"Little Oration"

In Tanga, port of Tanganyika (before the War, German East Africa), Britons seethed with righteous indignation last week, wrote letters to the papers, sent cables to the Foreign Office, demanded the withdrawal of German Consul, Herr Speiser.

Short time ago the small (6,000 tons) super-efficient German cruiser Karlsruhe dropped anchor in Tanga harbor. Seldom nowadays has a German Consul on the east coast of Africa opportunity to feast his visiting compatriots, and Consul Speiser made the most of it. In Tanga Herr Speiser prepared a huge banquet for the officers of the Karlsruhe, invited all Tanga's remaining German colonists, piled the long table with a little forest of slender Rhine wine bottles.

The banquet lasted, with intervals of song and story, for hours. At the end of it Consul Speiser made a speech. He wanted to remind his dear friends, his honored guests, of those dear days when Tanga was one of the chief jewels in the Kaiser's crown. He wanted to remind them too that it was from German East Africa that the commerce raider Konigsberg, almost as spectacular as the Emden, started in 1914, and that it was not far from Tanga harbor that she was finally sunk with colors flying.

He wanted them to remember how gallantly Tanga's land forces had defended their little fort in 1914, how they had defeated the British East African Expeditionary Force with heavy losses and made the wounded British lion creep ignominiously away! Banquet guests woke the echoes with Hoch! after Hoch! bellowed tearful choruses of Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles!

Same evening British colonists were horrified to hear the blare of a German band from the waterfront, to see German sailors replete in brass buttoned pea-jackets, with fluttering ribbons hanging down their backs, goose-stepping past the Consul while native boys grinned in delight. German settlers shouted Hoch! again. Horror soon changed to fury when they read a full translation of Consul Speiser's speech.

In Tanganyika, where 5,800 Europeans, some 350 of them German colonists, rule over nearly five million blacks, British prestige is a vital thing. Two days later, to offset the Karlsruhe's parade, H. M. S. Enterprise, anchored in Tanga harbor, emptied every man jack ashore to parade through the town with fixed bayonets while a seaplane whirred overhead.

Last week chastened Consul Speiser apologized.

"I did not dream," he wrote to Governor Sir Donald Charles Cameron, ''that any British bystanders would understand my little oration."

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