The Burning Sky rtw-1

by Jack Ludlow

  ‘He’s always like that, miss,’ Vince said. ‘We call it the “black dog”, an’ it was made a lot harder by the way they took out that wounded geezer he was questioning to have a bit of sport.’

  ‘Folk think soldiers are made of stone, honey,’ Alverson added, ‘and they ain’t.’

  ‘Is he married, Vince?’

  ‘Down, girl,’ Alverson barked.

  ‘It’s only a question.’

  ‘One you’ll have to ask the guv, miss. I don’t talk about things he don’t want talked about.’

  ‘So he is married. Any kids?’

  ‘Honey, you should have been a reporter like me.’

  ‘Jaundiced, cynical, overweight, drinks too much, smokes cigars and can photograph mutilated bodies without turning a hair.’

  ‘I can’t wait till you get to my bad points.’

  ‘Oasis,’ cried Vince, pointing ahead to the first hint of greenery, glad to get off the subject.

  The Ethiopians were sat in a wide circle, those with rifles cleaning their weapons, while the camels, who had now been let loose to forage, crunched at the tough thorny foliage that surrounded an aquifer-fed waterhole. The ammunition was on the inside of the pile of crates, those around it protecting it from the fires they had lit as much to ward off animals as to keep them warm, for if they needed water, so did the wildlife.

  Jardine and Vince, having set the task of cleaning and oiling in motion, had reconnoitred the waterhole, staying well away from the mud-churned area where animals fed: water buffalo, wild asses, antelopes, and sometimes, no doubt, elephants. Some of these being prey, at night there would be lions and hyenas, which worried Vince.

  ‘These people we are with live here; if they are not frightened we shouldn’t be either.’

  ‘I’m more used to mice and the occasional rat, guv, and the biggest cat I’ve seen is a neighbour’s moggie.’

  ‘People pay good money for this. A night on the savannah and big beasts to hunt during the day.’

  ‘That,’ Vince replied emphatically, ‘do not make them sensible.’

  ‘Snakes are more of a problem, mind. Sometimes they like to snuggle up to a warm body at night.’

  ‘Thanks for that, I’ll sleep much easier now.’

  ‘Then you won’t mind being awake half the night, will you?’

  ‘Not sentry duty, guv?’

  ’I’m only joking. Ras Kassa’s men can do the sentinel job and we can sleep undisturbed.’

  Tyler Alverson had purchased half a dozen oil lamps — he had given one to Jardine — and the remainder were illuminating his tent and that of Corrie Littleton, where they had set up flimsy metal and canvas beds. The Ethiopians were round the fire saying evening prayers again, they being a pious lot, and all around the sounds of the African night were emerging: deep-throated toads, barking creatures and laughing hyenas — seemingly magnified by the vastness of the landscape. When the first lion roared — there would always be a pride close to a waterhole — the Ethiopians looked engrossed.

  ‘Have you ever killed a lion, Captain Jardine?’ Ras Kassa enquired. ‘I did as a young man, with nothing but a spear, which elevated me among my tribe. It is the aim of every one of our warriors to do the same.’

  Jardine had a vision of the warriors and half his camel drovers rushing about trying to spear a lion. ‘Tell them they will have to put it aside, we have more important things to worry about.’

  It was not Jardine’s place to set the pickets but he did look over the arrangements and was satisfied. He and Vince, by the limited light from their lantern, laid out their bedrolls on the weapon crates, wondering if in doing so they were being watched. Not that they had seen or heard anything, but people who were born into this kind of land could move about with an assurance denied to Europeans, and that applied as much to their drovers as anyone out in the bush-like landscape. If there were nomads about they might seek to sneak inside the ring of sentinels, perhaps just to steal what they could, perhaps to see what there was worth stealing.

  ‘As long as they don’t have knives, guv. It always worried me in Mesopotamia that some Arab would slit my throat in the night.’

  ‘You still got that sod of a knife you bought in Brussels?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Well, sleep with it by your side.’

  ‘What about you?’

  Jardine raised his sub-machine gun. ‘For anything that wakes me up.’

