Harkaway's Sixth Column (23 page)

Back in Bidiyu, Guidotti felt cut off.

He had little in the way of orders, except to remain where he was, holding the road open so that the army could pass through him on the way to Jijiga. After Jijiga, he wondered, then what? If the British were coming down from the Sudan, where could he go?

He decided it might be a good idea to light a candle himself. The priest was obviously also preparing to leave and the church had a bare look about it.

‘What are we to do, Excellency?’ he asked.

‘I know as much as you, Father,’ Guidotti said. ‘However, as soon as General Barracca’s safely through and in Jijiga, someone will surely inform us that we can go, too.’

An hour later, however, Di Sanctis telephoned. ‘The post at Kilometre 207 reports the sound of firing, General,’ he said. ‘Between them and the frontier.’

Ten minutes afterwards, Piccio arrived, hot and hurried. ‘We’ve had a radio message from Barracca yelling for help,’ he announced excitedly. ‘He’s bottled up in the Wirir Gorge. There’s heavy fighting and he’s under fire from machine guns, mortars, grenades, and guns.’

In the pass Barracca’s troops were still battling to break out. The engineers were struggling to cut a way through the heap of rock and rubble but only the smallest vehicles could make it and the heavy lorries on the other side would have to be left behind. At the front, the burning truck was filling the gorge with blinding smoke and they were trying to edge the following trucks to one side so that a couple of the light tanks could move forward to nudge it out of the way. But there wasn’t much room for manoeuvre and the rearmost lorry had to be moved first, then all the others all the way down the line to the front. And all the time a devastating fire was coming from the slopes, rifle fire in unsteady volleys and a steady clattering of machine guns - among which Barracca recognized Italian weapons - that knocked men over in groups whenever they tried to assemble. Then he heard the thump of mortars again from a position too far up the slopes for his own mortars to reach and he turned to one of his aides.

‘Let’s have a couple of companies up there,’ he said, crouching on the ground alongside his car, well aware that it wasn’t particularly safe because the firing was coming from both sides at once. ‘They’re lining the crest. Find those machine guns and destroy them.’

A company of native infantry set off up the slopes, but they were met by showers of grenades. Some of them were British Mills bombs and some their own Japanese-made grenades, which came rolling down the slope to spray the climbing men with their fragments. There wasn’t a lot of skill in the way they were being delivered but they were remarkably effective.

Taking heavy losses, the infantry struggled upwards, one or two of the braver souls attempting to snatch up the bouncing grenades and throw them back, a not very profitable exercise because the bombs mostly bounced back again on to the throwers. With difficulty they struggled to the crest, only to find that the machine guns and the men who had manned them had already vanished.

Swinging round to where they could see other black heads further along the crest, they pushed along the shale slope towards them, firing as they went, only for the guns they had been attacking to reappear behind them. It was like rabbit shooting. Every time a man moved forward across the slope, slipping and scrambling as he went, he was caught by a burst of firing so that he fell forward, rolled over and over until he fetched up against a rock and lay still. Occasionally several men tried to run forward at once but the machine guns and the volley firing sent them tumbling, limp and shapeless, down the slope, and in the end Barracca called off the attack.

The burning truck had finally been nudged off the road, however, and now lay on its side in the catchment ditch, still sending up its thick column of smoke. With the column moving again at last, the road was beginning to clear. But Barracca was well aware that he was going to lose a lot of the heavier vehicles, which would never make it through the blocked pass.

‘Tell the crews they must abandon them and rejoin with what they can carry,’ he ordered.

But even as the aide turned away, he was hit by a heavy bullet from a Martini wielded by an Odessi youth and crashed down at Barracca’s feet. As he was carried away, Barracca gave the message to a sergeant of Savoia Grenadiers, only to be hit in the shoulder himself a moment later.

As the doctor arrived and tried to bandage up the groaning man, he was cursing.

‘Where’s Guidotti?’ he was asking.

The front half of Barracca’s column burst free just before dark, but his troops were totally demoralized. Their losses in men had been heavy but their losses in vehicles were disastrous, though Barracca was hoping many would be salvaged by Guidotti when he finally reached them.

