Harkaway's Sixth Column

by John Harris

  ‘Lorries,’ Gobelaar said.

  ‘Here?’ At once Gooch and Tully were on their feet and staring with them. As Bronwen Ortton-Daniells joined them, she saw the lorries – four of them, with an armoured car and a scout car – were approaching the white mud-walled flat-roofed houses of Eil Dif.

  ‘They’ll find us,’ Gooch said.

  ‘No, they won’t!’ Harkaway gestured briskly at the lorries. ‘Kom-Kom, drive ’em higher up the hill! High as you can get ’em! Hide ’em among the rocks, then sweep the road so there are no tracks. You drive the Lancia, Danny.’

  Her head jerked up. She’d never like the name Bronwen, associating it somehow with the rigid attitudes of her father. Somehow, also, it could never be shortened so that people had always addressed her by her full title as ‘Miss Ortton-Daniells,’ which had always seemed too much of a mouthful. ‘Danny’ seemed so natural she couldn’t imagine why she’d never thought of it before, and she hurried to the Lancia, her heart surging with happiness and the feeling that somehow, here, among these rocks, in the company of soldiers, she was finding herself for the first time.

  As the engine of the Bedford roared and the gears crashed wildly, Harkaway grabbed the crowbar and led the other two down the hill. They could see the Italian vehicles now pulling into Eil Dif, trailing their feathers of dust.

  Half a mile down the slope, there was a gap in the piled rocks. It lay just on the lower side of a group of high boulders that towered above it in silent towers and screes. On the other side of the road, the mountain fell away into tormented rifts and valleys filled with scrub and bare stunted trees. They’d more than once parked the lorry here when they’d been searching for buck and there were plenty of wheel-tracks left in the dust.

  ‘Let’s have those rocks down,’ Harkaway said, pointing. ‘Across the road.’

  Struggling with the crowbar, his big muscles bulging, Gooch loosened several of the boulders, which crashed down and rolled across the road in a cloud of dust. Tully and Harkaway worked below him and after a while Grobelaar and Danny Ortton-Daniells joined them. Together the five of them sweated and strained until they had a respectable-looking pile of rubble spread across the road as if from a fall of rocks.

  ‘Now,’ Harkaway said. ‘Get some of that scrub and sweep the tracks beyond them. Make the bastards think we never went higher than this.’

  They had almost finished when they heard the grind of gears and, with a last flick at the road, they disappeared into the rocks. A few minutes later, the armoured car appeared, followed by one of the lorries. Reaching the scatter of rocks, the armoured car stopped. A head appeared, then two or three men jumped from the lorry and peered about them. Hands pointed and there was a quick conversation in Italian.

  ‘What are they saying, Danny?’ Harkaway whispered.

  ‘They’ve decided no one could have got a lorry beyond here,’ she said.

  ‘Have the wogs in Eil Dif said anything?’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like it.’

  Two of the men from the lorry had climbed over the scattered rocks and were studying the dusty earth beyond.

  ‘Let’s hope they’re city dwellers,’ Grobelaar whispered, ‘and don’t know much about tracking.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Sure. Learned it from Wild West films.’

  The Italians seemed to examine the track for hours, small dark men with puttees, baggy trousers like plus-fours and wide-brimmed topees. The men with them were all black Eritreans or Italian Somalis dressed in the white robes of a Gruppo Banda, the native guerrilla troops they trained.

  ‘They’re going,’ Danny said after a while. ‘They’ve decided that a lorry’s been up here, but never beyond.’

  The Italians climbed back into their vehicles and ground slowly down the steep slope back to Eil Dif. As they vanished from sight, Harkaway grinned and flung his arms round Danny. It was a spontaneous gesture and meant nothing to him but Harkaway was a good-looking young man and it made her blush. As he released her, she pretended to be busy with her shoe, and rose, pushing at her hair, keeping her face away from them until the pink had gone from her cheeks.

  From the slopes, they watched the Italians return to Eil Dif and crawl away across the plain. When they were sure they had finally disappeared, they dragged the rocks aside while Grobelaar hurried up the slope to fetch the Lancia. Piling in, they drove down to Eil Dif.

  Yussuf met them, his face crafty.

