‘Stand back—stand back! Make way there!’ and with a whir of starting engines, the motor ambulances steer their way through the pressing crowd, and slowly the stretcher-bearers carry their freight along the lower deck and round the difficult angle of the lowered gangway. In silence this, and the greetings are very quiet as the waiting women meet their loved ones again—for this great steamer with her rows of decks and wide accommodation holds but the remnant of a regiment. Fifteen hundred strong they marched through Durban nine months ago, and how many have not returned! Fever, dysentery, debility, starvation, wounds and death—these have all taken their toll. I suppose there are few parts of the world which nature has made more difficult to the intruder than German East Africa. In the forest the thorny creepers join tree to tree in close high walls until the very stars—man’s only guide—are hidden, nearly all the trees also are a-bristle with protecting spears, sharp as needles to pierce and tear the flesh, and to leave behind, it may be, a poisoned festering sore. Mountain ranges throw their boulders and tear their gaping chasms in the way, the streams, too few and far between for thirsty man, are torrents to be crossed on fallen logs, on slimy boulders where one sees the sudden agony flash in the eyes of a laden mule that slips, and with a struggle of frantic hoofs is tossed to death. A herd of elephants crashes like thunder through the scrub, trumpeting their suspicion of man’s presence, the lions prowling unheard startle with a sudden hungry roar and seek their meat from God. Then come the swamps where the crocodile lies in the slime, and snakes coil, and the mosquito goes about its deadly work. Men sink to their waists in mud, the transports break down—all are tried in vain, ox waggons, mule carts, motor-cars, ‘and then we go hungry,’ said one man to me. Gaunt and weak, with eyes too bright for health, he smiled and spoke lightly—a least trembling of the hands, a twitch of a muscle, a look behind the smiling eyes which no laugh could quite conceal, these the only signs of the over-strained, still quivering nerves. He told me the story of how the flour supply ran out, of how the pangs of hunger were eased with the flesh of donkey or rhinoceros. For eight days the hungry men waited and watched and then a transport laden with sacks appeared—and the sacks held newspapers!