2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth

by Giles Foden

  Despite the shower that had greeted the expedition, the rains seemed to be holding off a little. The weather was glorious, in fact; the sun’s rays made the high sandstone and granite cliffs of the lake’s precipitous shores gleam like shields of gold. The foliage that clothed the cliffs luxuriated in its own greenness. Here and there the bluffs were broken by a pebble or small sand beach, upon which dugout canoes were drawn up, carved from huge trunks with axe and adze and infinite labour. In the villages behind the beaches—there were not many—stood the odd oil palm or banana tree and some small huts. Covered with drooping straw, the huts had the shrouded appearance of old-fashioned beehives.

  Had any of the members of the expedition taken a walk that morning—on 28 October 1915–this is pretty much what they would have seen, before hurrying back to the mess for breakfast. As usual Josephine, Eastwood’s chimpanzee, joined them. As an honorary human being she now wore a bib and had her own cup and saucer. Marapandi, Eastwood’s servant, was just pouring tea when a cry went up. A German boat had been spotted on the horizon.

  Everyone ran to the top of the bluff for a better view. Eastwood and Dr Hanschell joined 20 or so others on the hill of granite, below which were scattered peculiar rock formations piled up in a fantastic manner. ‘Enormous masses of rock,’ wrote Verney Cameron in 1874 as he searched in vain for Livingstone, ‘vast overhanging blocks, rocking-stones, obelisks, pyramids and every form imaginable. The whole is overgrown with trees jutting out from every crevice or spot where soil has lodged and from them hang creepers, fifty or sixty feet long, while through this fringe there are occasional glimpses of hollows or caves.’

  It was from this dramatic viewpoint 800 feet above the water—‘more like a design for a transformation scene in a pantomime, rather than a substantial part of Mother Earth’, as Geddie described the same place—that members of the Naval Africa Expedition first sighted the enemy.

  The German ship was a wooden paddle-steamer, about the length of a tug, but narrower in the beam. Mounted amidships was a small gun, a six-pounder, around which stood a curved steel shield. Next to the gun, sticking up through a kind of awning that covered most of the ship, was a dirty smokestack. In all truth she didn’t look much of a challenge as she steamed down the coast; but she was still twice as long as Mimi or Toutou. Squinting through his field glasses, Dr Hanschell noted that the gun of the Kingani—for that was the name of the ship—was trained on them where they were lined up on the cliff. There was less than a quarter of a mile between them. He looked around to ask Spicer what he thought, but the Commander was nowhere to be seen.

  The Belgian guns were, in their turn, trained on the Kingani: the twelve-pounder guns that had been sent by the British for the Baron Dhanis. But neither side fired. The Belgians were waiting for Commander Goor to appear from the mouth of the Lukuga in the Dix-Tonne, his river-barge. The Kingani was out of range by the time he emerged, struggling through reeds and mudbanks in the oddly shaped Dix-Tonne or ‘Fishcake’, as the Belgian garrison nicknamed it.

  As the watchers scrambled down from the bluff, Josephine’s undomesticated cousins began chattering in a nearby ravine, just as Cameron had seen them a litle over 40 years before—‘suddenly the long creepers began to move, as some brown object, quickly followed by another and another, was seen. It was a party of monkeys swinging themselves along, and outdoing Leotard on the flying trapeze; and then stopping, and hanging by one paw, they chattered and gibbered at the strange sight of a boat.’

  Eastwood rejoined his chimp (Josephine cried if left alone too long) and Dr Hanschell located Spicer on the veranda of his hut. Seated on a wooden chair, he was studying the Kingani through his binoculars. Spicer said nothing then, but over the next few days he explained to the doctor his theories of speed versus power and their relation to naval engagements. He concluded that the odds against Mimi and Toutou were rather high.

  Meanwhile work was under way on the harbour for the British boats, to protect them from the weather as much as from German attacks. It was also agreed that a second British camp should be built on a cliff above the harbour. The site itself would be called Albertville, in honour of the Belgian king. The name was still used a decade and a half later when Evelyn Waugh dropped in and gave the Belgians a dose of his trademark satire:

  It was raining again before we reached harbour and moored against an unfinished concrete pier, where dripping convicts were working, chained together in gangs. Albertville was almost hidden in mist; a blur of white buildings against the obscurer background. Two rival hotel proprietors stood under umbrellas shouting for custom; one was Belgian, the other Greek. Officials came on board. We queued up and presented our papers one at a time. The inevitable questions: Why was I coming into the Congo? How much money had I? How long did I propose to stay there? Where was my medical certificate? The inevitable forms to fill in—this time in duplicate: Date and place of father’s birth? Mother’s maiden name? Maiden name of divorced wife?