  ‘Christ, I hope you’re not upset by snoring.’

  ‘Mind if I join you, gentlemen?’

  Visually all they could see was a silhouette and the end of a glowing cigar; it was the deep voice and drawl that identified Tyler Alverson.

  ‘This club is not exclusive,’ Jardine replied. ‘Anyone can join.’

  ‘Good, I brought us a little nightcap.’ As he moved into the circle of light the proffered square bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch Whisky became visible, the golden liquid picking up the lantern glow. ‘Your national drink, Jardine.’

  Drinking whisky in the middle of Africa was not the same as at home — water that had been in a flask all day and warm did nothing for the purity of flavour — but it was welcome nonetheless.

  ‘I was wondering,’ the American said, after a quick toast, ‘what you guys are planning to do after this little job is completed.’

  ‘Goin’ home, I hope,’ Vince Castellano said.

  ‘Not your style, Jardine, from what I recall. Strikes me you are the kinda guy that gets involved in a fracas like this one.’ Met with a non-committal look on Jardine’s face and a ‘here we go again’ look on that of Vince, Alverson continued, ‘I have always found that having along a man who knows his way around a battlefield is a real help when it comes to understanding what is going on.’

  ‘From what I have gathered you have been round a few yourself.’

  ‘With nothing but a camera.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Get to where the action is — what else, it’s my job? — and that means a trip to the Eritrean borderlands. I have promised Corrie Littleton that I will help her get to where her mother is doing her stuff, but after that I need to make sense of the campaign. I was wondering if a tour of the probable battle area might interest you?’

  ‘It’s a thought.’

  ‘Guv!’ Vince protested.

  ‘Good,’ the American said, unscrewing the bottle cap again.

  Vince Castellano had no idea of how close he came to dying that night: with his well-hit boxer’s nose and full of Alverson’s whisky, he was noisy enough with his snores to frighten off any curious lions, which gave Cal Jardine a disturbed night.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  General Emilio De Bono had procrastinated as much as possible before advancing into Ethiopia: a man his age could remember the Battle of Adowa. Indeed, as he was selfishly inclined to remind people, the news of that defeat and massacre of Italian forces had gone a long way to ruining his thirtieth birthday celebrations; the effect on his fellow countrymen — in essence a sense of deep national mourning — seemed to be of less moment.

  Benito Mussolini was on his back, demanding action, seeming to forget his position as a senior member of the Fascist Grand Council, the body that had appointed him to his dictatorship. Bad weather, the lesser period of rains, had provided one excuse, but there had been many others: lack of equipment, the need to train his troops, the preparation of weapons for desert warfare, all designed to put off the moment when he must send his soldiers into a battle in which the outcome was far from certain.

  The home front was, as usual, bellicose and full of confidence. It was all very well for those in Rome to insist he had such technical and numerical superiority he could not fail; in 1896 the government of Prime Minister Crespi — indeed the whole of Europe — had assumed something similar, quite putting aside how ferocious and numerous these Abyssinian warriors could be and how determined they were not to become a subject colony like the rest of Africa. It was Italian soldiers
who had paid the blood price for the last exercise in imperial hubris; what he feared now was a repeat, with his head on the block as the man responsible for the catastrophe.

  His comprehensive plan for a cautious advance, the careful taking of positions followed by lengthy consolidation — the building of good roads and fortification added to husbandry in the area of losses — had been swept aside as too feeble for a Fascist state that believed willpower alone was sufficient to overcome opposition. Mussolini and the Italian people wanted a war of tempo, a swift campaign, which would reflect the glory of a nation descended from the all-conquering Caesars.

  In the end it was not the impatient telegrams from Il Duce that moved him but the look in the eyes of his inferior officers and aides, which had started off showing understanding for his problems, then moved to frustration at his reluctance to act decisively. Now he observed an air of pity that challenged the very notion of his being in any sense a proper military commander.

