While the engagement was in progress Colonel Rose and several members of his staff had a very narrow escape. They had been walking up and down the road at some distance to the rear when a loud explosion occurred within a few feet of them, and a man of the 22nd D.M.B., who a few moments before had been coming down the road toward them, was blown into the air, receiving terrible injuries from which he shortly afterwards died. It was a road-mine which he had touched off—a road-mine constructed, as usual, of one of the 4·1 shells from the Koenigsberg—and Colonel Rose and his companions, who as it was were only spattered from head to foot with mud, had during the last quarter of an hour repeatedly passed within a few inches of the spot where the slightest pressure upon the surface of the road would have ignited the charge. These road-mines were found with considerable frequency, and the men of the Gold Coast Regiment had a rather embarrassing habit of digging them up, and carrying them to their officers for inspection, live-fuse and all, handling the lethal things with a reckless familiarity which it was hair-erecting to witness. On the whole, however, extraordinarily little damage was done by these man-traps.
Mention has been made of the good work done by the Stokes guns under Captain Foley and Lieutenant Lamont. These guns, one of the notable inventions of the Great War, proved to be the ideal artillery for bush-warfare. Their discharge causes so slight a report that, when rifle-fire is going on, it is practically inaudible, and it was therefore very difficult for the enemy to locate the positions from which the guns were shelling them. On the other hand, the Stokes guns were very handy and could be got into action with great rapidity, while the shells thrown by them burst with a particularly loud report that was not without its moral effect, and threw a very effective charge.
The losses sustained by the Regiment from the 10th to the 12th of April amounted to 4 Europeans—Colour-Sergeant Thornett, Sergeant Mudge, and Sergeant Flatman—killed, and Lieutenant Barrett wounded; 10 men killed and 40 wounded; and 1 carrier killed and 14 wounded—in all 69 casualties. Unfortunately the losses among the rank and file included a number of old soldiers and section commanders, all of whom were at this time doubly valuable owing to the experience which they had gained during nearly four years of almost continuous[continuous] warfare.
During these three days a great strain was imposed upon Captain J. M. O’Brien, of the West African Medical Staff, and upon his assistants; and Captain O’Brien, by no means for the first time, displayed almost reckless courage while attending to the wounded under fire.
On the 13th April scouting parties sent out from the camp found that, as usual, the enemy had retired. His primary object had been to delay and embarrass the British advance, and to make it pay as heavily as might be for its passage over a few miles of road lying through particularly difficult country. This he had achieved; and if indeed the boma at Medo had contained any accumulation of supplies, he had also succeeded in removing them before he was compelled to evacuate that place, for none were found when the troops occupied Medo on the 13th April. Meanwhile “Pamforce,” which throughout the three days’ fighting had been engaged in attacking and being attacked by an enemy who, from beginning to end, remained practically invisible, was no nearer the fulfilment of its purpose—the wearing down or rounding up of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces—than it had been when, more than three months earlier, it had first landed at Port Amelia.
CHAPTER XVII
THE ADVANCES FROM MEDO TO KORONJE AND
MSALU
All that remained of the Portuguese boma at Medo was the deep ditch by which it had been surrounded, and the mound or earthwork fashioned from the earth that had been excavated from it. Any buildings that these fortifications may have been designed to protect had long ago been burned to the ground, and save for a big red-brick store, with an iron roof, situated outside the ditch, there was no habitable place in the immediate vicinity. It can never have been of much military value, except against attacks delivered by natives armed with primitive weapons, and its capture and occupation by the British conferred upon the latter no material advantage. Medo, however, or rather the place a few miles east of it where Rock Camp had been formed, marks the beginning of a stretch of very blind and difficult country, where big clumps of bamboos are numerous, where bamboo-brakes of considerable extent are not infrequently encountered, and where elephant grass nine feet high is a common feature. Further on along the road, as the columns advanced, more broken ground was met with, and numbers of isolated rocky hills, often fantastically shaped—the solitary curved horn of the rhinoceros being one of the forms most commonly represented—provided the enemy with excellent observation-posts from which every movement of the British troops could be watched and provided against.
On the 13th April the two columns camped at Medo, and on the following day a strong officer’s patrol of the 4th Battalion of the 4th King’s African Rifles went down the road toward Mwalia, and speedily found itself engaged with the enemy. Von Lettow-Vorbeck and Kohl had allowed the British, very slowly and painfully, to work their way inland from the coast from a distance of eighty-four miles to Medo; and having now drawn them on into a very difficult belt of country, they were preparing to ambush the advance once or twice daily, to make the troops fight as often as possible and in disadvantageous circumstances, for the camping-ground and for their supply of water, and to withhold from them any chance of dealing a very effective blow at their ubiquitous and elusive enemy.
The campaign was at once more harassing and less hopeful than had been the advance from Narungombe to Lukuledi in the preceding year, for then “Linforce” had been working its way inland from Lindi, and there had always been a chance of the enemy being enveloped by the converging columns; and the country, though thick and difficult, had not been so blind and so impenetrable as that through which “Pamforce” was at present engaged in making its way. Now, too, there was no British force closely co-operating with “Rosecol” and “Kartucol” to threaten the enemy’s flank and rear, though some of General Northey’s troops had made their way in a south-easterly direction from Mahenge, and were known to have crossed the Rovuma, and Colonel Rose, while still in command in Portuguese East Africa, had succeeded in getting the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd King’s African Rifles dispatched to Mozambique, where, under Colonel Phillips, they were brigaded with a Portuguese force under Major Leal. There was, however, no immediate prospect of bringing von Lettow-Vorbeck to a definite action, for there no longer existed German posts, such as Ruponda, Massassi and Newala, the defence of which was important to him because their capture would work him a measure of moral and even of material injury. Instead von Lettow-Vorbeck, at this time, seemed to have the whole of the vast continent of Africa into which to retreat, and the prospect of surrounding or cutting off any large body of his forces was felt by all to be more remote than ever.
None the less, “Pamforce” continued to move forward down the road from Medo to Mwalia and from Mwalia to Koronje, with ever-lengthening lines of communication stringing out behind it, and with daily ambushes delaying its progress. These, often enough, were laid for it by small enemy posts consisting of one native non-commissioned officer and half a dozen Askari, but in such blind country it was on each occasion necessary to clear up the situation before the advance could be continued, lest the column should find themselves caught in some more elaborate trap with results that might well prove to be disastrous. Moreover, the character of the country, which greatly favoured the tactics that the enemy was now adopting, practically confined the British to a series of frontal attacks, as it did not admit of flanking movements being successfully carried out.