  Members of the Naval Africa Expedition built the harbour Waugh would eventually sail into, using heaps of rock that lay about by the railway track near where Mimi and Toutou were concealed. The track was extended by taking up pieces of rail that had already been laid and placing them forward, which enabled the engine to bring the stone down to the shore. While this was under way, Spicer went out with Goor in the vedette, making hydrographic measurements of the Lukuga.

  At breakfast a day or two later, someone told the doctor he’d seen the Commander wearing a skirt. Hanschell assumed they were pulling his leg, for they knew he was friends with Spicer. But at that moment Spicer appeared, framed in the doorway. He was indeed wearing a skirt. It was made of lightweight khaki and came down to his knees. The doctor studied the garment. It was not a kilt, as worn by Tait and Mollison; it was most definitely a skirt. Spicer sat down at the breakfast table, joining Josephine and the humans. Tyrer’s monocle nearly popped out of his eye and nobody knew what to say.

  ‘I designed it myself,’ Spicer announced eventually, in response to the questioning stares. ‘My wife makes ‘em for me. Very practical for the hot weather.’

  FOURTEEN

  Spicer’s skirt became a familiar sight during the first week of November, as he decided to join his men working on the new harbour. It had to be finished soon so that Mimi and Toutou could be brought out of hiding and sink the Hedwig. The Sea Lords had made no mention of the Kingani, the ship the expedition had seen from the bluff, and in communications they professed themselves entirely satisfied with Spicer’s progress. However, it was during this period that Spicer’s peculiarities came to the fore.

  Building the harbour was tough work. As the men piled up the blocks they had to wear shoes in the water, because the stones cut their feet. Several of them suffered severe sunburn and blisters. Along with his 28 men and some 200 African labourers—many of them Holo-holo—Spicer worked with his sleeves rolled up. This allowed the tattoos of writhing snakes on his arms to be seen, which fascinated the Holo-holo tribesmen and their families, who came along to watch. As Shankland reports: ‘A crowd of women, children, askaris and hangers-on, kept at a respectful distance by a native corporal, gazed at him all day long with cries of pleasure and amusement.’

  What the Donegal seaman whom Spicer had bawled out for taking off his shirt on the Lualaba thought of this is not recorded. Spicer’s skirt blew up in the wind from time to time, Marilyn Monroe-style, leaving nobody in any doubt that there were tattoos all the way up his thighs as well. Laughing as they looked on, Stinghlamber and his officers began calling him le Commandant à la jupe.

  This caused more friction. Spicer did not object to jupe (skirt), says Farwell, ‘but he did object to being called commandant (major). He demanded that he be addressed as mon colonel.’

  ‘These Belgians don’t even know the difference between a commandant and a commander!’ raged Spicer to Dudley over dinner one night.

  After weighing up all the evidence—the bogus Vice-Admiral’s flag, the co
nfusing array of pips and crowns on his shirt and the story of the attack on the Kent coast—the Belgians had decided Spicer was Stinghlamber’s junior. Ironically, Spicer’s account of his incredible heroism while sinking a German cruiser had done him no favours. They were now calling him ‘only the captain of a ship’, as he complained in a letter to the Admiralty.

  On the morning of 8 November work on the harbour came to an abrupt halt after a shocking discovery. The corpse of a young woman suddenly floated up to where the men had been working the previous day. Her legs had been bitten offby a crocodile. Construction stopped for her burial, though she was never identified. Fearful of more crocodile attacks, the men wouldn’t go back to work, so Spicer put some of them on guard on the half-built harbour wall. Shankland remarks that ‘every now and again they fired at a dark patch, but no crocodiles were slain’. Still, nobody wanted to go near the water. Eventually, Goor came scooting by in his vedette and threw a stick of dynamite into the water, its fuse protected by a bottle. The detonation killed plenty of fish, but no crocodiles, as far as anyone could tell. The ratings watched from the wall, while a large troop of baboons watched the ratings from the hillside above. They occasionally made loud hooting noises, as if in derision.

  §

  Also observing these farcical scenes—through a pair of binoculars while standing on the deck of the Kingani—was one of Zimmer’s two Jobs on the lake. It was Lieutenant Rosenthal of the Imperial German Navy, who had seen service on the disabled German cruiser the Königsberg. In spite of the terrible hardship endured by his crew and the shame of losing the German Navy’s most important battleship on the coast, Rosenthal could be proud of his track record. The Königsberg was blockaded in the Rufiji from 30 October 1914 to 11 July 1915, and it had taken 27 British ships to locate her. That meant 27 ships and their men were not fighting on the European front.

