DAR-ES-SALAAM
(The Haven of Peace)
This town is indeed a Haven of Peace for our weary soldiers. The only rest in a really civilised place that they have had after many hundreds of miles of road and forest and trackless thirsty bush. In the cool wards of the big South African Hospital many of them enjoy the only rest that they have known for months. Fever-stricken wrecks are they of the men that marched so eagerly to Kilimanjaro nine weary months before. Months of heat and thirst and tiredness, of malaria that left them burning under trees by the roadside till the questing ambulance could find them, of dysentery that robbed their nights of sleep, of dust and flies and savage bush fighting. And now they lie between cool sheets and watch the sisters as they flit among the shadows of cool, shaded wards. Only a short three months before and this was the "Kaiserhof," the first hotel on the East Coast of Africa, as the German manager, with loud boastfulness, proclaimed.
There had been a time when we doctors, then at Nairobi and living in comfortable mosquito-proof houses, had blamed the men for drinking unboiled water and for discarding their mosquito nets. But even doctors sometimes live and learn, and those of us who went right forward with the troops came to know how impracticable it was to carry out the Army Order that bade a man drink only boiled water and sleep beneath a net. Late in the night the infantryman staggers to the camp that lies among thorn bushes, hungry and tired and full of fever. How then could one expect him to put up a mosquito net in the pitch-black darkness in a country where every tree has got a thorn? Long ago the army's mosquito nets have adorned the prickly bushes of the waterless deserts. "Tuck your mosquito net well in at night," so runs the Army Order. But what does it profit him to tuck in the net when dysentery drags him from his blanket every hour at night?
From the verandah of the hospital the soldier sees the hospital ship all lighted up at night with red and green lights, the ship that's going to take him out of this infernal climate to where the mosquitoes are uninfected and tsetse flies bite no more. And there are no regrets that the rainy season is commencing, and this is no longer a campaign for the white soldier. On the sunlit slopes of Wynberg he will contemplate the white sands of Muizenberg and recover the strength that he will want again, in four months' time, in the swamps of the Rufigi. Now the time has come for the black troops to see through the rest of the rainy season, to sit upon the highlands and watch, across miles of intervening swamp, the tiny points of fire that are the camp fires of German Askaris.
Through the shady streets of this lovely town wander our soldier invalids in their blue and grey hospital uniforms, along the well-paved roads, neat boulevards, immaculate gardens and avenues of mangoes and feathery palm trees. Along the sea front at night in front of the big German hospital that now houses our surgical cases, you will find these invalids walking past the cemetery where the "good Huns" sleep, sitting on the beach, enjoying the cool sea breeze that sweeps into the town on the North-East Monsoon.
Imagine the loveliest little land-locked harbour in the world, a white strip of coral and of sand, groves of feathery palms, graceful shady mangoes, huge baobab trees that were here when Vasco da Gama's soldiers trod these native paths; and among them fine stone houses, soft red-tiled roofs, verandahs all screened with mosquito gauze and excellently well laid out, and you have Dar-es-Salaam.
Nothing is left of the old Arab village that was here for centuries before the German planted this garden-city. Sloping coral sands, where Arab dhows have beached themselves for ages past, are now supporting the newest and most modern of tropical warehouses and wharves, electric cranes, travelling cargo-carriers and a well-planned railway goods yard that takes the freights of Hamburg to the heart of Central Africa.