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Germany’s explanation of her desire to acquire colonies was based upon her need for extra territory capable of supporting her growing population. For this purpose she acquired East Africa, and immediately set about the task of raising, equipping and drilling a large force of black troops. She seized the French Cameroons, and at once increased the handful of natives which the French had found sufficient for the maintenance of order in the colony, to an army of 1,550 black and 185 white troops, and she had planned the formation of additional corps of mounted infantry, and the rearming of all the troops with modern rifles. As soon as wireless telegraphy became a practical means of communication, a wireless station was installed in Togoland which rendered the little colony of inestimable potential value from a military point of view, while in South-West Africa, the extent and completeness of her defensive and offensive preparations, is abundant proof that the real value to Germany of this territory lay in the proximity of the region to the Boer States, disaffected to Great Britain. “The land was not taken for bona fide colonisation,” wrote the Rev. William Greswell over thirty years ago, “only as a point d’appui.” Germany pushed forward her military preparations in East, West and South Africa, as she did in Prussia, because she had convinced herself of England’s ultimate inability to hold India, Egypt and her colonial dominions. Her professors assured the Kaiser and his junker parasites, that the English had lost both “the qualities of creative genius in religion and the valour in arms of a military caste”, that we had become “a timorous, craven nation, trusting to its fleet”; and that, while we had “failed to impress our dominion” on the chiefs of the Indian Tributary States, the colonies were “shivering with impatience under the last slight remnant of the English yoke.”