2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth Read Online Free PDF Page B

electrical wiring, leaving nothing but a tangled mass of metal and melted glass.
    Thousands of men slept in hammocks in its courts and rooms, doing physical training and marching about among its statuary. It must have been a strange experience. Stray cats prowled in the echoey building, making hideous cries at night, and jokers put clothes and masks on the statues—Venus wearing slacks and Cupid sporting a beard. Vast chess championships took place in the Egyptian Court under effigies of the Pharaohs. In the evening the sailors danced to the Crystal Palace Band, doing hornpipes and rag-times with each other for half an hour before turning in.
    As they left the Admiralty and went down the Mall, the Tanganyika party would no doubt have admired Brock’s new statue of Captain Cook, who stood on a stone pedestal with ships’ prows protruding at the sides. Cook was an inspiration, but he might also have made some of them think twice. After all, there was no less danger in their African enterprise than Cook had faced on the beach in Hawaii where he met his end.
    Only a fool would set foot in the Congo’s pathless wilderness unthinkingly. Only a fool would believe that pitting HMS Mimi and HMS Toutou (as Spicer had finally christened the motor boats) against the Germans on the lake was not a truly desperate endeavour. The fact that it was an impossible adventure, a very British kind of stunt, did not lessen the probability that somebody would die. Even if, by some miracle, death were avoided, there was still the very real danger of fever and other considerable hardships.
    As Hew Strachan points out: ‘East Africa was home to the anopheles mosquito, the tsetse fly, the jigger flea, the spirillum tick, the white ant, the scorpion, the poisonous spider, the wild bee, and the warrior ant. The range of larger fauna provided more than an exotic backdrop to the fighting. Soldiers, if sick or sleeping, were liable to be eaten by lions or hyenas; both elephants and rhinoceroses were known to attack patrols, with fatal consequences.’↓
    ≡ The First World War (2001).
    It is perhaps indicative of how things would turn out that the expedition split up while it was still being assembled. John Lee returned to South Africa in the middle of May, before Spicer had even met him. The big-game hunter was accompanied by the reporter, Frank Magee. They were followed shortly after by two others, Douglas Hope and Reginald Mullin, respectively a captain from the War Office and a mechanic from the Thorneycroft yard. Hope and Mullin took with them a three-ton lorry, which they would put on the train from South Africa to the Congo. The advance party also carried some other ‘stores’, as the Navy phrase goes.
    These included 36 long ‘Marine’s’ rifles, three acetylene searchlights and some mines to blow up the stacks of firewood the Germans kept at various points along the lake to fuel their ships.
    The Admiralty accepted the names Mimi and Toutou for the launches. As Spicer later explained to his crew, they meant ‘Miaow’ and ‘Bow-wow’ in French, but nobody found this quite so amusing as he did. In the meantime he had the motor boats altered for the job in hand, cutting their height so they could go faster. Maxim machine-guns were mounted aft and three-pounder Hotchkiss guns fixed in the bows. The mounting of the Hotchkiss guns made the centre of gravity in the boats too high, so they also had to be cut down. This meant, says Spicer, ‘that the gun-layer, instead of standing at the gun, had to kneel down to fire it. Anyone who has ever handled a Hotchkiss gun will realise how much more difficult it is to fire from a kneeling than from a standing position.’↓
    ≡ RUSI lecture, 1934.
    Spicer had the petrol tanks lined with extra steel sheeting to deflect bullets—if they were ignited the wooden boats, with their 3⁄8-inch mahogany hulls, would go up in a flash. The sheets helped compensate for the weight of the guns forward.
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