- 'In the African Bush'
- by Francis Brett Young
An Ambulance in East Africa
Officers and other ranks in East Africa
The name of Francis Brett Young brings a host of stories to the mind, but here as a medical officer attached to the combined Field Ambulance during General Smuts' victorious invasion of German East Africa in 1916 he gives a vivid account of bush fighting and the tremendous difficulties in tending wounded. The MS. of this story was twice torpedoed on its way to England.
two pages from a British magazine
The officer who had been in charge of the regiment since it left Rhodesia overtook us, bringing with him orders for me to return to Nairobi. But now we were not only many hundred miles from Nairobi, but many days' journey from railhead, and it seemed too great a pity that I should not see any of the fruits of our labours; so, like a bad soldier, I evaded my orders, asking that I might be retained with the brigade. The same evening, awaiting confirmation of my request, I was attached to the Combined Field Ambulance, and given charge of the Indian section, which was called B 120.
The change from regimental life was very abrupt. Henceforward I had to do with a number of African stretcher-bearers, Indian ward-orderlies and babu sub-assistant surgeons, Cape-boy muleteers, and a Boer conductor of transport. Nor could anything have been more different from the European conception of a Field Ambulance either in its constitution or its duties, for in time of action it might represent anything from a regimental aid-post to a casualty clearing station, or even take on the functions of a stationary hospital. The African stretcher-bearers, fifty of them, were untrained, and ready to disappear into the bush on the approach of danger. Only one European medical officer was allotted to each section; the only technical assistance on which he could count, was that of two half-educated babus. But I was glad, at any rate, that I should still keep company with the brigade, and help to receive the sick and wounded of the regiment.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth we set out at day-break from the camp between Old Lassiti and the river. In the dark we had quite missed the loveliness of that place, but now, in a faint light, and with many birds singing, we could see the lower slopes of the mountain crossed by a band of horizontal cloud from which little fleeces spilled over, and all the hillside below blue-black and washed with milky vapour, as are the flanks of the Old Red Sandstone hills in Wales.
I walked in front of the whole caravan, behind me the stretcher-bearers in ragged fours, led by their Neapara or headman, carrying a furled Red Cross flag. That morning they were very happy, talking and laughing together; and wondering what they were all thinking about, I listened, and found that they were all talking of places: of Kampala, of Nairobi, and of the camps of M'buyuni and Taveta. But most of all they spoke of distant places, and chiefly Kisumu, the capital of their own Kavirondo country. When all this wretched business is over, I thought, there will be great tales in Kisumu. But what intrigued me even more was to realise that these primitive people, who, only a few years ago, were walking in nakedness, were not only afflicted with the same nostalgia as myself, but found some relief from its twinges in thinking of places which they had loved and left, and in speaking of them too. For places, both strange and familiar places, had always meant more to me than anything else in life : the mere seeing of some new country—an unfamiliar village in a loved county, or even a new street in an old city, being something of an adventure. These stretcher-bearers, like myself, were out to see the world : they, like me, would carry home memories that they would treasure, a great hoard of sub-conscious wealth ; and, perhaps, some day, in a village by the shores of the Nyanza drowsy, and gorged with m'hindi, one of them would dream of this cool morning under Old Lassiti, just as I had dreamed the other night of Slapton Ley.
All through the Pangani trek I carried in my haversack one book, a thin paper copy of the Oxford Book of Verse, but what I read more often, in the little light that was left for reading, was a small-scale Bartholomew map of England, finely coloured with mountains and meadowland and seas, and there I would travel magical roads, crossing the Pennines or lazing through the blossomy vale of Evesham, or facing the salt breeze on the flat top of Mendip at will. In these rapt moments the whole campaign would seem to me nothing but a sort of penance by means of which I might attain to those " blue, remembered hills."
All that morning we were marching into the neck of the bottle, bent eastward by the sweep of the Pangani. At first the going was hard, over level spaces of short grass .with driven sand between; but from this we passed to a kind of open slade where tall grasses bent and rippled in the wind like a mowing meadow at home. The lower air was full of dragon-flies. We could hear the brittle note of their stretched wings above the soft tremor of grasses swaying slowly as if they were in love with the laziness of their own soft motion. Clinging to the heads of these grasses, and swaying as they swayed, were many beetles—brilliant creatures with wing-cases blue-black and barred with the crimson of the cinnabar moth. As we marched through the lane which we had trampled in those meadows they clung to their swaying grasses and took no heed of us though we had trodden their brothers to death in thousands. It was a wonderful day for them: the one day, perhaps, for which they had been created; and so, in a warm breeze blowing from the south, they swung their cinnabar bodies to the sun.
