by Evelyn Waugh
With James’s help we got together a suitable staff for the journey. He and my own boy, an Abyssinian, had long been at enmity. In the hiring of the servants they frequently came to tears. The most important man was the cook. We secured one who looked, and as it turned out was, all that a cook should be. A fat, flabby Abyssinian with reproachful eyes. His chief claim to interest was that his former master, a German, had been murdered and dismembered in the Issa country. I asked him why he had done nothing to protect him. ‘Moi, je ne suis pas soldat, suis cuisinier, vous savez.’ That seemed a praiseworthy attitude, so I engaged him. He suffered a great deal from the privations of the journey and cried with cold most evenings, the tears splashing and sizzling among the embers of his fire, but he cooked excellently, with an aptitude for producing four or five courses from a single blackened pan over a handful of smoking twigs.
The chauffeur seemed to be suitable until we gave him a fortnight’s wages in advance to buy a blanket. Instead he bought cartridges and tedj, shot up the bazaar quarter and was put in chains. So we engaged a Harari instead who formed a Moslem alliance with James against the other servants. The Radical and I found ourselves in almost continuous session as a court of arbitration. A cook’s boy and chauffeur’s boy completed the party. We had brought camping equipment and a fair quantity of stores from England; we supplemented these with flour, potatoes, sugar and rice from the local market; our Press cards were officially endorsed for the journey; our servants had been photographed and provided with special passes; and by November 13th, the day announced by the Press Bureau for our departure, everything was ready.
Rumours came back that there were disturbances on the Dessye road. Part of it ran through the fringe of the Danakil country and these unamiable people had been resorting to their traditional sport of murdering runners and stragglers from the Abyssinian forces; there had also been sharp fighting between the Imperial Guard and the irregular troops, causing a number of casualties which reached us in a highly exaggerated form. A Canadian journalist who had arranged to start a week earlier with a caravan of mules had his permission cancelled abruptly and without explanation. David and Lorenzo refused to commit themselves; both were unapproachable for the two days preceding the 13th, but on the night of the 12th no official announcement had been made of postponement, our passes were in order, and the Radical and I decided to see how far we could get. At the best we might arrive before the road had been cleared of traces of the recent troubles; at the worst it would be an interesting experiment with Ethiopian government methods. The correspondent of the Morning Post decided to join us.
Most of the loading was done on the day before. That night we kept the lorry in the road outside the Deutsches Haus and put two boys to sleep in it. We meant to start at dawn, but, just as we were ready, James accused the cook of peculation, the Abyssinians refused to be driven by a Harari, and my personal boy burst into tears. I think they had spent the evening saying goodbye to their friends and were suffering from hangovers. The only two who kept their composure were those who had guarded the lorry. It was nearly nine before everyone’s honour was satisfied. The streets were then crowded and our lorry, painted with the names of our papers and flying the Union Jack, made a conspicuous object. We drove past the Press Bureau, glancing to see that there was no notice on the door. We let down the side curtains, and the three whites lay low among the cases of stores hoping that we should pass as a government transport.
For nearly an hour we sprawled under cover in extreme discomfort as the heavily laden lorry jolted and lurched along the rough track. Then James told us that all was clear. We sat up, tied back the curtains, and found we were in open country. Addis was out of sight; a few eucalyptus trees on the horizon behind us marked the extreme of urban expansion, before us lay a smooth grassy plain and the road, sometimes worn bare, scarred by ruts and hoof marks, sometimes discernible only by the boulders that had been distributed along it at intervals to trace its course. There was brilliant sunshine and a cool breeze. The boys at the back began to unwrap their bundles of luggage and consume large quantities of an aromatic spiced paste. An air of general good humour had succeeded the irritation of early morning.
We drove on for five or six hours without a stop. The way was easy. Galla girls came out to wave to us, tossing their bundles of plaited hair. The men bowed low, three times; no one had travelled by car on that road for many months except Abyssinian officials or officers, and they had learned to associate motor traffic with authority.
After the first twenty miles we found soldiers everywhere. Some at noon, still encamped; others wandering along in companies of a dozen; some with mules to carry their loads, some with women. These were stragglers from Ras Getatchu’s army which had gone through Addis a week before.
The road turned and wandered, following the lie of the ground; every now and then we ran across the line of the telephone, a double overhead wire running straight across country. This, we knew, constituted our danger.