  ‘We told them nothing, effendi,’ he said. ‘We said we had seen men with guns but that we had none.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said they will come back. They said they will keep an eye on the village. Perhaps they don’t believe us.’

  Back at Shimber Addi, they celebrated with cans of beer. It was cold in the evening and they were glad of the fire, which filled the cave with dancing shadows but gave a measure of warmth to their chilled bodies.

  ‘My back’s cold,’ Gooch complained. ‘I need an overcoat.’

  ‘Next time we stop an Italian lorry, we’ll get you one.’

  ‘Well, it’d be an idea, wouldn’t it?’

  They looked at each other, because it would be an idea. The lorries they’d seen had often contained men wearing coats for their journey through the hills.

  ‘Get us some music, Paddy,’ Gooch said. ‘Something to cheer us up.’

  Tully crouched over the radio, trying to find his way on to an Italian wavelength to pick up news of what might be happening between Jijiga and Bidiyu. The cave was filled with the clatter of Morse then, switching the band, Tully finally found the BBC.

  ‘…It is said there are twenty acres of officer prisoners and a hundred acres of men. It has been a classic advance…’

  Tully switched off the set sourly. ‘Looks like they’re knocking hell’s bells out of us in Egypt,’ he said.

  Harkaway frowned. ‘Switch it on again,’ he said sharply. ‘It isn’t us they’re talking about. The BBC wouldn’t say that if we were losing. They’d dress it up a bit.’

  ‘You’re a bloody optimist,’ Tully said, bending over the set again. ‘The Eyeties are in Greece, Cyrenaica, Libya, Abyssinia, Eritrea and Italian, British and French Somaliland. They’ve got Egypt surrounded.’

  ‘For God’s sake–’ Harkaway’s voice rose abruptly, loud and commanding ‘–stop yapping and get on with it!’

  Tully gave him a sour look and by the time he raised London again, the news had finished, and all he could get was dance music. Working the dials, he managed to pick up Johannesburg and Nairobi but they seemed to have missed the main news and there seemed to be nothing but stories about South African Air Force planes attacking the Italian Region Aeronautica and destroying their machines on the ground. Harar, Massawa, Mogadiscio, Asmara and Diredawa were all being hammered, it seemed, with considerable losses to the Italians in aircraft and transport. But this wasn’t what they were seeking, and Harkaway gestured angrily.

  ‘Try Radio Geneva.’

  ‘It’ll be in French.’

  ‘I can understand it.’

  Tully gave Harkaway a sidelong look and found Geneva. Once again they managed only to get a fraction of what was being said. ‘The British,’ they heard, ‘are in rear of Nibeiwa…’

  Grobelaar sat up. ‘Nibeiwa’s in the Western Desert,’ he said excitedly. ‘It’s where the Eyeties have their line of forts! They run between Nibeiwa and Sofafi. They kept a map in the Public Works Office in Berbera. I saw it.’

  Harkaway glared at him. ‘Shut up,’ he snapped. ‘Shut up, all of you. Listen!’

  As they became silent the voice of the announcer filled the cave. ‘…The British have now cut the coast road between Buq Buq and Sidi Barrani, which is expected to fall tomorrow. General Wavell estimates that five Italian divisions are likely to be hors de combat.’

  It was impossible to discover more, but it was enough to put them on edge and Harkaway kept the protesting Tully glued to the set. Eventually late that night, h
e was able to present them with a picture of what was happening.

  ‘The Eyeties are running like rabbits,’ he said in amazement.

  Their geography of the North African coast was vague and it was Grobelaar who provided them with the location of the places whose names they’d heard from the map he’d seen.

  ‘Jesus,’ Gooch said as the South African drew a rough outline in the sand with a stick, ‘we’re throwing ’em right out of Libya! If they lose that, this lot here in East Africa are going to be cut off.’

  Harkaway’s eyes were glinting. ‘There’s one thing: it means they’ll have more on their minds than just us. They’ll be conserving petrol, and they’ll be worried in case the Abyssinians start on them. They’ve got no love for them. They only took the place over in 1936 and a lot of ’em disappeared into the hills and formed patriot bands. Shiftas, they call ’em. They didn’t like Haile Selassie very much so they’ve never had much time for the Italians.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve read about it!’ Harkaway snapped, his eyes contemptuous. ‘I don’t go about with my eyes shut, my ears shut, and my bloody head shut! I bet they’re worried sick. The Abyssinians are bound to have a go at ’em now.’

