f Muizenberg and recover the strength that he will want
again, in four months' time, in the swamps of the Rufigi. Now the time
has come for the black troops to see through the rest of the rainy
season, to sit upon the highlands and watch, across miles of intervening
swamp, the tiny points of fire that are the camp fires of German
Askaris.

Through the shady streets of this lovely town wander our soldier
invalids in their blue and grey hospital uniforms, along the well-paved
roads, neat boulevards, immaculate gardens and avenues of mangoes and
feathery palm trees. Along the sea front at night in front of the big
German hospital that now houses our surgical cases, you will find these
invalids walking past the cemetery where the "good Huns" sleep, sitting
on the beach, enjoying the cool sea breeze that sweeps into the town on
the North-East Monsoon.

Imagine the loveliest little land-locked harbour in the world, a white
strip of coral and of sand, groves of feathery palms, graceful shady
mangoes, huge baobab trees that were here when Vasco da Gama's soldiers
trod these native paths; and among them fine stone houses, soft
red-tiled roofs, verandahs all screened with mosquito gauze and
excellently well laid out, and you have Dar-es-Salaam.

Nothing is left of the old Arab village that was here for centuries
before the German planted this garden-city. Sloping coral sands, where
Arab dhows have beached themselves for ages past, are now supporting the
newest and most modern of tropical warehouses and wharves, electric
cranes, travelling cargo-carriers and a well-planned railway goods yard
that takes the freights of Hamburg to the heart of Central Africa.

It must be pain and grief to the German men and women whom our clemency
allows to occupy their houses, throng the streets and read the daily
Reuter cablegram, to see this town, the apple of their eye, defiled by
the "dirty English" the hated "beefs," as they call us from a mistaken
idea of our fondness for that tinned delicacy.

But the soldiers' daily swim in the harbour is undisturbed by sharks,
and the feel of the soft water is like satin to their bodies. Not for
these spare and slender figures the prickly heat that torments fat and
beery German bodies and makes sea-bathing anathema to the Hun. On German
yachts the lucky few of officers and men are carried on soft breezes
round the harbour and outside the harbour mouth in the evening coolness.

Arab dhows sail lazily