Birds -- Tanzania; World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Tanzania
Readers will be able to follow the fortunes of that wonderful unit,
the 25th Royal Fusiliers, through the campaign, and will perhaps gain
thereby an insight into this strangest of all side-shows more true and
illuminating than a more comprehensive work. There was little that
this old Legion of Frontiersmen missed. Comparisons are odious; yet
I think it may safely be said that no other white unit took so full
a part in the diverse stages of the campaign. They bore the long and
arduous months of frontier and railway guarding in 1915. They took no
mean share in the spectacular capture of Bukoba. Their mounted infantry
as well as ordinary rank and file, took part in many of the small but
intensely trying patrols through the thorny scrub along the Serengeti
plains. General Smuts’s operations around Kilimanjaro saw them. Right
to the fore were they in the long and tiring treks, varied by frequent
and fierce rear-guard actions, which took place down the Pangani and
southward through the bush and forests to the capture of Morogoro; and
onwards again right down to the Rufiji. They bore that cruelly hard
period through the rains of 1916, when they held the Mgeta line against a
numerically superior foe, living literally in a swamp for months, riddled
through and through with fever. In January, 1917, when General Smuts made
his final effort to crush the opposition, Colonel Driscoll and his men
were right in the van, and here among others they lost Captain Selous,
that great hunter and greater English gentleman. After a brief period in
the south we find them back in time for the final stages of the campaign.
Here they went in from Lindi to take part in the fighting of 1917,
fighting so bitter that all the previous work was but as child’s play in
comparison. Lest it seem that I exaggerate, let me say that, with a force
of about half the size, the casualties during these last four months were
three times as great as those throughout the whole previous two years.
There was indeed hardly an action in which the battalion did not take
part, until that day on the 18th of October, 1917, when, while covering a
temporary retirement, they were overwhelmed by immensely superior numbers
and cut to pieces.
The author does not harp overmuch on the sickness and privations of his
comrades—he has been through too many of them to do so; but I am reminded
of the remark of one of them during the not infrequent periods of
grousing which every respectable British soldier must have. “Ah, I wish
to h⸺ I was in France! There one lives like a gentleman and dies like a
man, here one lives like a pig and dies like a dog.” There may have been
something in this remark, yet I have thought as I saw the 25th staggering
on, absolutely in rags, many with fever actually on them, nearly all
emaciated and staring-eyed, that they were living, if not like gentlemen,
at all events like Men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account