Harkaway's Sixth Column (3 page)

‘What else is there?’ Harkaway asked.

‘Grease,’ Gooch said. ‘Gun oil. To make sure your bundook works proper. Water down at Eil Dif.’

Harkaway was studying the crates. ‘Two Brens,’ he said. ‘Two water-cooled Vickers. Four Lewises. They must have been in a hurry to get to the Tug Argan to leave this lot here. You reckon they’re all right, Gooch?’

‘They look it.’ Gooch was bending over the crates, a crowbar in his hand. ‘They’ll need cleaning - they’re covered with grease - but they seem all right. There must be a couple of hundred rifles here.’

‘Good ones?’

‘Depends what you call good. Most of ‘em seem to be single-shot Martinis. Old as God. Recoil like a kick in the face. Big bore. Soft-nosed bullet. Used to use ‘em on the North-west Frontier for native levies.’

‘I expect that’s what they’re doing here,’ Harkaway said. ‘In case they raised native troops who never aim properly anyway.’ He bent over the boxes. ‘Plenty of ammunition,’ he went on. ‘All types.’

‘They made it good and secret,’ Tully said, staring about him. ‘Nobody’s been here.’

‘If they had, we’d have been out long since stopping a massacre.’ Harkaway was peering about him, his eyes alert and interested. ‘This country’s full of warriors and they’d as soon kill as look at each other.’

It didn’t take them long to get a fire going. There were four large primus stoves but Harkaway suggested that, since they had no idea how long they were likely to be there, it might be a good idea to conserve their supply of paraffin for the hurricane lamps, and there were plenty of dried thorn bushes about. With the aid of twigs, they soon had a billy can of water boiling. They were even beginning to feel cheerful and, since it was their first day and Watson’s unexpected death had shocked them a little, it didn’t seem amiss to have a can of beer each.

‘It’s hot enough for
two,’’
Gooch pointed out.

‘One,’ Harkaway insisted. ‘We might be here a long time.’

As they prepared the meal they were all busy with their thoughts. Harkaway sat by the fire, staring at the flames, and Grobelaar perched on a rock overlooking the plain, playing a nostalgic Afrikaner tune on a harmonica. Gooch, the armourer, was quietly rubbing at his rifle with a cloth while Tully crouched over the radio. He had discovered that a bullet had struck the transmitter so that, while they could hear what was happening, they couldn’t tell anyone where they were or what had happened. There seemed to be a lot of radio traffic and it was clear there was a lot of panic on the road towards Berbera.

By the following day, the suggestion Harkaway had made of harassing the Italians seemed to have lost its point because most of the twenty-five thousand Italians heading for Berbera were already between them and the British, anyway.

‘We could still blow up the road,’ Harkaway said.

Nobody argued. Three of them were regular soldiers, two of them nearing the end of their career when the war had broken out and, though Harkaway was the youngest, he was also the natural leader of the group, with a brisk no-nonsense manner that nobody ever questioned. Even Grobelaar knew the facts as well as any of them. He had arrived in Berbera from Cape Town donkey’s years before and had worked with the army since the war had started the previous year, a good mechanic who knew his job, stoop-shouldered from bending over engines but with an anxious look always on his face as if he constantly expected to be let down. The few officials in Berbera he’d dealt with had always been urging him on with ‘Come on, Piet, you can do it,’ when they wanted him to repair their vehicles out of turn, but they’d never invited him to eat with them, had never offered him anything more than an occasional beer, and his worried expression seemed to suggest that if he’d ever realized how difficult his job would be, he’d never have taken it on.

Two days later they were still there, still trying to decide what to do. By this time they had learned from the radio that Hargeisa had fallen and that the Italians were heading for the Tug Argan Gap while the Royal Navy was preparing for the evacuation to Aden. Abyssinians, Arabs, Indians, even some Somalis, with their wives and families, had gone rather than accept Italian rule. Civilians and administrative officials had also left and the base personnel were now aboard the ships to make room for the troops who would be arriving from the last-ditch defences that had been constructed in the hills.

Since there was nothing they could do, they made themselves comfortable. It wasn’t all that difficult because even in Berbera there had never been either fresh milk or butter and most things had come out of cans, and in the hills the thirsty climate of the plain and the sea-coast gave way to one that was equable, even invigorating. There was grass here instead of sand, box trees, acacias, a variety of flowering aloes with crimson and yellow blossoms, gum, myrrh and frankincense. In some sheltered spots there were junipers or wild fig trees, and in a few of the gorges even maidenhair, while everywhere there were euphorbias lending an artificial stage-like effect with their candelabra branches and dark creased trunks.

