has been the hardest fighting, their green woollen caps and leather
sandals marking them out from other negroid soldiers. And their
impetuous courage has won them many captured enemy guns, and, alas! a
very long list of casualties. But in hospital they are the merriest of
happy people, always joking and smiling, and are quite a contrast to our
much more serious East Coast native; they have earned from their white
sergeants and officers very great admiration and devotion. By far the
best equipped of any unit in the field, they had, as a regiment, no less
than eight machine-guns and a regimental mountain battery.




THE NAVY AND ITS WORK


To the Navy that alone has made this campaign possible, we soldiers owe
our grateful thanks. But there have been times when, in our blindness,
we have failed to realise how great the task was to blockade 400 miles
of this coast and to keep a watchful eye on Mozambique. For before the
Portuguese made common cause with us, there was a great deal of
gun-running along the southern border of German East Africa, which our
present Allies found impossible to watch. Two factors materially aided
the Germans in making the fight they have. First, there was the lucky
"coincidence" of the Dar-es-Salaam Exhibition. This exhibition, which
was to bring the whole world to German East Africa in August, 1914,
provided the military authorities with great supplies of machinery,
stores and exhibits from all the big industrial centres; and these were
swiftly adapted to the making of rifles and munitions of war. To this
must be added the most important factor of all, the _Königsberg_, lying