Harkaway's Sixth Column

by John Harris

  ‘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 Two Vickers water-cooled, two Brens, four Lewises, fifty-four Enfield rifles, a bit out of date but still working, one hundred and fifty Martinis, very out of date but also still working, four mortars, two pack guns, a few land mines, several boxes of grenades, and Christ alone knows how much small arms ammo.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.’

  Three

  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 veranda 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 veranda, 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.

  ‘Not too many wreaths for the dead,’ he instructed Colonel Piccio, his chief of staff. ‘We wouldn’t wish to be too ostentatious.’

  He walked to the table and, pouring two glasses of the recently departed Englishman’s cool Muscadet, handed one to Piccio.

  ‘To the Duce,’ Piccio said loyally.

  Guidotti smiled. ‘And to us, Piccio. You, me, Di Sanctis and the rest of us. After all, the Duce spends his time in Rome in considerable comfort. We’re the ones who do the work.’

  Piccio clicked his heels. ‘To us, Excellency,’ he agreed. ‘I think we have this place well under co
ntrol with little likelihood of trouble.’

  ‘Who could cause it?’ Guidotti asked. ‘There is no one.’

  Well, almost no one.

  By this time, the men in the cave above Eil Dif had almost forgotten the war.

  The plan to hit at the Italians had finally been abandoned. There was no longer the thump of bombs, the thud of artillery or the flickering light of gunfire in the sky at night. They had seen lorries approaching from the north-east that were full of British prisoners, and Italian vehicles were now moving freely backwards and forwards along the long straight road with the slow trains of camels while, overhead, aeroplanes droned in safety across the brassy sky.

  The Italians were in control. The war was over in that part of the world.

  Undisturbed except for the wild cackle of a hyena or the scuffle as an occasional dik-dik or gerenuk slipped among the rocks, they were quite unconcerned. Once they smelled leopard and heard its throaty roar in the night but they saw no sign of anything but troops of baboons that sat among the rocks watching them.

  ‘Bloody things,’ Tully said. ‘Once when we were out on an exercise near Sheikh the bastards attacked us.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Gooch leaned back lazily, a cigarette in his mouth.

  ‘We chucked rocks at ’em.’

  ‘Stop ’em?’

  ‘No. The bastards chucked ’em back.’

  During the afternoon, they took the Bedford down to Eil Dif, the back full of empty petrol cans.

  The people occupying Eil Dif were Habr Odessi, a clan of the great northern tribe of Aidegalla, and they found the chief in the coffee house in the marketplace, an emaciated old man with a shock of greying hair and one leg crippled from a sword slash thirty years before when the Mad Mullah was terrorizing the country. He stood leaning on his staff listening politely as Harkaway explained in barrakee hausa what they had to offer for the privilege of using the tribe’s waterhole, then he gestured at one of the waiting Somalis who vanished and returned with a tall smiling villain of a man with a limp. He wore a long robe, an embroidered cap like a tarboosh and an over-large pair of western boots devoid of laces.

  ‘Hello, Chief,’ he said in English. ‘Salaam aleikum. Ma nabad ba? Is it peace?’

  ‘Wa aleikum, salaam,’ Harkaway replied. ‘Wa nabad. It is peace. You speak English?’

  ‘Yes, effendi. We have palaver?’

  ‘We wish to replenish our water,’ Harkaway said. ‘We also wish to barter for fresh meat.’

  ‘We have meat to sell, effendi. How much do you offer?’

  Harkaway produced several tins of boot polish. ‘Very good,’ he explained. ‘You polish your sandals. Like this.’

  He pushed forward the toe of his boot, carefully rubbed up for the occasion. ‘Very good,’ he said again. ‘Your women like it.’

  The limping man smiled and shook his head. ‘Effendi, I am Yussuf abu Jibril. But I am known to the English sailors as Shovel Joe. I stoker in ships from Aden. My mother Arab. My father Abyssinian. I speak English good. I go many times Cape Town. Once London. All white people have boots like that. I see it. It is worth nothing.’

  Harkaway studied the Somali silently. It was not uncommon for a Somali to go to sea, returning after several years with a suit, a stiff collar and a valise full of money and trinkets bought in Cape Town or Alexandria, and then to abandon them all for the nomad life of his ancestors, complete with camels and a herd of sheep and goats and wearing the tobe, the traditional dress of the country, which was nothing more than fifteen feet of Manchester cotton cloth worn like a toga.

  ‘We’re up against a business tycoon here,’ he muttered to the others. Turning to the Somali he asked, ‘How much do you want then, Joe?’

  Yussuf shrugged. ‘What have you got, effendi? We are a poor people. All Somalis are poor people. It is the will of Allah, though I sometimes wonder why, if Allah is so merciful, he created Somaliland so empty. I leave the sea because too hard work and I hurt my foot. Perhaps I become chief when Italians come to Eil Dif. Chief Abduruman already much old, and I speak also Italian, you see. Many times into Massawa and Mogadiscio.’