‘AH we need is a few girls,’ Tully pointed out cheerfully. ‘They’re not bad, these Somalis. Slim. Nice hips and taut little tits.’

‘Just try and take one,’ Harkaway said quietly, ‘and their brothers’ll have your balls off quick as light.’

‘Yeh - well -’ Tully considered this. ‘Of course, you could do it proper. They’d sell you one.’ ‘Twelve camels is about the going rate, I believe.’ Gooch was silent for a moment. ‘Or a rifle,’ he said slowly. ‘We’ve got plenty of them.’

Ten days later they had still made no effort to move because there seemed to be even less point than there had been earlier. At the Tug Argan a desperate battle was being fought and they could hear the thump of bombs and the thud of artillery. Occasionally, they saw Italian aircraft looking for targets, and the main road below the hills was swarming with Italian troops. The native bandas were constantly moving up and down it, wild strong-looking woolly-headed men in white robes criss-crossed by cartridge belts, more than willing to fight, and it seemed better not to try their patience too much. The conquest of Somaliland seemed assured now and perhaps it would be easier to stay put until the dust had settled.

The chief problem was boredom. They hadn’t much to say to each other. They were all too different and Harkaway was distinctly unforthcoming. But he always
had
been un-forthcoming and they put it down, as everybody did, to his past. Harkaway’s past had been mentioned in whispers in the bars and canteens in Berbera but never to Harkaway. Again and again, it slipped out, in references to people he knew, to hunt balls, to taxis when everybody else rode in buses, and for the most part his friends had exchanged glances and said nothing. Now he was brooding over something. Though the others didn’t know it, he was becoming ambitious. He could see no future in merely hiding from the Italians, and was itching to do someone some damage. In his lumpish, awkward, aggressive way, Gooch resented Harkaway’s aloofness but there was nothing he could do about it. If Harkaway chose to ignore them, then that was exactly what he did.

‘He’s all right,’ Tully said in answer to Gooch’s grumbles. ‘He just gets things on his mind. What do you think about the situation, Kom-Kom?’

Grobelaar shrugged and gave a shadowy, cobwebby smile.
‘Alles sal regt kom,’
he said.

‘What’s that mean, you Dutch bastard?’

‘It means everything will work out.’

The fight at the Tug Argan went on. Every day the Italians surged forward to break the British grip, so their mechanized columns could burst through to the coast, and since there were just too many of them, positions were being encircled and the British were slowly having to withdraw, first from one hill, then from another.

But the troop embarkation in Berbera had already begun and, as men withdrew from their positions and headed for the coast they were taken on board ship while the Italians were still licking their wounds in the hills. The town was full of burning vehicles and by 17 August, less than a fortnight from the beginning of the Italian advance, the men on the hills above Eil Dif learned that the convoys were finally at sea and heading for Aden. Somaliland was lost.

‘What now?’ Gooch asked heavily. Automatically, his eyes turned to Harkaway. The idea of blowing up the road seemed entirely pointless now and what was in his mind was merely a means of getting south to Kenya.

Tully wasn’t listening. He was staring about him. ‘You know,’ he observed unexpectedly, ‘it’s worth a bit, this lot.’

‘What lot?’ Gooch asked.

‘This lot here. Two Vickers water-cooled, two Brens, four Lewises, fifty-four Enfield rifles, a bit out of date but still working, one hundred and fifty Martinis,
very
out of date but also still working, four mortars, two pack guns, a few land mines, several boxes of grenades, and Christ alone knows how much small arms ammo. Seems a pity to blow it all up. Think what it’d be worth if we could sell it.’

Gooch frowned. ‘Who’d buy it?’

‘The wogs.’ Tully gestured. ‘For hunting. They’d jump at it. There’s game around. Especially up here. Dik-dik and gerenuk. I’ve seen ‘em. Perhaps bigger stuff even. All we have to do is show ‘em how to use ‘em.’

There was a long silence. ‘It belongs to the army,’ Grobelaar ventured.

‘Not now, mate,’ Tully said. ‘They abandoned it.’

‘How do they pay?’ Gooch asked. ‘I haven’t much use for bloody camels. There’s no call for ‘em in Islington, where I come from.’

