by John Harris
‘It seems to me,’ Harkaway said slowly, ‘that from now on things are going to become difficult if we don’t do something about it.’
‘What for instance?’ Tully asked.
‘Well, these bloody Odessi seem to think we’re licked and that means they’ll probably inform on us to the Eyeties. If that happens we might have to move on a bit sharpish.’
The others looked at him, aware that as usual Harkaway had thought of something that had never occurred to them. Gooch was cleaning one of the old Martinis ready for sale and he put it down quietly and looked up. ‘So what do we do?’ he asked.
‘The first thing that occurs to me,’ Harkaway said, ‘is that all we know about the Eyeties has to come from Yussuf or some of his tribesmen. And that’s bad. I think the time’s come for us to see ’em ourselves in their natural habitat.’
Gooch, at least, wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘natural habitat’ and Harkaway hastened to explain.
‘Bidiyu,’ he said.
They looked at each other. The idea of thumbing their noses at the Italians appealed. Especially since they were so smugly sure of themselves, and there appeared to be little danger. They looked at Harkaway. His eyes were suddenly far away.
‘It also occurs to me,’ he went on, ‘that while we’re at it we might even do some damage. Take the smiles off their dials. It won’t be hard. The buggers are so cocksure they won’t be expecting anything and it’ll give us face. And face is important anywhere east of Suez.’
‘What you got in mind, Squire?’ Tully asked.
Harkaway smiled. ‘I could make ’em up a nice little bomb. Just to show they still have friends around.’
It was easier than they’d thought. Dressed in robes, turbans and sandals acquired in Eil Dif, Harkaway with a curved Omani dagger at his waist as if he were a chief, they stuck to the hills all the way to the town because the boot-blacking they’d applied to their skins had produced a strange dark shade that was more grey than brown and looked distinctly odd in daylight.
The shadows of the pepper trees and acacias hid the jaundiced mud walls of the tea-shops and the leprous whitewash of the mosque that thrust up its curved dome among the foliage. In the milky moonlight, the place looked good, the Somali huts like silver beehives among trees that were wreathed with drifting woodsmoke from the cooking fires.
They had acquired camels to give them a reason for being in Bidiyu and had loaded them with bales of hides exchanged like the camels and the robes in Eil Dif for guns, and, with their eyes shaded by ragged turbans and their grubby yellow-brown robes hitched well up to their faces, they passed easily enough for traders from the troublesome borderlands. In the darkness the doubtful boot-blacking gave them the ripe purple-brown colour of a Sudanese or an Abyssinian, and no one looked twice at them.
There seemed to be plenty of vehicles about in the square with Italian and native levies lounging about, and red, white and green fascist flags were hanging from all the larger buildings. The tea-shops were open, Somalis squatting at the low tables drinking spiced tea or eating dried dates or mutton and steamed rice moistened with ghee. There were also three cafés for the Italians, one for the officers, one for the NCOs and one for the men. In the officers’ café a gramophone was grinding out ‘Santa Lucia’ from a worn record.
‘Nice to see the lights,’ Tully observed nostalgically. ‘It’s been a long time.’
A soldier in one of the cafés started to sing. It was a song none of them knew but it was a European song, with a European melody instead of one of the strange African tunes they’d had to listen to in Eil Dif, full of half-notes and phrases that never quite seemed to reach where they were going.
The Italians had erected a flagstaff in the marketplace and despite the late hour the tricolour floated there, a light, organized by Colonel Piccio, directed on to it to give a spot of brilliant colour against the night sky. Against the wall of an old house opposite, as if to indicate who was now in command and placed where it could be clearly seen, a column had been erected. It was a standard column that the Italians put up quickly, and it had been only a day’s job for Guidotti’s men to pour wet cement into a cast to produce a concrete fixture announcing that the fascist forces of Italy had entered the southern hemisphere to bring the light of the civilized world to the dark places of Africa.
