The Australo-Mozambiquan Conflict
The Events and Chemical Operations of the War
The new era has arrived. The old established order of things has collapsed, at the same time as the antique dominatrix of the world. Europe, ravaged by the martial monomania of her populations, has allowed the scepter of the world to slip from her senile hands, and the vigorous and healthy peoples of young continents are preparing to pick it up.
The struggle today is between young Africa, overflowing with sap, exuberant with youth, and adolescent Australia.
America, the daughter of Europe, as Europe was of the great ancestor Asia, is growing old, and from now on has been thrown out of the lists; the future belongs to the nations constituted by the vast territories of Australia, or the almost virgin lands of great Africa, the mixture of a hundred diverse races, newly melted, so to speak, in the crucible of nature.
Africa and Australia have come, arms in hand, to dispute the scepter of the world, in a first collision, which has stirred the African continent from the Cape of Good Hope to Lakes Nyanza and Tanganyika, bloodying the banks of the Mozambique, the waves of the Indian Sea and the clouds racing above the Mozambiquan and Australian plains.
It is an accurate summary of the terrible events of the great Australo-Mozambiquan War that we are going to condense in a few pages, accompanying our story with a certain number of sketches collected on the terrestrial, aerial and submarine battlefields, as many by trustworthy eye-witnesses as by myself, who has had the honor of participating in the entire campaign in the capacity of volunteer aide-de-camp of the Colonel-General of the Mozambique Torpedo Corps, and who, as a result of my conduct, has been mentioned in dispatches six times in three weeks.
The Causes of the War
Everything has changed since the last century closed the era of ignorance and barbarity. Once, among the ancient peoples of the little corner of the Earth still called Europe on maps, war was only waged between adjacent or not-very-distant neighbors. There were no points of contact, no motives for war, and, above all, no means of waging it more distantly, even if anyone had wanted to.
Science, shrinking distances, removing obstacles, cutting isthmuses and perforating mountains, has created points of contact between the most distant peoples, and permitted all communications amicable or otherwise. Immense progress!
No more barriers! No more separations! Instead, commercial and financial relations between peoples, giving birth to entirely new motives for war. Peoples no longer fight nowadays for frivolous and sometimes chivalrous motives, such as the protection of a weak ally or the defense of principles of liberty, but for serious, solid reasons, most often resounding, such as advantageous commercial treaties, the opening of markets, favorable custom duties, speculations on the Stock Exchange and the regulation of financial accounts.
The Australo-Mozambiquan War had no other origin than an immense coup on the Stock Exchange. Taking advantage of the temporary embarrassment of the great African nation, caused by the great expense of the completion of its railway network, making a further eight hundred thousand kilometers available to traffic, not to mention the enormous impetus given to other public works, a group of Australian bankers was able, by means of skillful maneuvers, to cause a panic on the Mozambicoville Stock Exchange, and bought a colossal quantity of 2½% bonds at 35.75. When the operation was complete, the Australian government, interested in the scheme and acting in the name of the syndicate, demanded via diplomatic channels the reimbursement of the bonds at full value, which would have produced a net profit of eighteen and a half billions.
The Australian demand provoked a legitimate surge of indignation throughout Africa. On 15 April 1975 the President of the Republic responded with a formal refusal and immediately convened the Parliament at Livingstonia, the political capital of the great South African Republic, situated in a strong position at the extremity of Lake Tanganyika.
17 April 1975. From this day forward events will progress rapidly. Second Australian note.
Australia repeats its demand for the eighteen billions and raises another question. The Mozambiquan Parliament having raised its import duties on merchandise from Australia several years before, in order to prevent the crushing of African markets, is summoned to abolish those duties completely.
Australia gives Mozambique three days to respond, and warns that a refusal will constitute a casus belli.
18 April. Call to the flag of all men capable of bearing arms. The Mozambiquan taxpayers are invited to pay three years taxes in advance.
“What is the Fatherland?”
“It is the place where one pays one’s taxes.”
The best Fatherland must be the one where one pays the least, in money or in military service. Unfortunately, the more one progresses, the more one pays, in both fashions. We fear that the men of the twenty-first century will be tormented by the fatherland’s collectors or recruiters from weaning to the age of seventy, the age at which one will be put into the reserves.
Those are the slight inconveniences of civilization. In the barbaric centuries, the times of armies of twenty thousand men, one was acquitted much more cheaply. Everything increases, the consumption of human flesh as well as other contributions.
