Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  ‘The Shag’ was our name for all of endless Somalia.

  ‘How far gone is he, really?’

  ‘He’s swinging his thirty-eight up like this. Need I say more?’ Joe had an invisible pistol in his hand and swung it up to his temple, again and again. ‘He does that sitting in there. I’ve watched it. Go and see him. He’s quite a nice chap, but he’s had his chips already. In a month, mind you. He’s an expert. It takes me about two years before I start swinging my thirty-eight.’ Joe, the old Africa hand who had come to terms with wilderness a long time ago.

  ‘I’ve no room in the truck,’ I said. ‘It’s packed with ration-eaters and kit.’ Ration-eaters were askaris, like yourself, only interested in the next meal.

  ‘Now don’t start any of that, Gerry, there’s a dear,’ Joe said. ‘You’ve got to take him or I’ll find him splattered all over his room one morning, letter to mother on the floor, then courts of inquiry, and why didn’t I evacuate this officer before things came to this stage? etcetera. What with? Seen the transport here, even if I had the petrol for it? It’s special, Gerry, my transport – in pieces all over the sand. No, for Christ’s sake, take this chum down with you. I’m serious.’

  The second lieutenant sitting on his camp-bed in the room I entered was far gone all right, no doubt about it. I could see that by the long, vacant stare he gave me as I introduced myself. Admittedly I looked strange in my rags, my long tangled hair, my bare sunburned legs and my rawhide sandals. In fact I was the living picture of what, it turned out, this officer feared he would become in this scorched and silent desert peopled by spear-carrying savages who were holding their Italian rifles in reserve, for now.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him, sitting down on the floor. ‘Are you feeling ill?’

  He shook his head slowly, still staring at me.

  ‘If you’re ill I’ll take you down with me to Mog,’ I said. ‘I’m pulling out in the morning.’

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘Cape Gardafui,’ I told him.

  ‘How long have you been up there?’

  I told him. He put his head in his hands and murmured, ‘I didn’t join the army for this kind of thing. This isn’t soldiering. It’s impossible.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you call this soldiering?’

  ‘I can’t tell you what I call it,’ I said. ‘We’re too young for that kind of language. But bullshit apart, you’ve had your chips here, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I hate it. I hate it.’

  ‘Come on, then, pack your bag and I’ll give you a lift out of it. You don’t look very well to me.’ He was pale, drawn, and his hands trembled when he lit a cigarette. He refused to come and I knew why. It would look to authority as if he had run out.

  I went back and told Joe. ‘Let’s open the whisky in that case,’ he said. ‘I’ll send a signal to Mog and get them to remove him. I know he’s going to knock himself off, this character, if he stays here.’

  The officer was removed a fortnight later, a special truck being sent for him. He proved to be seriously ill with a deficiency disease. Two years later I heard he was a major in the Middle East, on the staff.

  Three hundred miles to the tarmac from Galkayu, three hundred of the worst miles, over white rock and through foot-deep sand, but the tarmac to Mogadishu, which suddenly started at a non-existent place called Firfir, a mere place-name, was always like a magnet to us on the last stage of the drive to Mog and salad and drink and bread and friends at a real bar in the officers’ club. I said goodbye to Joe at dawn, promising to see Humphrey, that marvellous doctor who tried to do so much for us in our outposts, and to tell him that the pistol-swinging officer was due for treatment in Mog.

  I drove all out that day, stopping only once to eat a tin of bully beef and to drink some camel milk (the best anti-scorbutic in the world), and, like the askaris, had to piss over the side of the lurching truck as we moved, and made a game of it. Anything for speed out of the desert. It was twenty minutes past midnight when I saw the black gleam of the tarmac ahead in the moonlit sand and rock, and the truck climbed up on to that smooth tarmac laid by the Italian troops in 1935, as they advanced on Abyssinia. I was exhausted, and happy. A sleep at Bulo and then down the tarmac at sixty miles an hour to Mogadishu. I stopped the truck outside the headquarters at Bulo, a two storey house of white stucco with a verandah running round it, climbed out of the cab and stumbled stiffly across the sand, wondering who I would find in command here. A voice in English said, ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘I want about twenty,’ I said, ‘but one would be a godsend right now. Where are you?’