  ‘Why not us, too?’ Danny closed her Bible and turned to them.

  They swung round to face her.

  ‘Why not us?’ Tully asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Harkaway agreed briskly. ‘Why not us?’

  ‘How do four of us – five then! – how do five of us set about that lot?’ Grobelaar asked. ‘They’ve got a hundred thousand men in East Africa, twenty thousand of ’em here. We can’t do much against that lot.’

  ‘Let’s find a few more then.’

  Gooch and Tully were listening speechlessly. Grobelaar was wearing his worried old man’s expression. Danny’s eyes were shining with enthusiasm.

  ‘Why not?’ she said excitedly. ‘Before I left French Somaliland I heard of guerrillas in Abyssinia being raised by an English colonel. He’d crossed the border and stirred up enough trouble already to keep four Italian brigades busy.’

  ‘You ought to be in intelligence,’ Harkaway said admiringly. ‘What else?’

  ‘I heard that another man called Wingate had flown into Gojjam and was passing the news round Abyssinia that the return of the Emperor Haile Selassie was imminent.’

  ‘You sure about this?’

  ‘You know what the Africans are like. The bush telegraph works, even if it isn’t connected up with wires to a telephone.’

  ‘That means we must be intending to start an offensive against them. They wouldn’t risk it otherwise. They must be coming from the Sudan and Kenya.’

  ‘Christ,’ Tully said. ‘Listen to the general.’

  Harkaway turned on him savagely. ‘I’ve forgotten more about military history,’ he snapped, ‘than a pinhead like you could learn in a lifetime.’

  There was an abrupt silence as there always was when he dropped some hint of his past, and they waited for him to explain. But he went on as if he had no time for their curiosity. ‘Where the hell else would they come from?’ he demanded. ‘Only Aden. Things have changed, can’t you see?’ He leaned forward, peering at them, willing them to understand. ‘Until this thing in the Western Desert, it was British Somaliland that was surrounded. Now, with the Italians pushed back into Libya, it’s Italian East Africa that’s surrounded. They can expect no help from anywhere. And if we’re going to set about Italian East Africa, we’ll obviously make for Addis Ababa, the capital. And the quickest way to Addis is from the southern Sudan or up from Kenya.’

  ‘That won’t help us much,’ Gooch said.

  ‘Christ!’ Harkaway sounded irritated. ‘The navy could set up a landing from Aden like that!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Into French Somaliland. Or Berbera. That’d make our friends in Bidiyu think. I’ll bet the buggers are running round in circles already, wondering what to do. Why don’t we make ’em run faster?’

  ‘What are you going to use for troops?’ Gooch asked.

  ‘The Somalis. You can teach ’em to shoot and perform simple manoeuvres. We used to recruit ’em for the Somali Mounted Infantry.’

  ‘They’ll fight.’ Danny leaned forward eagerly. ‘The Somalis are the Irishmen of Africa. Somaliland formed part of the land of Cush mentioned in Genesis.’

  ‘Somaliland’s the empire’s arse,’ Tully said flatly. ‘And this place’s right up it.’

  She ignored him and went on enthusiastically. ‘They’re greedy, vain, excitable and quarrelsome, and they know that they’ll never be wealthy so that victory would mean loot and that would mean riches and wives. And because they’re Moslems, the prospect of death doesn’t trouble them much.’

  Harkaway reached out and touched her hand. It was a sign of approval, nothing more, but it pleased her tremendously.

  ‘The Odessi and the Harari have already shown they can use guns,’ he said. ‘If only to kill each other. Why not persuade them to kill Italians instead?’

  Grobelaar laughed. ‘They’re not interested in killing Italians,’ he said.

  ‘They could be made to be,’ Danny said. ‘They’re brave and indifferent to pain.’

  ‘And they enjoy fighting,’ Harkaway added. ‘They learn to throw spears while they’re still kids. Why not at the Italians? Persuade them there’s money to be had. Money that means camel herds and sheep and goats.’