The Mozambiquans do not murmur. Six months before, in order to claim a little liberty hindered by a Ministry, they had had a Revolution. This time, at the first appeal, they rally as one man to the offices of revenue, customs and excise, in nature or recruitment.
19 April. Review, at Livingstonia, of the troops of the active army. Call up and mobilization of all the chemists in the territory.
Review at Mozambicoville of the four divisions of the torpedo corps.
20 April. Response of the South African Republic to the Australian Republic. The Australian demands are flatly rejected and the revision of customs tariffs refused.
The Australian ambassador leaves in a war balloon of the Australian squadron. It is war; it only remains to wait for the official declaration.
Mozambique prepares energetically to sustain the struggle. She has complete confidence in her forces. A well-planned system of torpedoes defends her coasts and the Zambezi, her great river, against the attack of the Australian submarine naval forces. It is absolutely impossible for the enemy ships to carry out a disembarkation without running into three narrowly-spaced lines of torpedoes.
Everything is prepared to repel a submarine attack and submerge the assailants. Unfortunately, an aerial attack has more chance of success; all militaries are aware of the extent to which the unexpected enters into the schemes of aerial warfare. How can one anticipate in advance the precise location of a descent, and how, even if the location were to be divined, can sufficient troops be transported there to the descent efficaciously, without removing them from another location, on which the adversary might precipitate his flying squadron?
And in fact, the Australian air fleets have, in recent times, been raised to a high degree of power, and are commanded by engineers of the greatest merit.
The Great Council of War
Engineer Marshal Blick, the commander-in-chief of the Mozambiquan forces, an old warrior curbed by sixty-five years of studies in his laboratory, meets with all the chiefs of the army aboard the admiral balloon Ravageur: the Engineer General of Military Railways, the energetic Balister; Dr. Clakson, commander-in-chief of the aerial squadrons; General Turpin, commander-in-chief of the land army, an old moustache whitened in a hundred combats; Colonel Engineer Barbarigo, commandant of the perforators; Engineer General Coloquintos, commander-in-chief of the torpedo-carriers of the line, flying, subterranean and submarine; and finally, Engineer Eugene, the commander of the mobilized chemists.
After three hours of secret discussion, the defense plan prepared long ago by the great Engineer Marshal Blick, has been adopted, save for slight modifications of detail, and the engineers have departed at top speed to take up their posts at the head of the troops.
21 April. The Light Aerial Squadron, reinforced by all the available aerial scouts and dispatch-vessels, has departed for an observation mission. Overseas, a squadron composed of the lightest balloon scouts has to reach the coast of Australia in order to track the enemy preparations.
The greatest activity reigns in the arsenals. The mobilization of railway troops is carried out with an extraordinary precision; in 13 hours 45 minutes, all the contingents have arrived at their posts with the officers, engineers and electricians of the reserve, fully assembled. The locomotives of war receive their garrisons and charge their electric accumulators. The locomotives of the active army are speeding along the iron roads inland and along the coast; the huge blockhouse-locomotives and fortresses have reached the important strategic points.
22 April. The submarine army is still at anchor off Mozambique aboard submarine frigates, on the surface. It has set up its advance posts six leagues out at sea. Off the foremost protrusion of the coast, at a depth of twelve meters, strong patrols are scouting the passes and submarine dispatch-boats are extending reconnaissance at a distance; at the first signal, the submarine forces will be able to set off for the threatened point.
23 April, 7 a.m. A telegram brings the Australian declaration of war.
7:50. A series of frightful detonations bursts forth at sea off Mozambicoville; jets of water are launched to enormous heights, clearly designating three lines of conflagration. They are the torpedoes blowing up. Engineer Marshal Blick, returning from a nocturnal aerial reconnaissance in his admiral-balloon, is nearly hit at a altitude of three hundred meters by a column of water and rocky debris.
The Australian attack has followed closely on the heels of the declaration of war.
The Mozambiquan engineers were tranquil, the dispatches of the aerial observation fleet over the Australian coast had simply announced a concentration of troops in Melbourne and a few ports.
The Australian government, having decided on the war, had very secretly sent out a strong submarine division even before sending the first note. At the very moment when the declaration of war reached Mozambicoville, the commandant of the Australian submarine corps received his instructions via a special wire connected to the first international telegraphic islet in the Mozambique Channel.
Six volunteers commanded by Engineer Electrician Pipermann slipped between the enemy posts in the torpedo-launch Fuse, destroying a Mozambiquan patrol by means of an electrical discharge, and came to attach an electric conductive wire linking the three coastal torpedo systems.
