i4 
I.AND & WATER 
S5eptember 27, 1917 
Eife m^ betters 
Marching on Tanga 
By J. G. Squire 
AccURATP: histories of the operations will no 
/% doubt be written, and there have been and will be 
/ % r reduced very vivid journalistic descriptions of 
jL jlL^trcnch life and trench fighting : jbut it is notj likely 
that we shall get from the Western Front—at any rate until 
the war is far behind us --a book with any permanent value 
as " pure literature." The whole thing is too filthily ugly 
and monotonous in that expanse of mud, devastation and 
scientific slaughter, and it is of pathetic significance that the 
few good poems that have come from the trenches have almost 
all been poems of escape, snatches at stray beauties still remeni- 
bered or within reach ; the stars on a fine night ; flowers in 
a ruined garden or on a parapet ; memories of placid things 
at home. Moreover, even with circumstances at their best, 
good artists are few. and it is a chance whether those that 
exist happen to find themselves in places where they are 
moved to write about the things actually around them. I 
remember that Rupert Brooke, just before he went to Galli- 
poli, told me how clearly he retained the picture of the noc- 
turnal flight from Antwerp, the confused stream of refugees 
along the road, the great sky lit up by the flames of burning 
buildings. He said he should write about it, and one wondered, 
a month or two later, what he would make of the Greek sea, 
the islands, and the battles in that parched and mountainous 
peninsula. Another young poet, J. F.. Flecker, had he lived and 
been a soldier in an African or an Asiatic theatre, 'might 
also have given us an account that was something more than an 
account. But the first war narrative by a soldier which as 
literature can compare with the best contemporary imaginative 
work, is Captain F. Brett- Young's Marching on Tanga 
(Collins, 6s. net.). Captain Brett-Young (who is otherwise 
known as a poet and novelist) served as a doctor a ttached first to 
the 2nd Rhodesian Regiment, then to an Indian ambulance 
unit. He took part in the operations in the summer of 1916, 
when General Smuts drove the Germans from the foothills 
of Kilimanjaro down the Tanga railway. The autlior, having 
reached German Bridge, on the Pangani, then went with his 
brigade southwards along the trolley-line to Handeni, and be- 
yond it towards the Central Railway. He finished up with fever 
and began this book in hospital. The manuscript was twice 
torpedoed, and once had to be completely rewritten. Thfe 
reader can only be thankful that the author had an extra- 
ordinarily rare combination of qualities : the genius to write 
the book, and the patient industry to write the same book a 
second time. Most of us, if I may say so, would have seen 
the book damned first. 
it tt ft * * 
Captain Brett-Young supplies a good map, and a compre- 
hensible account of the operations — from which it is possible 
to gather that medical arrangements might have been made 
with more forethought, that Smuts's generalship was sound, 
and that the personality of Smuts was largely responsible fcr 
the splendid spirit of the troops. Probably we should have 
been told more if no censors existed. But in any case. Cap- 
tain Brett-Young's main business is only with the things 
which came under his observation, including his own state 
of mind and heart. He was often close to the fighting and 
sometimes in the thick of it ; but in that campaign, actual 
fighting was intermittent, and the most formidable and con- 
stant presence in the book is African Nature, a far more 
terrible enemy than the Germans. The keynote of the 
whole book is struck in the first chapter. He strays a 
short distance into the forest from the station of Taveta, 
and there, in a clearing between pestilential creeks, he comes 
upon a company of emaciated black women dancing to ex- 
haustion, whilst an old man and two boys beat tom-toms 
to drive away the devils of fever. The horror and strange- 
ness of that country, the cruelty of its wild life, the reek of 
its forests, the awful drought of its deserts, are one of the 
main themes of the book, though they are never paraded. 
And another is its tremendous grandeur. Stepping out of 
that fever-laden forest of TaVeta, he finds that the mist has 
lifted and there 
Out of the mist range after range materialised, until, through 
those dissolving veils there loomed a shape far mightier than 
any which my brain could have conceived : Kilinianjaro, 
the greatest mountain of all Africa. Now that the sun had 
quite gone fiom our lonely sight, the glaciers on the fluted 
crater of Kibo shone with an amazing whiteness, while the 
snows of the sister peak, Mawenzi, were cold in .shade. 
