Eerie army of children brought hardened soldiers to their knees

IT started out as a bright and sunny day in the early 1960s, on the Congolese shore of what was then called Lake Tanganyika.

But it fast became dark and terrifying for a platoon of battled-hardened soldiers of fortune fighting against rebel factions in a country that just a few years before had been abandoned by its Belgian masters and left to become a morass of military mayhem that would torture it for another four decades.

The mercenaries were expecting an enemy attack, but were not too concerned, given their superior training in the armies of Europe, South Africa and Britain. In spite of their being white men in the middle of one of the most inhospitable regions of Africa, they were, unlike their adversaries, well fed, well educated, well clothed and well prepared. At least, they thought they were.

The sound of chanting, strangely high-pitched and not like anything they had ever heard before, turned their blood cold. This was no attacking horde of African warriors!

They raised their rifles and prepared for battle, but were unprepared for the sight that greeted them: hundreds of children brandishing sticks and stones, raising their waif-like voices in a haunting, off-key and almost ethereal dirge.

The soldiers stood their ground, and as the children drew closer they saw that none of them looked more than 12 years old, with the youngest round about 6 or 7. The platoon’s commanding officer, a young British lieutenant, ordered them to hold fire. These were children, not an enemy.

The children got near enough for the soldiers to see the whites of their eyes, except that there was no white so see. Their eyes were yellow and bloodshot, their faces vacant and curiously displaying no outward signs of terror. Calmly and inexorably they marched down in a pathetic rag-tag and bizarre phalanx with their sticks raised and rocks ready to hurl at the white men who were invading their turf.

The soldiers suddenly realised that the myths they had been told, by elders in villages where they had camped were not the laughable fantasy they had believed them to be, but perfectly true. These children fed a diet of drugs, mostly dagga, and indoctrinated by rebel commanders to believe that the white man’s bullets would turn to water—a vile and nauseating example of people’s inhumanity to their fellow human beings.

The soldiers retreated until their backs were to the water. A few opened fire out of sheer terror and the realisation that nothing would make these children stop until such time as they had walked among their enemy and calmly beaten them to death.

Sickened by the sight of his men mowing down defenceless children, the lieutenant ordered them to abandon their weapons and bulky equipment, take off their boots and swim out into the lake, hoping that the bulk of the children were not good swimmers.

His ruse worked and the children stopped at the water’s edge, still chanting plaintively but somehow realising in their drug-addled minds that while the white man’s bullets might well turn to water, that same water would drown them.

The soldiers swam until they came across an old boat lying on the shore. They jury-rigged a sail and headed away as fast as they could.

Night came, and with it even greater terrors. A violent storm drove them away from shore. High waves caused by the combination of high winds and the narrow width of Lake Tanganyika, tossed their tiny craft about for hours, with all of them unable to do anything but hang on desperately.

At about midnight the wind changed direction and drove them towards land with such force that their boat broke in half. They dragged themselves ashore and made their way towards a solitary light in the distance. To their amazement they had stumbled upon a remote monastery, home to an order of Belgian missionaries. They were fed, given dry clothes, and each soldier was assigned a cell in which to sleep.

I met the lieutenant in charge a few months later while working in the Congo as a war correspondent for the BBC. He told me that when he woke, he found himself walking through the monastery as though drawn by an unseen force. He heard the sound of prayers and walked into the chapel where morning Mass had just started.

“I was never a religious man, and neither were my men. They were a rough, tough, irreligious and an often thoroughly blasphemous bunch whose only god was a rifle,” he told me.

“But when I walked into that chapel, all of them were already there, on their knees, with heads bowed in thanksgiving and repentance…”