  ‘You can’t just turn loose a few hundred uneducated blackies on European-trained soldiers,’ Gooch said.

  ‘Then train them to the same standard.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘We’re all soldiers, for God’s sake! We all know what to do.’

  Gooch and Tully looked at each other, unspeaking.

  ‘We have over two hundred rifles,’ Harkaway went on. ‘We have eight machine guns, mortars, land mines, grenades. We have three vehicles. Let’s teach ’em to drive. Teach ’em to shoot. Teach ’em what to do. Their women will encourage them, especially if they think there’s silver to be had, and goats and sheep to feed their children.’

  Gooch and Tully looked at each other again.

  ‘They’re quick to pick things up,’ Danny said, caught by Harkaway’s enthusiasm. ‘I’ve taught them skills myself. And they’re nomads, indifferent to comfort. Death’s part of their everyday life. They’d make good soldiers.’

  ‘The Italians have made them soldiers,’ Harkaway went on. ‘The British army’s made them soldiers. Why can’t we? Now’s the time, while the Italians are reeling from what’s happened in the north.’ He glared angrily at them. ‘Don’t you see, you bloody dimwits? It’s changed the whole set-up. Until now, they surrounded the British. Now, the British are surrounding them. Now’s the time to hit ’em for six, while they’re still wondering what to do.’

  Tully looked at him indignantly. ‘That’s been your bloody idea all the time!’ he accused.

  Harkaway rounded on him. ‘Of course it has, you stupid clot,’ he said. ‘I’m a soldier. You don’t think I’ve been sitting here on my bum all this time like you, thinking of nothing but beer and women, do you?’

  ‘You said we’d go to Kenya! Or Portuguese East!’

  ‘Well, now we’re going to hammer the Eyeties instead.’ Harkaway paused. ‘But, if we’re going to recruit the locals we’ll need someone who can speak their language.’

  ‘We’ve got Yussuf,’ Grobelaar pointed out.

  ‘I can just imagine a battle with all the orders going through him. “Muchee shootee this side. Very quick run.”’

  ‘We can do better than that,’ Danny said quietly. ‘We have someone who can speak their language very well.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me.’

  Ten

  The news from the Western Desert had also been heard in Bidiyu.

  Rumours had reached them of a disaster in North Africa, and as usual nobody knew where it had come from. Africa was immense but somehow news could travel across its breadth or along its lengt
h, passing from one country to another, overcoming frontiers, language barriers, tribal illwill, and still be the truth. Rome Radio insisted there had been no disaster but Guidotti was suspicious and insisted on hearing the news from the BBC.

  ‘They claim Graziani’s army’s been wiped out,’ Piccio said.

  ‘Try to get Switzerland,’ Guidotti suggested. ‘They’re neutral. It’ll be the truth from there.’

  But Radio Geneva produced exactly the same story: acres of Italian prisoners, and more being rounded up every day.

  ‘Rome still insists there’s been no disaster,’ Piccio pointed out.

  ‘Propaganda,’ Guidotti muttered. ‘Troppo propaganda.’

  After all, he thought, when they’d taken Sidi Barrani in 1940, Rome had said they’d got the town back on its feet, even to the extent of opening the night clubs and starting the trams running, when, as Guidotti well knew, there were no night clubs and no trams and Sidi Barrani was only a dusty little Arab town.

  And hadn’t Rome trumpeted the triumph in British Somaliland as imperishable laurels to be added to Italian arms, when everybody knew it had been a very minor sort of affair. You could hardly call a campaign which had produced less than three hundred enemy casualties a major victory. No matter how much the Duce might offer it as another Polish campaign and compare it with the German triumph in France, Guidotti knew very well it was nothing of the sort.

  Piccio, his mind still on the Western Desert, was speaking slowly. ‘Marshal Graziani was always a bit of a snail,’ he was saying. ‘It’s a pity Marshal Balbo was killed in that air raid on Tobruk.’

  ‘They say it wasn’t the air raid that killed him,’ Di Sanctis pointed out. ‘They say he was removed because the Duce was jealous of his popularity.’

  Guidotti looked at Di Sanctis. ‘Who says?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve heard it said, Excellency.’