DAR-ES-SALAAM


(The Haven of Peace)

This town is indeed a Haven of Peace for our weary soldiers. The only
rest in a really civilised place that they have had after many hundreds
of miles of road and forest and trackless thirsty bush. In the cool
wards of the big South African Hospital many of them enjoy the only rest
that they have known for months. Fever-stricken wrecks are they of the
men that marched so eagerly to Kilimanjaro nine weary months before.
Months of heat and thirst and tiredness, of malaria that left them
burning under trees by the roadside till the questing ambulance could
find them, of dysentery that robbed their nights of sleep, of dust and
flies and savage bush fighting. And now they lie between cool sheets and
watch the sisters as they flit among the shadows of cool, shaded wards.
Only a short three months before and this was the "Kaiserhof," the first
hotel on the East Coast of Africa, as the German manager, with loud
boastfulness, proclaimed.

There had been a time when we doctors, then at Nairobi and living in
comfortable mosquito-proof houses, had blamed the men for drinking
unboiled water and for discarding their mosquito nets. But even doctors
sometimes live and learn, and those of us who went right forward with
the troops came to know how impracticable it was to carry out the Army
Order that bade a man drink only boiled water and sleep beneath a net.
Late in the night the infantryman staggers to the camp that lies among
thorn bushes, hungry and tired and full of fever. How then could one
expect him to put up a mosquito net in the pitch-black darkness in a
country where every tree has got a thorn? Long ago the army's mosquito