When the Going Was Good

by Evelyn Waugh

  The method by which telegrams were distributed gave limitless opportunity for loss and delay. They were handed out to the messengers in bundles of about a dozen. The men were unable to read and their system of delivery was to walk round the town to the various hotels and places where foreigners might be expected to congregate and present their pile of envelopes to the first white man they saw, who would look through them, open any that might seem of interest, and hand back those that were not for him. Often it took more than a day for a message to reach us and, as the commands of Fleet Street became more and more fantastically inappropriate to the situation and the enquiries more and more frivolous, we most of us became grateful for a respite, which sometimes obviated the need of reply.

  However, on the third day one of these messengers found his way to my room with the first, very reasonable request, so I left my bed and set out rather shakily into the pouring rain to look for ‘colour’.

  First steps as a war correspondent were humdrum – a round of the Legations with calling cards, a sitting at the photographers’ to obtain the pictures needed for a journalist’s pass, registration at the Press Bureau.

  This last was a little tin shed at the further extremity of the main road. It might well have been classed among the places of entertainment in the town. Here morning and afternoon for the first six weeks, until everyone, even its organizers, despaired of it ever performing any helpful function, might be found a dozen or so exasperated journalists of both sexes and almost all nationalities, waiting for interviews. It was an office especially constituted for the occasion. At the head of it was a suave, beady-eyed little Tigrean named Dr Lorenzo Taesas. He was a man of great tact and many accomplishments, but since he was also Judge of Special Court, head of secret police, and personal adviser to the Emperor, it was very rarely that he attended in person. His place was taken by another Tigrean, named David, equally charming, a better linguist, an ardent patriot, who was unable on his own authority to make the most trivial decision or give the simplest information. ‘I must ask Dr Lorenzo,’ was his invariable answer to every demand. In this way a perfect system of postponement and prevarication was established. If one approached any government department direct, one was referred to the Press Bureau. At the Press Bureau one was asked to put one’s enquiry in writing, when it would be conveyed to the invisible Dr Lorenzo. At this early stage the Abyssinians had no reason to be hostile to the Press. Most of them in fact – and particularly the Emperor – were eager to placate it. But this was the manner in which Europeans had always been treated in the country. Just as many white men see a Negro as someone to whom orders must be shouted, so the Abyssinians saw us as a people to be suspected, delayed, frustrated in our most innocent intentions, lied to, whenever truth was avoidable, and set against one another by hints of preferential treatment. There was no ill-will. The attitude was instinctive to them; they could not alter it, and closer acquaintance with us gave them good reason to stiffen rather than relax.

  Almost all those impatient figures on Dr Lorenzo’s doorstep were after one thing. We wanted to get up country. Travelling in Ethiopia, even in its rare periods of tranquillity, was a matter of the utmost difficulty. Many writers have left accounts of the intricate system of tolls and hospitality by which the traveller was passed on from one chief to another and of the indifference with which the Emperor’s laissez-passer was treated within a few miles of the capital. Now, with torrential rains all over the highlands flooding the streams and washing away the mule tracks, with troops secretly assembling and migrating towards the frontiers, with the subject peoples, relieved of their garrisons, turning rebel and highwayman, the possibilities of movement in any direction were extremely slight. But, at any rate for the first weeks after our arrival, we most of us cherished a hope, and the Press Bureau constantly fostered it, that we should get to the fighting. No one ever got there. My last sight of Lorenzo, more than three months later at Dessye, was of a little figure, clad in khaki then in place of his dapper morning coat, surrounded by a group of importunate journalists in the Adventist Mission compound, promising that very soon, in a few days perhaps, permission would be granted to go north. Actually it was only when the front came to them, and the retreat of the government headquarters could not keep pace with the Italian advance, that any of them saw a shot fired.

