2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (18 page)

Bent over their twelve-pounders in postures of something like supplication, they were feeding shell after shell into the breeches. Each time the guns spoke their booming piece, gusts of white cleared the barrels. These wreaths of smoke hovered for a while before drifting along the bluff and slowly sinking down to the water.

The British ratings thought they were firing at the
Hedwig
, the ship
Mimi
and
Toutou
had come to sink—and for this reason some of them half-hoped the Belgians wouldn’t get her. This hope was soon fulfilled as the
Kingani
drew out of range, getting smaller and smaller until she disappeared round the promontory of the bay. Afterwards, the British gunlayers Waterhouse and Flynn were scornful of the abilities of their Belgian counterparts, especially since they were firing from stationary gun platforms. Magee says the commander of the
Kingani
showed clever manoeuvring, but that doesn’t seem to have been the view of the naval personnel.

The Belgian gunners only spoke French or Flemish, but no doubt they caught the drift of the British comments. Typically, Spicer exacerbated the situation by offering Flynn and Waterhouse’s services to Stinghlamber. He suggested they man the twelve-pounders in place of the Belgians until
Mimi
and
Toutou
were ready to be brought from their inland hiding-place. The twelve-pounders were originally Admiralty guns, after all. The offer, says Shankland, ‘was coldly but politely refused’.

§

The routing of the
Kingani
did not deter Lieutenant Rosenthal. The next night he returned, hoping to gain further intelligence. Donning a cork life-vest and putting his clothes, boots and hat into a rubber bag, he slipped over the side of
Kingani
into the cold black water. As he swam closer to the shore, he could see the outlines of Belgian dhows in the river mouth and a small motor boat. There was a fairly strong current and he let himself float quietly up the shelving rocky beach just to the right of the new harbour.

He lay there for a while, taking in the scene in the moonlight: the half-built wall and the two camps. One had a Belgian flag; the other flag, he suddenly realised, was British. It was the flag of a Vice-Admiral! Gaining the shore, he ran to some bushes and quickly changed into his clothes. Then he bravely skirted the two camps and carefully examined the harbour. There were no ships. But why were the
Englanders
here, if not to bring a ship? It must be inland, he concluded, and started to walk along the railway.

After several hours, Rosenthal came upon a small encampment next to the track. Avoiding a dozy sentry in British uniform, he could make out two boat-like shapes under tarpaulins in the shade of some trees. They were clearly motor launches of some kind, but it was too dangerous to go any nearer. Realising he had to get this information to Zimmer as soon as possible, he turned and looked for the
Kingani
’s signal light. There it was, winking deep in the lake. He began to walk, then run, back down to the shore.

At the lake’s edge, his arms and legs cut to ribbons by thorn bushes, Rosenthal searched in vain for the signal light on the water. He checked his watch. He had been ashore for much longer than he had agreed with his shipmates, but surely they hadn’t given up on him? It was almost dawn, at which time they had arranged the
Kingani
should leave. He began to panic. Finding the cork vest, he quickly put it on again and swam out into the lake, hoping that he might spot the
Kingani
beyond the promontory. There was nothing to be seen except Mount Kungwe’s ominous summit and behind it the sun rising, casting pink and yellow rays over the water.

It was no use. Rosenthal swam back to shore. He would have to hide out until nightfall, when he hoped the
Kingani
would return for him. Exhausted, he staggered out of the water and sought cover near some bushes. He had just finished changing when he heard African voices. It was a patrol of Belgian
askaris
. They spotted him at once. At first they were respectful, asking him in Swahili what he was doing, until one of them noticed the black, red and white epaulette markings on his shirt and shouted ‘
Jerumani!
‘ The game was up.

Prodding him with their bayonets they took Rosenthal to Major Stinghlamber, who questioned him for several hours. What had he seen? A British flag (though he didn’t say so). The new harbour (he could hardly deny that). After several days in detention, Rosenthal was escorted up the railway inland to Kabalo.