Immediately informed, the Australian admiral, sacrificing the brave men of the Fuse in order not to lose the fortunate opportunity, had activated his electrical battery. All the torpedoes disseminated over a distance of twenty leagues had blown up simultaneously. Two frigates and eight dispatch-boats, surprised by the immense conflagration, perished along with forty or fifty merchant ships, belonging for the most part to neutral nations.
23 April. Complications in the South. The Australian Atlantic Squadron, which was believed to be in America, comes in violation of human rights and treaties to land a corps of troops in the neutral territory of Kaffiria.
Port Natal has been taken by a nocturnal surprise attack. The Kaffir troops only put up feeble resistance, and King Nelusko III has contented himself with registering a protest by means of a note addressed to the diplomatic corps. The Australians, arguing links of origin between the founders of the former English colony of Port Natal and Australia, have proclaimed the annexation of Kaffiria to Australia, while announcing the intention of respecting the rights of Nelusko III if he will resign himself frankly to recognizing the suzerainty of powerful Australia.
That sudden conquest of Kaffiria gives the Australians an excellent base of operations and provides them with the key to the South-East African and Timbuktu-Congo-Cape railroads, and thus the entire Mozambiquan network.
The Statesmen of Mozambique now see the danger present for their neighbors, small neutral countries, too weak, if necessary, to compel respect for their neutrality by overly powerful and, above all, inadequately scrupulous nations.
24 April. The Australians have already received reinforcements at Port Natal by the submarine route. The Kaffir war locomotives, filled with Australian troops, have crossed the Mozambiquan frontier and have taken possession of the mountain passes after a fierce combat.
Six hundred thousand Australians left Melbourne last night by maritime, submarine and aerial routes.
Engineer Marshal Blick has rallied all his army corps in order to confront the enemy. The initial reverses, far from diminishing the courage of the Mozambiquans—on the contrary—stimulate the martial ardor of the engineers and soldiers.
25 April. Bad news from the South. The Australian locomotives are making the most of their advantages, crushing under their number the few mobile fortresses spaced out along the frontier, from which forces had been withdrawn. They have reached the great plains and hastened their progress over the roads and tracks toward the passes of Monomotapa. Their objective is Zumbo on the Zambezi, where the Timbuktu-Congo-Cape intersects with the major Mozambiquan lines of the Lakes.
Engineer Marshal Blick has gone to met them with eight hundred mobile blockhouses, a hundred and fifty thousand men of the railway infantry, and a strong aerial division.
For his part, Engineer General Coloquintos, with a superb submarine corps, is heading up the Zambezi in a submarine flotilla in order to collaborate with the defense of the Zambezi lines.
The Battle of Zumbo3
26 April. The Australians, stopped during the night by the aerial squadron’s rocket-torpedoes, mounted a vigorous offensive at four a.m. The great mass of mobile blockhouses was launched against the Mozambiquan mobile fortresses, in spite of the frightful fire vomited by the six hundred railway artillery pieces and the aerial squadron’s two or three hundred pump machine-guns.
In less than twenty minutes, the Australian right wing was repelled and almost pulverized, but a division of reserve blockhouses commanded by Adjutant Engineer Flaghurst, the savant professor of the Military University of Melbourne, replaced the destroyed locomotives and launched a vigorous assault on the breathless and badly damaged Mozambiquans. The Mozambiquans, who had thought that they were already victorious, were forced to retreat.
At five a.m., at the moment when the great Engineer Marshal Blick advanced in his admiral-balloon to clear the damaged mobile fortresses and bring forward in the midst of the debris the intact blockhouses and armored wagons, the Australian railway artillery, recognizing the Engineer Marshal’s flag in the smoke, directed all their fire at the balloon.
The Engineer Marshal, excessively scornful of the danger, leaned a little too far over his armored poop, and was hit full in the body by one of the superdynamite shells that the Australians’ new cannons sent forth with a simple two-gram cartridge. The illustrious Engineer Marshal was killed outright; all that was found of his remains were a few buttons from his uniform.
Disorder spread through the Mozambiquan lines. One after another, fourteen engineer generals were killed. The aerial squadron sacrificed itself and resolutely engaged the enemy in order to give the railway artillery time to reorganize. In the meantime, the fortresses retreated and formed up again in front of the great tunnels of Zumbo. Two companies of Mozambiquan perforators, arrived that same morning, penetrated the immense embankment of Zumbo, with a dozen electric borers traveling at two kilometers an hour.