And from this, again, we passed to an upland, scattered with the bush, where the soil was like ochre, and an ochreous dust rose from our column and drifted away on the warm wind. It seemed as if we were too late again. There below us lay the valley through which the railway ran. There, with their rugged outlines shagged with forest, stood the South Pare Mountains. This was the point at which the enemy must make a serious stand, the point at which, if we had been moving fast enough—and heaven knows we couldn't have moved faster—-we might even cut him off. But the column moved on without stopping into the narrow bottle neck; which, surely, could never have happened if the enemy were there, and particularly since our heavier transport was following close behind, struggling now through the edge of the bush, and churning up the ochreous dust into the air.
We had never before been so near the Pare range. Very soft and summery it looked with its fair fantastic outlines against a blue sky. The whole of it was softened by dense patches of forest, except in one place where a slab of bare rock rose perpendicularly for several hundred feet. Watching these mountains, and enchanted by their beauty, I suddenly saw a little puff of smoke drifting away from the lower part of this sheer face.
"There's somebody there, at any rate," I said to Heale with whom I was walking. He shook his head. "A bit of cloud," he said, "or perhaps a native's fire."
We heard a distant boom.
"We're not too late after all..."
"No ... I suppose that's the bridge at Mikocheni."
He had scarcely finished speaking when a great explosion on our right cut him short. Not many yards away a column of dust and black smoke shot up into the air.
"Good Lord ... the blighters are having a plug at us."
They had not gone after all.
It seemed that we had actually caught up with them, that we had moved too fast for their railway, and that they must now put up a rearguard action or leave their equipment behind.
Another shell and yet another screamed over our heads. This time their direction was perfect, and very soon they picked up the range as well. Four-point-one shells, high explosive: the Konigsberg's legacy. Most of them were bursting well behind us, and we knew that our dust-raising transport must be getting it; but it was evident that the observer whose puffs of smoke I had seen from the cliff-side, must have had a good view of all our column, for the bush was fairly open and all the later units had their share of shelling.
With these things' sailing over us, or sometimes bursting very near our track, we pushed on into a thicker patch of bush. It was now early afternoon, and we were ordered to halt and take what shade or cover we could find.
All that afternoon the four-inch boomed away ; and once, for a short time, we heard the sharper explosion of our own mountain guns. We realised well enough that neither they, nor for that matter any of our artillery, could touch their naval guns, which can fire effectively at twelve thousand yards range ; but we knew that the mountain gunners must be firing at something and that encouraged us.
All our ambulance lay scattered through the bush. Only the bearer subdivision of my section stood ready with their stretchers. Nor had they long to wait, for in a little while there came a call for stretchers, and I went out with the bearers to collect wounded. This was the first time that such work had fallen to my lot. One felt rather adventurous and small, moving out of the bush into a wide open space on which the mountain observation post looked down. It seemed, somehow, as if one were actually less protected from the bursting shells in the open than under the trees: which was ridiculous, for none of those thin branches could stay a flying fragment. We moved on at a steady pace over the rough grass. We could not have been walking there, along the edge of the Pare, on a more peerless day. The cool breeze of the afternoon swept all the grasses; the aromatic scent of the brushwood, thus diluted, suggested nothing more than bland summer weather.
At last we came to the first casualty, a sowar of the Indian Cavalry, but not, as it happened, one of their handsome, sinister Pathans. He was a Punjabi Musulman, one of that people which is the backbone of the Indian Army, and his name was Hasmali. Actually he had ridden past the face of the enemy's position, within range of Tanda station, and the shot in the abdomen which had laid him out had been fired while he was aiming at the engine driver of the last train. He thought that he had hit him too. Wounded, he galloped back, sprawling, a dead weight, on the horse's neck, until he reached the place where we found him. Now his dark eyes, of a brown that was hardly human, were full of pain, and more than pain, anxiety— as though he couldn't quite feel sure what would be the end of it. But I could ... I was suddenly very sorry for the sowar Hasmali, and particularly when I saw his horse, a chestnut, most beautifully groomed, standing by with all its barbarous caparisons. Far more terrible to me than death was the sight of that apprehension in those brown eyes.
