Harkaway's Sixth Column (31 page)

As the mortar fire came again, Guidotti watched from the tower. There was no sign of the enemy. He had tried a few mortar bombs against them but his ammunition was low and they had to endure the bombardment without being able to hit back.

As he watched, he saw a flash from where he knew the enemy had sited his 75-mm and, almost immediately, there was a roar below him near the gate. For some time now, the shells of the mountain guns had been knocking chunks out of the walls and Guidotti and his soldiers, sweating to shore up the damage, were growing tired and dispirited.

There was another crash and Guidotti heard the rattle of falling stones and timber.

‘I think they’re about to attack,’ he said to Piccio. ‘Bring the reserve up in case they make a rush. Have a machine gun ready to cover the gate.’

Running to the courtyard, Piccio formed up a mixed bag of Italians and Eritreans who waited nervously in the rooms opposite the gate while another squad stood by the machine gun, ready to rush it out and set it up the minute the gate went.

As the shelling continued, Guidotti moved along the ramparts, checking that every man was in his place. He was determined to die like a soldier, to kill the lie the British put out that Italians lacked courage. His men were looking over their shoulders at him, though, and he knew it meant they would probably throw down their arms at the first sign of a reverse.

Descending the stairs, he moved towards the armoury to check that Piccio was in position, but as he turned the corner by his own room, he was startled to find one of his Italian corporals lying by the stairs. He was surprised, because it was impossible that he could have been hit by a splinter from one of the mortar bombs. Then it dawned on him that the man’s throat had been cut.

The first thought that came to Guidotti’s mind was that his native troops had mutinied. Swinging round, he reached for his sword, that magnificent sword he’d carried ever since the campaign in Spain. He’d never used it, but it was a sign of authority when he wore it and he drew it now, searching the shadowy corners of the corridor.

There was no sign of anyone, and he hurried to where Piccio was waiting. The bombardment had stopped again but the heavy gates were only a tangle of splintered timbers now.

‘I think - ‘

Guidotti had barely started speaking when they heard a swish and saw a streak of smoke going up behind them. It soared into the blackness and burst into a vivid red glow that hung in the sky. Guidotti stared at it, his jaw hanging.

His first idea was that somebody was trying to surrender and he stared round wildly.

Then Piccio pointed. ‘They’re inside!’ he yelled and in the light of the flare, Guidotti saw half-naked black figures running along the ramparts. They held rifles, but they were making no attempt to use them and were slashing instead with curved swords.

‘Mother of God!’

Ramming his sword back in the scabbard, Guidotti drew his revolver and fired. One of the black figures stumbled and fell, but others were pouring along the ramparts, hacking at men still peering through the firing slits.

‘Watch the gate!’ he shouted at Piccio as he tried to gather a few men round him in an attempt to clear the ramparts.

As he rushed up the stairs, he came face to face with a tall, lean black man with bushy hair and wild eyes. He was armed with a rifle and a spear; his face was streaked with yellow and he wore a sprig of foliage in his hair. As he saw Guidotti, he gave a high-pitched yell and flung the spear. It missed Guidotti and went into the throat of the man behind. Guidotti fired and the black man staggered and fell.

Jumping over the squirming body and dashing through the door to the ramparts, Guidotti could see a whole flood of white-robed men on the ramparts now. They were driving slowly forward and, to his horror, he saw his own men beginning to throw down their weapons and run.

He turned and saw an Italian sergeant with a sub-machine gun and pointed. As the gun stammered, the men swarming on to the ramparts seemed to collapse like puppets with broken strings. Then, as he swung round, Guidotti saw a white man, bulky in European uniform, with the stars of a lieutenant on his shoulder, step out of the doorway and, thinking it was his enemy, Harkaway, he fired.

The white man gave him a startled look then, taking a couple of stumbling steps forward, he overbalanced and fell from the rampart to the courtyard.

As the Very light had gone up, Harkaway had blown his whistle, and the dark figures lying on the ground about him had risen to their feet, yelling their war-cries. Slamming in the clutch of the armoured car, the driver revved the engine and moved forward. Behind him the other armoured cars formed a line and, bouncing over the planks laid over the filled-in portion of the khor, thundered towards the fort. A machine gun in a sandbagged position near the gate started to fire but Harkaway ignored it and directed his vehicle towards it. As it drew near, the gunners rose to their feet and all but one of them, who kept the gun firing, began to run.