As the survivors scrambled on to what lorries remained and broke away to the west, the Somalis came down the mountainside towards the abandoned vehicles, brandishing their rifles and spears. A few fell to the shots of the wounded still in the lorries but the rest came on, leaping like stags over the scree, their high ululating yell enough to strike terror into the stoutest-hearted.

There was bloody scuffling among the abandoned lorries and the spears jabbed and became reddened, then Danny arrived like a fury, knocking up the weapons and pushing the excited youths to one side. One of them, driven to the point of hysteria by the killing, lifted his spear to her and, only just in time, Tully swung a rifle butt and sent him flying.

‘Thank you, Paddy,’ she said, then she swung round to find Harkaway, his eyes bright, his red hair flying, wielding a revolver.

‘Stop them!’ she screamed. ‘Haven’t you done enough?’

Even Harkaway finally accepted that the fighting should stop and he rampaged among the yelling black men, knocking up their weapons and pushing them aside. There seemed to be bodies all over the road, most of them Italian or Italian native levies. On the western side of the road-block they could hear the dwindling sound of engines as the front portion of Barracca’s column escaped, but on the eastern side there appeared to be twenty-three abandoned undamaged lorries and a few other vehicles of all types from Lancia trucks to scout cars.

‘Prisoners?’ he asked.

‘About forty,’ Danny said, staring round her, sickened by the red splashes on the surface of the road and the crumpled corpses among the rocks. ‘But no thanks to you.’

As Guidotti’s rescue column roared out of Bidiyu, the first of Barracca’s lorries was rocketing down the slope from the road on to the plain. Driven by a nervous askari, with an armed Somali alongside him, it swung over the lip and, tilting crazily, slithered down, to bounce to a halt below, rocking on its springs.

‘Now the next,’ Harkaway yelled. ‘Hurry up! Get a move on!’

Caught by the excitement, the Somalis were yelling and laughing as the second lorry rocked and slithered down the slope to take up a position behind the first. One after the other, they went down, some skilfully, some with a frenzied enthusiasm as the drivers were urged on by the wildly excited Somalis. One of them, slithering sideways, as its driver struggled to keep its nose pointing the right way, swung beam-on to the slope and slowly began to turn over. The Somali jumped clear but the driver was crushed under the cab.

Behind them, Gooch was rapidly taking the mountain guns and mortars apart. Lashing them to the backs of the mules, they were swung off the road and into the hills. Sweating Somalis hurried down the slopes with the machine guns to push them with the captured weapons aboard the vehicles lining up on the scrubby plain below the road.

‘Keep going,’ Harkaway was yelling, waving his arms. ‘Don’t stop! Keep going!’

He was moving up and down the road, pushing at the Somalis as they hesitated over the scattered loot. Already strings of camels, mules, horses and asses were beginning to wind away back into the valleys in the hills. Behind them was a line of men, their eyes fierce, their tobes like loincloths round their waists under looted Italian tunics. They carried rifles and swords and bayonets and wore Italian watches and bracelets and Italian sun helmets on their woolly hair. Bringing up the rear were the women and children who had waited in the hills.

Harkaway shoved at one or two last hesitant men still trying to loot the dead Italians then he fired his revolver into the air. As they looked up, he pointed to the hills.

‘Go!’ he roared. ‘If you’re caught here you’ll be shot! Go!’

They lost one more lorry as it struck a hollow in the slope, tucked its nose down and went down end-over-end. This time, both men escaped, the Somali laughing, the askari driver shuddering with shock.

Harkaway was the last to leave. The whole gorge was down, several vehicles and men under the rubble. Beyond it, there was only wreckage. On his own side there were more dead men, many of them stabbed by Somali spears, and the twisted remains of the two wrecked lorries at the bottom of the slope from the road.

‘Mount,’ he yelled and everybody who was left began to climb on to the captured lorries. Their own lorries started up as they saw them moving towards them, then the two columns formed together, and began to move south under a spreading cloud of dust.

Rushing to Barracca’s rescue with what few troops he still had under his command, Guidotti had come to a full stop. Beyond the gaping hole in the road where the gully had been, he could see vultures already circling in the sky.

