valley. The boom of the old German rifles gradually faded. It was Hoskins’s first notable achievement and, according to the official history, “one of the few engagements of the campaign in which the British troops enjoyed the elation of victory in battle…. The whole force gained new confidence in itself and its commander.” Soon the central railway, too, was under British control, isolating its terminus, Dar es Salaam (also the seat of government). In July, Tanga fell. “One can only think with pain of the South African mob, with their cowboy habits, in well kept and clean Tanga, but this will only be a passing episode,” wrote the
Hamburg Nachricten
when the news reached the motherland.