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We may forget all this: it is in keeping with our soft and sentimental ways. But will the French? Will Italy forgive? There will be no weakness there when the day of reckoning comes. All this we had from the Commission of Inquiry in Morogoro and Mombasa that sat to take evidence.
The fruit of this treatment was that eighty of these wretched soldiers died and were buried at Morogoro. But these prisoners, on their release, marching through the streets caught sight of two of their erstwhile jailers walking in freedom and security and going about then daily avocations as if there was no war.
They told me of the glad relief with which they welcomed the coming of our troops, and how with tears of gratitude they threw swift death into the bushes, much indeed as they hated the humiliating spectacle of the gallant Rhodesians and Baluchis making their formal entry into the fair streets of Morogoro.
For this smooth surface that now trembles to the thunder of motor lorries seemed to echo to the soft padding of millions of slave feet limping to the coast to fill the harems or to work the clove plantations of his most Oriental Majesty the Sultan of Zanzibar. Halfway between the Usambara and the Central Railway, the dusty road to Morogoro crosses the Turiani River.
One stout fellow I well remember, who had acute appendicitis at Morogoro, was the driver, or engineer as they are called, of a Grand Trunk Pacific train that ran from Edmonton in Alberta to Prince Rupert on the Pacific. We operated upon him, and, though he did very well, yet he must have suffered many things from our want of nursing in his convalescence.
Through the gauze screen on to the white operating table passed all the flotsam of wounded humanity in the summer months. All the human wreckage that marked the savage bush fighting from German Bridge to Morogoro came to me upon this table.
But the almost uninjured railway trucks that had run their little race, down embankments into the bush, were saved to run again. Into Morogoro station steamed the trains with the German lettering and freight and tare directions, carefully undisturbed, printed on their sides.
He cannot partake of the Body and Blood of Christ any more when he is in that state of mind. So you see, padre, it is often the honest men who won't be hypocrites, that won't go to your church. Many the padre that used to drift into our hospital on the long trek to Morogoro, Church of England, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, and those who look after the "fancy religions," as Tommy calls them.
But how different the truth when it reached us at last along the railway by our troops that came from the northern column to join us at Morogoro. Not a German woman insulted; not one fat German child missing; no occupied house even entered by the Belgian troops, not so much as a chicken stolen from a German compound.
Standing on the river bridge that crossed the main road into Morogoro was a slender figure in the white uniform of a nursing sister. In one hand a tiny Union Jack, in the other a white flag. "Don't shoot," she cried, "I'm an Englishwoman;" and the bearded South African troopers, who were reconnoitring the approaches to their town, stopped and smiled down upon her.
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