the German engineers left
it a little too late; they panicked at the last and destroyed wholesale,
but without intelligence. True, they put an explosive charge into the
cylinders of all their big engines and left us to get new cylinders cast
in Scotland. They blew out the grease boxes of the trucks; but their
performance, on the whole, was amateurish. For they blew up, with
dynamite, the masonry of many bridges and contented themselves that the
girders lay in the river below. But this was child's play to our Sappers
and Miners. With hand jacks they lifted the girders and piled up
sleepers, one by one beneath, until the girder was lifted to rail level
again. Now any engineer can tell you that the only way to destroy a
bridge is to cut the girder. This would send us humming over the cables
to Glasgow to get it replaced. It was what they did do on the most
important bridge over Ruwu River, but in their anxiety to do the thing
properly there--and they reckoned four months' hard work would find us
with a new bridge still unfinished--they forgot the old deviation, an
old spur that ran round the big span that crossed the river and lay
buried in the jungle growth. In ten days we had opened up this old
deviation, laid new rails, and had the line re-opened. When I passed
down the line we took the long way round by this long-abandoned track
and left the useless bridge upon our right. Much method but little
intelligence was shown in the destruction of the railway lines; for they
often failed to remove the points, contenting themselves with removing
the rails and hiding them in the jungle.

The German engineers must have wept at the orgy of devastation that
followed: blind fury alone seemed to animate this scene of blind
destruction. At N'geri N'geri and Ruwu they first broke the middle one
of the three big spans and ran the rolling stock, engines, sleeping
cars, a beautiful ambulance train, trucks and carriages, pell mell into
the river-bed below. But the wreckage piled up in a heap 60 feet high
and soon was level with the bridge again. So they broke the other spans
and ran most of the rest of the rolling stock through the gaps. When
these, too, had piled up, they finally ran the remainder of the rolling
stock down the embankments and into the jungle. Then they set fire to
the three huge heaps of wreckage, and the glare lit the heavens for
nearly a hundred miles. But the almost uninjured railway trucks that had
run their little rac