While the great campaigns were being waged on the western fronts, there was being carried on in a more remote part of the world a series of operations which involved as hard fighting and as many difficulties as were encountered in any other field of action. The campaigns in East Africa which resulted in driving the Germans from their former colonies are described in the following narrative.
EAST AFRICA
JAN CHRISTIAAN SMUTS
Learned South Africa in The Boer War.
In the strenuous days of the Boer War I learned to know my South Africa from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean as one learns a country only under the searching test of war. I came to know the unfrequented paths, the trackless parts of the bush, the wastes where people do not often go. I believe it is generally admitted that I covered more country than any other commander in the field on either side—and my movement was not always in the direction of the enemy!
Obtaining water on the Kalahari Desert.
When the present war broke out, I proceeded once more on my extensive travels, and I became something of an expert in the waterless, sandy wastes of the southern half of German Southwest Africa. As for the Kalahari Desert, over which the movement of men and transport was supposed to be quite impossible, we did not rest until we had sunk bore-holes for water for hundreds of miles, and until we had moved a large force of thousands of mounted men across an area in which it was thought no human being could ever move. One of the reasons of our success in that campaign was that, moving through the Kalahari Desert, we struck the enemy country at its very heart. The travels of Livingstone, of Selous, who was a comrade of mine in this war, and of other illustrious men in those vast solitudes of southern Africa were as joy-rides to what we had to undergo in conducting a big campaign against the enemy, and still more against nature.
A campaign in East Africa.
Careful study of topography necessary.