  But meanwhile there still lingered in our minds the picture we had presented of ourselves to our womenfolk at home, of stricken fields and ourselves crouching in shell holes, typing gallantly amid bursting shrapnel; of runners charging through clouds of gas, bearing our despatches on cleft sticks. We applied, formally, for permission to travel, absolving the government of all responsibility for our safety, and awaited an immediate reply.

  The Radical, who knew his job, had no illusions of the kind. The court, the government offices and the Legations were the ‘news centres’. His place was near the wireless office. Not so my immediate neighbour in the Deutsches Haus, an American who proclaimed his imminent departure for the Tigre. A squad of carpenters was noisily at work under our windows boxing his provisions, his caravan of the sturdiest mules was stabled nearby. He had already discarded the dress of a capital city and strode the waterlogged streets as though he were, even at that moment, pushing his way through unmapped jungle. Poor chap, he was one of the group surrounding Lorenzo at Dessye.

  In Addis everything seemed to be at a standstill.

  Mr Rickett, it is true, held out hopes of a story. On the second day of our visit he had promised me an important piece of news on Saturday evening. Saturday came and he admitted, rather ruefully, that he had not been able to arrange anything; it would probably be next Wednesday, he said. It seemed clear that he was involved in the endless postponements of Abyssinian official life, and that in ten days’ time I should find him at the Deutsches Haus, still negotiating. Accordingly, with Patrick Balfour, an old friend who had preceded me as correspondent for the Evening Standard, I decided to leave for the South by the Monday train.

  It was full of refugees. The Greeks from Rhodes and the Dodecanese formed a more sombre body. Many of these had been born in Abyssinia; almost all had come to the country as Greek or Turkish nationals. It was the only home they had known; they were artisans earning a better living than they could have got among their own people. Then, by changes in the map that were incomprehensible to them, they found that they had suddenly become Italians, and now they were being hustled down to the coast with the prospect of being recruited into labour gangs or soldiers to fight against the country of their adoption. There were several of them in our train, wistfully sucking oranges in the second-class coach.

  Until three years before, the journey from Dirre-Dowa to Harar took two days. Now there was a motor road.

  We left Dirre-Dowa shortly before midday. Patrick and I and his servant had now been joined by another Englishman, an old acquaintance named Charles G., who had come out primarily in search of amusement. There was also a youthful and very timid Abyssinian nobleman, who wanted a lift and raised entirely vain hopes of his being useful to us.

  We left in two cars and, twisting and groaning up the countless hairpin bends and narrow embankments of the new road, were very soon at the top of the pass, which formerly had taken four hours of arduous riding. Here was a military post, a barricade and new corrugated-iron gates, which were later described by many poetic correspondents as ‘the ancient “Gates of Paradise”’.

  They certainly emphasized the contrast between the Harar province and the surrounding wilderness. Behind lay the colourless, empty country which one saw from the train; mile after mile of rock and dust, anthill and scrub, and, on the far horizon, the torrid plain of the Danakil desert, where the Hawash river petered out in a haze of heat. In front, beyond the surly Abyssinian guard, the uplands were patterned with standing crops, terraces of coffee, neat little farms in flowering stockades of euphorbia, the pinnacles of their thatched roofs decorated with bright glass bottles and enamelled chamber-pots. In less tha
n four hours after our departure from Dirre-Dowa we were in sight of the walls and minarets of Harar.

  Perhaps I had been unduly eloquent in describing to my companions the beauties that awaited us.

  After all I had remembered, and all I had said, the reality was a little disappointing. There had been changes. The first sight to greet us, as we came into view, was a vast, hideous palace, still under construction; a white, bow-fronted, castellated European thing like a south-coast hotel. It stood outside the walls, dominating the low, dun-coloured masonry behind it. The walls had been breached and, instead of the circuitous approach of medieval defence, the narrow, windowless lane which had led from the main gates, under the walls, bending and doubling until it reached the centre of the town, a new, straight track had been driven through. There was an hotel, too, built in two storeys, with a balcony, a shower-bath and a chamber of ineffable horror, marked on the door, W.C. It was kept by a vivacious and avaricious Greek named Carassellos, who, everyone said, for no reason at all, was really an Italian. This building, where we took rooms, had been erected immediately in front of the Law Courts, and the space between was a babel of outraged litigants denouncing to passers-by the venality of the judges, the barefaced perjury of the witnesses, and the perversions of the legal system, by which they had failed in their suits. About twice every hour they would come to blows and be dragged inside again by the soldiers to summary punishment.