  ‘Over here. Where’ve you come from?’ I told him.

  ‘Never heard of it. Come on. Over here.’ I could now see the shape of a mosquito net and a figure sitting on a camp-chair beside it about twenty yards away in the thick, warm darkness. He was an old grizzled major stripped to the waist, tattooed on both arms, grinning at me as he handed me a bottle of whisky. ‘You’re one of these maniacs who live up there, I take it.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of the Shag. ‘Better you than me, anyway. Sit down.’ He pushed his ration-box towards me with his foot and I sat down, poured some of his whisky into a tin cup and wished him well.

  ‘I’ve just had the lousiest day in my life, son,’ he said to me. ‘And the bird has flown anyway, but what a mess he’s left.’ He then told me his story. It was about a transport officer who had fallen desperately in love with an Italian prostitute who lived far down the tarmac, in Mogadishu.

  We did not know it as he talked, but the subject of his story had already shot himself that day in Mogadishu.

  He was an officer who had been sent by Command to check on army transport coming down from the Abyssinian campaign, and while in Mogadishu had fallen violently in love with an Italian prostitute who had come down from Addis Ababa. He was stationed here at Bulo near the end of the tarmac and his trips to and from Mogadishu increased in frequency as the mania for her grew. She took all he had, and when he had finished all he had, he began to sell wheels, petrol, tools, trucks, used up the imprest account and started another, and went in for special book-keeping, until finally, when nodding Command suddenly sat up and took notice he knew that he was finished. But even then, alone at the end of the tarmac, thinking about the woman in Mogadishu, and knowing he was for court martial, he had to see her again. He must have passed my old grizzled major on the road as he drove down to Mogadishu, the major driving up to ‘look into things’, and to arrest him.

  ‘Yes, he’s flown,’ the old major said. ‘Have another whisky. The only thing he didn’t sell here was the sand. He’s flogged everything else. I wouldn’t mind if the woman was worth it. Have you seen her?’ He named her. I said I hadn’t seen her.

  ‘An all-leather job,’ the old man said. ‘Solid rock heart and a born bitch, I’m telling you. I knew her in Addis. I wouldn’t mind if he’d spent everything on a decent piece of crumpet, but this bag, it beats me. He’s gone crazy about her, crazy. He’ll get about five years for this little lot when they get him.’

  I heard the rest of the story in Mogadishu the next night. The officer had gone around the town searching for his woman, but she, knowing that he was due for arrest, had retired into a convent in a hysterical state, begging for sanctuary, and he traced her to the convent. He ran up the steps of the convent in the glare of the midday, hammered on the door, calling her name. He had had a few desperate drinks by then. A nun appeared. He asked for the woman and the nun told him that she was very sorry but the woman could not be seen, would not be seen, and did not wish to see him again. The woman had already conveyed this to the officer, apparently, but he longed to see her and talk to her.

  When he saw it was no use he drew his pistol and said, ‘Tell her I love her,’ and shot himself, rolling down into the sandy street in front of the Somalis. Died on Active Service. ‘Poor sod,’ everybody said. She was in action again some months later, a beautif
ul woman.

  The club was crowded with officers drinking beer out of huge glass insulators which had been found in an Italian dump. Some of us from the Shag, officers come down on leave like myself, drank for twenty-four hours and talked, in our own Mess out on the Balad road, about who was going round the bend ‘up there’ in the Shag, who had gone round it already, and about the chances of transfer out of this wilderness, to anywhere, anywhere at all.

  You can forget it,’ a senior officer told us. ‘You’re staying right here, so get down to it. Drink while you’ve got it at hand, and forget words like Transfer and Posting to battalions.

  Chapter 8

  ‘GO ASHORE IN MOGADISHU?’ the ship’s officer said to me, his eyebrows raised. ‘Perchè? È il più brutto posto nel mondo. You really want to go ashore there?’

