by John Harris
O’Mara’s face was sombre as he listened. He was an intelligent enough man to believe that the Prime Minister’s self-righteous words were a little suspect. The issue as he saw it unclouded by ambition and half-truths, was simply that Britain had lost a base and that she was determined, by threats if not by force, to get it back. She was finally taking a stand against the cheerful plundering of the remaining parts of her Empire, to which – harassed by well-meaning pacifists and racialists, by the anti-imperialistic groups in the United Nations, and by the United States who gaily stepped in whenever she withdrew – she had hitherto been obliged to submit. The whole point of the force gathering at Pepul was that it was a pistol pointed at the heart of Khanzi. Every new man who was jammed into the crowded tents and hutments, every new aircraft that roared down the hastily prepared runway, and every new ship that anchored in the creeks and bays nearby, increased the threat; and all the nonsense that the politicians talked about going to the help of the Malalans was just a lot of cloudy oratory to obscure the real point.
O’Mara mopped at his face, not at all sure what to make of it all. He looked up at Ginger’s unprepossessing form as he listened. Under the clauses of the new National Service Act, which had been brought in unwillingly by a Government eager not to offend the trade unions, no man in a profession or a trade, or training for a profession or a trade, could be called up, with the result that only the leftovers like Ginger could be used – and most of them, though they were cleverer than Ginger, weren’t half so likeable. Regulars like the sergeant were in the habit of sweating blood to rouse enthusiasm in people like Ginger and, as pay had recently been cut for all but those with over ten years’ service in an effort to stave off Britain’s growing economic problems, enthusiasm was not an emotion that was easy any longer to find in the Forces.
As the country’s Chief Minister stopped speaking, O’Mara switched off the set and sat for a moment, staring at it. Whether the severe cut in Servicemen’s pay which had taken place a mere three months before the present crisis had blown up was a wise move was now something very much to be doubted. With eleven years’ service behind him, the sergeant was not affected, but he’d heard Ginger sounding off more than once about it, and he had a feeling that in the uncomfortable and crowded camp a feeling of greater fury than Ginger was capable of expressing was hardening into resentment. The Government, he thought, might have got away with it if it hadn’t been for the crisis.
He looked up and saw Ginger still standing in the doorway, waiting to be dismissed.
‘Well, Ginger,’ he said, his smile returning. ‘Did you listen to your First Minister?’
Ginger shook his head. ‘No,’ he said frankly. ‘Not really.’
‘Perhaps you ought to have. It might have a great effect on your future. It looks very much to me as though we might be going to war.’
Ginger’s sweating face didn’t alter much. ‘Whacko,’ he said, a slow grin spreading across his features.
‘You like the idea of being incinerated by an atom bomb?’
Ginger shrugged. ‘They won’t use an atom bomb for this,’ he said confidently.
‘No, they won’t,’ O’Mara agreed. ‘But somebody – probably the Russians – might decide it’s more than just an attempt to get a base back, and they might make a stand. There might even be a line-up, and then – then, Ginger – there might be an atom war. After all, it only wants some bloody fool somewhere to pull the trigger.’
‘Ah, well,’ Ginger grinned, ‘it might come down on you, Sarge.’
O’Mara shook his head, with all an old soldier’s contempt for an unwilling recruit.
‘Shove off,’ he said. ‘And see you’re here tomorrow – on time!’
As he watched Ginger disappear into the darkness outside, his brows came down in a frown. Ginger was careless, lazy, stupid and unwilling, and the sharpest punishment never impressed on him the necessity for listening to what he was told to do. It would be a bad day for England, O’Mara thought, if she ever had to depend on men like that. Yet Pepul camp, he knew, was full of Ginger Bowens – and worse– rounded up from a dozen camps all over the country at the urgent request of the Government in its efforts to raise an army.
The sergeant flung his cigarette away angrily. What he knew, what his officers knew, what the general down in the capital knew, but what the politicians back in England, without their intimate knowledge of the workings of the military mind, did not appear to know, was that the demand for soldiers to make up depleted units had resulted only in commanding officers taking the opportunity to get rid of as many of their troublemakers as possible.