  But the main change seemed to be in the proportions of Abyssinians to Hararis. It was at the moment, by all appearance, an Abyssinian town. Great numbers of troops were being drafted there. A Belgian training school was established. Abyssinian officials had been multiplied for the crisis, and with their women and children filled the town. The Hararis were rapidly melting away; those that could afford it, fled across the frontiers into French and British territory, the majority to the hills. They were a pacific people who did not want to get involved on either side in the coming struggle; particularly, they did not want their women to get into the hands of the Abyssinian soldiers. In place of the lovely girls I had described, we found the bare, buttered, sponge-like heads, the dingy white robes, the stolid, sulky faces and silver crosses of the Abyssinian camp followers.

  Later the chief of the police dropped in for some whisky. He was an officer of the old school, greatly given to the bottle. He was suffering at the time from a severe cold and had stuffed his nostrils with leaves. It gave him a somewhat menacing aspect, but his intentions were genial. Very few journalists had, as yet, visited Harar, and the little yellow cards of identity from the Press Bureau, which were an object of scorn in Addis, were here accepted as being evidence, possibly, of importance. Patrick’s servant, whose French was fluent but rarely intelligible, acted as interpreter. That is to say, he carried on a lively and endless conversation, into which we would occasionally intrude.

  ‘What is he saying, Gabri?’

  ‘He says he has a cold. He hopes you are well.’

  Then they would carry on their exchanges of confidences. The end of this interview, however, was a promise that we should have a pass to take us as far as Jijiga.

  During our day of waiting for permission to go to Jijiga, Patrick and I each engaged a spy. They were both British ‘protected persons’, who had for a long time made themselves a nuisance at the Consulate. That was their only point in common.

  Mine, Wazir Ali Beg, was an Afghan, an imposing old rascal with the figure of a metropolitan policeman and the manner of a butler. He wrote and spoke nearly perfect English. At some stage of his life he had been in British government service, though in what precise capacity was never clear. Lately he had set up in Harar as a professional petition writer. He put it about among the British Indians, Arabs, and Somalis who thronged the bazaar that he was a man of personal influence in the Consular Court, and thus induced them to part with their savings and brief him to conduct their cases for them. To me he represented himself as the head of a vast organization covering the Ogaden and Aussa countries. He never asked for money for himself but to ‘reimburse’ his ‘agents’. On the occasion of our first meeting he gave me an important piece of news: that a party of Danakil tribesmen had arrived at Dirre-Dowa to complain to the Governor of Italian movements in their territory; a force of native and white troops had penetrated the desert south-west of Assab and were making a base near Mount Moussa Ali. It was the verification of this report, a month later, which provoked the order for general mobilization and precipitated the war. Wazir Ali Beg had a natural flair for sensational journalism and was so encouraged by my reception of this report that he continued to recount to me by every mail more and more improbable happenings, until, noticing letters in his scholarly hand addressed to nearly every journalist in Addis Ababa, I took him off my pay roll. He then used my letter of dismissal to put up his prices with his other clients, as evidence of the sacrifices he was making to give them exclusive service.

  Patrick’s spy was named Halifa, but he was soon known to the European community as Mata Hari. He was an Aden Arab whose dissolute appearance suggested only a small part of the truth. He approached us that evening without introduction on the balcony of the hotel, squatted down on his haunches very close to us, glanced furtively about him, and with extraordinary winks and gestures of his hands expressed the intention of coming with us to Jijiga as interpreter.

