BLINDMAN’S BUFF.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 16301, 29 November 1918, Page 4

BLINDMAN’S BUFF.

GAME LASTS FOUR YEARS,

EAST AFRICAN “SIDE-SHOW.” “LORDS OF THE TWENTY'-FIVE LASHES.” [On November 16, 1918, General Lettow von Vorbeck, commanding all German forces still in Africa, surrendered unconditionally. Here are some aspects of this extraordinary campaign in the bush from the pen of Captain Francis Brett Young, author of “Marching on Tanga. ”J

On November 27 the Mahengo Force, under Colonel Tafel, surrendered with 3500 officers and men, and with this disaster the position of the other main body, under von Lettow, tho com-mandcr-ih-chiof, became so perilous that ho abandoned his guns and his supplies, escaping as quickly as ho might across tho llovuma into the territory of the Portuguese. Thus ends at Inst in East Africa tho dominion of a people whoso civilisation has won for thorn in the mouths of their subject races the name of “Lords of the Twenty-live Lashes.” At last, one says, for the campaign has boon long and curiously ful of hopes deferred, and so little of its detailed strategy has been known that people in Europe have thought it hardly worth tho trouble of understanding. That it has been a “side-show” no member of the East African Field Force will deny; but, for all that, every student of war i must admit that the conquest, in a i period of 19 months, of a country twice l the size of Germany, a villainous land of swamp and mountain and desert, as full of pestilence as any in Central Africa, waterless, roadless, utterly unsuited to tho sustenance and transport of great armies, in a military feat for which if would be difficult to find' parallels in the history of war. It is an obvious thing to point out that the natural difficulties of climate and country may have been the equal enemies of ourselves and of tho Germans; but this is only half the truth, for the Germans, in their 1000-mile retreat, were always following tho plans of their staff; every,mile of their retirement brought them nearer to bases and food depots, of which the exact capacity was known; for every tactical emergency they had provided vast caches of food and of munitions. Again, their columns moved in full knowledge of tho country through which they must pass, while ours marched as blindly as any jiarty of pioneers feeling their way

through unexpected recesses. Even in the incidence of disease the scales were weighted against us; for the bulk of the German troops were negroes, living in their natural environment, and the Germans themselves old colonists, “salted,” as the phrase goes, against tropical disease while our men were dwellers in the temperature highlands of South Africa, fa ir-skinncd Indian hillmen, and boys from Cornwall and Lancashire. NATURAL DEFENCE. . As for the lie of the land, one can .imagine the pious German deciding that God made it precisely for the prosecution or a successfuTdefensive campaign. Along the _ English border lay the mighty bastion of the-Pare and Usambara Mountains, pivoting on KilimaNjaro; behind these, and parallel, the lauga Strategic Railway, a perfect line ot lateral communication; behind the railway the obstacle of the Pungani River; beyond the Pungani a zone of waterless desert; and then, again, a second strategic railway of eight hundred miles. All these obstacles stand

in tlie path of the invader advancing from British soil; all were capable of stubborn defence; and even if these lines were forced, there lay behind them a further series of groat rivers, running, as do all the waterways of East Africa, from west to oast-; —the Bufiji, the Matandu, the Lnkuledi, and lastly, on the Portuguese border, the Rovuma. Such were the obstacles which, in the end, wo have overcome. The history of this long campaign falls naturally into three phases. The first of these extends from the declaration of war in August, 1914, until the arrival of General Smuts in March, 1916. It was the longest and the weariest of all. Its endurance and privations were not perhaps so great as those which were borne in the periods which followed it; but from the military point I of view it was full of doubt, of anxiety, and of actual peril. Our troops were few in number; the land frontier which they defended was six hundred miles in length. Our attack from the sea. at Tanga had been a failure. On every sector of the front the enemy were in occupation of British territory. Between Mombasa and the Germans there, lay no force but that of the romantic Wavel and his devoted Arabs, The outpost of Tavcta. threatened- the continuity of the Uganda Railway, Nairobi, the capital, was menaced by the garrison at Longido. If the German forces had then shown an initiative in attack equal to their later ingenuity in defence, it is difficult to say what might have happened to our colony. The year .1915 was full of scattered fighting, mainly in the Tsavo Valley and on the Longido lino, in which the K.A.R., the first regiments of Indian Expeditionary Force “B”—notably the Kashmiris and Baluchis—and the Loyal North Lancs., were principally engaged. Meanwhile the supremo command passed into the hands of General Sir Michael Tighe, who began to prepare methodically for the offensive of 1916, by throwing out the now military railway from Voi towards the German frontier, and running a pipe lino from the watery hills of Bura to the desert in front of Maktau. In his path lay the German stronghold of Salaita Hill. Against this position the first advance of the new campaign was made; but the first battle of Salaita is an engagement of which wo do not boast.

