“Impudent answers to this court shall always be soundly punished!  Call the next case while that one is being taught good manners.

A woman was stood in front of the line, fidgety with fear, in doubt whether to lay her suckling baby on the bench before she faced military justice.  She laid it on the floor at her feet, hesitated, and then picked it up again and wrapped it in a corner of the red blanket that constituted her only dress.

“Take that brat away from her!” the lieutenant ordered.  “She must pay attention to me.  With that in her arms she will only think of mothering!”

An askari seized the baby by the arm and leg and gave it with a laugh to another woman to hold, its mother whimpering with fright until she saw it safely nestled.

“Quick, now!  What about this one?”

It seemed there was no charge against her.  The two sergeants searched through the piles of blue sheets in vain.

“Then what the devil is she here for?  What do you want, you?”

The trembling woman pointed to her baby, but was dumb.  It needed courage to answer that lieutenant, and the crack—­crack—­crack of a thick kiboko descending at measured intervals on the naked back of the boy who had answered boldly was no help toward reassurance.

“Speak!” the lieutenant ordered, “or I shall have you compelled to speak!”

She burst into sudden volubility.  The dam once down, she poured forth a catalogue of wrongs that seemed endless, switching off from one dialect to another and at intervals inserting, apropos apparently of nothing, the few words of German she had picked up.  The lieutenant yelled for an interpreter, and a Nyamwezi who knew German rose from the front bench and came and stood beside her.

“That baby is a white man’s,” he explained.

“What does she want?”

“She says the white man is the bwana dakitari (the doctor!).”

“Oh!  Then I am glad she came here.  It is time these loose women were taught a lesson!  They tell the same tale.  They say a white man passed through the village, gave their father a present, and carried them off.  Is that her tale, too?”

“Yes.”

“Well—­what of it?  The father agreed at the time when he accepted the present, didn’t he?  The consequence is a baby—­not for the first time!  Instead of going back to her village, she comes here and tries to blackmail the officer!  She is young.  It’s the first time she has been in this court.  This time I will be lenient.  One hundred lashes!”

The interpreter translated, and the woman screamed.  An askari seized her by the shoulders.  She clung to him, but he threw her to the ground, and another one tore off the blanket that would have deadened the blows to some extent.  She begged, and clung to their feet, but the blows began to rain on her, and presently she lay still, her breasts flattened against the earth floor, her mouth full of dust, and her naked body paralyzed by fear of the descending lash.