Read 2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth for Free Online Page A

He packed some hair-dye, too: the canary-yellow shade was achieved by chemical means. Dr Hanschell had a pair of long leather mosquito boots, a set of Jane Austen and the Oxford Book of English Verse (the 1900 Quiller-Couch edition). The Donegal seaman had pencil and paper with which to write to his ‘mother’. Several members of the expedition brought slippers to wear in camp in the evening and white flannel shirts that could, similarly, be put on after a long day. Boots were generally leather, Army-issue type, though some of the volunteers took along more modern footwear with crepe rubber soles. Additional items included hurricane lamps, electric torches and compasses with luminous dials. Beads and lengths of cloth were also taken, in what was now a time-honoured tradition, for ‘trading with the natives’.
    Much to the bemusement of onlooking Londoners, the expedition paraded at St Pancras railway station before taking the train to Tilbury. Spicer had designed a special uniform for such ceremonial occasions, consisting of army khaki tunics (short sleeved and belted at the waist), grey flannel shirts and navy-blue ties. Each officer, even Dr Hanschell, carried a naval cutlass. Spicer insisted upon this, tearing a strip off the doctor when he questioned the point of a medic wearing such an item. Dressed mostly in this manner the men lined up under the Victorian Gothic portals of St Pancras. The effect cannot have been quite what Spicer intended, given that the ratings were in bell-bottomed sailor’s trousers or khaki shorts, and Tait and Mollison wore kilts. He marched up and down the line all the same, carefully inspecting each man.
    This performance was repeated on the quay at Tilbury, whereupon Spicer marched his men up the gangplank of the Llanstephen Castle to the suppressed laughter of the liner’s Merchant Navy officers. Some of the passengers were not so amused, complaining to the captain at this use of the ship for military purposes. Surely it made them more liable to be torpedoed by German U-boats, as had happened to the Lusitania the previous month.
    That event, which took more than a thousand lives to the bottom of the sea, puts the scale of the Naval Africa Expedition in some perspective. So, too, does the situation on the Western Front in June 1915 as Spicer’s 28-man team was embarking. Every day, close-ranked units of troops were being cut to ribbons by machine-gun fire as they tried to advance over fields of mud. The mud was caused not by the weather but by the pounding of heavy shells. At Ypres in April the Germans had used poison gas for the first time, releasing it from canisters whose arrival through the air would send troops into panicked retreat.
    It seemed as though the Germans were winning. Their dugouts, their steel helmets and most of all their guns were of better quality. In Africa, too, their superiority was evident, though their rifles were mainly old, puff-smoke things—1871-pattern weapons that used black powder and easily gave away a soldier’s position in the bush. Still the Germans were victorious and for a very simple reason: their commander von Lettow knew what he was about and the British did not.
    The battle of Tanga the previous November was a case in point. Two brigades of the Indian Army dispatched by ship from Karachi, hoping to take the port of Tanga in the north of German East Africa at the end of their voyage, had suffered a shameful defeat because of poor organisation and bad planning. That battle was the beginning of a long, fiercely fought campaign by von Lettow, which would outlast the war in Europe.
    The campaign had a naval element, as the British were trying to ensure naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Von Lettow, meanwhile, was desperate to supply his men from Germany. That June, he had only one way of protecting a cargo ship. It was the wily Königsberg , the heavily armed German cruiser, still hiding out in the sinuous green curves of the Rufiji delta. But the