Just before dawn on November 25, 1917, one day after L59 returned to her dismal shed at Jamboli, von Lettow and the remainder of the Schutztruppe bivouacked in the bush at a place called Negomano, on the northern bank of the Rovuma River, just below the confluence of the Rovuma and the Ludgenda. The Rovuma marked the border between what was left of German East Africa—now only the ground upon which von Lettow stood at that moment—and Portuguese East Africa, the fat, fertile colony to the south, so far mostly untouched by the hardships of war.
Another rainy season, occurring much earlier this far south, would soon transform the Rovuma into a thick brown torrent and the low-lying area around it into floodplain. Now little more than a trickle, the river ran no more than waist-high. But the ants knew what was coming and already crackled through the bush in deep columns to the higher ground.
Portuguese East Africa was unknown to von Lettow. He didn’t possess maps of its terrain or knowledge of its tribes. But a border being an artificial thing, an imaginary line drawn on a map by cartographers in Europe, its terrain probably wasn’t much different from that through which he’d been marching since Kondoa-Irangi: The same thick bush and rivers large and small in bewildering array crisscrossing each other in a race to the sea—interspersed with a few areas of heavy cultivation (sisal, cotton, millet) and here and there, jagged mountains folded into the landscape like creases into the bedspread of a fever patient. And all of it horribly mismanaged by the Portuguese, whom, with the exception of the murderous Belgians of the Congo, history records as perhaps the worst of the European colonial regimes in Africa.
Meinertzhagen, now safely ensconced in the Sinai and wielding his insults and fabrications against the Turks, nevertheless reserved some of his choicest rhetoric of the period for Britain’s Portuguese “allies”:
“The Portuguese . . . should have remained outside a war in which northern nations are involved,” he wrote. “They certainly have no right to colonies. In fact, it is time such a miserable, effete, and decadent nation came under some form of control, for by themselves they can only do harm. . . . Their colonies are a scandal, the natives being much worse off than they ever were before. Except for introducing every European vice and withholding every European virtue, they have done nothing.”
These were the adversaries von Lettow, with van Deventer’s columns snapping at his heels, would now be facing. The British were “hunting us,” he later said. “And we were hunting the Portuguese.”
But even a shallow river is best forded in the daylight, and waiting for the sun to rise, von Lettow hesitated. As his men stirred around him in sleep, he contemplated the recent events in the war that had led him to this Rubicon moment—to the necessity of abandoning his own colony and crossing a river to invade an alien land.
The most recent phase of the war had been disastrous for the Schutztruppe: It had begun with the Battle of Mahiwa, a kind of equatorial Somme, occurring over the course of four bloody days, October 15–19, 1917. Captain W. D. Downes of the Nigerian Brigade called Mahiwa “the most savage fought battle in the history of African conflict—not excluding Omdurman or any engagement of the Boer War.” A confused battle of trench warfare, barbed wire, hand grenades, sustained artillery barrages, futile bayonet charges against entrenched machine gun positions, it resembled the static contests of the Western Front more than the “War of Maneuvers” pursued in East Africa to that point.
Accounts of the action at Mahiwa set down by its participants differ widely from each other; no two agree in particulars and often do not seem to describe the same engagement. Unfortunately, von Lettow’s war diaries covering the period were lost during the months of Portuguese exile. As most of the fighting occurred between the town of Mahiwa and the village of Nyangao, but closer to the latter, some feel the battle should rightly be associated with that name—but as Nyangao was obliterated from the map by the action, to its larger neighbor go the honors.
—
By mid-October 1917, von Lettow’s forces—now joined by General Whale’s column, which had hacked its way across the colony from Tabora—had been driven to the edge of the Makonde Plateau by concentrated advances of British columns under General Hannyngton, in charge of the freshly deployed Nigerian Brigade, and General Beves, the tempestuous South African—an avid butterfly collector—who had sacrificed so many of his men in frontal assaults on the Latema-Reata Ridge back in March 1916.
