The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

up the meat supply and having to shoot crocodiles in order to provide food for the expedition’s porters.⁵⁴ Captain Shorthose often had to live off the country, and some of the most difficult fighting that he saw came in 1917 when he was hard pressed for food and fighting the Germans for the possession of native grain fields.⁵⁵ In 1916 Deneys Reitz reports several times being hungry: ‘Meanwhile we were living under famine conditions. There was little or no game in the forest, nor any cattle in this tsetse-haunted region [near Kissaki], and the millet fields lay mostly reaped… and for the next few weeks we lived on very spare diet.’⁵⁶ Buchanan, who fought against food shortages daily, eventually purchased a hen so as to guarantee himself a steady supply of eggs; the system worked well for several months until the hen ‘was stolen by someone whose hunger overcame his scruples’.⁵⁷ Arnold Weinholt recalled some of his porters going so far as to eat some ‘awful-looking red and yellow toadstools’ to satisfy their hunger; the result was not fatal, but it came close.⁵⁸

      For the Germans in East Africa, conditions were not much better, but resourceful improvisation often came to their aid. Of necessity, General von Lettow-Vorbeck had to rely on carriers for his transport, so in most cases this kept his food supplies abreast of his army. Invariably, von Lettow reports that he foraged, the supreme guerrilla tactician living off the land. Mtama, a kind of millet, was pounded into a native flour, which, when mixed with stocks of European flour, made excellent bread, the staple of the askari’s diet.⁵⁹ Watching flocks of birds gave von Lettow the idea that maize crops could be harvested and used before they were ripe, experiment soon showing him that the grain could be artificially dried before being made into very good meal.⁶⁰ Fruits were collected by primitive gathering techniques in the bush, water was often collected from inside coconuts and bamboo, and meat was derived from both hunting and native herds. Finally, hippos were used as a source of fat: ‘The quantity varies: a well-fed beast provides two bucketfuls,’⁶¹ providing that an expert was present who knew where to find it. These measures notwithstanding, food remained a persistent problem for the Germans, and on 27 November 1917, while Smuts’s famous scout, Major P. J. Pretorius, watched from the top of a gorge, Captain Tafel marched to within one mile of von Lettow’s approaching column before turning away and altogether missing their intended rendezvous. On the following day, ignorant of the fact that he had come so close, near starvation but unable to replenish his stocks of food, Tafel surrendered ‘3,400 askaris, nineteen officers, a hundred Europeans, and a thousand porters.’⁶²

      In Burma, for the men engaged, food often proved as much of a problem as it had been in East Africa, and the lack of it proved equally debilitating. During Wingate’s first raid, David Halley recalled how the Burma Riflemen of his intelligence section helped the regulars to supplement their diet by catching small sprat-like fish with their mosquito nets: ‘Then they impaled five or six of them on a bamboo splinter, stuck their splinters into the ground beside a fire, turned it round once or twice, and they were ready for eating,’ bones and all.⁶³ Later, during the walkout, when his own party faced starvation, Halley attempted to quell his hunger by swallowing a small piece of soap, while, ‘Our two Burmese plucked little bamboo shoots and the tenderest and greenest pieces of grass they could find and made themselves a sort of stew.’⁶⁴