‘You and your platoon,’ he said. ‘We can’t spare any more men. We’ve got the entire country to cover. Make sure you take up a sensible defensive position and deploy your troops under good cover. Some of those Germans may try to shoot their way out.’
‘You mean’, I said, ‘that just me and my platoon are going to try to stop every German in Dar?’
‘Those are your orders,’ he said.
‘But there must be hundreds of them.’
‘There are,’ he said, smirking a bit.
‘What happens if they do have guns and put up a fight?’ I asked.
‘Mow them down,’ the Captain said. ‘You’ve got a machine-gun, haven’t you? One machine-gun can defeat 500 men with rifles.’
I was getting nervous. I didn’t want to be the person who gave the order to mow down 500 civilians out there on the dusty coast road that led to Portuguese East Africa. ‘What happens if they’ve got their women and children with them?’ I asked.
‘You’ll have to use your discretion,’ the Captain said, evading the issue.
‘But … but,’ I stammered, ‘that road is the most important escape route in the whole country. Don’t you think that you or some other regular officer should be doing this job?’
‘We’ve all got our hands full,’ the Captain said.
I tried once more. ‘I am really not trained for this sort of thing,’ I said. ‘I’m just a chap who works for Shell.’
‘Rubbish!’ he barked. ‘Off you go now! And don’t let us down!’
So off I went.
I found a telephone and called Mdisho at the house to tell him not to expect me back until he saw me.
‘I know where you are going, bwana!’ he shouted down the phone. ‘You are going after the Germani! Am I right?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ll see.’
‘Let me come with you, bwana!’ he cried. ‘Oh, please let me come with you!’
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible this time, Mdisho,’ I said. ‘You’ll just have to stay and look after the house.’
‘Be careful, bwana,’ he said. ‘You will be careful they do not kill you.’
I went out into the barrack square where my platoon was waiting for me. The askaris looked very smart in their khaki shorts and shirts, and they were lined up at attention beside two open trucks with their rifles at their sides. As soon as I arrived, the Sergeant saluted me and told the men to get into the trucks. I sat in the cabin of the front truck between the driver and the Sergeant, and we drove through the town towards the coast road that would lead eventually to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa. In the second truck the askaris had a huge reel of telephone cable which they were going to lay along our route so that I could keep in touch with headquarters and be told the moment war was declared. There were no radios for that sort of thing out there.
‘How much cable have you got?’ I asked the Sergeant. ‘How far along the road can we go?’
‘Only about three miles, bwana,’ he answered, grinning.
Just outside Dar es Salaam we stopped by a small hut and two signallers jumped out and unlocked the door and connected up our telephone cable to a plug inside. Then we drove on and the signallers fed the telephone cable out on to the grass verge as we went slowly forward. The road ran right along the edge of the Indian Ocean, and the water out there was calm and clear and pale green. I could see the sandy bottom under the water for a long way out and on the little strip of sand between us and the water there grew those everlasting coconut palms waving their tops high up against the hot blue sky. It was a very beautiful sight and a little breeze was blowing from the sea into the cabin of our truck.
After a couple of miles, we came to a place where the road sloped steeply uphill and curved inland and went right through some very thick jungle. ‘What about over there in the trees?’ I asked the Sergeant.
‘It is a good place,’ he said, so we stopped where the road entered the jungle and we
climbed out of the trucks.
‘Leave the trucks outside blocking the road,’ I said to the Sergeant, ‘and see that each man takes up a concealed position on the edge of the forest. The machine-gun and all the rifles must be able to cover the road just beyond the blockade.’
When all this had been done, I took the Sergeant aside and had a little talk with him in Swahili. ‘Look, Sergeant,’ I said, ‘I am sure you realize that I am not a soldier.’
‘I realize that, bwana,’ he said politely.