They’d all since arrived in Malala, and Pepul was full of them.
Two
In Machingo, the capital of Malala, Lieutenant-General Horace Hodges, DSO, commander of Hodgeforce and, when the chain of command was carried to its last link, Ginger Bowen’s commanding officer, wiped away the perspiration round his neck and slowly began to pack his pipe with tobacco.
The hotel suite he’d been given for the use of himself and his staff during the conferences in the capital was modern and cool, with sleek Swedish furniture, angular lights and drapings in muted colours, but all the modernity in the world couldn’t hide the fact that the room was far from spotless and that the streets outside, for all the square concrete buildings that had been flung up in the last twenty years, were a little unkempt and shabby. Of all the places he could have wished to be sent, Malala was probably lowest on Hodges’ list.
He didn’t even particularly like the Malalans as a race, and he found their senior officers inefficient, self-important in their newly designed uniforms, and far too full of military clichés to be easy to get on with. Circumstances had forced a Malalan Deputy Commander-in-Chief on him and he was already at the point when he couldn’t think of General Ditro Aswana without feeling ill. A political appointee, Aswana had jumped from major to lieutenant-general almost overnight during the Young Officers’ Revolution.
Hodges sighed, realising he was not alone in his dislike of the Malalan troops. Judging by the number of fights that occurred at Pepul, it seemed that the British troops shared his distaste for their allies.
He finished loading his pipe and lit it slowly, savouring the taste of the tobacco. He was a squarely built man, tall but broad enough to make his height seem considerably less, and looked not unlike Wavell in the way he stood, rigid as a monolith, with his head up and his feet planted solidly on the ground.
He turned to his Chief of Staff and indicated the radio set he’d just switched off.
‘So much for the Prime Minister,’ he said slowly. ‘What did you make of it, Stuart?’
Colonel Leggo stiffened by the table where he was studying maps, and turned quickly. He was young enough to be Hodges’ son and he looked vaguely like him, except that there was nothing about him of the unmoving stolidness of Hodges. Leggo looked as though he were of finer grain and quicker intelligence, but probably of less staying power in a crisis.
‘Excuses, sir,’ he commented shortly. ‘It ought to be accepted by now that no coloured race’s going to accept domination by a white race simply because the white race’s stronger militarily. I thought the Americans and the French had discovered that in Vietnam. I thought it had been drummed home in England by Suez.’
The general nodded. ‘Makes a difference, though, doesn’t it,’ he said, ‘when the white race has a coloured ally? Still’ – he shrugged – ‘I suppose Malala’s terms of independence did say that Britain could intervene in case of trouble, though I don’t expect anybody thought that it would be this sort of trouble.’ He sucked at his pipe for a moment, filling the air with clouds of blue smoke. ‘That was twenty years ago, too, and things are different now. The Americans have been blowing hot and cold for weeks and there’s been a hell of a divergence of policy between us and them.’ He scraped another match and sucked flame into the tobacco for a moment. ‘It’d be a tragedy for us if this half-baked affair brought that friendsh
ip to an end.’
Leggo dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. He had been aware for some time that his general was not relishing the task ahead of him.
‘Particularly’ – Hodges seemed to read his thoughts and went on to explain the way he was thinking – ‘particularly as Malala doesn’t have the best of reputations either in Africa or Europe. Let’s face it, even when they were part of the Empire, they weren’t the steadiest of troops and when they were granted independence it was practically the only place outside India where there was trouble.’
‘Braka seems pretty well in the saddle now, though, sir,’ Leggo pointed out, thinking of the long thin African with the beard and horn-rimmed spectacles with whom they had been conferring only that afternoon.
Hodges had moved to the window to stare down into the street and through the new buildings opposite to the corrugated iron roofs among the palms in the old quarter of the city. Immediately, the heat struck him, in spite of the hour, and he felt the sweat start out down his spine and under his arms.