Fighting with Beves was Brigadier General Henry de Courcy-O’Grady, a coolheaded Anglo-Irishman, formerly of the Indian Army, whose first exposure to Africa had been at Tanga with the disastrous Expeditionary Force B. Wherever O’Grady went, there went also his West Highland terrier, O’Mara. This little dog, as oblivious to shell-fire and shot as the most hardened trooper, would trot along after his master during a battle, snuffling at the cordite-laden air and barking at the impact of each exploding shell.
Hoping as always to crush von Lettow in a pincer movement, Hannyngton divided his army into two massive heterogeneous columns: “Hanforce,” consisting of British, Indian, and KAR battalions, advancing from north to south, commanded by Hannyngton himself, and “Linforce,” composed largely of Nigerian troops advancing up the Lukuledi River Valley from the direction of the port of Lindi, under the command of Beves and O’Grady. Both these columns together outnumbered the Schutztruppe by more than five to one.
But von Lettow’s askaris “shot steadily and with judgment,” according to an admiring Nis Kock, now fighting at their side, rifle in hand. “They definitely knew their business.” During one action defending the fortified town of Ruponda in September, he noted, “on each flank, small groups of askaris were beginning to crawl out towards the enemy, carefully making use of every unevenness in the ground, and every scrap of cover. . . . Less than a minute after entering the fight, they were threatening the English flanks; they acted without commands, simply on a gesture from their NCO . . . and they carried out the most effective form of attack almost by instinct.”
Ruponda fell eventually, overwhelmed by the inevitable superior numbers, and the Schutztruppe faded into the bush, but not before they had killed more of the enemy than their own strength.
During the weeks leading up to Mahiwa, van Deventer, determined to end the war before Christmas 1917, became as obsessed with capturing von Lettow as Smuts had ever been. Van Deventer had caught his former commander’s fixation with the man like a bad tropical fever. Every officer on his intelligence staff received orders to devote all their energies to locating the elusive German. But von Lettow, now always half-disguised in askari khaki, a nondescript corduroy sun helmet pulled low to obscure his face, could not be easily identified by British scouts.
“Captured mails revealed the fact that in spite of his extensive intelligence and spy systems, the enemy was groping in the dark,” von Lettow wrote in his East African Campaigns. “He did not know, for instance, where I was, though he seemed to place the greatest importance upon knowing. . . . While one letter-writer thought I was in the neighborhood of Lukuledi, another insisted that I was at Tunduru, and according to a third, I was at Mahenge. . . . It is difficult to understand how intelligent people can entrust to the mail important matters which must be kept from the enemy, knowing how unreliable the mail is, and that letters often fall into the enemy’s hands.”
Von Lettow encouraged this confusion by allowing the British to acquire misleading German dispatches—all of it a perfect illustration of Sun Tzu’s dictum from Art of War: “When you are near, make them think you are far away; when far away, near.” One can imagine the wily commander chuckling in hindsight as he composed the above quoted excerpt, but at that moment, in October 1917, any humor was strictly of the gallows variety.
Hanforce and Linforce, working together, had driven the Schutztruppe into a small wedge of the colony, no more than 100 miles square. General Whale, dug in along the Lukuledi between Mahiwa and Nyangao, hoped to hold the line. British Intelligence caught wind of Whale’s presence there, and soon, both Hanforce and Linforce advanced against him from two directions at once: The Schutztruppe, van Deventer dared to imagine, would be smashed flat as a horseshoe between the hammer and anvil of his advancing armies, now numbering more than 5,000—mostly fresh, unblooded Nigerian troops. The British columns also included the 127th Baluchis, the Bharatpur Infantry, and the last remnant of Selous’s 25th Royal Fusiliers, the “old and bold” Legion of Frontiersmen. This eccentric battalion, once 2,000 strong, now numbered fewer than 200. Nearly 1,800 of them had been killed in battle or died of disease.
Unfortunately for Beves and O’Grady, no one seemed to be able to locate von Lettow. Aware of this fact, the German commander moved his askaris stealthily up behind Whale, strengthening the center of the line. He remembered Beves well. The South African general’s foolhardy assaults at Latema-Reata had stuck in his memory: “I had learned in that engagement,” von Lettow wrote, “that General Beves threw his men into action regardless of loss of life. He pushed for victory not by skillful handling and low casualties, but rather by repeated frontal attacks which, if the defense had anything like adequate forces and held its ground, led to severe losses. I guessed that here at Mahiwa, Beves would prosecute the same tactics.”
