From the village, a track runs out south along the west bank of the Dunthumi River. The track is narrow but level, and passes through low country with the usual perplexing growth of tall, rank grass and thorn bush.
One may gather, from this detailed description, the immense natural difficulties of the country, and how hard it may be to turn an enemy out of such positions. Here the only area of open space—viz. the mealie-field—down which an attacking force might push rapidly forward, was ruthlessly exposed to enemy fire from no less than three sides—from the village, from the low bush north of the road, and from the dark tree-belt south of the road. It meant death to too many to attempt it. The alternative attack was to advance slowly, through the all-screening, hampering bush, upon those concealed entrenchments in the grass; never sure, even when the enemy are located by their fire, of the exact position of the foe; never sure, at any time, what the next twenty yards of jungle hold in store for you. You are blind from the time you enter the rank jungle growth until you reach the enemy’s position, and you are lucky if at the end you have sighted an enemy at all, though you have been blazing away at one another at some fifty yards. And picture the difficulty of keeping in touch with your own people in such jungle, which, the moment you enter it, swallows you up in its depth of undergrowth as if you were a rabbit taking cover in a field of ripe corn. Not only is it difficult—I might say impossible, sometimes—to know where your own people are, who are advancing on the right or left, but also it is difficult to know the movements of the enemy. One moment they may be in front of you; a few moments more, and they may be gone, undetected—all but a few bluffing rifles—to a new position, or may be working round on an open flank.
Truly the enemy chooses his positions well, and it is the country, not he, well though he fights, that robs us again and again of decisive battle. Their positions are, with rare exceptions, chosen where they and their movements cannot be seen, and thus their strength, at the many points of battle, may be either a handful of men or a dozen companies. Moreover, under cover of the bush, their lines are flexible to any change, while always, in the rear, they have sure and safe lines of retreat by which they can escape in the bush, in a dozen directions, to meet again at a given point when their flight is over. Moreover, the enemy is always on his own soil, whereas each new battle-front is, in all its details, for us an unmapped riddle of which eye and mind have no clear conception.
BUSH FOILS DECISIVE COMBAT
I have often been asked, “What were the difficulties of the campaign?”—for the uninitiated have sensed that there were difficulties—and I have answered, “Our greatest enemy to overcome was the ever-blinding, ever-foiling bush and jungle growth; our second enemy was the intensely hot climate, and subsequent disease; the third enemy was the shortage of adequate rations; and the fourth enemy was the grim tenacity of a stubborn and worthy foe.” There you have the four essential conditions that made the East African Campaign a long one. But, undoubtedly, the main condition, the one that can never be overlooked, is that, in a territory 176,210 square miles larger than Germany—which is seven-eighths larger than the whole area of the German Empire—the country was a vast, unbounded wilderness of bush, with ready cover to conceal all the armies of the world. Into that blank area were placed our tiny pawns of armies, to move and counter-move, with the touch of blind men, in pursuit of peoples who were, in their knowledge of the country, like wild animals in their native haunts.
And there for a time we must leave this subject, and the enemy—free like wild animals in the bush—while I return to our camp life at Tulo.
On the 19th of September, leaving Nkessa’s, I rejoined my unit at Tulo, and remained there ten days, while the operations of our column stood more or less at a standstill. Apparently our chase from Morogoro had entailed even greater difficulties than usual to our line of communication, and a breathing space had become imperative to attend to road repairs in the hills behind, and to augment our failing supplies.
Ultimately it transpired that our onward-pressing advance had come to a prolonged halt that was to confine us to this unhealthy area for three and a half wearisome months, while rains fell incessantly in the Ulugúru hills in the rear and blocked the road to almost all traffic. Hence we were constrained to wait in patience, holding on to our front in this low country, and subsisting on such rations as could be got through to us, while here too it rained, though in lesser quantity than in the hills. When we came down out of the hills into the low country our battalion camped for nineteen days at Tulo, before moving on, on the 30th of September, to take over permanent positions at Old and New Kissaki on the Mgeta River.
DELAYED AT TULO
A few records of Tulo may be interesting, and I will endeavour to follow our existence there for a few days.