  Now Rosenthal was itching for revenge. He had a taste for it, having seen more action since the sinking of the Königsberg. In September, while Mimi and Toutou were crossing the Lualaba plateau, the Belgian commander-in-chief General Tombeur had sent three battalions of askaris north from Elizabethville with the aim of taking Ruanda-Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi, then unified) from the Germans. The Kingani was one of several German ships that had transported six askari companies north from Kigoma as part of the counter-offensive. She might have been less than half the size of the Hedwig van Wissmann, and tiny compared to the vast von Götzen, but Rosenthal’s ship had played her part. His immediate superior Gustav Zimmer was pleased with him.

  Zimmer’s lake-steamer fleet had also supported raiding parties along the Belgian coast of Lake Tanganyika, with Rosenthal again distinguishing himself by cutting Belgian telegraph lines, then cutting them again as soon as they were repaired, in a series of successful raids. On another occasion, Rosenthal and a crewman named Müller attempted to disguise themselves as Africans so as to scout out the Belgian camp at Lukuga (just before Mimi and Toutou arrived). But the boot polish with which they had blackened their faces washed off in the water, so they abandoned the plan.

  The purpose of Rosenthal’s mission—and the reason why he was now spying on the Lukuga camp—was to establish just how far the Belgians had got in constructing a slipway for the formidable Baron Dhanis. Holo-holo informers had now told the Germans that the steamer’s numbered sections were at the railhead at Kabalo. According to Shankland, the Germans had also ‘heard a rumour some time ago that the English were trying to drag boats across the Mitumba Mountains, but they had simply laughed, believing it to be impossible’.

  Telling his stoker—a tall young African called Fundi—to lay off for a while, lest the roar of the Kingani’s engine or the smoke from her chimney alerted the Belgians to their presence, Rosenthal let the boat drift towards the shore. He was watching the aftermath of the detonation of dynamite in Lukuga harbour. Dead fish were floating to the surface and the Africans were eagerly collecting them in their dugout canoes. A white man in what appeared to be a skirt was pacing up and down the breakwater, wildly gesticulating. Other white men were sitting or lying around on the beach or on the half-completed wall. After a while they stood up and began to go back down into the water with their shovels and pickaxes. It was as if they had been on strike and the man in the skirt had persuaded them to up tools again.

  Rosenthal took the Kingani as close to the camp as he dared, jotted down some observations in his log, then decided to come back later. He wanted to confer with the other Job, Job Odebrecht, who commanded the Hedwig von Wissmann, and with their mutual ranking officer Zimmer. Odebrecht knew a little more about Lukuga—during a raiding party earlier in the year he had destroyed some Belgian dhows and whalers that had been moored there. Odebrecht had also tried to sail into the mouth of the Lukuga in a dinghy, but it was difficult to navigate through the shoals and reed-banks, so he had turned back.

  It was nearly three weeks before Rosenthal returned, chugging along in the Kingani. After conferring with Zimmer and Odebrecht he had decided to come right into the bay in front of the Belgian camp, under cover of darkness very early one morning, to see if he could get a better look at what they were up to. He had noticed a strange flag of some type on his previous recce—white with a red circle in the corner—and then there was all the building work…

  Rosenthal had crept within 400 yards of the shore by the time the sun had risen, but the Belgian guards spotted him immediately. They began firing twelve-pound artillery shells at the Kingani from the two gun emplacements on top of the cliffs. The shells landed splashing in the water near to the boat.

  Realising he had underestimated the Belgians, Rosenthal quickly turned tail, heading for the open lake. He told Fundi to get a fierce fire going as quickly as possible. The noise of another shell—an unearthly moan over the water—filled their ears. As it fell to starboard, the Kingani began vibrating like a drum-skin as the water in the boiler heated up. The noise of the shell still echoed among the crags above Lukuga, ricocheting from bluff to bluff, then bouncing out across the water.

  It was as if that great echo were pursuing them. Looking back anxiously, Rosenthal saw people running from the camp up the cliff, from where—at just that moment—the white puff of another volley of shell could be seen. Thank God for Fundi’s skill with the furnace. His name meant ‘expert’ in Swahili, and so he was proving as he hurled log after log into the fire.

  §

  Dr Hanschell woke that morning (it was 1 December) to the sound of gunfire and he too heard the echo reverberating among the rocks above the camp. He pulled on his long leather mosquito boots over his pyjama bottoms and ran outside. In the grey light of dawn he saw the Kingani zigzagging across the open lake, with shells falling all around her. The large Iron Cross flag in her bows was enveloped in smoke from the funnel. Others emerged from their tents and the doctor joined them as they ran up to the bluff where the Belgian gunners were hard at work.

  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 Wa
terhouse’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.