It was brand new in white shining concrete, its edges sharp and clear. On top was a bust of Mussolini – all chin, helmet and Roman determination, and opposite, near the flagpole, all strapped and buckled authority, was a sentry.
Standing by the three camels under the eucalyptus trees, Harkaway studied it for a while.
‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘that’s what we should go for.’
Leading them away from the lights in the centre of the town, Harkaway headed for the dark areas under the trees. The plot of land behind the wall where the column stood was full of date palms, gum trees and bougainvillaeas.
‘We could tackle it from the back,’ he said. ‘We could get into that garden and lay the charge from the other side of the wall. It should be enough to knock Mussolini’s hat off.’
Leaving Grobelaar as lookout with the camels, the other three moved quietly into the garden between the trees. The old house was silent, the windows shuttered, the veranda dark. Reaching the wall, Harkaway dug at the mud bricks with his jack-knife until he had made a sizeable hole. Across the marketplace, the Italian gramophone was still grinding away at ‘Santa Lucia’ and the Italian soldier was still singing in opposition in a high tenor voice. Every now and again lorries ground past and once there was the harsher machine-gun sound of an army motorcycle.
‘It’s a good job this wall was never expected to keep out invaders,’ Harkaway muttered. ‘It’s falling out on its own.’
Scrabbling with his fingers, he pulled away the rubble and dug again with the knife until the illumination in the marketplace showed as a small speck of light at the base.
‘We’re through,’ he murmured.
Gooch’s eyes were flickering about him as Tully took over. Enlarging the hole, he lay flat on his face and finally pushed his head and shoulders through. As he withdrew, they heard Italian voices on the other side and Harkaway gave a wolfish grin in the darkness. Clearly, the hole couldn’t be seen from the other side of the column.
Digging beneath the plinth, he scooped out the soil then began to feel with his fingers along the back of the column itself. Cast in three parts which had then been cemented together, the column consisted of a base and a narrower top half in the shape of a fasces on which the inscription was inset, with the head of Mussolini resting on top. Similar columns were being raised all over the new East African possessions.
Finding the crack between the bottom half and the top half, Harkaway scraped at it and, finding the cement of poor quality, managed to make a hole. Pushing his explosive through, he jammed it hard into the gap he’d made and plastered it up with mud which Tully made by the simple method of urinating. A second charge was stuffed into the hole beneath the plinth where he used the stones and dirt he’d dug from the wall to tamp it down in a hard wad. Finally, he laid a third small charge just behind Mussolini’s head at the top of the column, and led the cordtex fuses through the hole in the wall and away into the shadows.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
Gooch nodded, and Harkaway gave his cold smile then, lighting a cigarette, sucked it into a glow and applied it to the fuse. There was a faint crackle and a fizz and he watched it for a second moving along the base of the wall.
‘Time we left,’ he said quietly, and they slunk away through the shadows to the road.
There was no sign of Grobelaar but they eventually saw him walking towards them on the other side of the road. As they hurried towards him, Harkaway gestured and, as he turned to face in the opposite direction, they joined him and headed away from the marketplace.
The part of town where they were now was shadowed by trees and from inside the houses of whitewashed
mud and flattened paraffin tins, they could see rooms lit by the yellow light of lanterns where men smoked and drank tea, while the women squatted outside chattering in their high-pitched voices. A scrawny, tubercular-looking Arab lounged on a cart as it rattled past, half-heartedly beating the tiny donkey between the shafts, and a youth rode by on a bicycle, importantly sounding the bell at a misshapen beggar with only stumps for hands and feet. The air was pungent with woodsmoke and a few children were still running about despite the hour. Here and there groups of camels stood, gaunt and ugly in the faint light, their jaws working, or knelt in the dust like piles of dusty matting. Dogs barked but tall Somalis, robed against the chilly night air in blankets embroidered in stiff-petalled flowers, stalked past without paying any attention. Then an Italian lorry, its horn blaring, thrust through the busy street and, as they moved out of the way to let it pass, it began to edge by, its offside wheel crumbling the lip of the drainage ditch.