The first telephone station was named Koromach. We reached it at three o’clock. A uniformed Abyssinian stood across the road signalling us to stop. James and the Harari were all for running him down; we restrained their enthusiasm and climbed out of our places. The office was a small, lightless tukal a hundred yards or so off the road. There were twenty or thirty irregular soldiers there, squatting on their heels with rifles across their knees, and a chief in a new khaki uniform. By means of James the telephone officer explained that he had received an order from Addis to stop two car loads of white men travelling without permits. This constituted the strong point of our argument, for we were clearly only one car load and we had our permits; we showed them to him. He took them away into a corner and studied them at length; yes, he admitted, we had our permits. He showed them to the chief and the two sat for some time in colloquy. ‘The chief is a good man,’ said James. ‘The telephone man very bad man. He is saying we are not to go on. The chief says we have permission and he will not stop us.’
Since the man in charge of the guns was on our side, we took a more arrogant line. What proof had the clerk that he had received a message at all? How did he know who was speaking? How did he know the message, if message there was, referred to us? Here were we being held up in our lawful business by the hearsay statement of the telephone. It was evident that the chief really distrusted the telephone. A piece of writing on a printed card had more weight with him than a noise coming out of a hole in the wall. At this stage of the discussion James left us and disappeared into the lorry. He returned a moment later with a bottle of whisky and a mug. We gave the chief a good half-pint of neat spirit. He tossed it off, blinked a little, and apologized for the delay we had been caused; then he conducted us, with his men, to the lorry and, the telephone man still protesting, waved us a cordial farewell.
We had been held up for half an hour. It got dark soon after six, so, since we had as yet had no practice in making camp, after an hour and a half’s further drive, we turned off the track and stopped for the night under the lee of a small hill.
It was deadly cold. None of us slept much that night. I could hear the boys shivering and chattering round the fire whenever I woke. An hour before dawn we rose, breakfasted and struck camp under a blaze of stars. With the first sign of the sun we were on the road. Our hope was to get through Debra Birhan before the Gebbi officials at Addis were awake to warn them of our approach. Debra Birhan was about three hours’ drive away. It was the last telephone station on the road. Once past that the way lay clear to Dessye.
We were out of Galla country now and among true Abyssinians, but this part was sparsely populated and many of the farms had been left empty by their owners who were marching to the front. There were fields of maize here and there, standing high on either side of the road, many of them showing where they had been trampled down by passing soldiers; the track was tolerably level and we made good time. When we were a couple of miles from Debra Birhan, James warned us that it was time to hide. We dre
w the curtains, lay down as before and covered ourselves as well as we could with sacks and baggage.
It seemed a very long two miles and we had begun to believe that we were safely past the station when the lorry came to a halt and we heard a loud altercation going on all round us. We still lay low, hoping that James would bluff our way through, but after about five minutes his head appeared through the curtain. It was no good; rather shamefacedly we crept out of hiding. We found ourselves on the green of a large village. On one side stood the church of considerable size from which the place took its name. Next to it was the Governor’s compound and courthouse; on all sides irregular clusters of huts; some sizeable trees; a pretty place. A less agreeable prospect was the collection of soldiers who surrounded us. They were the crocks left behind when the young men went to the war. They were ragged and dilapidated, some armed with spears but most of them with antiquated guns. ‘I am sorry to disturb you,’ said James politely, ‘but these people wished to shoot us.’
In the centre stood the mayor – a typical Abyssinian squireen, tall, very fat, one-eyed. It was not clear at first whether he was disposed to be friendly; we tried him with whisky, but he said he was fasting – a bad sign.
He said he had received a message to stop us. We told him we had heard that story before at Koromach; we had cleared the whole matter up there. It was a mistake. We showed him our permits. Yes, he admitted, they were quite in order. He must just make a note of our names and write a letter of commendation for us to the other chiefs on the road; would we come with him to Government House.
It sounded hopeful, but James added to his interpretation, ‘I think, sir, that this is a liar-man.’
A leper woman had now joined the party; together we all sauntered across the green to the mayor’s compound.
The main building was a rectangular, murky hut. We went inside. The telephone operator was not well that day; he lay on his bed in the darkest corner. The chief of police sat by his side: a toothless little old man with an absurd military cap on the side of his head. These three talked at some length about us. ‘They do not want to let us go, but they are a little afraid,’ said James. ‘You must pretend to be angry.’ We pretended to be angry. ‘They are very afraid,’ said James.
The argument followed much the same course as yesterday’s, but the one-eyed mayor was much less impressed by our written permits. First he affected not to be able to read them; then he complained that the signature looked fishy; then he said that although we had indeed permission to go to Dessye we had neglected to get permission to leave Addis Ababa. It was a mere formality, he said; we had better go back and do it.
Then we made a false step. We proposed that he should do this for us by telephone. He jumped at the suggestion. It was exactly what he would do. Only it would take some time. It was unsuitable that people of our eminence should stand about in the sun. Why did we not pitch a tent and rest? His men would help us.
If we had gone on being angry we might still have got through; instead we weakly assented, pitched a tent and sat down to smoke. After an hour I sent James to enquire how things were getting on. He came back to say that no attempt was being made to telephone to Addis. We must come back and be angry again.