As the train climbed through the Lukuga Valley, he glimpsed those British boats again. At Kabalo he also saw the rusting pieces of the
Baron Dhanis
. How ironic it was that he and his fellow officers had been so worried about the Belgian ship that they had paid no attention to the rumour of a British expedition. Well, the rumour was obviously true, but there was no way of warning Zimmer, short of escaping…

T
he baboons smelt it first as they loitered on Lake Tanganyika’s shingle coast. Lifting their grey muzzles, they sniffed out the moisture in the air, then ran for the shelter of the forest. Out on the lake, the first sign of the coming heavy sea was an alteration in the colour of the water from blue to green as the skies darkened. Then a big thundercloud that had been hovering behind Kungwe slipped down the mountainside and rolled across the lake, whipping the crest of each wave into a fleck of foam.

The white-toothed waves increased in size as they raced towards Lukuga, their surfaces pocked with drops of icy rain. By the time they were within a hundred yards of the harbour, they were huge breakers throwing up spray in every direction as smaller eddies of wind and water attached themselves to larger ones and so on and on until, with an earsplitting crack, the thundercloud broke just above the new harbour.

Perhaps Mkungwe was angry that yet another foreign power had dared to set foot on his lands and was taking out his rage on Spicer’s new harbour. Eighty yards of work was swept away and two whaleboats were thrown up onto the beach.
You big devil!
Tons of rocks that had been blasted at a quarry inland and dumped into the water were swatted to one side as if they were marbles.
You big king!
The expedition was at least thankful that
Mimi
and
Teuton
had not yet been launched.
You kill all men; let us go by
.

Wainwright, who had been sent to collect the missing stores from Fungurume, returned in the midst of the storm. The moment the weather had cleared he took charge of the rebuilding of the harbour. Gradually, says Magee, ‘the rock piled up and extended into the water’. Wainwright now wore a large cowboy hat like that of the contractor they had used at Fungurume. He conveyed his instructions to the African labour force by miming. He shouted at them all the while in Shona (the language he had learned in Rhodesia), but since the workers understood only Swahili and their local tongue they hadn’t a clue what he meant.↓

≡ It can’t have helped that the Swahili for ‘I’, the first-person pronoun, happens to be
Mimi
.

Wainwright swore at them until he was blue in the face, but as Shankland points out the labourers simply ‘smiled happily as they ran to do his bidding’.

Magee records that the extension of the breakwater into the lake ‘gave the natives the impression that we intended to build a road across the lake to the German coast, 40 miles away, and march across’. Rosenthal—now on his way to a prisoner-of-war camp—had heard the same story and he was still determined to find a way of getting a message to his countrymen.

Spicer was still sulking. He had heard about Rosenthal from the servants, but had to wait until 7 December (four days after the German’s arrest) for Stinghlamber to inform him officially. On the 8
th
Spicer sent a message to Commandant Goor informing him that he wanted to interrogate Rosenthal. The Belgians didn’t take any notice; the prisoner had already been sent inland by then, in any case. A furious Spicer sent a complaint to the Admiralty.

The next fortnight was taken up with further work on the harbour. The necessity for
Mimi
and
Toutou
to have a place of safety became apparent when a German ship—no one was quite sure which one—came and shelled the sea-wall one night. Luckily, this attack did far less damage than the storm. Two more nights the men were called to action stations after reports the enemy had landed, but these proved to be false alarms.

It was not until 22 December, seven months after leaving Tilbury, that the first of the motor boats was launched.
Toutou
led the way this time—pushed down the rickety Lukuga railway by the litle steam engine and its Belgian driver. She ran straight into the lake (thanks to a clever system devised by Wainwright whereby the rails and sleepers projected into the water) and was joined the following day by
Mimi.↓

≡ Again Spicer takes credit for this operation in his lecture. ‘I devised a method of running [the boats] on railway trucks from their place of concealment into 10 feet of water and in each case the launching was accomplished in 20 minutes.’

It was Christmas Eve morning by the time everything was ready. The petrol tanks had been filled, the guns had been mounted fore and aft and the boats had been carefully checked: this was no time to spring a leak, as had happened before.
Mimi
and
Toutou
were ready to go forth and fight.

Dr Hanschell watched the boats take to the water, with half an eye on the local bird life as usual. A curious fish-eagle inspected
Mimi
and
Toutou
, but its distinctive cry was soon lost in the roar of engines.
Mimi
and
Toutou
drove out into the bay, heading straight for Mount Kungwe on the opposite shore. Some way towards it, the guns were tested—their boom echoing across the sheet of water—then the crews returned triumphant. Waterhouse claimed to have seen a crocodile swimming alongside
Mimi
.