  His frequent appearances at the Consular Court were invariably in the capacity of prisoner, charged with drunkenness, violence, and debts of quite enormous amounts. He made no disguise of the fact that most of his recent life had been spent in gaol. When he found that this amused us, he giggled about it in a most forbidding way. He wore a huge, loose turban which was constantly coming uncoiled like the hair of a drunken old woman, a blue blazer, a white skirt, and a number of daggers. Gabri, Patrick’s Abyssinian servant, took an instant dislike to him. ‘Il est méchant, ce type arabe,’ he said, but Gabri, once outside the boundaries of his own country, was proving a peevish traveller. He did not at all like being among Mohammedans and foreigners. Harar he could just bear on account of the abundance of fellow countrymen, but the prospect of going to Jijiga filled him with disgust.

  The chief of police had given us two effeminate little soldiers, who trotted at our heels wherever we went, weighed down by antiquated rifles, looking as though they would burst into tears at every moment of crisis.

  After protracted negotiations we had taken seats in a coffee lorry, bound for Hargeisa. There were the usual delays as the Somali driver made a last-minute tour of the town in the endeavour to collect additional passengers, and it was soon clear that we should not reach Jijiga by nightfall. Our two soldiers began nervously to complain of danger from brigands, but the journey was uneventful.

  Rain came on at sunset and for four hours we made slow progress. The headlights pierced only a few feet of darkness; we skidded and splashed through pools of mud. Our driver wanted to stop and wait for dawn, saying that, even if we reached Jijiga, we should find ourselves locked out. We induced him to go on and at last came to the military post at the outskirts of the town. Here we found another lorry, full of refugees, which had passed us on the road earlier in the day. They had been refused admission and were now huddled together in complete darkness under sodden rugs, twenty or thirty of them, comatose and dejected. Our soldiers climbed down and parleyed; the driver exhibited the consular mailbag which he was carrying; Patrick and I produced our cards of identity. To everyone’s surprise the barrier was pulled back and we drove on to the town. It was to all appearances dead asleep. We could just discern through the blackness that we were in a large square, converted at the moment to a single lake, ankle-deep. We hooted, and presently some Abyssinian soldiers collected round us, some of them drunk, one carrying a storm lantern. They directed us into a kind of pound; the gates were shut behind us and the soldiers prepared to return to bed.

  There was no inn of any kind in Jijiga, but the firm of Mohamed Ali kept an upper room of their warehouse for the a
ccommodation of the Harar consul on his periodic visits. We had permission to use this and had wired the local manager to expect us. His representative now appeared in pyjamas, carrying an umbrella in one hand and a lantern in the other.

  Fresh trouble started, which Mata Hari tried to inflame into a fight, because the soldiers in command refused to let us remove our bags. They had to be seen by the customs officer, who would not come on duty until next morning. As they contained our food, and we had had nothing to eat since midday, the prospect seemed discouraging. The Indian from Mohamed Ali’s told us it was hopeless and that we had better come to our room. Mata Hari, Charles, and I set out with one of our own soldiers to find the customs officer. We knocked up his house, where they refused to open the door but shouted through the keyhole that the customs office was at the French House. A handful of Abyssinians had now collected in the darkness. Mata Hari did all he could to provoke them to violence, but our Harari guard was more conciliatory and eventually we were led through what appeared to be miles of mud to another house which showed a light and a posse of sentries. The nature of the ‘French House’ was not at the moment clear. Sounds of many loud voices came from the interior. After Mata Hari had nearly got himself shot by one of the sentries, the door opened and a small Abyssinian emerged, clean-shaven, dressed in European clothes, horn-spectacled; one of the younger generation. We later learned that he was new to his position, having spent the previous year in prison on a charge of peculation. He came with us to the lorry, apologizing in fluent French for the inconvenience we had suffered. Our bags were surrendered and the Indian led us to our room, where, after supper, we slept on the floor until daybreak.