We found the chief holding a court, his single, beady eye fixed upon a group of litigants who at a few inches’ distance from him were pleading their case with all the frantic energy common in Abyssinian suits. He was not at all pleased at being disturbed. He was a great man, he said. We said we were great men too. He said that the telephone operator was far from well, that the line was engaged, that the Gebbi was empty, that it was a fast day, that it was dinner-time, that it was late, that it was early, that he was in the middle of important public business, that James was offensive and untruthful and was not translating what he said and what we said, but instead, was trying to make a quarrel of a simple matter which admitted of only one solution, that we should wait until the afternoon and then come and see him again.
I do not know what James said, but the result was an adjournment of the court and a visit to the telephone hut, where the chief of police demonstrated, by twirling the handle, that the machine was out of order. We wrote out a telegram to Lorenzo protesting in the customary terms of the Foreign Press Association that we were being unjustly held prisoner in defiance of his own explicit permission to proceed. We had little hope of moving Lorenzo; we thought it might impress the mayor. ‘They are very frightened,’ said James. But they proceeded to their luncheon with the utmost composure and our message remained in the hands of the bedridden and now, apparently, moribund telephonist. ‘They are too frightened to send it,’ said James, trying to put an honourable complexion on the affair.
When we returned to our tent we found that, in our absence, the entire male and female labour of the village had been recruited and a barricade built of stones and tree trunks across the front of the lorry. Walking a little way back along the road we had come, we found another barricade. Any hopes which we might have entertained of the mayor’s good will were now dispelled.
The afternoon passed in a series of fruitless negotiations. The chief would not send our message to Lorenzo, nor subsequent messages which we wrote to other officials. We tried to get him to endorse them with a note that they had been presented and refused. That was no good. We made up our minds to spending the night at Debra Birhan and pitched the other tents.
Our sudden docility disconcerted the chief and for the first time he showed some sign of the fears which James had attributed to him. He clearly feared that we intended to make a sortie by night. To prevent this he tried to separate us from the lorry; he and the chief of police came waddling down at the head of their guard – now reinforced by the village idiot, a stark-naked fellow who loped and gibbered among them until they drove him away with stones, when he squatted out of range and spent the rest of the day gesticulating at them obscenely. They said that we had chosen a very cold and dangerous camping ground. We might be attacked by robbers or lions; the tents might be blown down; would we not prefer to move to a more sheltered place? We replied that if they had been solicitous of our comfort earlier, we could no doubt have found a better camping ground on the road to Dessye.
Later they tried a stupendous lie. The Emperor was on the telephone, they said; he had rung up to say that ten lorry loads of journalists were on the way to join us; would we mind waiting for them until tomorrow morning, when we could all travel together?
Finally, to make things certain, they set a guard round us; not a mere posse of sentries but the whole village, leper, idiot, police chief and the mayor himself. The latter pitched a tent a few paces from us; a ramshackle square thing which, to the loud derision of our boys, who were enjoying the situation to the full, blew down twice. The others squatted with spears and rifles in a circle all round us. It was a bitterly cold night. By dawn they looked frozen. We breakfasted, struck camp, loaded the lorry and waited. At eight the chief came to say that we must go back. The barrier behind us was removed. We climbed into the lorry. Even now the chief feared a sudden dash for Dessye; he drew up his men across the road with their rifles ready. The chief of police spoiled the gravity of the defence by trotting forward and asking us to take his photograph. Then, in a cheerful mood, we drove back to Addis Ababa, which with some rather ruthless driving we made before nightfall.
Our little trip had caused a mild scandal. As soon as it became known we had gone, officials from the Press Bureau had trotted round all the hotels with typewritten notices, dated the day before, saying that leave for Dessye was indefinitely postponed. A stout barricade and a military post were set up on the road out of Addis. The French journalists had lodged a formal protest that preferential treatment was being given us; Belattingetta Herui announced that we were enjoying a little holiday in camp five miles outside the capital; an American journalist cabled home that we were in chains. Mr Karam hung round us rather tentatively offering a bill for ten pounds; the return trip to Debra Birhan, he claim
ed, had not been specified in our original contract. We had missed no news of importance and had picked up through James, who had earned the esteem of one of our guards with the present of six matches, some interesting details of the Danakil raids and inter-regimental fighting near Dessye. On the whole it had been an enjoyable excursion.
Two days after our return general permission for Dessye was again issued, this time in earnest. In the end it was a scratch caravan which set out for Dessye. The Radical, the Daily Express correspondent, and I were the only regular English journalists; an American preacher, a free-lance communist, and an unemployed German Jew deputized for more august principals. Only the cinema companies travelled impressively.
