Pullman car. It exemplified the resource of our men and illustrated the
idea that proved Lettow wrong. For we adapted the engines of Ford and
Bico motor cars and motor lorries to the bogie wheels of German trucks
and sent a little fleet of motor cars along the railway. Light and very
speedy, these little trains sped along, each dragging its thirty tons of
food and supplies for the army then 120 miles from Dar-es-Salaam.

This adaptation of the internal combustion engine to fixed rails may not
be new, but it was unexpected by Lettow. And the German engineers left
it a little too late; they panicked at the last and destroyed wholesale,
but without intelligence. True, they put an explosive charge into the
cylinders of all their big engines and left us to get new cylinders cast
in Scotland. They blew out the grease boxes of the trucks; but their
performance, on the whole, was amateurish. For they blew up, with
dynamite, the masonry of many bridges and contented themselves that the
girders lay in the river below. But this was child's play to our Sappers
and Miners. With hand jacks they lifted the girders and piled up
sleepers, one by one beneath, until the girder was lifted to rail level
again. Now any engineer can tell you that the only way to destroy a
bridge is to cut the girder. This would send us humming over the cables
to Glasgow to get it replaced. It was what they did do on the most
important bridge over Ruwu River, but in their anxiety to do the thing
properly there--and they reckoned four months' hard work would find us
with a new bridge still unfinished--they forgot the old deviation, an
old spur that ran round the big span that crossed the river and lay
buried in the jungle growth. In ten days we had opened up this old
deviation, laid new rails, and had the line re-opened. When I passed
down the line we took the long way round by this long-abandoned track
and left the useless bridge upon our right. Much method but little
intelligence was shown in the destruction of the railway lines; for they