The missionaries and the Allied civilians released from Tabora have the
usual tale to tell of German beastliness, of white men forced to dig
roads and gardens, wheel barrows and other degrading work under the
guard of native soldiers, insulted, humiliated, degraded before the
native Askaris at the instance of German officers and N.C.O.s in charge.
The Italian Consul-General working in the roads! We may forget all this:
it is in keeping with our soft and sentimental ways. But will the
French? Will Italy forgive? There will be no weakness there when the day
of reckoning comes. All this we had from the Commission of Inquiry in
Morogoro and Mombasa that sat to take evidence. Gentle nurses of the
Universities' English Mission, missionary ladies who devoted a lifetime
in the service of the Huns and the natives in German East, locked up
behind barbed wire for two years, without privacy of any kind,
constantly spied upon in their huts at night by the native guard, always
in terror that the black man, now unrestrained, even encouraged by his
German master, should do his worst. Can you wonder that they kept their
poison tablets for ever in their pockets that they might have close at
hand an end that was merciful indeed compared with what they would
suffer at native hands? So with many tears of relief they cast friendly
Death into the bushes as the Askaris fled before the dust of our
approaching columns. Do you blame gentle Sister Mabel that she would
never speak to any Hun in German, using only Swahili and precious little
of that?

Far worse the story told by the broken Indian soldiers, prisoners since
the fight at Jassin, left abandoned, half dead with dysentery and fever,
by the Germans on their retreat to Mahenge. A commission of inquiry held
by British officers of Native Indian regiments elicited the facts. The
remains of two double companies, one Kashmiris, the other Bombay
Grenadiers, to the number of 150, were brought to Morogoro and there
farmed out to German contractors. Here they toiled on the railway,
clearing the land, bringing in wood from the jungle building roads, half
starved and savagely ill-treated. They might burn with fever or waste
their feeble strength in dysentery, it made no difference to their
brutal jailers. To be sick was to malinger in German eyes: so they got
"Kiboko" and their rations reduced, because, forsooth, a man who could
not work could also not eat. To "Kiboko" a prisoner of war and an Ind