Tully smiled. ‘There’s silver, old son. Silver bangles. Silver anklets. Silver necklaces. You’ve seen ‘em. They’d give silver for a rifle.’

Gooch looked about him uncertainly and Tully went on eagerly. ‘We could make a fortune,’ he said. ‘Make our pile, head for Djibouti with a camel or two and use some of it to hire a boat to get to Aden. We could head for Khartoum. Live there in luxury. Nice house. A few birds. Perhaps we could even get down to Portuguese East Africa. They’re neutral there and I bet there are a few skulking there already to avoid the war. We could live like lords.’

In the town of Bidiyu, General Ettore Guidotti was in the process of settling in. Bidiyu lay astride one of the roads that ran from Jijiga in Abyssinia across the border of British Somaliland to Berbera, and his job and that of the 7th Savoia Battalion, supported by the 49th Colonial Infantry, was to make sure it remained open.

There was little to fear now from the British, because they’d all disappeared, and Italian troops had even pushed across the borders of Italian Somaliland and Abyssinia into Kenya and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. There was little to do, in fact, except bring Roman culture and the dignity of the Duce’s empire to the conquered country and wait until Graziani pushed through Egypt from Libya to join them.

Bidiyu was a collection of white buildings surrounded by feathery pepper trees and flat-topped acacias, with here and there a few staunch zinnias thrusting upwards in muted pinks and muddy yellows. It never looked at its best in the hard glare of the sun, when you seemed to see only the shrivelled old men and women gossiping under the thorn trees of the marketplace. Camels plodded by and men from the interior stacked up the piles of dried sheepskins they had brought for sale. Somali labourers, still staggered by the change of ownership but sensible enough to realize it meant little difference as long as they were willing to work for the new authority, sang a high-pitched song as they toiled on the road out of town. A disgruntled Indian merchant who had not bothered to leave with the British sipped spiced tea in the shade of a coffee house, and Somali girls, lean and beautiful, moved past with a grace that would have been the envy of Roman society, enticing in their gaily-coloured robes.

Guidotti had taken over the biggest house in the town, the old British Residence, a place of stone blocks of brownish coral colour with a wooden verandah running the whole way round the second floor. Once it had been luxurious after the Victorian fashion but, between the departure of the British and the arrival of the Italians, Somali looters had rampaged through the place. However, the furniture, carpets, curtains and beds remained, though here and there scattered papers still blew about the corners of the gardens, and on the walls surrounding the house, a few muscular slogans had been painted:
Credere, Obbedire, Combattere
and
Vivere Pericolosamente.
Believe, Obey, Fight and Live Dangerously were good fascist creeds, Guidotti felt. He would have preferred them to have been painted somewhere else, but there were many young men anxious to show their strength and their courage and, if nothing else, the slogans showed their eagerness.

The house was pleasant enough. Its previous occupant had lived well in a country that had little to recommend it, and there was French wine in the cellar to add to the chianti Guidotti had brought with him. The garden was overgrown but there were a few trees and a few bougainvillaeas to give shade to the wide verandah, while the view of the purple hills that surrounded the town was magnificent.

Among the things Guidotti was expected to do was to erect a column with the date of the capture, topped by a bust of the Duce to show who was in charge, and a few kilometre posts of the type that studded the road which ran through Italian Somaliland from Mogadiscio. In Italian Somaliland they were tall and square and made of concrete, gave the distances to the Abyssinian towns of Addis Ababa, Jijiga and Harar, and announced the existence of the Strada Imperiale, or the Via Graziani, as the first governor of the new colony had chosen to call the road. Guidotti’s road was to be the Strada Del Duce and he intended to immortalize himself by calling the stretch for which he was responsible the Via Guidotti. There might be objections later, but once it was set in concrete with a fascist eagle or two, complete with laurel wreaths, fasces and the letters SPQR, in the manner of the old Roman legions, it might well remain there for a thousand years.

It would require a parade, of course, with the troops drawn up in lines, the priest and his acolytes in their robes, fascist hymns, and Guidotti in full dress of white jacket, gold-braided lanyard and sword. It was a splendid sword and Guidotti always enjoyed wearing it. He was well aware that it had no purpose whatsoever except as decoration and he was intelligent enough to realize it made him look a little over-dressed, even a little pompous. But he was proud of it. It had been presented to him by General Franco after the war in Spain, and was of finest Toledo steel with a chased blade, a hand-grip of gold wire and a gold-cord swordknot to bind it to his hand if he should ever need to use it, which was most unlikely.