—
On the morning of October 15, 1917, von Lettow assumed his full regimentals—which is to say, put on his dress uniform with all medals and ribbons displayed—for the first time since 1914. This exchange of rough askari garb for the costume of an Imperial German general betokened two things, both detrimental to the success of British efforts: First, von Lettow, though now nearly driven from German East Africa entirely, was not prepared to surrender. Second, after two years of a skillfully wrought fighting retreat, von Lettow had at last decided to engage in the stand-up battle that Smuts had always sought and he had always avoided. Hard against the Portuguese border, what remained of GEA could be crossed on foot in a few hours. The Schutztruppe no longer had anything to lose: Time to make a stand.
Von Lettow’s askaris who saw their general splendidly arrayed in his dress uniform with his medals glinting found themselves both inspired to fight and stricken with a kind of fearful awe. Now they gave him a new name: He was no longer the Bwana Obersti—or, given his recent promotion, the Bwana General—but now the Bwana Aliyefanya Saanda: “the Shroud Maker.” And they would follow him willingly, most of them, to their doom.
—
Whale’s column, nearly 2,000 strong, dug in Western Front–style behind barbed wire and in deep trenches, received Beves’s opening assault in the gray hour just after dawn on October 15. The first wave of Nigerians were quickly driven back by the efficient rattle of askari machine-gun fire. Wave after wave of punishing attacks proceeded over the course of the day, as the heat rose and iridescent insects chattered from the thickets. Beves lost many men, but spoiled by two years of Schutztruppe fighting retreats, he expected the Germans to fade with the dusk. No doubt morning light would reveal empty trenches as at Kondoa-Irangi. But as the sun sank below the tree line, Schutztruppe bugle calls didn’t sound the expected call to disengage. Rather, they summoned von Lettow and the reserves to the center of the line:
“Wave after wave . . . broke on our front,” von Lettow remembered, though the energy of the attackers began to dim as the afternoon wore on: “My own observation told me that the weight of the attacks here on the right wing was diminishing.”
These costly frontal assaults continued in the waning light with the Nigerians absorbing the hardest blows: The last Königsberg gun, hauled from one end of Africa to the other for the last two years, now did tremendous damage. Exposed to this punishing fire in hastily dug, shallow trenches, the Nigerians suffered beneath a typhoon of massive 10.5 shells, big enough to sink a battleship. Most were blown to bits, their body parts flung into the branches of overhanging trees. For days afterward, Captain Downes observed, the trees, “dripped blood from the limbs and trunks of men who had been blown up and been wedged between the branches.”
Meanwhile, in another part of the line, General O’Grady’s little dog had disappeared. The distraught, dog-loving general, careful to hide his anxiety, walked calmly up and down the line, exposing himself to continual enemy fire, inquiring everywhere after O’Mara: Had anyone seen his dog? Whether the tenacious battle pooch ever returned to his owner is unfortunately not recorded.
Fighting ceased at last with the fall of a particularly dark tropical night, but immediately picked up again with first light. October 16, according to the British Official History, “was the most disastrous day for the Nigerians since the formation of the force.” Many of the new Nigerian recruits, inadequately supplied, inexperienced and fighting on the inaccessible flanks of the German line, subsisted on a handful of rice and barely enough water to wet their tongues—the closest watering hole being covered by askari sharpshooters:
“We find ourselves literally besieged,” signaled one of their British officers. “Ammunition is very scarce, and the men have eaten all their emergency rations. To add to all these troubles, the enemy have a machine gun and snipers posted along the water, so that our men are continuously getting hit whilst trying to obtain water. As our trenches are dug in sand, more or less out in the open, the heat is terrific, and the men are willing to do anything to quench their thirst. . . . There is no news of any reinforcements or of a relieving column. Matters are extremely critical, and if we are not relieved shortly, we shall meet with disaster.”
