The Kamerun campaign was one of the First World War's least-remembered theaters. When war broke out in the summer of 1914, British forces from neighboring Nigeria attacked the German colony's northern forts, beginning with an assault on Garua that ended in embarrassing defeat. The First Battle of Garua cost the British heavy casualties and forced them into a defensive posture along the border. Emboldened, the German commander at Garua, Von Crailsheim, mounted a cross-border raid into Nigeria -- only to be repulsed at the Battle of Gurin in April 1915. Captain Schipper led the wounded Germans south to the fort at Banjo. The British commander in the region, Hugh Cunliffe, seized the initiative. He captured Garua in the Second Battle of Garua, then pushed further south to win the Battle of Ngaundere in July. Rains halted his advance, but the momentum had shifted decisively.

Banjo -- also known as Banyo -- sat near the Nigerian border and was the last German stronghold between Cunliffe's forces and the colonial capital at Jaunde, modern-day Yaoundé. The fort occupied a mountaintop with steep slopes on all sides, its approaches studded with boulders that provided natural defensive positions. Schipper had studied the sieges at Mora and Garua, where German forces had held out for months against superior numbers, and he modeled his defenses accordingly. The agricultural plots on the summit were not an afterthought but a strategy: if the garrison could feed itself, it could wait indefinitely. By October 1915, when Cunliffe's forces occupied the village of Banjo below the mountain and then the town of Bamenda nearby, the fort above them appeared formidable -- a natural citadel prepared for the long game.

Dense fog gave the British their opening. On November 4, Cunliffe's troops began their approach up the mountain under cover so thick that the German sentries could not see them coming. The initial fighting was fierce. A British officer named Bowyer-Smijth was killed near the summit along with several members of his company, which was forced to retreat back down the slope. For a day the situation hung in balance, the Germans holding their high ground. Then the weather intervened again. On the night of November 5, a thunderstorm broke over the mountain -- the kind of equatorial downpour that turns slopes to mud and renders visibility almost nil. The British attacked through it. By the time the storm cleared, Captain Schipper was dead, along with approximately 27 of his soldiers. Much of the Askari force had deserted in the darkness. The remaining Germans surrendered on November 6.

The fall of Banjo broke the last barrier to a British advance through northern Kamerun. Without Schipper's garrison blocking the route south, Cunliffe could now push toward Jaunde, where the German colonial administration was headquartered. The broader Kamerun campaign would continue into 1916, but the outcome was no longer in doubt after Banjo. For the soldiers on both sides -- the British regulars, the German officers, and the African Askaris who fought and died on a mountain most of the world has never heard of -- the battle was a small, violent episode in a war that was reshaping the globe. The German cemetery at Banyo still stands, a quiet reminder of the men who planted crops on a mountaintop and waited for a siege that ended in a single thunderous night.