We carried him back over the same open space, breathing of summer. His horse followed meekly behind with long strides. We should not have taken the horse with us, but the beast wanted to come. Under an acacia thorn we hid the stretcher and gave him morphia, plenty of it, and dressed him. At first he was distressed, even more than by the pain of his wound, because we must uncover him. His native modesty was stronger even than his anxiety: but we gently persuaded him and the pain was too strong, and he yielded to us. In his agony he cried, "Aiai, aiai," like any martyr in Greek tragedy. I think I shall remember the eyes of Hasmali, sowar of the 17th Cavalry, as long as I live.
It was nearly sundown when the order came for us to advance. Sheppard's Brigade had taken up a position in the loop of the Pangani, and the rest of us were going to encamp on the slightly higher ground which the enemy were still shelling. Our long column unwound itself from the tangles in which it had lain all afternoon, and as our dust rose the German gunners found us again.
To approach the new bivouac our transport must climb a steep and dusty hillside ; and as we doubted if our cattle, already so fatigued, could drag the wagons through the dust, I stayed behind with half my bearers to put shoulders to the wheels. Every minute the sky was darkening. The four-inch shells were travelling overhead with a whisper which resembled that of silk tearing. I stood on the hillside waiting while the ammunition column stumbled past, the poor lank mules, the panting oxen. Apart from the gunfire that evening was extraordinarily quiet.
At the spot where I was waiting, a little thorn-tree stood up against the orange sky, a straggling bush of many branches, from the ends of which the plaited nests of the bottle- bird hung like so many flagons of Chianti. In passing, one of our men had carelessly torn the bottom from one of them and all the flight of weavers had left the tree. But now, seeing that our column was endless, the owners of that broken home had returned, and were fluttering, from below, about the place where once their door had been. It seemed as if they couldn't believe the ruthless hurt that had been done them. I watched the sweet, bewildered fluttering of these small birds against the orange sunset. A native boy came up the path singing to himself. When he saw the unhappy weaver-birds he stopped his singing. He stood utterly still, his face uplifted under the branches, watching them. Then, very gently he put up his arm beneath the tired flutterers. I could see the whole picture, the native's thick lips parted in expectancy, and the wings of the homeless weaver-birds, in silhouette. Then one of the little things, tired with so much futile fluttering, dropped down gently to the perch of the boy's finger and rested there. This was the moment for which the bushman's instinct had been waiting. Very softly he lowered his arm, until the bird was within reach of the other hand : but, as he made a swift movement to grasp it, it darted away. ... In a second the delicate silhouette was broken.
There I waited until the last of our bullock carts had swayed past. By this time it was quite dark, and I hurried on to see where the rest of our column had got to. The stretcher-bearers of all three sections were nowhere to be seen : but the ambulance wagons, with their teams of eight mules, still plodded along in the rear of the ammunition carts. The enemy had now ceased firing: the trick of midnight bombardments by the map was one which they learned later. There seemed to be a definite track which the people in front of us were using, and so we marched on for a long way in the dark. As we went forward this track grew more narrow, the road more difficult to clear. But in the end we came to a deep nullah, at which the first of our ambulances stopped. The wheel base of the wagon was so long as to make it impossible to clear the channel which was as narrow as a trench. The Cape-boys lashed at their mules with long thongs, and the poor beasts, who could not move forward, plunged into the thorn at the side of the track, breaking the hood of the ambulance under which our patients were lying. Plainly we couldn't go forward. Plainly, too, we could not turn a team of eight mules in a track less than ten feet wide. Meanwhile, I supposed we were holding up the rest of the divisional transport. Either we must hack a way through the thorn—no easy matter in that pitchy night—or else we must stay where we were till daybreak. We wondered that we should ever have been expected to bring wheeled transport along such a road.
Then came a staff officer who wanted to know where the hell we were all going to. I had hoped that he would have been able to tell me.
