often failed to remove the points, contenting themselves with removing
the rails and hiding them in the jungle.

The German engineers must have wept at the orgy of devastation that
followed: blind fury alone seemed to animate this scene of blind
destruction. At N'geri N'geri and Ruwu they first broke the middle one
of the three big spans and ran the rolling stock, engines, sleeping
cars, a beautiful ambulance train, trucks and carriages, pell mell into
the river-bed below. But the wreckage piled up in a heap 60 feet high
and soon was level with the bridge again. So they broke the other spans
and ran most of the rest of the rolling stock through the gaps. When
these, too, had piled up, they finally ran the remainder of the rolling
stock down the embankments and into the jungle. Then they set fire to
the three huge heaps of wreckage, and the glare lit the heavens for
nearly a hundred miles. But the almost uninjured railway trucks that had
run their little race, down embankments into the bush, were saved to run
again.

Into Morogoro station steamed the trains with the German lettering and
freight and tare directions, carefully undisturbed, printed on their
sides. To us it seemed that the destruction of an ambulance train that
had in the past relied upon the Red Cross and our forbearance, was
cutting it rather fine and putting a new interpretation upon the Geneva
Convention. The Germans, however, argue that the English are such swine
they would have used it to carry supplies as well as sick and wounded.

And what a magnificent railway it was, and what splendid rolling stock
they had! Steel sleepers, big heavy rails, low gradients, excellent cuts
and bridge work; cuttings through rock smoothed as if by sandpaper and
crevices filled with concrete. Fine concrete gutters along the curves,