But the fighting only got hotter throughout the day—especially at the center of the line where Beves, like an imbecile banging his head repeatedly against a brick wall, kept throwing his troops at the German trenches, as von Lettow had predicted. These assaults, turned back by machine guns and wire, were often followed by askari counterattacks that carried the fight all the way across no-man’s-land to the British trenches. During one of these actions, the last of the Frontiersmen raced into a gap between two advancing columns. Schutztruppe machine guns cut them down; fewer than a dozen crawled back alive. The 25th Royal Fusiliers had ceased to exist as a unit of the British Army.
Again night fell, black and cloying with humidity and filled with the cries of the wounded and the dying. The next day, again, fighting started with first light. An unidentified Schutztruppe officer, apparently sick of the battle and sick of the war and sick of life itself, mounted a white horse—obtained who knows where—and led a suicidal charge against an entrenched British position. One British officer watched, astonished, as the German, with “no less than two machine guns and two score rifles aimed at him, disappeared in a storm of lead—never, I should think, to lead his troops on earth again.” But perhaps, he might have added, in Valhalla.
As the battle wore into its third day, a kind of psychological fatigue set in and bizarre doings abounded: A company of Nigerians jumped out of their trenches, dropped their rifles, and performed a traditional tribal war dance, as askari bullets splattered the mud at their feet. Von Lettow himself now appeared in the forward German trench to direct the course of the day’s action, his resplendent uniform disheveled and powder-burned from too close an association with the fighting. Drinking black coffee and smoking like a fiend, he deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire as an example to the troops.
His current supply of cigarettes—so critical to his military judgment—had come in the form of manna from heaven: During the retreat from the Rufiji, British planes had dropped tiny parachuted bundles on the German lines. The askaris had watched them fall softly to earth but hesitated to retrieve them—was this some kind of dastardly British trick? Did the bundles contain tiny bombs? No. Thousands of cigarettes, intended as a gift for British troops but blown by the German-leaning wind, had landed in von Lettow’s lap. A miracle! Enough cigarettes to keep him supplied for the rest of the war.
The fighting at Mahiwa, by now both sanguine and pointless, continued for another two days. Not the “Gentleman’s War” of the long retreat at all, but a vicious slugfest between mismatched brawlers complete with—rare in the East African campaign—accusations of atrocities on both sides. The British charged that their wounded had been indiscriminately bayonetted in bush fighting on the flanks of the battle lines. One of the Nigerian’s British officers, Captain A. K. Stretton, kept a “small Nigerian boy,” an orphan, as a servant; the boy himself kept a pet monkey, which had become the mascot of the 1st Battalion. Both were found shot and stabbed, bayonetted multiple times.
At last, by the evening of October 18, the machine guns stopped their chattering and the sharp crack of rifle fire drew down. Both the British and the Germans simply stopped fighting. The smoke cleared; the sound of insects and birds could be heard again. Row after row of wounded men of both sides lay on stretchers on the ground at nearby Nyangao in British-held territory. A photograph exists, showing this tragic scene; it’s like the crane shot of the casualties lying in the dusty street after the Battle of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.
The British had thrown themselves at von Lettow’s entrenched positions in profligate numbers—“at least 4,000, but no less than 6,000 strong,” he says in his Campaigns: “We had with our 1,500 men,” he says, “completely defeated the enemy.” True, British losses amounted to more than half their original number; they had also lost Beves, who following his disastrous frontal assaults experienced an acute attack of conscience manifested as a nervous breakdown, and had to be removed from command. Meanwhile, the Germans lost only 95 Europeans and 422 askaris. A victory, von Lettow declared, but this wasn’t quite true. As at Jasin, the Schutztruppe couldn’t afford any more such victories: Most of their ammunition had been expended, including all the shells for the last of the Königsberg guns. For them, Mahiwa, decidedly pyrrhic, only bought them a couple of weeks’ breathing room.