The brightly hued chattering people below him seethed outside the flare-lit open-fronted shops where the Syrian traders squatted, their corpse-faces impassive but their restless eyes not missing a single move of the black hands over the goods they sold. A Creole clerk went past, one of the new Africans in his smart starched suit of dazzling drill and white topee, staring down his nose at a Hausa trader in a dusty pyjama-cloth robe and shabby gold-embroidered smoking cap who brushed against him as he hurried by. Pushing arrogantly past the trader’s calabashes, the clerk elbowed his way between the labourers with their strident banjo voices and slapping feet and the mammies with their Madras head kerchieves and the hideous Mother Hubbards, which had been forced on them generations before and had not yet entirely disappeared.
The melon-slice grins over the baskets of fruit and the paper-stopped ginger-beer bottles brought a smile to Hodges’ face because he loved Africa for its colour and its rawness and its noise, though he had little liking for the new Africans like the Creole clerk, who had swept away all the old tribal loyalties and dignities without replacing them with anything better. The thought reminded him abruptly of Leggo’s comment on Braka.
‘Do you think so?’ he asked. ‘Do you really think he’s consolidated himself?’
He was thinking of the private instructions he’d received from the Foreign Office before he’d left England. ‘Watch Braka,’ they’d said. ‘We’re not sure he’s very safe.’
Neither was Hodges. They’d been greeted warmly enough, apart from a few banners in the streets and a brick bouncing on the car bonnet, which Braka, all affability and smiles, had explained away with the suggestion that the sight of white faces was still inclined to incur African wrath. There’d been willing co-operation, however, in the setting up of the base at Pepul where Malalan soldiers had been marched out of their camps and the green and white flag had been replaced by the Union Jack. There had been a formal handing over and a review of British troops, and a great deal of speech-making by Braka and a lot of hot air about friendship, ties with Britain and the need to honour the sanctity of treaties. It hadn’t cut much ice with Hodges. He knew from the Foreign Office that Braka had been influenced less by noble sentiments than by the several million pounds which had been hurriedly placed at his disposal to bolster up an unstable economy.
Hodges frowned, uneasy in spite of himself. Ever since he’d joined the Army as a young soldier in 1940, he’d dreamed of an independent command, but now that he was in command, he wasn’t so sure that reality had come up to his dreams. When he’d had his dreams, there’d been an army, but now his command consisted of a few companies from two or three first-line regiments – all of them under strength because the clause in the National Service Act which let out craftsmen provided only the sort of men this type of regiment wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole – and a hotch-potch of other battalions, hastily brought up to strength by intakes from depots all over the country, entirely devoid of pride or a feeling for tradition, and transported by over-age vehicles scraped up from every vehicle pool in the United Kingdom and a few more places besides.
He thought of his orders and how they were framed. ‘You will enter King Boffa Port and in conjunction with Malalan troops, will undertake operations aimed at re-occupying the base there. If necessary, Khanzian forces will be engaged and destroyed. Casualties on both sides to be kept to a minimum.’
Hodges considered the signal for a moment. Leggo had not yet seen it, but Hodges had spent several days considering it. Once he received the preparatory signal, it only required the code word, ‘Dash’, to put the whole thing in motion, but the idea implicit in the last sentence was that he was to do the job without anybody getting hurt. In the climate of rising temperatures and cooling personal relationships in Africa, someone at home had got cold feet at the last moment and they were asking him now to drive a military machine with all the brakes on. They preferred to call the operation a police action instead of war, but the academic difference in terminology meant only that the politicians had felt that, because of political expediency, the planning should be done in London and had changed the arrangements a dozen times, with the result that Hodges’ initiative was now constrained within a narrow limit. He was to fight a battle under a directive which said ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’.
He pushed his uneasy thoughts aside and picked up a photo interpretation laboratory file, marked with the red seal of Intelligence. The photographic enlargements inside showed a view of King Boffa Port taken from a big R5. As it had floated with blunt-ended wings on the thin upper air at 40,000 feet, the pilot checking his instruments and flicking the lever that had started the cameras whirring in the slender body of the machine, it had shown on the Khanzian radar screens as nothing more than a blurred blip.