Standing by his car, he sent his native troops ahead on foot while his engineers struggled to fill the hole in the road. It was a hopeless situation and Guidotti knew that while he was away from Bidiyu, what few troops he had left behind might well be deserting and attacking the women.

Eventually he began to get his lighter vehicles across the gap, with the aid of ropes and a lot of muscle-power, but round the next bend they found the road covered with boulders, scattered over a wide area and obviously placed there deliberately.

His men began to roll them clear, but it was a slow business and his vehicles could edge forward only at the speed at which they were clearing the obstructions. By the time he reached the gorge, he found only a few wrecked lorries, a few dazed survivors and the native troops he had sent ahead.

It was a macabre scene of burned-out vehicles and the dusty, broken-doll shapes that had been flung aside by the tidal wave of earth and stones that had come down. Shocked, he walked through the wreckage among the damaged and abandoned lorries, past the sprawled corpses and the moaning wounded who were calling on Mary, Mother of Jesus, to help them, to the front of what had been Barracca’s column. The three smashed lorries which had stopped it dead lay on their side in the catchment ditch, still sending up columns of black smoke between the towering defiles of the gorge.

Indifferent to the possibility of snipers, Guidotti stood still and stared upwards, screwing up his eyes against the light. There was no sign of the attackers and, walking back along the road, assailed by worried aides, he reached his car. There, a group of officers were questioning the survivors. One of them crossed to Guidotti and pointed.

Guidotti lifted his binoculars. Away to the south, he could just make out a dwindling cloud of dust.

Barracca’s kidnapped drivers turned up several days later, coming from a totally different direction from that which had been expected, indicating that the stolen lorries had been driven in a vast circle, first south, then west, then north and finally east. Now, Guidotti knew, they were somewhere in the region of Eil Dif.

But now that he knew for certain where they were, there was no longer anything he could do about it. He hadn’t the men, time was growing short and the South Africans were drawing nearer every day. One column had reached Ferfer and was heading for Scillave Wells, and the second had reached Dolo. From the speed with which they were travelling, Guidotti expected them in Jijiga around the middle of March and he knew that before then he had to be on his way.

The drivers were distressed and exhausted, haggard with thirst, their clothes covered with dust, but they realized they were lucky to be alive. The stories they brought confirmed everything Guidotti had heard: four white men and a white woman, and Somalis trained to a point to which they had never seen Somalis trained before.

With the Italians in the north already retreating on Addis Ababa, Guidotti was well aware that time was not on his side and that he had to leave Bidiyu. He knew it even more clearly the following day when he heard that Gabredarre had fallen and that the South Africans had reached Daghabur. They would be in Jijiga within a matter of days and then he would be completely cut off.

He called for Piccio and Di Sanctis. He was still awaiting orders from Jijiga and he knew the Duce didn’t look kindly on men who moved without them, but he was aware that something had to be done.

‘We have no alternative but to withdraw,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for orders but Berbera seems entirely concerned with the arrival of the British from Aden, and Addis Ababa is virtually surrounded. We have no alternative but to save ourselves. I shall probably answer for it with my neck if things go wrong - even - ‘ he paused ‘- even if they go right, but I wouldn’t wish for what happened to Barracca to happen to us. Piccio, you will warn all Italian troops in the town to be prepared to move at once.’

‘What about civilians, Excellency?’ Piccio asked. ‘There are a lot of them. Officials who were sent down from Eritrea and Abyssinia last year. Many of them brought their wives. They thought the war was about to end.’

Guidotti’s shoulders moved helplessly. ‘I barely have enough vehicles to remove my troops.’ The words stuck in his throat.

‘Suppose the natives rise, Excellency?’

Guidotti sighed. ‘The British are efficient. They’re also not unkind. The lot of those who stay might well be better than that of those who go. Inform every man that he will be allowed no more than what he carries on his back. Make sure there’s enough food and water and that guns are mounted and ammunition’s at hand. And don’t rely too much on the native levies. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll remain with us. Di Sanctis, I want you to look out a route north. We might have difficulty getting to Harar, but there’s a road that goes north via Borama towards French Somaliland.’