While the British regrouped and buried their dead, von Lettow consolidated. He withdrew to a place called Chitawa; there he abandoned the first batch of walking wounded—98 Germans and 425 askaris—to the pursuing British columns. He continued to retreat toward the Rovuma through the last weeks of October and into November 1917. His little army was plagued by shortages of all sorts—only a few hundred thousand rounds of ammunition remained, all for the “old smokies,” the much-loved, much-hated Jagerbuch 71 black-powder rifles. Barely enough firepower for a small engagement, certainly nothing on the scale of Mahiwa. Along the way, he left more sick and wounded—50 Germans and 600 askaris and carriers—at nameless jungle campsites for the British to find, feed, and cure.
On November 17–18, von Lettow paused for the final culling at Nambindinga, less than twenty miles from the Rovuma and Portuguese East Africa. Here he finalized his invasion plans, took stock of his supplies: Enough remained for maybe six weeks of self-sufficient marching. After that, the Schutztruppe would be forced to live off the land, an expedient open only to the healthy and the strong. Difficult decisions remained as to who would stay and who would go.
Captain Tafel, who with 1,000 askaris had remained behind on the Makonde Plateau, fighting a rearguard action against the British there, now struggled to reach the main body of the army. Encircled by enemy columns guided by the jungle man, Pretorius, and eventually starved out, Tafel surrendered at last in late November. Pretorius, now van Deventer’s eyes and ears in the bush, watched gleefully from the top of a tall tree as Tafel’s column, marching along blindly, missed von Lettow’s advance guard by a single mile. Confused, Tafel turned right instead of left and marched into the arms of the British. A pathetic, rambling note eventually reached von Lettow, by that time far into PEA, in which the officer, half-mad with hunger, apologized to his commander for “having let you down.”
Nis Kock, among the walking wounded at Nambindinga, made the list for demobilization (his malaria had become chronic; he couldn’t walk more than a few feet without collapsing), as did a bitter Captain Loof, to whom von Lettow assigned command of the wounded. After evacuating Dar es Salaam, Loof had fought the Portuguese along the border, blasting them with the Königsberg gun Leutnant Wenig had rescued from the fallen capital. Unfortunately for von Lettow, no excuse could be found to abandon Governor Schnee, who remained with the Schutztruppe, still dragging his supply of paper money via a dozen carriers—the colony’s cash reserves, he called them—though no colony now existed to guarantee their value.
Schnee again insisted, as he did periodically, that von Lettow must surrender. For the first time, the governor made a strong case: The Schutztruppe, cornered in the armpit of the colony, couldn’t continue much longer: Even down to its current low strength, the force could barely feed itself and didn’t have enough ammunition or medical supplies to fight another battle. Things looked bad indeed. Von Lettow paused and considered Schnee’s request, agreeing that “it would be madness to go on with fighting that would not bring about a favorable decision.” But sometimes the best of us are mad. He had already decided to invade Portuguese East Africa and there continue the war. Wherever he went, he knew the British would follow, committing more and more troops and equipment that might otherwise go to the Western Front. He had never once deviated from his original plan, formulated back in 1913. His army, now trimmed of all but the best and most healthy fighters, would continue its advance toward the Rovuma in the morning—as it turned out, no more than two hours ahead of pursuing British troops. His only strategic objective now was to remain uncaught.
Nis Kock, both shivering and burning with the chills and fevers of malaria, woke from unpleasant dreams at midnight, just in time to watch the pullout begin. Nambindinga, though little more than a clearing where once had stood a town, became for him “a milestone in the history of the war in East Africa.” He pushed aside his mosquito netting, raised himself on an elbow, “and stared . . . with wide-strained feverish eyes” at the Schutztruppe evacuation: “Swiftly, with hardly a sound, company followed company, grew out of the darkness, showed clear for an instant in the light of many fires, and were gone into the darkness again.
“This was the German East African Army, marching towards the frontier river, the Rovuma. The camp-fires gleamed on fantastic shapes, black and white, side by side, carrying rifles over their shoulders, butt pointing backwards. Some of the shapes were barefooted, some naked torsos had cartridge belts slung across them like bandoliers, some wore topis all askew, old felt hats, or uniform caps, and some were bareheaded. Rags of every kind of uniform sprang into sight in the firelight, and were gone into the blackness again. Camp-fire shone back from rifle barrels, or now and again from machine-guns carried between two men. More came by and still more. Some sections were very small, but there were many of them, perhaps the remnants of different companies. How many were there? I could not keep count, but there cannot have been more than 2,000. . . .