The Mozambiquan perforators soon reached the Australians and blew up several blockhouses, but they were rapidly disemboweled and annihilated by depth-torpedoes. At that moment, as the Australians were accelerating their movement, a column of their veteran blockhouses, by way of reputedly impracticable and unguarded paths, reached the summit of the hills overlooking the tunnels and the course of the Zambezi, and covered the Mozambiquan flanks with a hurricane of iron.
The Mozambiquan engineer, fearing that he might be cut off, beat a precipitate retreat without being able to bring the torpedoes placed in front of the tunnel into play. 45,000 dead and 490 mobile fortresses destroyed or captured was the bill for that first encounter.
Noon. The passes of Monomotapa and the city of Zumbo are in the power of the enemy. The submarine division of the Zambezi has also suffered a defeat. An Australian corps, having traveled upriver at top sped in thirty-five submarine case-boats with powerful electrical engines, took the Mozambiquan submarines by surprise as they were taking on air. The casualty figures are unknown. The Australian corps, reinforced by twenty case-boats brought by aerostats, have departed for the grand canal of Loanga to rejoin the upper Zambezi and reach the Lakes.
27 April. The second Australian army has disembarked. The great port of Mozambicoville is entirely blockaded by land and sea. The Australians want to take possession of it and occupy it strongly before marching on the interior.
The Mozambiquan army, having lost the Zambezi line, is concentrating at Mazayamba in order to protect Lake Nyanza against the first Australian army. A second corps is forming up at Lucenda, at the southern end of Lake Tanganyika.
30 April. The siege of Mozambicoville is proceeding with vigor. Two suburbs have been destroyed by enemy torpedoes, but our rocket-torpedoes have blown up a position on the besiegers’ right wing along with an armored battery. The enemy perforators, having begun drilling twelve kilometers from the walls, have already reached our ramparts. The garrison of the Southern fort, surprised last night, has perished in its entirety. Honor to those brave men, crushed beneath their bunkers!
The other forts built on the rock have nothing to fear from perforators, but they are suffering greatly from the enemy’s asphyxiant shells.
31 April. The perforators have succeeded in skirting a rocky massif and penetrating, through a weak stratum of friable terrain, into the elegant quarter of Mozambicoville. The district in burning over their heads, but the main body of the enemy forces is preparing for the assault.
The chemist Eugene, the governor of Mozambicoville, has recommended that the inhabitants to lock themselves in their homes tonight and to seal all the openings carefully. Something new is expected.
A powerful magnetic current directed at the southern front having totally paralyzed the defenders of the forts and bastions, the Australians captured that portion of the wall without firing a shot, at ten p.m., taking 18,000 prisoners. They were about to launch themselves into the city when the governor found a mean of blowing up their electricity reservoir. Our troops, who immediately launched an attack on the hill were the reservoir was situated, found the entire division occupying it prey to the most violent attack of epilepsy.
Forty-five mobile fortresses fell into our power; the cannons were turned on the enemy, but, as asphyxiating shells converged on the expeditionary troops as well as the epileptic Australians, we were obliged to beat a retreat, bringing our prizes with us and reoccupying the southern bastions.
1 May. The entire army has been obliged to don helmets fitted with chin-bands, and tampons soaked in chemical solution over the mouth, in order not to suffer the deleterious emanations of as asphyxiating fog that the governor and his general staff of chemists have succeeded in producing. The Australian cannonade has become very weak, our fog-rockets crushing the enemy positions.
2 May. 35,000 inhabitants not having obeyed the governor’s instructions relative to the absolute sealing of houses are very ill and nearly all doomed. The Australians have been severely tested; their losses due to the fog are estimated at 40,000 men. Unfortunately, new reinforcements have disembarked, and Commandant Clifton has supplied all his troops with protective chemical tampons.
4 May. Great aerial and submarine battle to the south of Lake Nyanza.
The Mozambiquan aerial squadron took the offensive. Burning to avenge the Fatherland’s reverses, it fell upon the Australian army in the process of extracting war taxes from the rich cities of Nyanza.
The Australian air fleet covering the railway fortress and infantry engaged combat resolutely. The Australians had numbers in their favor, but the gutta-percha armor of the Mozambiquan balloons offered considerable resistance to shells. The victory remained indecisive; after three hours of terrible cannonades and broadsides, the two fleets, their munitions exhausted, withdrew.
