Tom Willoughby's Scouts: A Story of the War in German East Africa
9781465674951
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Among the passengers who boarded the Hedwig von Wissmann at Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika, one June day in 1914, there were two who engaged more particularly the attention of those already on deck. The first was a tall stalwart man of some fifty years, with hard blue eyes, full red cheeks, a square chin, and a heavy blond moustache streaked with grey. He stepped somewhat jerkily up the gangway, brought his hand stiffly to his brow in response to the salute of the first officer, and was led by that deferential functionary to a chair beneath the deck awning. The second presented a striking contrast. Equally tall, he was slim and loosely built, with lean, sunburnt, hairless cheeks, a clean upper lip that curved slightly in a natural smile, and brown eyes that flashed a look of intelligent interest around. He walked with the lithe easy movements of athletic youth, turned to see that the porter was following with his luggage, a single travelling trunk and a rifle case, and satisfied on that score, picked up a deck-chair and planted it for himself where the awning would give shade without shutting off the air. Both these new arrivals wore suits of white drill, and pith helmets; but whereas the elder man was tightly buttoned, suggesting a certain strain, the younger allowed his coat to hang open, showing his soft shirt and the cummerbund about his waist. The gangway was pulled in, a seaman cast off the mooring rope, and the vessel sheered off from the landing-stage with those seemingly aimless movements with which a steamer, until she is well under way, responds to the signals from the bridge. In a few minutes the Hedwig von Wissmann was heading southward down the lake, on her three-hundred-mile voyage to Bismarckburg. The younger of the two passengers lit a cigarette and unobtrusively took stock of his fellow-travellers. The tall man before mentioned was already puffing at a long black cigar, and a steward, with marked servility, had placed a glass of some lemon-coloured liquid on a table at his elbow. Beyond him four men of middle age, also provided with cigars and glasses, were playing cards, not in dignified silence, like Sarah Battle of immortal memory, but with a sort of voracity, and a voluble exchange of gutturals. Sitting apart, smoking a dark briar pipe, sat a grizzled and somewhat shabby passenger who, though the brim of his panama was turned down over his eyes, had nevertheless watched and drawn conclusions about the two strangers.
