not already had enough to do, took her with them through the sunny South
Atlantic seas to the home that had not seen her since she left for
Tropical Africa five weary years before.




THE WILL TO DESTROY


The journey from Morogoro to Dar-es-Salaam is a most interesting
experience, a perfect object lesson in the kind of futile railway
destruction that defeats its own ends. For Lettow and his advisers said
that our long wait at M'syeh had ruined our chances. Complete
destruction of the railway and of all the rolling stock would hold us up
for the valuable two months until the rains were due. Our means of
supply all that time would be, perforce, the long road haul by motor
lorry, by mule or ox or donkey transport, two hundred miles, from the
Northern Railway. Lettow bet on the rains and the completeness of the
railway destruction he would cause; but he bargained without his
visitors. Little did he know the resource and capacity of our Indian
sappers and miners, our Engineer and Pioneer battalions.

They threw themselves on broken culverts and wrecked bridges; with only
hand tools, so short of equipment were they, they drove piles and built
up girders on heaps of sleepers and made the bridges safe again. Saving
every scrap of chain, every abandoned German tool, making shift here,
extemporising there, bending steel rails on hand forges, utilising the
scrap heaps the enemy had left, they finally won and brought the first
truck through, in triumph, in six weeks. But the first carriage was no