Sketches Of The East Africa Campaign, by Robert Valentine Dolbey

This book is an extraordinary volume, written by a British medical officer of an observant nature as letters home from serving as a medical doctor in advanced hospital stations far from the comforts of civilization in a war where the main enemies were disease and accident rather than the fury of the Germans and their native allies, and where there were few battles worthy of the name but rather guerrilla campaigns. The book, as a result, is not about the romance of battle but instead about the more mundane matters of dealing with wounds and illnesses, the sort of expedients that a doctor and a staff often lacking in nurses had to undertake far from the medical supplies that were taken for granted even in World War I, observations on imperialism and the need for white people to stand together to ensure common prestige against natives, a rather observant but pointed eye towards ethnology (the author is very hostile to the Germans, whom he invariably labels as the Huns), as well as the importance of logistics to warfare and the way in which much of the conduct of this campaign was conducted based on the need to reach railways and ensure access to river systems and other transportation, and even a great deal of attention on the animals (including the disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks as well as carrion animals like lions and vultures and hyenas).

The book itself was not conceived originally as a single volume, but is rather stitched together from letters sent to home. When the author returned home after the war, he found that the letters presented, taken together, a whole account of what was then (and certainly is now) a neglected front for studies of World War I. As a result of its origin as a series of epistles, there is a great deal of repetition and there is not a strong narrative flow from one letter to the next. That said, the contents themselves are worthy of investigation and provide a wealth of interesting notes about the resourcefulness and immense suffering of the British army in East Africa. While the author has some unkind things to say about the Germans and their lack of industriousness in their colonies, as well as their frequent cruelty while strong and cravenness while weak, although he does speak highly of the courage of his own general, a Boer named General Smuts, as well as the German commander von Lettow, whose iron resolution kept the German war effort alive in East Africa long after the other German colonies had been overrun. The author even manages to be immensely fair-minded about the contributions of chaplains and the navy to the war effort in his frontier, showing none of that interservice rivalry that causes so much difficulty in combined operations in strenuous circumstances. The author even manages to find the time to write about the songbirds of East Africa and their beautiful melodies, showing an artistic and romantic temperament that is not dimmed even by the horrors of a guerrilla war, and about a military blunder that destroyed the only brewery in the colony and stopped the supply of lager to British troops there.

So, although the material of this book is somewhat scattered and many of the “chapters,” such as they are, are brief accounts of a very miscellaneous nature, this is an immensely worthwhile book for a wide variety of reasons. For one, it provides a wealth of intriguing information about life in East Africa, ranging from the habits of the local population to the behavior of Germans as imperialists to the confusion of British fairness and mildness for weakness. For those readers who are able to tolerate its somewhat blunt and direct language, and who do not mind the fact that it is clearly a work of its time, it provides a great deal of careful and keen observation of the sordid nature of military life in “small wars” against irregular opponents. The importance of good food, the difficulty in locating and defeating troops skilled at hiding, and the sufferings of life for cultured Europeans in harsh tropical climates are all things that apparently have to be relearned generation after generation, since we can never bother to remember or pay attention to those who have come before. Let those who read this book be wiser than so many who neglect the lessons of history and have to relearn them over and over again at heavy cost to themselves and others. Of particular interest is the fact that the author had experience both as a prisoner of war as well as a hospital chief who had to take care of German prisoners of war. His varied experiences and surprising compassion and understanding, despite his critical nature, make this book a rare pleasure as a ground-eye view of a brutal war by an articulate eyewitness.