resh foods. Then at last the railway opened up a big
Stationary Hospital, our Casualty Clearing Station moved further to the
bush, and Sister Mabel's work was done. But there was no elegant leisure
for her when she arrived at the Coast to take the leave she long had
earned in England. An Australian transport had some cases of
cerebro-spinal meningitis aboard, and wanted Sisters, and, as if she had
not already had enough to do, took her with them through the sunny South
Atlantic seas to the home that had not seen her since she left for
Tropical Africa five weary years before.

THE WILL TO DESTROY

The journey from Morogoro to Dar-es-Salaam is a most interesting
experience, a perfect object lesson in the kind of futile railway
destruction that defeats its own ends. For Lettow and his advisers said
that our long wait at M'syeh had ruined our chances. Complete
destruction of the railway and of all the rolling stock would hold us up
for the valuable two months until the rains were due. Our means of
supply all that time would be, perforce, the long road haul by motor
lorry, by mule or ox or donkey transport, two hundred miles, from the
Northern Railway. Lettow bet on the rains and the completeness of the
railway destruction he would cause; but he bargained without his
visitors. Little did he know the resource and capacity of our Indian
sappers and miners, our Engineer and Pioneer battalions.

They threw themselves on broken culverts and wrecked bridges; with only
hand tools, so short of equipment were they, they drove piles and built
up girders on heaps of sleepers and made the bridges safe again. Saving
every scrap of chain, every abandoned German tool, making shift here,
extemporising there, bending steel rails on hand forges, utilising the
scrap heaps the enemy had left, they finally won and brought the first
truck through, in triumph, in six weeks. But the first carriage was no
Pullman car. It exemplified the resource of our men and illustrated the
idea that proved Lettow wrong. For we adapted the engines of Ford and
Bico motor cars and motor lorries to the bogie wheels of German trucks
and sent a little fleet of motor cars along the railway. Light and very
speedy, these little trains sped along, each dragging its thirty tons of
food and supplies for the army then 120 miles from Dar-es-Salaam.

This adaptation of the internal combustion engine to fixed rails may not
be new, but it was unexpected by Lettow. And