Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Having failed to convince Aitken of the need to scout out the deep mangroves on the landing beach, and having listened to him refuse the help of his old company, the experienced 3rd KAR, Meinertzhagen had retired to his cabin and confided in his diary once more: ‘I tremble to think what may happen,’ he wrote, ‘if we meet with serious opposition.’

They did meet with serious opposition, and over the following three days Meinertzhagen experienced the lowest ebb of his military career. It began with a misplaced exhibition of British fair play. Aitken, deciding to honour a naval truce of coastal neutrality, allowed the naval commander, F.W. Caulfield, to sail into the port of Tanga a little after dawn on 2 November to inform Governor Auracher that hostilities would commence unless he surrendered within the hour.

Three hours later, looking through the flat view of his binoculars, Meinertzhagen could still see the Imperial Eagle fluttering over the neat whitewashed houses of the town. A pointless British mine-sweeping exercise gave the German commanders another twenty-four hours to bring in reinforcements from up the line at Moshi, and Meinertzhagen despaired as his troops only started piling off the transports and wading through the warm water of the landing beach the following night. Sitting on a mangrove root on the beach, he had turned to his diary again, writing by the full moon which also illuminated the massing British troops and their transport ships:

So here we are, with only a small portion of our force, risking a landing in the face of an enemy of unknown strength and on a beach which has not been reconnoitred and which looks like a rank mangrove swamp.

Three days later the entire British convoy steamed away in retreat from that same beach, leaving behind them the arms of three companies being inventoried by the German quartermasters and more than 700 British dead and wounded. Officers, sepoys, porters, the British corpses scattered the streets of the town, the plantations and the surrounding scrublands like a cargo of discarded dummies dropped from a passing plane. Meinertzhagen had killed two of these British dead himself. They were both 13th Rajputs, who along with the rest of their company had bolted at the first sign of heavy German machine-gun fire. With the enemy’s bullets whining in the air about him and kicking up spurts of dust at his feet, Meinertzhagen had tried to stem the panicked retreat, first with his boot and then with his pistol. A terrified Rajput had drawn his sword when Meinertzhagen ordered him to advance, so he shot him through the head. The second wasn’t even able to stand, but was crouched like a child behind a wall, crying into his hands. Meinertzhagen was so disgusted he shot him there and then through the back of the neck, more out of anger than in punishment.

The rest of the battle was equally disastrous. At one point the firing disturbed a colony of bees nesting in African hives, hollow logs tied to the trees. The advancing British soldiers were scattered both by the swarm and then by the German machine-guns that sprayed their retreat.

It was all over a couple of days later and on the morning of 5

November Meinertzhagen found himself suffering the ignominy of being treated to a breakfast by officers of the Schütztruppe as he visited their headquarters to negotiate the British surrender and withdrawal. The Germans laid on beer, eggs, cream and asparagus, and talked over the battle with him as if it had been a football game. Meinertzhagen, however, could not see it in quite the same way. He’d had to walk to the German headquarters through streets littered with the British wounded calling out to him for help, speaking in their native tongues of Hindi, Swahili, Xhosa, Urdu. In their distress, though, they’d all sounded the same; pain, as he had learnt long ago, was a Ianguage that crossed all borders.

Entering the German compound he’d seen what he first thought was a row of bamboo planting poles stuck in a deep furrow of earth. He’d looked again, wondering who would be planting here. But then he saw the furrow was sown not with seeds, but with men. The bodies of fifteen British sepoys, lying face down, each with his own bayonet stuck in his back.

Once the details of their withdrawal had been agreed Meinertzhagen left the German officers to their breakfast. He was on his way back to the British beach when he was surprised by the crack of a rifle report, then a second later by his sun helmet flying sideways from his head. He spun around and saw a German askari who, not recognising his flag of truce, had shot at him from point-blank range. Meinertzhagen felt a flood of anger rush through him. He was angry at the fiasco this battle had become, at the generals, at being on the losing side, at the wounded lying in the street and now at this askari who had shot at him. Before the soldier could fire another round, Meinertzhagen strode towards him and, reversing his grip on the truce flag, jabbed its pole into the askari’s stomach. The man bent double, and as he did Meinertzhagen wrenched the rifle from his grasp and stabbed him through the ribs with his own bayonet, thinking of the sepoys in the furrow as he did. Leaving the man curled on the dusty ground, clutching at the barrel of his rifle and choking on his own blood, Meinertzhagen went back to pick up his helmet. He examined the bullet hole with his forefinger, put it back on, glanced towards the writhing askari, then carried on down towards the beach and the British transports, swinging his truce flag as he walked.

After the failure at Tanga and the disastrous fighting at Jessin, where again Von Lettow had the pleasure of parading defeated British officers and commending them on their gallantry, the morale of the British forces was badly shaken. Kitchener was furious and advised the British leaders in Nairobi to steer clear of offensive actions and stick to defending their positions. So rather than purging Von Lettow and his troops from German East Africa, Force B had spent the last seven months having to satisfy themselves with just containing them instead. Rather than wiping out the Schütztruppe before Christmas, they had merely tolerated and endured its presence. For Meinertz-hagen, this was a sorry state of affairs, and one which rubbed raw on his nerves. British naval dominance meant the Germans had no supply access, and no reserve troops to call upon. Every casualty for them was crucial. The British had more troops and were better armed, and yet despite this Von Lettow conducted his guerrilla warfare against the British railway and any other target he could reach. It was like having a gun and no bullet, like hearing your prey on the other side of the wall and being forbidden to go and hunt it.

So far, Meinertzhagen’s intelligence work had been his only success of the war; he was particularly proud of the network of African scouts and agents he had nurtured in German East Africa. The jewel of his intelligence work, however, was a practice he called his ‘dirty paper method’. Through this he had acquired the signature of every German officer, details of troop movements, private letters, notes and coded material, all brought to him smeared and crumpled in the hands of his African agents who cleaned the German latrines. Meinertzhagen couldn’t believe his luck, or how careful the Germans were with their communications and code switching and yet how free they were with their choice of toilet paper.

Rifling in German shit, however successful, still didn’t feel much like a war to Meinertzhagen and to date he’d only had one truly satisfying encounter with the enemy. It was last Christmas Day. Meinertzhagen had seen German troops at Christmas time before. He knew they grew sentimental and relaxed during the season, and he took this opportunity to take matters into his own hands and go on a raid across the frontier. He was accompanied by another European, Major Drought, an English farmer from British East Africa who’d raised an irregular unit of wild Masi whom he commanded over like a tribal god. This unit was known around the lake as the Skin Corps, their own skins being the full extent of their uniforms.