The Long and the Short of Addis Ababa to Berbera
Hoping for an early return to Nairobi and onward to South Africa, Morris Hirsch was disappointed and dismayed by an order to travel by the Addis/Djibouti Railway and report to the 5th Kenya Casualty Clearing Station at Dire Dawa.
At Dire Dawa he was the sole officer to supervise the transport of permanently disabled soldiers and prisoners by road to the port of Berbera in British Somaliland to board a South African hospital ship for evacuation back to South Africa.
At the Addis Ababa train station he had an altercation with the station master who objected to his taking along his Kikuyu batman, Kamdu. Interrupted by the sudden departure of the train, he and Kamdu dashed out with their luggage. To their relief and amusement, catching up with the archaic train, trundling out at a walking pace was no problem.
There were no refreshments on board during the twelve hour hot and boring journey through sparse shrub and desert. Food was available at two stops in unhygenic shacks. Morris made careful choices.
The 5th Kenya Casualty Clearing Station was quartered in a double story brick building in the dusty little town of Dire Dawa.
Morris felt lonelier and lonelier as the convoy traversed mile after mile of barren hot desert. The journey was not without mishap...
Berbera was also desolate, with a sparse population of Somali people, Arab-like in biblical garb, amidst a sparse collection of white washed mud huts. Morris was quartered in one, stifling hot in the day, though not surpassing Massawa, and chilling cold at night. It was no consolation that he had experienced two of the hottest places on Earth.
The Hospital Ship was a civilized oasis where he received VIP treatment. The nurses commiserated with him over the prospect of his desert return and that the residual South Africans in East Africa were the forgotten legion.
They assured him that they would see to it that the soldier welfare committee in Durban would write and send comfort parcels to sustain the morale of the forgotten legion. To his surprise, both letters and parcels brightened his eventual return to Nairobi.
Morris, feeling forlorn on the coast of the Horn of Africa, watched the glistening ship disappear over the blue horizon. He climbed into his vehicle with his batman Kamdu and headed back to Dire Dawa. There, to his great relief, he was ordered to return to Addis Ababa for transfer back to Nairobi and the prospect of reuniting with the Three Musketeers and busing back to South Africa together.
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
References:
Excerpt: Dr. Morris Isaac Hirsch's Unpublished Memoirs. Hirsch Archives
Photo Credits: Hirsch Archives