“Following the askaris’ army of shadows came an endless stream of bearers and after them again, a long file of women and children, clinging to the rear of the army. It grew darker and darker, and I could see ever less of what went on around me. My fever grew worse; I had hardly any quinine. I lay down in my rugs, but still for a long time, I heard the sound of hundreds of feet leaving Nambindinga on the way to the Rovuma. They were going on, while I stayed behind.”
Kock fell back into feverish sleep; it was as if he’d seen in a dream a vision of the retreat of the last army at the apocalypse.
Just after dawn, the vanguard of the British column arrived, drawn into the German camp by the sunlight. Abandoned men sat in clumps, thin as skeletons; others lay murmuring on pallets of leaves; a thin exhalation of gloom rose above them like a cloud. Hardy, well-fed men, rifles in hand, flooded the camp. These were, Kock noted, “Negro soldiers from the Cape in smart new uniforms and turned-up Boer hats. . . . They took no notice of the sick, they were looking for living, fighting troops.”
At last, a South African officer appeared, angrily brandishing his Webley revolver: “Where’s the general?” he shouted again and again, meaning von Lettow. “Where’s the general?”
Silence, then laughter from one of the sick, then everyone, all the Germans laughing.
“The general?” someone shouted. “The general’s gone to hell!”
Or Portuguese East Africa, whichever came first.
—
The final surrender of Nis Kock and the others at Nambindinga occurred on November 18, 1917. Eight days later, after marching through Newale and dismantling the radio transmitter there, and after the aborted mission of the Afrika-Schiff L59, and a few tight skirmishes, von Lettow stood on the banks of the Rovuma at Negomano at dawn, studying the unknown colony across the river’s shallow flow. As the sun rose, he ordered the Schutztruppe—now reduced to about 200 German officers and underofficers and fewer than 2,000 askaris—to cross into Portuguese East Africa. Before noon, with half his force still waiting to cross to the other side, von Lettow engaged in his first battle against the Portuguese. The latter, informed by British Intelligence that the Schutztruppe might try to invade, had sent a sizable force to Negomano, fortified with tons of supplies and ammunition, to prevent the crossing. But the Portuguese troops—about 1,700 strong—behaved as if oblivious to the presence of the enemy they had been sent to fight. Unloading supplies in a leisurely fashion, halfheartedly digging trenches, their officers lounged about in clean white uniforms, thinking more about lunch than the military necessities at hand. Von Lettow watched them, both amazed and disgusted, through his field glasses. Meanwhile, the askaris of the Schutztruppe, as if to show their contempt for the Portuguese, made no attempt to conceal their crossing of the Rovuma.
“It was as if my men deliberately taunted the Portuguese to open fire upon them,” recalled von Lettow. “We were in a filthy condition and we had our tattered uniforms to wash and our prickly heat to assuage, and it must be admitted that many of the troops flung off their clothes as soon as they got in the water and began to splash around in joyous bathing. When the enemy fired on them from the bank, they laughed at it, and I had considerable difficulty in making them take cover.”
Fighting began in a desultory fashion, with the Portuguese taking a few poorly aimed and hesitant potshots at the Germans crossing the river; one could almost feel them trembling behind the sights of their rifles. Growing impatient with this penny-ante skirmishing, von Lettow brought up his single remaining piece of artillery, a mountain gun, and opened up on the Portuguese camp, while at the same time a column of askaris, mostly fresh from bathing in the river and still naked, moved in a neatly executed encircling movement around the Portuguese rear. The unfortunate Portuguese, it seemed, had never been in a real battle before. Von Lettow’s askaris, armed only with their primitive smoky 71s, made good targets, each one of their shots sending up a telltale billow of smoke, but surprisingly none of them were hit.