It had just passed them when there was a sharp crack from behind them and even at that distance they felt the disturbance of the air. Immediately, two more followed. The driver of the lorry yelled something in Italian and as he gestured at his companion the lorry dropped its front wheel into the ditch. As it canted over, its nose down, they turned and saw blue smoke rising against the lights of the market-place and heard voices yelling. The Somalis, always eager for excitement, began to hurry. Children began to run and the women rose to their feet and set off after them with their stately gait to see what had happened.
The driver of the lorry and his mate were standing in the road, gesturing and shouting at each other in a rage. No one took the slightest notice of them and in the end they gave up and hurried after the crowd to see what was going on. Immediately dark figures swarmed over the lorry from the trees to remove anything that wasn’t screwed down.
Harkaway looked at the other two and smiled under the boot-blacking. ‘Let’s join the crowds,’ he said. ‘This I would like to see.’
The marketplace was filling with robed and turbaned figures, and Italian policemen, aided by fezzed native levies, were pushing them back, yelling wildly. A car, its horn blaring, forced its way through and an officer in a green tunic resplendent with buttons climbed out.
‘Cosa successo?’ he demanded. ‘What’s happened?’
‘La colonna,’ one of the policemen yelled at him. ‘E coventrizzata!’
The officer stared across the square where a wisp of blue smoke was still drifting across the beam of the light that had been rigged up to shine on the flag. The ramshackle mud wall of the old house had disappeared for about thirty yards. Its condition had not been up to the assault on it and, as the explosion had carried away a good ten feet of it, the rest had given up the ghost and collapsed. It was now possible to see into the garden where the dry grass was still smouldering. The column announcing the bringing of light to Central Africa by Mussolini’s fascist forces was cracked across the middle so that it had a drunken look, the fasces at the top leaning forward at an angle of forty-five degrees, while Mussolini’s head had performed a neat parabola through the air, just missing one of the Italian policemen, to land at the feet of a sergeant who had just paused to stare up at the flag.
‘Dov’è il generale?’ the officer in the green tunic snapped.
The policeman gestured and, pushing at the curious Somalis, the officer set off at a half-run towards the Residency, where it was possible to see several figures in white on the balcony, trying to discover what had happened.
Standing among the crowd of chattering people, Harkaway smiled. He nodded at Gooch and Tully and Grobelaar, then at a tall man alongside with fuzzy hair who looked like an Ethiopian. The Ethiopian grinned back at him, pointed to the listing concrete column and laughed. Turning round, he indicated the column to another man and they began to laugh together, the laughter high and infectious. In no time it was running through the crowd with the high ululations of surprise from the women. In seconds half the marketplace was laughing, while the Italian police pushed them furiously back.
At the other side of the square, there were shouts of ‘Aprire la strada per il Generale Guidotti,’ and, as the crowd opened, several officers appeared in a group. They crossed the square to examine the broken concrete, the one in the middle talking quietly to the man behind him.
‘So that’s Twinkletoes, is it?’ Harkaway murmured. ‘He doesn’t look much to write home about.’
‘Who did it?’ Guidotti demanded.
‘It’s impossible to say, Excellency,’ Piccio said.
‘The British?’
Piccio shrugged. ‘It might have been British explosive, but that doesn’t mean a thing. A lot was left behind after their demolitions.’
‘Patriots? Bandits. Shifta, as we had in Abyssinia?’
‘It could have been, Excellency. It could even have been Somalis. A few of them are clever enough. It’s a land of warriors, Excellency. They’re brave, cruel men. In the sixteenth century, a Somali king conquered the whole of Ethiopia. And Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, the man they called the Mad Mullah, fought the British for twenty years, wiping out more than one expedition that was sent against him. He was only defeated when they brought in aeroplanes and destroyed his forts with bombs.’