The magnitude of these lovely shapes was overwhelming, 
for they do not rise, as do the other African peaks, Jrom tlie 
base of a mountainous table-land, but from the edge of a 
low plain, not two thousand feet above the sea-Ieycl. Since 
then I have .seen the great mountain in many guises : as a 
dim ghost dominating the lower waters of the Pangani ; as a 
filmy cone, imponderable as though it were carven out of 
icy vapours, gleaming upon hot plains a hundred miles away ; 
as the shadow whicli rises from the level skylines of the great 
game reserve ; but never did it seem so wonderful as on that 
liight wlicn it was first revealed to me, walking from the 
Lumi forest to Taveta. There was indeed something cere- 
moniousin its unveiling, and the memory of that vast immanence 
coloured all the evening of our departure. 
You feel that great mountain, and others not so great- 
towering all the time behind the narrative. There are detail^ 
enough ; many unforgettable pictures of men and places, sn I 
delicate sketches of small wild things, hornbills and rain birds, 
acacia trees, dragonflies, orange tip butterflies. But his domi- 
rlant impression throughout that campaign was that of the 
immensity of wild Africa and the smallness of the men who 
were crawling after each other through its swamps and over 
its sandy wastes, the enormous ferocity of nature in an un- 
tameable land, the transitoriness of man's journeys and fights 
in that wilderness, 'where in a year or two the deep tracks will 
have been overgrown by bush, the bleached bones of men and 
beasts, all the rubble of passing armies, drifted over by sand 
and put out of sight for ever. Beauty, Mutability, and Fate 
still dominated him even in his most desperate time when, 
with a little party of wounded men, having been foodless for , 
thirty hours, he was surrounded by German-commanded 
• savageswho searched and searched for them within earshot 
whilst they crept or ran through the undergrowth, deliberately 
tangling their footprints and longing for the dark. He thought 
even then of the beauty of the grasses, and the evening light in 
that solitude, and then his mind flew back to the extremest 
contrast, a Devon summer afternoon "in a garden ravished with 
the spicy odour of pinks. A strange business this . . .a 
strange business, that I, torn and bleeding, should be running 
for my life through the heart of Africa, through dense 
thorn which had never been shadowed by man's figure or 
penetrated by his violence since the beginning of the world ; 
while, at home, perhaps, she whom I loved most dearly was 
sitting in that summer garden -among so many peaceful 
scents and knowing nothing . . knowing nothing. It 
seemed incredible that this could be at All." Then when night 
fell, and his parched and bleeding charg'es curled up in a nullah 
to take an hour of broken sleep, he watched the Southern Cross 
swing over the sky and wondered again " at the strangeness 
of fate which had cast me upon this strange land," 
perhaps to feed the hyenas, and thought that he had rather 
die " in a country where the works of man bore witness of 
his unconquerable courage ; where I might see on every side 
tokens of the great anonymous T dead in whose footsteps I 
.was following, and so take courage . . . For that which 
makes a place terrible or kindly is the life of men who have 
worked and suffered a.nd loved and died in it. That was the 
way, I thought, in which a country got a soul ; and this land 
had none." 
* tt * * * 
It makes the book quiet. The fighting breaks in and sub- 
sides again, as the machine guns rattled^and died away in the 
green depths of those untrodden forests. Whatever hardships 
and{excitementsbriefly come, they subsidej; and reflection pours 
back in a flood. Various men took it no doubt in various ways, 
and with varying degrees of consciousness. But the author 
is a poet, and was never far, even when most active, from 
the mood in which, at the first camp by the Pangani, he sat 
with his comrades by the fire, listened to the sap hissing, 
looked at the shadowy figures around him, and wondered what 
men they were whom fate had dumped together in so strange 
a spot. His writing has scarcely a flaw from beginning to end, 
and many pages are exquisite in phrasing and movement. 
This does not mean that, at intervals, he lays himself out to be 
purple for the sake of the thing. It merely means that he 
always rises to the occasion, and that when his emotions are 
more than ordinarily deep or the sights and sounds of those 
hills and forests peculiarly in command of his senses, he lifts 
naturally into passages of sustained beauty. He cora- 
murticatcs his awe. • 