The armoured car struck the wire, the strands twanging as they snapped and coiled about it. The driver, one of Catchpole’s ex-prisoners, gasped and fell forward just as the front wheels hit the sandbags of the gun position, then the heavy vehicle crashed down on top of the gun and the man firing it.

As it came to rest in a cloud of dust, Harkaway banged his head and could feel blood running into his eye. Gathering his senses, he saw that the driver was dead, so he opened the hatch and jumped out as the other armoured cars raced for the gate.

‘Get through,’ he roared. ‘Get through!’

Yelling black men were swarming over and round the splintered gates into the courtyard. A machine gun in the shadows at the opposite side of the fort stuttered and the black wave crumbled. Then the gun stopped, its crew hacked down, and the wave picked up speed again and swept forward. A blast of fire came from the ramparts where Guidotti and Piccio had gathered a group of Savoia Grenadiers round them, and once again the wave crumbled.

His face splashed by the blood of his driver, Harkaway realized he was facing defeat. He had expected Guidotti and the Italians to throw down their weapons at the first rush but they were keeping their heads and fighting back courageously. As another wave, moving against the wall, was swept away by the firing, he leapt forward, brandishing his revolver. ‘Keep going!’ he was yelling. ‘Keep going!’

As the black men poured past, him, another blast of fire stopped them dead in their tracks yet again. But the murder of the shepherds had roused the war fury in them and heavy swords hacked and slashed until the Italian native troops began to give way. Surrounded by the remnants of the Savoia Grenadiers and a few loyal Eritreans, the Italian officers had reached the barrack rooms at the rear of the fort and had barricaded themselves in with beds, tables and cupboards, and were firing through the iron-barred windows that gave air to the place in the stifling heat of the summer. Outside the doorway behind which they crouched was a pile of bodies, and the bullets were chipping industriously at the mud walls.

‘We can’t hold them, Excellency,’ Piccio panted. ‘We’ve got to evacuate the place!’

‘In God’s name, man,’ Guidotti snapped. ‘How?’

Piccio gestured. ‘The lorries are still there under the trees! They haven’t touched them!’

Guidotti’s head jerked round, a faint gleam of hope in his eyes. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’ve seen them, Excellency. It’s worth a try. If we can hold them here, we can hack our way through the wall into the passage that leads to the gate to the garden.’

Guidotti swung round, studying the barrack room with its overturned fitments. The interior walls of the fort, he knew, were largely of mud and could be pierced easily enough.

‘Get on with it, Piccio,’ he said. ‘Take as many men as you need. I’ll hold them off. Collect ammunition and any supplies you can lay your hands on. Let me know when you’ve broken through to the garden and we’ll join you. For the love of God, though, hurry!’

As Piccio’s party started tearing at the wall of the barrack room with crowbars, bayonets, knives and bare hands, the men outside in the courtyard were pinned down by the fire coming from the barrack-room windows and it was several minutes before it dawned on Harkaway what was happening.

Tully,’ he yelled. ‘Where are you?’

A figure appeared alongside him, its hands covered with blood. ‘The bastards got Goochy,’ Tully said. ‘Right between the eyes, poor bastard. He’s lying in the courtyard. He’s dead.’

Harkaway’s pause lasted only a second, then he gestured angrily. ‘To hell with Gooch,’ he raged. ‘They’re escaping!’

Outside the gate the women were shrieking shrill encouragement, and black-faced Somali Muslims yelling ‘Allah, Allah,’ charged forward yet again alongside Christian Ethiopians screaming ‘Kill, kill, kill!’ They had forgotten their rifles and instead swung the long curved swords and lunged with the broad-bladed spears. A row of water containers made of wicker and mud were smashed to fragments in the frenzy and one of the Italian levies flung himself down with his hands over his head in the debris. A spear thrust killed him at once. Alongside him, an Italian soldier rocked on the sandy earth, holding his knees and yelling for mercy.

Horsemen had arrived now and were galloping about inside the courtyard, shouting that there was no God but God and Allah was his name, while half-grown boys, screaming like hyenas, rampaged along behind them. Some of them carried bows and, as one of the Eritrean levies staggered back with an arrow in his throat, a man with wild eyes and red dust in his hair hacked him to pieces, stabbing and cutting with a frenzy that bordered on insanity.