“Leo nafasi ya bunduki ya zamani!” the askaris crowed—“It is the day of the old rifles!” But this fusillade, along with the artillery bombardment of the single German gun, quickly unmanned the Portuguese troops. Then the askaris, naked and screaming, attacked from the rear and sowed utter terror in their ranks. Many of the Portuguese native troops dropped their rifles and ran for it, only to end up on the point of askari bayonets. One officer threw up a white flag, which was ignored in the melee. Von Lettow’s askaris, now driven by a kind of bloodlust, could not be restrained: Out-and-out slaughter ensued. The half-starved askaris massacred nearly 1,000 Portuguese over the course of the afternoon, some while trying to escape, others while trying to surrender. Von Lettow made every effort to stop the killing but at last threw up his hands.
“It was a moment when they needed to kill,” he explained later, and made no attempt at an apology. In other words, bad things happen sometimes in war, especially when battle-hardened veterans driven by contempt and privation find themselves up against an overfed and unworthy enemy. After the general slaughter, the looting began. Von Lettow’s sense of soldierly discipline, always offended by looting, prompted him to intervene perhaps more strenuously than he had during the killing. Also, the Portuguese supplies, critical to the Schutztruppe’s survival, needed to be counted and conserved:
“Even the Portuguese askari, already taken prisoner, joined in the plunder of their own stores,” he wrote. “To make an example, I dashed at least seven times at one bearer I knew, but each time he got away and immediately joined in the looting somewhere else.” Still, von Lettow admitted, “with one blow we had freed ourselves of a great part of our difficulties.” They had just acquired five tons of food, new Portuguese rifles in sufficient quantity to arm more than half the Schutztruppe, a quarter million rounds of ammunition, six machine guns, horses, medical supplies, and a 40mm fieldpiece. Not quite the fifteen tons carried in the belly of L59, but enough for immediate needs.
Now the rich colony with its fields and forests, plantations, and vast wilderness inhabited by compliant natives, so embittered by centuries of Portuguese misrule that they welcomed the invaders, lay before von Lettow and his men. But first the winter rains would inundate the landscape, and the Schutztruppe needed to find suitable quarters to wait them out.
—
Christmas 1917 found von Lettow and his army encamped around a lushly appointed plantation near Chirumba, in the heart of the Portuguese colony. Here they stayed for several weeks in a state of luxury unknown since the beginning of the war.
Von Ruckteschell, the artist and von Lettow’s adjutant, had pushed his column through the bush and taken the place as a sort of Christmas present for his commander. On Christmas Eve, von Ruckteschell led him from a rough encampment in the bush to the plantation house, where he was shown a comfortably appointed bedroom. Finely woven mosquito netting hung from a four-poster bed spread with clean sheets, his first in at least two years. Von Lettow took off his new Portuguese boots—which he’d sliced open over the toes to accommodate his large feet—lay down, and fell deliciously asleep.
In the morning, his staff fixed up a breakfast of coffee, mangoes, and fresh eggs. Later, they all sat down to a Christmas dinner of roast pork with crackling, sauerkraut, and sweet potatoes, washed down with many bottles of Portuguese wine and a digestif of port. The highlight for von Lettow, however, was his Christmas gift: Von Ruckteschell handed him a nicely wrapped box that, when opened, contained a neat stack of excellent Portuguese cigars. The tobacco fiend was indeed pleased—and the attached card provided a laugh: For the Country Postman. This peripatetic figure—mail carriers in rural German often walked endless miles on their rounds—was an indirect slam at Governor Schnee. “Still further?” Schnee had remarked upon von Lettow’s advance into PEA. “The fellow must come from a family of country postmen!” The comment, an insult coming from Schnee (a striving son of the middle classes) aimed at von Lettow (a member of the rarefied Junker aristocracy), had been turned on its maker.
December 1917 through January 1918—the weeks spent at Chirumba Plantation—was a period remembered by all as an idyll in the midst of war. Askari hunting parties went out into the bush in driving rain after hippos and bagged scores of these helpless, ungainly creatures to feed the carriers: A dozen hungry Africans, swarming over the massive carcass like ants, could consume an entire hippo down to the bones in a single day. German officers and underofficers preferred other offerings of the forest: the antelope or bushbuck and African catfish taken from the region’s overflowing rivers and fried in hippo lard—for which the taste, once acquired, becomes something of an addiction; many of the German officers claimed they preferred hippo lard to butter on their bread. At night, the bibis danced in the plantation’s expansive outbuildings, while their children played in the mud. Both black and white who had shared the hardships of war now shared its spoils.
