One day my luck turned. It was my business to treat a new arrival who went by the name of Rosen—something or other. A Jew at any rate. He had been left behind somewhere in the neighbourhood of Morogoro, had been taken unarmed, had claimed to be a missionary, and had been treated as such. Personally I am convinced that he was a waiter, and an appalling specimen at that. When he discovered that he was on the point of repatriation, he remembered that he had been born at Kalisch, in Poland, and was therefore a Russian. Anything in the world to keep out of Germany. You see, the papers were full of the stories of bread riots and fat tickets, and, for all his religious protestations, his only god, as far as I could gather, was his belly. When the day came nearer he sprung an attack of fever. I’m prepared to admit that it was genuine enough, but he certainly made the most of it.
“Herr Doktor,” he said to me, clasping his hands in front of him, so that I could see no less than ten black finger-nails, “it is probable that the next attack will kill me. I have had blackwater fever five times. I understand this disease. I have been for many years in Africa, and if you will pardon me saying so, I understand myself.”
So did I; but although I hadn’t any possible use for the swine, the mere mean ingenuity which he showed in his attempts to avoid returning to Germany amused me, and so, sometimes, I let him talk. He had lived in England. I must confess that for a missionary he was pretty well acquainted with the least reputable bars and lounges of the West End. Of course he was a waiter . . . or perhaps he had been a steward on a British liner. He was great on idiomatic English and the slang of the nineties, and from time to time he would trot out the names of Englishmen whom he had befriended or whose lives he had saved in German East. One day he startled me with the remembered name of Bullace. “Bullace?” I said. “Yes . . . I knew him. Tell me about him.”
“Ah, Herr Doktor,” he said, “then you knew, no doubt, my old friend’s failing? A sad thing for a brother missionary. Twice I nursed him with what you call the jim-jams.”
I questioned him about Luguru, about Godovius, about James. He shook his head.
“But do you not know what happened at Luguru early in the war?” he said.
At last he had found a chance of entertaining me without so much painful effort. He settled down to it. He was charmed to tell me everything he knew.
It surprised him that we, in British East, should have known nothing about it. Quite a sensation, he said. At the time when it all happened he had been in Kilossa. He was at great pains to explain that his mission lay near to that place. Those were early days of the war, and all his community had volunteered for work—noncombatant work—in the field. They were all gathered together at Kilossa, waiting for orders.
And then, one day a message came over the wire from a small station near M’papwa. The stationmaster, a fool of a fellow, had been given a message about some native rising at Luguru. He hadn’t had the sense to detain the messenger. Madness . . . but the Germans were such a simple, trustful people. A rising at Luguru, where the levies of Godovius were believed to be in training; where, only a few days before, a caravan of rifles and ammunition had been sent. Still, the news was definite enough, and there was no time to be lost. Volunteers were asked for. Ober-Leutenant Stein, a planter himself, was put in charge. “And I offered to go with them,” said the little Jew.
“But you are a missionary. . . . You cannot carry arms . . .”