By this time, the armoured cars were circling the courtyard, looking for something to shoot at, but there was such a crowd of hacking, stabbing men chasing their shrieking victims, it was impossible to take aim.

Italian soldiers began to clamour round the white men, and, terrified of being hacked to pieces, were trying to climb on to the armoured cars, begging to be saved.

‘I think it’s finished,’ Harkaway said, and suddenly the racket faded. The shouting died and they could hear only moans, the triumphant yelling of Harkaway’s Boys, the crackle of flames and the dull throbbing of the armoured car’s engines.

The butchery had been frightful. The heavy curved swords had slashed the defenders to so much meat, and there were pools of blood staining the sandy floor of the courtyard. The walls were splashed with it and almost every room seemed to contain huddled bodies. Catchpole and his gunners wore shaken looks and the civilian drivers who had accompanied them were keeping well clear until the mess had been tidied up. It wasn’t the sort of war they were used to and they were beginning by this time to regret having anything to do with Harkaway.

He stared round the courtyard. Two armoured cars stood together near the well and men outside the fort were trying to drag the third from the pit where it rested on the smashed machine gun and the body of the sergeant who had kept it firing.

Chattering excitedly, blood-splashed Somalis, still wild with excitement, were dragging away the timbers of the gate. Others were collecting their injured who were having their wounds stuffed by their own Somali doctors with packages of roots and leaves. The bodies were brought out across the backs of horses, torn, stained sacks, their hands rusty with dried blood, and given to the women who stood wailing and beating their foreheads as they waited. The corpses of the Italians and their native troops were being stacked like cordwood in another corner of the fort, and Tully, bent over the body of Gooch, looked up at them, a sick look on his face.

‘Have you seen what that bastard’s got,’ he said, indicating one of the grinning Ethiopians. ‘It’s an ‘ead!’

They had won, but it had been a costly business and had very nearly been a defeat. After their easy victories of the past, the narrowness of the margin had come as a shock, and the dazed survivors were hardly able to believe their luck. In addition to the black dead, Gooch and three of the white men had died.

The picnic seemed to be over. Harkaway was not deluding himself. Their part in the destruction of the Italian army had been small, and Guidotti had not lost his head. He and his men had fought well and the losses they had inflicted were grievous. Danny had warned him not to push his luck too far and he had treated her suggestion with scorn. But, he realized now, he wasn’t as clever as he’d thought he was, his luck had suddenly run out and they’d been saved from defeat only by the ferocity of ill-drilled, ill-armed black men.

‘We need help and medical supplies,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to contact Addis.’

Tully gave him a sullen look. ‘I thought we could do it on our own,’ he said.

Harkaway gestured at the Italian and Eritrean prisoners penned in a corner of the courtyard. ‘What do we do with that lot?’ he demanded, unwilling to offer any other reason. ‘We can’t guard ‘em and we can’t shoot the bastards. We’ve still got a job to do.’

‘What job, for Christ’s sake,’ Tully demanded angrily. ‘Haven’t we done the bloody job?’

‘We haven’t got Guidotti.’

‘What’s so important about this bloody Guidotti?’ Tully yelled.

‘Don’t you realize, you stupid idiot?’ Harkaway yelled back. ‘With Guidotti in our hands, they’ll certainly confirm your bloody commission. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Instead of a couple of bob a day, you’ll be earning a fortune.’

‘You don’t give a monkey’s what happens to me!’ Tully said bitterly. ‘All you want is that they confirm your own bloody rank. If I know you, you’ll make sure that you stay a major.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

Tully seemed to collapse, as if the spine had gone from him. ‘I’ll send your message,’ he said slowly. ‘Then I’m going to attend to old Goochy. Put him away nice. Put a cross up or something. He was a good bloke.’

‘He was a stupid bastard,’ Harkaway said unforgivingly. ‘But for him, we’d have got Twinkletoes. Why in the name of God didn’t he immobilize their vehicles? Puncture the tanks? Set ‘em on fire? Let the tyres down? The bastards just climbed in and drove away. But for your bloody precious Gooch we’d have been staying here.’