  It was with a wrinkled and shaking hand that the seventy-year-old general, white of hair, weak of eye and bereft of resolve, signed the order that would send his troops across the Mareb river the next morning. Then he went to the new cathedral of Asmara to confess his sins and ask for God’s help, which should be forthcoming in a noble endeavour designed to tame the savage and put an end to heretical barbarism.

  Every night round the fires and food, on the way from the coast, Cal Jardine had listened to tales extolling the greatness of Ethiopia: of a two-thousand-year-old empire fluctuating in size but never overcome, of a race of warriors of such numbers and prowess that not even modern weapons could defeat them. The religion that sustained their belief in themselves came from Jerusalem and it was to that city they ascribed the purity of their faith, brought to ancient Aksum by Menelik, the son of the legendary Solomon and Sheba, bearing with him the Ark of the Covenant, the chest which contained the tablets given to Moses by God.

  ‘So you see, Captain Jardine,’ Ras Kassa Meghoum had intoned, ‘we cannot be beaten, for we have God on our side.’

  In response he regaled the ras and his American guests with the tactics necessary to fight a more powerful enemy, not only citing his own experiences in Iraq, but alluding to the campaign fought in Ireland by the late Michael Collins as a prime example of the effect of insurgent tactics. Naturally, the military opinions of Geoffrey Amherst had been well aired but they were wasted on Ras Kassa.

  ‘Our Lion of Judah will not be in favour of what you have called a war of attrition, Captain Jardine. He will seek to win a great victory like Adowa and every Ethiopian warrior will support him.’

  ‘Every one, Ras?’

  That was not a subject they discussed much; if it came up at all, everyone had adhered to the fiction that Haile Selassie was totally secure on his imperial throne. Jardine threw a rock into that still pool and the ripples of his words soon became evident in the older man’s features.

  ‘There are those who think themselves better suited to the title he holds than he, that is true, but they are tiny in number. He commands the loyalty of most of the nobility and they will follow where he leads.’

  ‘And his own vanity?’

  ‘That is an inflexible word to employ, Captain.’

  ‘Ras Kassa, I do not know the emperor but I have made some study of the history of your country and you have told me more. Tewodoros killed himself rather than let my fellow countryman, General Napier, take him prisoner. Menelik was advised to avoid battle and went against that advice; in short, his victory at Adowa was close to a fluke. Haile Selassie is heir to those two and many more and I worry he will seek to emulate one or the other. Nations have myths — God knows, the land of my birth has them in spades — and it is not just populations that are goaded by them. Rulers, too, are seduced.’

  ‘You know this?’ The ras had replied as though it was a fiction.

  ‘I was told by a man with a very fine mind and a keen eye for history.’

  ‘Odd — so few Europeans know anything about our history.’

  ‘But he was right, was he not?’

  ‘Menelik trusted in God, and God provided, for he was King of Kings and so is Haile Selassie.’

  Jardine wondered how much Ras Kassa knew of the intentions of his emperor and the field commanders, suspecting that to be more than he had ever let on, for, when gently questioned by Tyler Alverson, he had shown great skill, once he had imparted what he wanted to tell, in being politely evasive not only about that, but his own future role in the conflict.

  This caused Jardine no disquiet: such things were not really of any concern to an outsider, though it had frustrated the American who, with his journalistic eagerness, could not see he would be the last person to be told of any upcoming Ethiopian movements; he was wanted as a mouthpiece for one side, not as a neutral observer.

  Ras Kassa was inclined to close any discussion with a statement like, ‘You will see, Captain Jardine, and so will you, Mr Alverson, the Italians will regret what they do as they did forty years ago.’

  The news of the invasion reached the caravan when they were a day’s travel from the city of Harar, so high and hard a place to get to they had intended to bypass it. The information was delivered, as had been that of the Ancient Greek victory at Marathon, by a barefoot runner, who, having imparted the information to Ras Kassa, went on his way to tell the warriors of village after village, probably all the way to the eastern border.

  Weary and filthy after ten days of travel, the caravan was rushed up steep gradients to the provincial capital, the well-being of the camels of less vital moment than that what they carried should be made available to the defending army. Ras Kassa then commandeered every motor lorry in Harar to get the weapons to the railhead of Dire Dawa.