During the combat four hundred meters below the balloons, the submarine fleets met beneath the surface. The Mozambiquan submarine monitors Shark and Silurus sank twelve enemy vessels in succession; unfortunately, the Silurus having had her electric propeller broken by a torpedo, was surrounded by four enemy monitors. When the submarine refused to surrender, the Australians sent the Silurus to the bottom and drowned her heroic crew.
5 May. Destruction by the Australians of all the factories of the great manufacturing districts of Nyanza. The great manufacturing cities of Australia are delighted; they had requested the destructions in order to obliterate dangerous competition.
6 May. In modern warfare neutrals sometimes have the opportunity to witness superb aerial combats, when they least expect it. Thus, when six Mozambiquan balloons, giving chase to Australian corsair aerostats, caught up with them during the night over Seville, in Spain, the battle was fierce.
Finally, thanks to the terrible Mozambiquan rocket-torpedoes, the corsair balloons perished with all hands. Two churches, twenty-five houses and approximately three hundred inhabitants of Seville suffered grievous damage in the battle; compensation will naturally be paid at the end of the war.
7 May. Mozambicoville taken by the Australians. The Mozambiquan general staff was blown up with a part of the fortifications, two hundred mobile blockhouses and thirty thousand troops, owing to the incompetence of a chemist officer in the middle of a chemical operation while storing a murderous gas in cylinders, on which the governor was counting heavily. The Australians have taken possession of the ruins.
8 May. Attack on the entrenched camp of Mazayamba.
The greatest battle of the war: 800,000 Australians against 625,000 Mozambiquans; the terrestrial and railway infantry maneuvered in profound and exceedingly mobile masses against the Mozambiquan troops supported by solid retrenchments, opened at intervals in order to give passage to the railway fortresses. The reservoir-rifles of the Mozambiquan infantry covered the terrain with a storm of iron and lead; the Australians swept by that machine-gun fire fell in thousands. Unfortunately, their masses seemed more inexhaustible than the reservoir-rifles of the valiant African soldiers.
The Australian engineers worked wonders. They succeeded in bringing their veteran locomotives and mobile blockhouses, armed with enormous cannons loaded with superdynamite, through the machine-gun fire and over a thousand obstacles. Behind the mobile blockhouses the infantry frayed a passage all the way to the Mozambiquan lines.
The bullet-pumping rifles and machine-guns of the Australian railway infantry then demonstrated their superiority, at short range, over any engines whatsoever.
At two p.m., the Mozambiquan army, reduced to 180,000 men, beat a retreat to the fortified locations of Lake Tanganyika; the aerial squadron and the mobile fortresses, retreating slowly, covered the retreat gloriously.
9 May. Foreign powers having offered their mediation, the ambassador of the Congo, Monsieur le Duc de Brazza, has brought the response of the Australians to Livingstonia.
Australia is making exorbitant demands: an indemnity of twenty-five billions, plus an obligation for the Mozambiquan nation to furnish exclusively to Australia raw materials, manufactured goods and objects of consumption that she cannot produce herself, the suppression of all duties on Mozambiquan merchandise exported to Australia, etc.
The Mozambiquan National Assembly has rejected the enemy’s demands.
10 May. Counter-offensive by the Mozambiquans. The Australians, confident of their victory, having not expected contact with the enemy, have been taken by surprise in the midst of an asphyxiating fog and driven out of the positions occupied two days earlier. Victory has shifted, essentially. The ex-victors have lost 900 mobile fortresses and 290,000 men in four hours. The Blackrifles, the Mozambiquan negro regiments, have fought heroically alongside white and mulatto regiments.
11 May. The Australians are beating a retreat. The submarine corps that had traveled up the Zambezi, surrounded in one of the reservoirs of the river dried up by means of the sluice-gates, has been obliged to surrender after a fierce combat.
12 May. Mozambiquan torpedo corps brought by the aerial squadron have succeeded in getting ahead of the retreating enemy columns. At Topambas, flying torpedoes and electric rockets destroyed more than three hundred locomotives of war, along with their crews.
19 May. The Australians are counting on retrenching in Mozambicoville and holding it, until a peace is signed or reinforcements arrive. A corps of two hundred thousand Mozambiquans has embarked for Australia on the large transport vessels of the submarine fleet and cargo aerostats.
30 May. Bombardment and asphyxia of Melbourne. The Australians sue for peace. Signature of an armistice.
2 June. A peace congress is about to meet to negotiate the conditions of the peace.