And during all this time the entry in the War Diary of the Regiment, “Half Rations,” sounds its reiterated and despairing note.
On the 23rd February the Gold Coast Regiment moved out of Njimbwe camp at daybreak, marched to Ngarambi Chini, which was reached at 2 p.m., and where an hour’s halt was called. The march was continued till 6 p.m., at which time Namatewa was reached. The distance traversed was a good twenty miles, which at any time is a tough bit of work for a body of marching men, but though a few swamps were met with the road was drier than might have been expected. None the less, the men, in their then half-famished condition, arrived very tired, and were glad to find that the Pioneer Company, which had gone on in advance, had got a comfortable camp ready for their reception, and had succeeded in finding excellent water. This latter feat had been performed, not for the first time, by Corporal Musa Fra-Fra, a native of the North-Eastern Province of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. This man seemed to possess some strange instinct which enabled him unerringly to discover water if such were to be obtained anywhere by digging or otherwise; and though he obstinately refused to reveal his secret or to show any one how to perform similar miracles, frequent use was made of his strange faculty by the officers of the Pioneer Company during the campaign in East Africa.
From this point the Regiment marched by fairly easy stages to Kitambi, at the foot of the hills, to Mtumbei Chini, Chemera, and Mitole, where it arrived on the 27th February, and went into camp to reorganize and recuperate. The men had richly earned a period of rest, for they had been continuously on the march or on active service ever since their arrival at Kilindini, in British East Africa, exactly seven months earlier.
Colonel R. A. de B. Rose, D.S.O., who had actively commanded the Regiment ever since the end of August, 1914, who had served with it throughout the Kameruns campaign before bringing it to East Africa, and who since January 20th had been in command of a column, was made a Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel with effect from the 1st January, 1917, to the great satisfaction of the officers and men.
This pause in the Regiment’s activities, though it was not destined to prove of any long duration, may be taken as providing a convenient opportunity briefly to review the general military situation as it stood at the end of the wet season of 1917. The rains in the lower valley of the Rufiji River began this year early in February, and in the ordinary course they might be expected to last until late in May, the commencement of the dry season in tropical East Africa usually synchronizing more or less accurately with the breaking of the south-west monsoon upon the shores of Ceylon on the other side of the Indian Ocean.
As we have seen, the drive from north to south, which had been begun in earnest in the preceding August, and for participation in which the Gold Coast Regiment had arrived just in time, had had the effect of expelling the enemy first from the country between the Tanga-Moschi and the Dar-es-Salaam-Lake Tanganyika railways, and later from the country between the last-named line and the Rufiji. Once across this river, a further retreat to the south became for the enemy almost a necessity; and when he found that he could not establish his winter headquarters in the highlands about Kibata mission station, he seems to have broken his forces up into comparatively small parties, and while keeping in touch with the troops on the southern side of the Rufiji, who were under General Hannyngton’s command, to have worked steadily south, living on the country as far as possible, and gradually making his way out of the water-logged areas amid which he had been overtaken by the break-up of the dry weather early in February.
Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German Commander-in-Chief, who throughout was the living soul of the resistance offered to the British, was not a man who believed in doing things by halves, and when he found that the valley of the Rufiji was untenable, he established his main headquarters nearly two hundred miles further to the south of that river, at a place lying within thirty-five miles of the Rovuma, which is the boundary between erstwhile German and Portuguese East Africa. The spot chosen was the mission station at Massassi, which is pleasantly situated at a height of 1500 feet above sea-level, and is a point at which the principal roads running through the south-eastern portion of the territory cross one another. The main road from the port of Lindi, which runs in a south-westerly direction to Makotschera on the Rovuna, and there effects a junction with the main road which skirts the northern bank of that river from Sassaware to its mouth, crosses at Massassi the main road from Newala on the south-east, which runs in a north-westerly direction to Liwale, and thence almost due north to the Rufiji River at Mikesse. From Liwale, moreover, another main road runs in a north-easterly direction to the sea at Kilwa Kivinje, and west by south to Songea—itself a point of junction of an elaborate road-system—and thence due west to Wiedhafen on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.
Even in this campaign, it should be noted, the influence of British sea-power made itself felt, for though some supplies are known to have reached the enemy in spite of the naval blockade, the command of the sea had enabled General Hannyngton’s force to be slipped in behind the retreating Germans viâ Kilwa, and had shown to von Lettow-Vorbeck the danger he ran of being cut off or surrounded by troops rapidly transported by sea to some spot south of the scene of his land operations. Apart from the commanding position which Massassi occupied as the key-point of the main lines of communication by land in this part of the country, and from its convenient proximity to the German-Portuguese boundary, its selection as von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main headquarters during the 1917 campaign was probably due to the fact that it could not easily be outflanked by troops conveyed further to the south by sea. With his main headquarters established at this point, moreover, and with all the principal highways in this part of the country at his immediate disposal, he could freely raid the districts to the north in which the scattered British forces were strongly established, and could occupy and hold, as long as it paid him to occupy and hold them, points of vantage such as Liwale, which could conveniently be used as his advance bases.
The German troops must have suffered considerably during the months immediately following their expulsion from the country north of the Rufiji, though it is doubtful whether they were called upon to endure a greater measure of physical discomfort or more acute starvation than that which fell to the lot of the Gold Coast Regiment and the 40th Pathans in their water-logged camp at Njimbwe, or to that of the Nigerian Brigade—which had now arrived in East Africa—and which, while holding with other troops the northern bank of the Rufiji during all that dismal rainy season, went lamentably short of everything save water, of which there was always an odious superfluity.