But all idylls are, by nature, brief. An army, even the small force the Schutztruppe had become, can denude a well-stocked and fertile region in a short time. A shortage of hippo meat coincided with the slackening of the rains in late January 1918. But a more ominous sign that the war had found them arrived at Chirumba early one morning toward the end of January: Low-flying British aircraft dropped multicolored leaflets over the plantation house and fields. A warm wind blew them into the drying mud and against the palings of the swine pens. Written in Swahili, the leaflets exhorted von Lettow’s askaris to desert:
To the German askari. I greet you and bring you a message from the Bwana Mkubwa [Commander] of the English. The talks you have had from the Germans are full of lies. . . . Your commander has told you that by crossing over the Rovuma River you will be safe . . . but do you really believe we have given up the fight? Don’t we continue to search for you? Have you not heard our guns sounding in the bush? There you are, without supplies and food and you are getting no pay. Why do you continue to run away? And why not instead run to us and bring this war which is of no concern of yours to an end? . . . You will be given food and not made to work . . . and you will be happy once again. We salaam, Colonel Baxter.
In other words, after a delay of a few months because of the rains and Portuguese shilly-shallying, the British under van Deventer had disembarked at Porto Amelia in PEA and were advancing now through poorly charted country toward von Lettow. The Schutztruppe had not heard the guns of the enemy, but they soon would. Again, von Lettow had forced their hand: Britain would soon commit substantial forces—eight full battalions!—to Portuguese East Africa, to finding him and catching him. And even though the German colony had just been declared a British protectorate and fighting there had officially ended, to van Deventer and the War Office in London, the war wouldn’t be over until von Lettow had been killed or captured.
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Around this time, an official cable from England’s King George V reached van Deventer. The king saluted his South African subject for their total victory over the Germans: “I heartily congratulate you and the troops under your command,” the king wrote, “on having driven the remaining forces of the enemy out of German East Africa.” The text of this message—to use a modern analogy—was akin to George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech about the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003. In other words, many, many months of hard fighting remained; the enemy had not been defeated at all.
Arnold Wienholt, an Australian soldier of fortune and a big game hunter fighting with the British in East Africa, put it this way: “The retreat of von Lettow’s force into Portuguese territory was again the subject for further and very premature congratulations in high quarters, and once more the conquest of German East was hailed in the papers. The sale of the bear’s skin had twice been concluded, though the animal himself, in the shape of von Lettow and his little army of picked men, was very much alive.”
But for von Lettow, the certainty that his Schutztruppe remained a threat to the British arrived in the form of an official surrender offer sent through the German lines under white flag from van Deventer to von Lettow. Such requests always boosted the commander’s fighting spirits. He operated under the principle that a surrender was never requested from an army that had already been beaten.
Van Deventer’s message merely “strengthened my belief that our escape had taken him by surprise,” von Lettow wrote, “and that our invasion of Portuguese territory had put him at a loss. Neither he nor General Smuts had ever thought of sending a summons to surrender when the situation was favorable to the English. Why should they do so in a situation like the present? . . . Only because they were at their wits’ end.”
True, a couple dozen or so of the German askaris, after digesting the information contained in the airborne British propaganda leaflets, deserted the Schutztruppe—but von Lettow, after swallowing his initial disappointment, was able to shrug philosophically over the loss: “Many of my troops were very war-weary,” he said. “Added to this the feeling of uncertainty as to where the campaign was going to lead them. The great majority of black men cling to their homes and relations. They say to themselves: ‘If we go further, we shall come into country we don’t know. We can find our way back home from where we are now, but soon we won’t be able to.’”
Von Lettow gathered his remaining forces and moved out of Chirumba Plantation in the first week of February 1918. Where was he going? Wherever the pickings offered the most bang for the bullet; wherever the British Army, now chasing him in earnest, would find it difficult to follow.