  That was the junction on the Djibouti-Addis Ababa rail line where control of the traffic passed from the French, who had constructed it, to the Ethiopians, who depended on it, so the guns could be quickly freighted to the northern front, where they could be of most use. Given it would take a very powerful man to get them on to the trains and through Addis, Ras Kassa would travel with them.

  The whole country had been awaiting the invasion but it had not been totally mobilised to withstand it: the Imperial Ethiopian Army, when fully up to strength, was made up mostly of farmer-warriors. It was these the Italians would have to overcome, and they had been tilling their fields and tending their flocks before the call to arms came.

  In essence, once the lorries were loaded and on their way, Cal Jardine’s job was over and he had telegraphed Peter Lanchester in code to tell him so. Delivery had been made and it was time for the Ethiopian leader to depart, an invitation to join him and receive the personal thanks of the Lion of Judah for his efforts declined. He said his farewells outside the palace of the Provincial Governor, where the engine of Ras Kassa’s vehicle was already running.

  As well as the load the lorry carried, some of the warriors who had escorted them from the coast were hanging onto the sides, their rifles slung over the shoulders; it was going to be a rough and slow journey but it was very noticeable how much trouble they had taken to wash their shammas: all were brilliantly white again, as they had been when first Jardine clapped eyes on them. As a uniform colour in a modern war it was stupid.

  ‘Captain Jardine, I cannot thank you enough and neither can my country, and not only for the weapons you have brought. You have turned my personal following into a body of men who can stand comparison with the regular troops of the Imperial Army.’

  Reacting to those words involved a degree of dissimulation: the ras was talking rubbish. The men of whom he spoke were enthusiastic, not competent, while he had learnt too few words in their language to turn them into anything else. He had been training them in batches, each morning while the camels were being loaded, though without the opportunity to do much more, like giving them lessons in the most basic tenets of infantry tactics. If all were now comfortable with a modern pattern rifle, there had been no time to mo
ve on to the more potent weapons of machine guns and 50 mm mortars.

  ‘You will leave Ethiopia?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Cal Jardine said, before adding, with a degree of dissimulation, ‘I have undertaken to help Miss Littleton rescue her mother, whom we hope is in Gondar, but she fears might be in Aksum.’

  ‘She will be in grave danger now the Italians have begun to invade, if she is there. I hope you do not have to employ the weapons which you have taken.’

  ‘So do I, Ras,’ Jardine replied, his hand running over the stock of his M32. Vince had his too, as well as enough ammunition for a decent engagement, and they still had their pistols. ‘Though I think the Italians would be very unwise to harm an elderly American matron.’

  ‘If they do, they will blame us and say it was done by the savages. The pity is, many will believe them.’

  ‘Would you have time to issue me with a safe conduct, sir, a message to the army commanders in the north to say I am a friend of your nation?’

  ‘That is a small request, Captain Jardine. Wait here.’

  The ras re-entered the governor’s palace and was gone for some ten minutes, while all the while the lorry driver wasted precious fuel. Tempted to order him to switch off, Cal Jardine had to stop himself: it was not his place to give commands to these men. The ras reappeared with the requested laissez passer, signed by him, then embossed with a seal, and handed it over.

  ‘I have requested in the name of the emperor that you be given all assistance and that you are allowed to go where you wish. I have also added that you are a military man whose advice might be of use should you find yourself in an area of conflict.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  The final handshake was firm, the cloud of dust as the lorry drove off thick and choking, but not enough to stop the keening war cries of the Shewan warriors. They had barely departed when the next sound emerged, a klaxon-like braying of a car horn, designed to clear the crowded roadway.

  ‘Bloody Ada, a Roller!’ cried Vince.

  The familiar stainless steel grille, topped with the eagle, the huge headlamps at either side, emerged from a throng of locals to pull up beside them. Behind the wheel was Tyler Alverson, waving over the windscreen of a silver Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupe. Corrie Littleton was in the passenger seat and there was a great deal of luggage strapped to the rear.