Guidotti looked at Piccio, startled; he hadn’t expected such erudition.
‘I read it, Excellency,’ Piccio explained, faintly embarrassed. ‘When we were informed we were to be part of the invading force. I obtained a book.’
‘And did your book inform you how to deal with such atrocities?’ Guidotti walked up and down, his hands behind his back. ‘The column’s only been up a matter of a few days,’ he snapped. ‘Why was no guard placed on it?’
‘Excellency, there was a sentry at the flagstaff directly opposite and only a few yards away.’
‘Then why did he see nothing?’
‘They placed the charge from the garden of the old house behind. They dug a hole in the wall and, since the column is two metres wide at the bottom, the sentry could see nothing.’
‘This house? What was it originally?’
‘It belonged to a British merchant, Excellency. It’s not occupied because orders were given that it had to be kept exclusively for the use of General Forsci if he should visit us from Jijiga.’
Guidotti muttered something about General Forsci never being likely to leave the luxurious quarters he’d made for himself in Jijiga for a town like Bidiyu, and certainly not until the occupation of British Somaliland was more advanced and there was a greater degree of good Roman comfort.
‘This is bad,’ he said. ‘It indicates carelessness and it’s my wish that Italian troops should not show carelessness. You heard what the British said when we entered the war. They said they would provide us with more of the ruins for which Italy was famous. They regard us with contempt, Piccio.’
‘Excellency.’
‘Italian soldiers can fight as well as any other soldiers.’ Guidotti was working up to a fine show of bad temper. ‘This is the sort of thing that gives the English opportunity to laugh at us. There must be no more of it! Inform all commanders to be alert. Everybody must be alert, down to the merest local levy. What if the British should hear of it?’
As it happened, the British heard of it within days.
The Horn of Africa was full of Somali spies for both sides and news travelled swiftly across country by the grapevine. They knew in Mogadiscio what had happened the following day and two days later it was over the Kenya border.
The British forces there, making probes in their armoured cars to worry the victorious but still very nervous Italians, had plenty to keep them occupied, and there wasn’t a great deal of comfort. Enduring the shortages of medical supplies, cigarettes and mail, they had sat in their damp patches of borderland throughout the winter as the rain came down like stair rods, outnumbered, but – as Guidotti was well aware – utterly contemptuous of their enemy, and the information that a triumphal column put up one day had
been blown down the next sent the dirty, shabby men guarding the frontier into gales of laughter.
‘Split it into three,’ they shouted.
‘Brought down a hundred yards of wall.’
‘Mussolini’s head almost brained the sentry guarding the flag.’
The British general in command looked up from his papers at the man who brought the news to his headquarters.
‘Who did it, Charlie?’ he asked with a smile.
Colonel Edward Charlton smiled back. He was a Rhodesian lawyer who had found himself in the army because of his services in the last war and his knowledge of the country, and his chief function was to be dogsbody for the general. With his placid nature and his washtub of a stomach he was not a fighting soldier and didn’t pretend to be.
‘That’s one thing we haven’t found out yet, sir,’ he said. ‘I expect we will eventually.’
‘What exactly happened?’
Charlton described as much as he knew, and the general laughed.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s nice to know we’ll have friends when we go back.’
‘Will we go back, sir?’ Charlton asked.
‘You bet your life we will, Charlie. But this is very much a sideshow – a bow and arrow war compared with the Western Desert. David against Goliath, if you like. All the same–’ the general frowned ‘–I wish we could get just enough elastic to make a sling, and anything that indicates we have support is welcome. Any chance of raising the locals?’
Charlton shrugged. ‘Doubt it, sir. Our information suggests that they’ve taken to the Italians quite happily.’
‘Hm.’ The general frowned. ‘They always were a treacherous lot. They kept us busy for twenty years up to and after the last war. Mad Mullah. Heard of him?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Charlton said. ‘I have. I get the impression that the warlike spirit’s dissipated a little since then, though.’