SMUT’S FIRST BLOW. The second phase opened with the arrival of Smuts. Brilliantly, on the eve of rains, ho reaped the harvest of Tighe’s labours in a sudden and staggering blow upon the one vulnerable point in the Germans’ mountain frontier. Van Deventer’s cavalry were cast in a wide encircling movement. North of Kilima-Njaro another column moved on Moshi. The Germans were thrown out of Taveta, stood, and were beaten, on the ridge of Latcma, and then attacked once more, despairingly, at Kahe, where Sheppard lay astride the Tanga lino. Then came the rains. In the first days of them Van Deventer pushed out to the post of Kondoa Irangi, in the heart of the enemy country, and held it. At the end of May Smuts struck again. This time south-east, along the valley of Pangani. It was a matter of forced marches, with transport dying like flics in winter and 1 rearguard actions all the way; and at last, for all our endeavours the German northern army under Kraut escaped us by the crossing of tho Pangam at Mkalamo, and hurried south towards tho Central Railway. Once more, in the face of unspeakable transport difficulties, the chase began. At the Lukigura, the first of the now river systems, we caught Kraut up again and handled him roughly. Then, perforce, we lay for six weeks in purgatory named M’siha, breathless, under tho shadow of the Uluguru Hills. By the end of this time Van Deventer was ready to move again. In three columns he descended on the Central Railway; while Smuts forced the passage of the Wnmi in a stubborn fight and entered Morogoro, isolating tho capital, Dar-es-Salaam. Nor was this triumph, as everyone would have imagined, tho cud. -On the heels of von Lettow, Smuts followed, sweeping through the defences of the Uluguru Hills forcing the Germans into the M’geta Valley, where they lay at tho village of Kissaki. Twice wo attacked them there, and at last they yielded to a threat on their left flank,.and fled to the swampy delta of the Rufigi, where, for the winter rains, wc, left them.

THE LAST PHASE. Thus opened the third phase, the last and in some ways tho bitterest. The brilliant flanking move of Bcves and the South African infantry dislodged tho enemy from tho Rufiji Valley. Landings of troops at Kilwa and .it Lindi pushed him inward from the coast. Terriblo difficulties of transport, scarcity of food, and, above all, the inroads of malaria, contributed to tho miseries of our forces, now operating for the most part in small and isolated columns. It was a game of blind man’s buff in a thorn-choked country half the size of France, in which the players, von Lettow, Tafel, Norths Van Deventer; and Huygho, the Belgian, met as often by chance as by design. On either side posts wore held for a little while and then abandoned for want of food. It seemed as if the end of,this warfare could only come win. r-lie exhaustion of tho Gorman resources. Nothing else short of a- miracle could end of struggle. It is this miracle that General Van Deventer, in the swift movements of the last few weeks, has performed.

It is, I think unsoldierly to enter into a competition for the exploitation of one’s sufferings, and there is ala-ays a chance that those who complain loudest will bo thought to have suffered most, but, for all that, it is doubtful if tioops in any theatre have achieved or suffered more than the fever-stricken company of the East African Field Force Indians, Africans, and Europeans