Sketches of the East Africa Campaign by Robert Valentine Dolbey
page 81 of 138 (58%)
page 81 of 138 (58%)
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Toiling behind the column on march is the long and ragged line of native
porters, the human cattle that are, after all, the most reliable form of transport in Equatorial Africa. Clad in red blankets or loin cloths or in kilts made of reeds and straw, they struggle on singing through the heat. Grass rings temper the weight of the loads to their heads, each man carrying his forty pounds for the regulation ten miles, the prescribed day's march in the tropics. Winding snake-like along the native paths, they go chanting a weird refrain that keeps their interest and makes the miles slip by. Here are some low-browed and primitive porters from the mountains, "Shenzies," as the superior Swahili call them, and clad only in the native kilt of grass or reeds. Good porters these, though ugly in form, and lacking the grace of the Wanyamwezi or the Wahehe. At night they drop their loads beside the water-holes that mark the stages in the long march, and seek the nearest derelict ox or horse and prepare their meals, with relish, from the still warm entrails. This, with their "pocha," the allowance of mealie meal or mahoga, keeps them fat, their stomachs distended, bodies shiny and spirits of the highest. Round their camp fires they chatter far into the night, relieved, by the number of the troops and the plentiful supply of dead horses in the bush, from the ever-present fear of the lion that, in other days, would lift them at night, yelling, from their dying fires. One wonders that their spirits are so high, for they would get short shrift and little mercy from German raiding parties behind our advance. For the porter is fan-game, and is as liable to destruction as any other means of transport. Nor would the Germans hesitate a moment to kill them as they would our horses. But the bush is the porters' safeguard, and at the first scattering volley of the raiding party, they drop their loads and plunge into the undergrowth. Later, when we have driven off the raiders, |
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