  The ship would only stay in Mogadishu for a few hours. There was no dock and the ship had to lie off. The only way to go ashore at Mogadishu was to be swung out in a canvas bag from a derrick and then be lowered into a boat which would take one to the jetty a couple of miles off. I said I knew this and had been swung off in a bag before, and could I be swung off in a bag again this time, and I would promise I would be back on the ship in three hours.

  ‘Bene, signore.’

  As the ship sailed towards Mogadishu in the warm darkness I could see lightning flashing over Somalia. Well inland, it would be over Eil and Sinadogo and Galkayu, the rare downpour which finished in hot steam, all sign of which vanished in a couple of days of the roasting sun. The angarara would come out of the earth for a while, the huge black centipede which appears with the almost unknown rain, and the camels would be worse tempered than usual, and the Somalis would run about naked, screaming with delight until the rain finished. That strange night with old Allen when we got caught in the rain on the way to taste the sweet water of Eil, a holiday from the wandering patrols in the bush. Eil has real water, water which is alive, fresh and sparkling, and you have to have drunk bitter, dead water from waterholes for months to know what real water can taste like.

  All those who have had Wajir clap will know what good water tastes like after the desert waterholes. The ailment is called Wajir clap because it was coined at the wells of Wajir, but the ailment is the same from Wajir onwards, through El Wak, right across Ogaden to the rain pans in the haud on the borders of British Somaliland, on down into Somalia and south to the Juba river.

  The first time I saw what it was we were drinking as water was when an Italian doctor opened a filtro idro we were using in a fort called Gardo. ‘Guarda,’ he said smiling, ‘il brodo.’ He showed me what was at the bottom of the filter, a thick white glittering mass of mica and gypsum.

  ‘Ecco, la causa del clap di Wajir,’ he said laughing. Yes, there it was, that scintillating white mass of paste filtered out of the water we had to drink. This filtro idro was the only one I ever saw out in the Shag, and I never forgot it.

  Clap, known to old sweats as ‘pissing fish-hooks and razor blades’, was very common among the troops of the field-force, one company reaching seventy-eight per cent after eight months on the borders of Southern Abyssinia. (Don’t bother to mention ‘prophylactics’, please – we were in Somalia.) Wajir clap is a very good imitation of the real thing, a tough old British sergeant told me, when condoling with me because of the agony I was having in pissing at a place called Bogol Manyo, after a longish diet of one particular waterhole.

  The tiny mica and gypsum crystals tore the lining of the urethra, and after that it would be agony. ‘I feel like a bloody shotgun today,’ one would tell one’s companion, ‘the rifling’s torn out of me.’

  Sweet tumbling glistening waters of Eil, how I remember steeping my burning face in your coolness, and drinking you up, while Corporal Ahamed Hussein watched and laughed, for we had praised you before we got to you, drunk you in our heads through days of journeying.

  The Somalis have as sensitive and knowing a palate for the taste of water as have some Spaniards, and like them will sing in praise of good water.

  When old Allen and I decided we would go to Eil, on the excuse of ‘showing the rifle’ there (there were two machine-guns hidden down there, but we never got them), I told him of the wonderful water, and of the patch of sweet potatoes which an Arab grew there. Sweet potatoes? He was ready to go at once.

  I can never forget old Allen, the delightful companionship and the laughter shared with him, the oldest who served with us up in the Shag, a man who would flout rules, who treated base wallahs and their pieces of paper with a special cynical disregard, who could ‘carry a can’ for you. I never liked British colonialism, but I could see what jewels it sometimes threw up when I got to know old Allen, who had spent most of his life in Africa, and knew how to feel Africa with all his instincts. He had been very badly wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, was not romantic about soldiering, having been hit too hard on the Somme, and was a real shagbag in every sense. Much older than us, he never intruded his age. One forgot he was thirty years older than most of us, and he was wise and good and honest, and I would have gone anywhere with him, anytime, anyhow.

