MILLER : Battle for the bundu (fülszöveg)
In a barely explored wilderness of dense jungle and thorn bush known as the bundu, the bizarre drama of the First World War in East Africa unfolded. This was the campaign that served as the background for Forester's African Queen; a colonial war in which a handful of native troops superbly commanded by Colonel von Lettow Vorbeck held back a 250,000-man British army for more than four years. Desperately needed on the battlefields of Europe, the British troops were stalled in Africa almost solely by the strength of the German colonel's will. It might be said that von Lettow determined the timetable for World War I.
The last war to be fought under a code of honor, the battle for the bundu was nonetheless a bloodbath. The British, whose forces far outnumbered the Germans', should by right of might have been the early victors; but as the head of British Intelligence reported: "Here I am in the rottenest side show imaginable, rotten troops and rotten leaders in a colony where from the Governor downward there is no feeling of patriotism."
The English, nothwithstanding generations of colonial experience, were badly out-maneuvered by the German guerrilla hit-and-run tactics. And in matters of discipline, the weaker force far outmatched the stronger. When a British commander failed, he was sacked. When a German botched a mission, the legendary von Lettow handed him a pistol and said: "Let me hear some interesting news about you in a day or two."
The Germans waged an almost faultless war, but the outcome of the struggle could only be dictated from the battlefields of Europe. When the end came there, World War I ended in East Africa also. In this brilliant re-creation of a time and place, the reader will feel the lumbering effort of the victor, the slippery ease of the vanquished, and will wonder, uneasily perhaps, which was which. For, as Mr. Miller so dramatically shows, it was very much a "capitulation of an army that had not lost to an army that had not won."
Battle for the Bundu captures the full measure of the soldier at war—the heroism and cowardice, the exhilarations and frustrations that are his lot. Although the story is filled with war's grim realities and cruel ironies, it is also vastly entertaining, with the "reads-like a-novel" quality noted by the reviewers of Miller's previous book The Lunatic Express.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
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