"God knows how any one's going to get out of this mess," he said.
"Isn't this the way to the brigade's camp?"
"No. It's the way to the water. You can't go anywhere except into the Pangani down there. And a devil of steep hill."
"I'd better turn."
"Turn? You can't turn. You'd better stay here until you're told to move. For God's sake don't go and make it worse."
"Where is the camp, then?"
"Oh, somewhere ... anywhere on this blasted hill. They're all making little camps of their own."
He rode off to find somebody else more worth cursing. It was cheering in a way to know that we were no worse off than most of the others. As for the ammunition column which had led us into that blind alley, they were even more deeply mired than ourselves. And the real fun of the evening would begin when the transport animals of the division came down the blocked road to water.
I told the conductor to hold fast, deciding to beat about the hill until I found our lost stretcher-bearers. I had gathered that we were somewhere to the right of the place in which they had landed, and so I followed the old track backwards for a mile or so, hoping to find some traces of the point at which they had left it. But though this task might have been easy in the daytime, in that dense night it was nearly impossible. The track was so narrow, and the surrounding bush so thick that in many places I could not push my way on either side of the carts which blocked the way, and had perforce to climb over their tail-boards and walk along the pole between the sweating oxen. And when I had travelled a mile or more backwards I had still failed to find any branching of the road down which our bearers might have wandered. I therefore determined to trust to luck and a rough idea of the map, and cut across country in the direction where I supposed their camp to be.
In those days I knew little about bush, else I had realised how hopeless was my undertaking. In the darkness, even though the thorn was scattered with wide grassy lacunae, walking was difficult, and soon my knees were torn, for I could not see the brushwood that grew knee high and hindered my steps. I walked perhaps for an hour, but under those circumstances one does not measure time, and neither saw light nor heard the least sound. I steered by the Southern Cross and by the planet Jupiter which hung near by. At last, with a suddenness which was curious, I heard the creaking of wheels. Somewhere not very far away transport was on the move, transport which had avoided the blind alley in which we had stuck. I was a long time finding it, but emerged at last upon a track over which many wheels had passed. I stooped in the darkness and felt the grasses to see in which direction they had been swept at the sides, and having settled this question, set off along the track until I overtook a tired string of bullocks. The drivers were Indians, and I could not find where they were going from them, but at last I came upon a corporal who assured me that this was the way to the camp, though which camp he could not say. And so I followed them to a dip in the land over which other transport animals, in front of them, were struggling. At the top of the rise many fires were burning. This I was told was the Fusiliers' camp. Nobody except the Fusiliers was there, but a little further on I should find General Headquarters. Sheppard's Brigade, and, probably, the rest of my unit lay some four miles away to southward. They were sitting on one side of the Pangani, the enemy on the other, and both were hard at work sniping. Nobody in this part of the world seemed inclined to help me.
I turned back along the same road. It seemed that I could do nothing better than rejoin my tangled transport. A mile or so down that dark track I came upon another train of struggling A.T. carts. They halted for a little rest.
"Who are you?" I said.
"Rhodesians." And very surly Rhodesians.
"Thank the Lord. ... Is Mr. Bennett there?"
And a moment later I heard Bennett's homely Somerset voice with its reassuring "burr." "Hallo, Doc!" it said. "Is this anywhere near our camp?"
I told him that we were near General Headquarters and the Fusiliers, and that Sheppard's Brigade was supposed to be nearer the river, four miles or more away.
"The main thing is, have you any food?"
"No, this is the second line. Rations are with the first."
They passed on, and in a little while I heard their creaking wheels no more. And then, strangely enough, taking a cross cut through the bush, I stumbled on Heale, the commander of our British section, who had been wandering round in search of me and the lost Transport, and in the process had lost himself. With some difficulty we managed to steer back to the place where I had left the column halted, only to find that it had vanished. There was no doubt about the place. Here was the trampled road among the thorns, the ruts of the wheels were there, and even the terrible nullah in which the ambulance had been broken.
"Well now," I said, "have you any idea where you came from?"
We hadn't, either of us ; but somehow we managed to roll up in the dark about midnight. By this time we had quite forgotten about food. We slept as best we could without covering. It was hellishly cold.
from a British magazine