  Harkaway glanced at the others. Yussuf abu Jibril might well be a useful ally. He thrust the tins of boot polish at him. ‘Might as well keep them,’ he said. ‘Give ’em to your wives. Polish their navels.’

  Yussuf smiled but offered nothing in return, and, glancing again at the others, Harkaway went on briskly.

  ‘Tell your chief we have guns to sell,’ he said.

  Gooch and Tully glanced at each other. Harkaway was a private sort of person and they never knew what he was thinking – usually because he was way ahead of them – but this was unexpected.

  ‘Life’s hard,’ Harkaway went on. ‘Not much meat. Goats and sheep hard to come by.’ His arm swept the desert. ‘Buck out there. Dik-dik and gerenuk. Even some kudu in the hills. Good eating but hard to catch. Run fast. Faster than a man can run. Further than he can throw spear. Gun stop them. Gun powerful.’

  Yussuf smiled. ‘Where are these guns? You take us to them?’

  ‘No.’ Harkaway smiled back. ‘We bring them to you.’

  Harkaway didn’t bother to explain his impulsive offer and no one attempted to ask him. It had always been assumed that Harkaway was the brains of the group and it was an indication of his potential that they didn’t argue.

  The following day, when they headed down to Eil Dif, hidden beneath the water skins in the back of the lorry were three of the ancient Martinis.

  ‘We show you.’ Harkaway gestured at Tully as the tribesmen appeared, watching warily. ‘Set up a target, Paddy.’

  Tully walked away from the village and placed a bully beef tin they had brought with them on a small boulder. Harkaway lay down on the sand and took aim. As the crack of the shot echoed in the ruins of the old houses behind them the can jumped into the air to land on the earth with a puff of dust.

  ‘Your people throw a spear that far?’ he asked.

  The men behind him were silent, leaning forward on their spears, covetously watching the rifle, their eyes glinting with menace.

  ‘You show?’ Yussuf indicated the young men.

  ‘Sure.’ Harkaway picked a tall young Somali with a lean, intelligent face and handed him the rifle. The Somali backed away but between them Harkaway and Yussuf got him on the ground with the rifle to his shoulder.

  The can was set up again, the sights were explained and the Somali fired. The can remained where it was.

  ‘He yanked at the trigger,’ Gooch said. ‘He didn’t squeeze.’

  Harkaway took the young tribesman to one side. ‘What him name him?’ he asked Yussuf.

  ‘He Abdillahi. He speaks small-small English. He fireman one-time, like me. One year. Me many.’

  ‘Right. You tell Abdillahi.’ Harkaway took the rifle and demonstrated. ‘Butt well into the shoulder and up against the cheek. Left hand well down the barrel. Right hand holding the narrow part of the stock. Then you squeeze the trigger. Once for the first pressure. Then again for the second. Tell him to try it again.’

  Yussuf explained carefully, his thin black hands fluttering over the rifle as the young Somali held it. This time, though the can didn’t jump, the bullet threw up a puff of dust only a few feet to the right.

  ‘Better,’ Harkaway said. ‘Go over it again.’

  The Somali’s third shot came within a foot of the can.

  ‘Near enough to bring down a buck. And he could do better if he were closer.’ Harkaway went to great lengths to explain the use of the sights. ‘You’ll need some ammunition to practise with, of course. Nobody can shoot without practice.’ He held out a sack containing cartridges. ‘Much as you like. Fire a few off. Two days from now you’ll be bringing buck down like clay pipes at a fair.’

  Yussuf went into a huddle with the old chief and several of the young men. Behind them the women of the village stood in a small group, chattering in shrill voices. Then the ex-fireman turned round.

&nbs
p; ‘How many women you want in exchange, effendi?’

  Tully licked his lips but Harkaway shook his head.

  ‘Not women. Money.’

  ‘No have money, effendi.’

  ‘Gold? They have gold in Abyssinia. Don’t tell me none ever found its way down here. Or silver. You’ve got silver. I’ve seen your women wearing bangles and anklets.’

  ‘Effendi–’ Yussuf smiled his sly smile – ‘when the English retreated to the sea, they left arms and equipment at the Tug Argan. I hear of a young boy in Hargeisa with three rifles he find.’ His face wrinkled. ‘Besides, effendi, what is to stop our young men following you and taking them for ourselves?’

  There was a long silence then Grobelaar bent, his hand over his face. When he straightened up again he held up his hand. Between his fingers he held his glass eye. A chorus of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ broke from the young men and women and Grobelaar smiled, his face oddly lopsided with its empty eye-socket.

  ‘Fine fetish,’ he pointed out. ‘You can tell your young men I shall always leave my eye behind me so that I can see if anyone comes.’

  They haggled for another ten minutes, then a price was agreed, less than they’d expected but enough. The ex-fireman disappeared and returned soon afterwards with a leather bag full of silver bangles and necklets. The rifles changed hands.

  ‘Now you want women?’ Yussuf asked, smiling. ‘Perhaps they earn their bangles back.’