‘How old are these, Stuart?’ Hodges asked.
‘Two months.’ Leggo lifted his head to reply.
‘Is that the best they can do since they took the job from Admiral Hoosey and gave it to that damn lackey of the Prime Minister’s? Ask for fresh ones.’
Leggo nodded, turning to his maps again, his fingers tracing across the sheets the coloured blocks of the harbour installations and mole at King Boffa Port. He looked up sharply.
‘Are the swing bridges strong enough for tank regiments’ new Senators, sir?’ he asked.
‘So the Planning Committee says,’ Hodges affirmed.
‘And are we to expect the lock gates to be in operation?’
Hodges shrugged. ‘Planning Committee says no,’ he growled. ‘I say yes.’
‘Do you really think the Khanzians can work the harbour installations on their own, sir?’
‘I’m damn sure they can,’ Hodges rapped. ‘The Egyptians worked the Suez Canal. There’s not much difference.’
Leggo nodded. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘And we know they’ve got Russian experts to help them.’ He wiped from the chart a droplet of perspiration that had fallen from the end of his nose. ‘I’m not sure I like the way the Russians have been sending arms to Africa, sir,’ he said. ‘Some of ’em might have reached Khanzi.’
Hodges grunted. ‘Russian arms are the least of our troubles, Stuart,’ he said. ‘My worries are much closer to home. Let’s have a drink and a look at those returns.’
Leggo handed him a pink file, then turned away and poured him a whisky and soda while Hodges stared at the papers, frowning.
‘Lot of sickness in the 4th/74th,’ he said sharply, the regimental titles offending his eye as he read. Since the Army had been expanded again, all but the crack regiments had lost their regional identities and had reverted back to numbers, and now, with the linking of regiments, nobody was certain where traditions and loyalties lay.
‘Perhaps it’s this climate, sir,’ Leggo said, handing him the glass. ‘A lot of ’em haven’t been out of England before. They’ve had no chance to get acclimatised.’
‘Neither did we in 1940,’ Hodges grunted. ‘But the sick
returns never looked like this.’
‘Lots of youngsters, sir,’ Leggo pointed out. ‘They don’t measure up as well as the older chaps.’
‘Never did,’ Hodges grunted. ‘Trouble is, there aren’t enough“older” chaps these days. Only too-young recruits and too-old Reservists. The Army’s not been the place for a man to consider a profession for some years now.’
‘We didn’t do too well at Suez, sir,’ Leggo admitted.
‘We did damn well against the Nazis, though,’ Hodges snapped.
Leggo stared at the general’s back and said nothing. Leggo was one of the new wave of officers who were coming to the fore and, though he was very fond of Hodges, he sometimes thought the old boy harked back a little too often. Modern soldiers just wouldn’t wear the kind of conditions he’d experienced in the Nazi War. What had sufficed in 1940 these days only stirred up trouble.
Hodges turned over a sheet. ‘Crime’s up,’ he commented.
‘Mostly trivial stuff,’ Leggo explained.
‘It’s the small stuff that shows what they’re made of,’ Hodges snapped.
He was fond of Leggo but sometimes he thought the younger officer was a bit too conscious of creature comforts. Too much concern with comfort, he considered, had helped to make the Army a soft one. There hadn’t been much comfort in the desert in 1940 and there’d been very little wrong with that army.
He opened a folder inside the file. The first thing that caught his eye was a bitter report from his parachute brigadier, complaining about the aircraft they were having to use and the fact that half his men were in need of practice drops; and a similar one – even if not quite so bitter – from the tank brigadier. Trying to prepare for a war that was not a war in an atmosphere of peace that wasn’t quite peace had revealed a state of military unpreparedness that was staggering.
He made up his mind abruptly and tossed aside the file. ‘Call a conference of brigade commanders when we get back tomorrow, Stuart,’ he said abruptly. ‘I want to talk to them.’