Further trials took place that afternoon, in the course of which Spicer attempted to semaphore from the Belgian barge to
Toutou
. Tasker,
Toutou
’s signalman, could make neither head nor tail of it and afterwards an irritated Spicer called him to his hut.

‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘Aren’t you a signalman? Aren’t you qualified?’

‘Oh yes, sir,’ replied Tasker. ‘It’s only your semaphore I can’t read, sir.’

According to Shankland, Spicer’s treatment of Tasker was brutal: ‘Spicer gave orders that he was never to enter the office hut, and he told CPO Waterhouse not to take him afloat again.’

On Christmas Day Spicer was still in a bad mood, though it had nothing to do with his semaphore. He had begun to accept the horrifying truth. As well as the 45-ton
Kingani
, which they had seen for themselves when the Belgians fired on it, and the 60-ton
Hedwig
, the only ship mentioned in the Admiralty orders, Spicer had been left in no doubt that there was another German ship on the lake to contend with, the even larger
Graf von Götzen
. The Belgians had filled in the details. With three big guns—the largest taken from the
Königsberg
, Rosenthal’s old ship—and the capacity to transport over 800 troops, the
Götzen
utterly dwarfed
Mimi
and
Toutou
. Its biggest gun fired shells four times the size of theirs.

Dogged by doubts about the expedition, Spicer did not embrace the Christmas spirit. During his rounds he discovered that the red-haired Irish seaman had decked his part of the dormitory hut with variegated leaves—a poor substitute for holly.

‘What’s this?’ shouted Spicer down the line of beds. ‘A whorehouse? Take all that down and burn it.’

Flushed with rage, the Irishman knew to keep silent and do as he was told.

In contrast to this display of mean-spiritedness, Magee reports that ‘we kept Christmas in the good old-fashioned style’, though this appears to have been purely for the benefit of the readers of
National Geographic
. Farwell says ‘there was no Christmas celebration of any sort’. The volunteers had a grim time of it: no alcohol, no cigarettes, no plum pudding. Not even a guinea fowl in place of turkey.

Spicer had other things on his mind. ‘It’s not fair!’ he complained to his officers as they ate tinned beef and biscuits that Christmas night. ‘I have to go out in the launches and take all the risks of the naval action, because there isn’t another seaman among you.’

He laughed crazily—then promptly disappeared to his hut, his skirt flapping about his knees.

The ‘time of death and wounds’, in Shankland’s memorable phrase, was approaching. The men were acutely conscious of their own destinies. Some couched them in religious terms. There had been bushfires along the hilly promontories of the shore around them. Lit by Holo-holo tribesmen hunting bush-rats, they were often miles long, advancing over the curving hills like a fiery army. It made for dramatic scenes at night, when the glowing ranks were mirrored on the lake below. During the day, extinguished by rain, the fires smoked. Eastwood remarked that they were being led by pillars of fire by night and pillars of smoke by day.

As Spicer’s men tried their best to celebrate Christmas without him, the
Kingani
was steaming south through the night towards the British camp. Leutnant zur See Junge had taken command after Rosenthal failed to return. The Germans had no idea what had happened to their former captain, but thought it most likely he had drowned. Junge’s orders from Zimmer were exactly the same as Rosenthal’s: to find out if the Belgians had built a slipway at Lukuga with which to launch the fearsome
Baron Dhanis
. Once assembled, the rusting fragments at Kabalo would constitute a ship of 1,500 tons—300 tons more than even the
Götzen
. With a boiler installed and the guns that were currently above the Belgian camp mounted, the
Dhanis
could prove invincible.

Zimmer’s concern was premature. It was
Mimi
and
Toutou
he should have been worrying about, but only Rosenthal knew of their existence. The German POW had tried to open a secret channel of communication by persuading his captors to allow him to send a written message to Kigoma—the main German base on the lake—requesting his personal possessions. On the back of the letter, written in the ‘invisible ink’ of his own urine, were detailed observations about the Allied forces. If Junge and his navigator Penne had known the letter’s contents as the
Kingani
steamed sedately down the coast early that Boxing Day morning, they might well have turned around.