  Perhaps I can convey something of his special style if I describe his farewell to a force we called Clapforce, when I and my officers paraded with the troops in front of a fort one midday, the laden camels bawling and showing their bladdered tongues twenty yards off. Old Allen came out wearing his bush hat side to front, so that it would look like Napoleon’s hat, and with his right hand stuffed into his shirt, like Napoleon. He knew that two hundred and sixty-three men, women and children had been speared, stabbed, hacked to death and those of the women who escaped, left to die of thirst in the bush, by the tribe we were going to operate against.

  ‘Officers and men,’ he shouted, while I shook with the effort not to burst out laughing (which was what he wanted), ‘my message to you on this solemn day, at this critical moment in our history, is – ’ he paused, and cleared his throat, lifted his jaw Napoleonically, ‘is – Shag them to the roots of their gonads! Do not rest. Press on regardless. Leave no stone unturned. Give your all. Shag them, I tell you. The booze ration, the mail, the fresh vegetables, all we hold dear, depends today on your endeavours. I am proud of you.’ He saluted, and I saluted for all of us. I gave the command ‘Fall out the officers,’ so that we could get away and laugh for a few minutes far from the troops, who had been most moved by the whole performance. And then we wound off in a long, trudging file into the Shag in search of the marvellous tribe who had only chalked up one more score in a blood feud a thousand years old, and now must pay for that. And I knew how well old Allen, who had hidden his feelings under this charade on parade, wished that all this killing would end and that Somalia would become like the other Africas, fatter, quieter, nearer the kind God of the Christianity that had been brought to them, while knowing that Somalia could never be like that at all.

  The more I listened to survivors of the front-line fighting in the First World War, especially old Allen, who described it in detail for me, the less I could understand how and why they were able to go on doing it for four years. Millions of Germans, French, British standing in stinking, sodden trenches, flinging explosives as fast as they came from the enormous factories, and then rushing on to each other’s machine-guns, dying in swathes to capture a hundred yards of shellholes, until the counter-attack, when they threw explosives at each other all over again. When you look at the photographs of the faces of the owners of that world, the kings and lords and generals and politicians, you see a hardness, almost a ferocity in some of them which made that kind of holocaust inevitable, almost a necessity. Those tight, glistening riding boots on the generals, those monocles, those splendid chargers on which they sometimes rode past the next supply of troops waiting to run on to the machine-guns, the whole master and man relationship which had lasted so long. When you read the literature and listen to the tales of the survivors you see ‘The Front’ as a special closed-in world, cut off from France and Germany and E
ngland, in which the professional generals could use men by the million and ammunition and equipment by the mountain, and in which the troops went on suffering and dying, until it suddenly stopped, and everybody went home to unemployment, except the generals. I doubt if any owners of people, factories, colonies, ever had such freedom to fling people and their sweat about for four years, to tear a world to pieces as they did, but most amazing of all is to think of the millions of soldiers killed, and the even greater number of millions wounded, and how they went on killing and dying in those trenches for four years, and for the second-rate people who commanded them all to do it.

  ‘They used to shoot them then if they couldn’t face it,’ old Allen told me over a camp-fire on the safari to Eil. ‘Stand them against a wall and shoot them. You had to do it, if necessary.’ Perhaps the mutiny of the French army in 1916 was the only realistic gesture made during that insanity, unless it was the fraternisation of the German and British soldiers between the trenches in 1914, so quickly stopped. ‘They shot one in ten of the French troops who mutinied,’ old Allen told me, ‘and the machine started up again. It had to go on, to the finish.’

  ‘The world’s always been a bloody madhouse anyway,’ he said as we began to nod over the ashes of the camp-fire. We had curried the meat we had shot, eaten it while watching the black clouds massing over the moon and felt the chill coming into the tensing electric air. The storm exploded over us while we were asleep. We always slept in the open, never using tents, and we were very tired that night, and I found I had struggled up on to my knees, my head on my arms, still asleep, with a river racing between my legs and the rain lashing on to my back, while old Allen was shaking his fist at the sky a few yards away, sitting in a sodden mess of blankets, and angrily shouting, ‘Why didn’t you warn us, you bastard?’ The askaris were huddled under a thorn tree trying to light a fire. The fire lit and we all sat round it shivering, trying to smoke damp cigarettes.