s of French homes. Now
we were in a position to loot; but how differently our officers and men
behaved! The spoils of hundreds of German plantations at our mercy; and
hardly a thing, save what was urgently needed for hospitals or food,
taken. Every house in which the German owner lived was left unmolested;
only those abandoned to the mercy of the native plunderer had we
entered. It pays a great tribute to the natural goodness of our men,
that the German example of indiscriminate looting and destruction was
not followed.

To people in England, and, indeed, to many soldiers in France, it seemed
that this campaign of ours in German East Africa was a mere side-show.
It appeared to be a Heaven-sent opportunity to escape the cold wet
misery of the trenches in Flanders. To some it spelt an expedition of
the picnic variety; they saw in this an opportunity of spending halcyon
days in the game preserves, glorious opportunities for making
collections of big game heads, all sandwiched in with pleasant and
successful enterprises against an enemy that was waiting only a decent
excuse to surrender.

How different has been the reality, however! The picnic enterprise has
turned out to be one of the most arduous in our experience. Many of us
had served in France and the Dardanelles before, and we thought we knew
what the hardships of war could mean. If the truth be told, the soldier
suffered in East Africa, in many ways, greater hardships, performed
greater feats of endurance, endured more from fever and dysentery and
the many plagues of the country than in either of the other campaigns;
the soldier marched and fought and suffered and starved for the simple
reason that time was of the essence of the whole campaign. From June
until Christmas we had to crowd in the campaigning of a whole year; for
once the rains had started all fighting was perforce at an end. Once the
transport wheels had stopped in the black cotton soil mud the army had
to halt. All the time the great aim of the expedition was to get on and
farther on. We had to advance and risk the shortage of supplies, or we
would never reach the Central Railway. And there was not a soldier who
would not prefer to push on and suffer and finish the campaign than wait
in elegant leisure with full rations to contemplate an endless war in
the swamps of East Africa.

The early history of the war in this theatre had been far from
favourable to our arms. In late 1914 our Expeditionary Forc