Part One
The Free British
One
‘What with their ice cream, their “Oh Soul Mio” and that,’ Tully said, ‘I reckon the Italians are a right set of twits.’
Gooch studied him, bouncing up and down in unison as the Bedford lorry they were travelling in shook and shuddered on the uneven road. ‘Typical of ’em to stab the French in the back,’ he agreed.
‘Always were untrustworthy buggers with knives,’ Tully went on. ‘I remember Jimmy Dillon getting involved with one once in Aden. Sailor, I think. Jimmy sent him back where he came from with a few missing teeth.’
Tully smiled reminiscently. He was a small shrivelled man with wide-open innocent eyes that had misled many a girl and many a young officer, a leprechaun face adorned with a thin-nostrilled nose, and a shock of black hair that stood upright on his skull like a yard brush.
‘He was a right boy, was Jimmy Dillon,’ he went on. ‘He was stripped, you know. In front of everybody.’
‘Drunk in charge of the guard, wasn’t he?’
Tully nodded. ‘CO came along and found him. Sergeant tried to save him by backing him up against the wall of the guard ’ouse with a man either side of him and his bayonet jammed in the woodwork. It stopped him swaying, but it didn’t hold him up. They shoved him in the cells. I was one of his guards.’
The lorry hit another stretch of ruts and clanked and clattered so much Tully had to remain silent and hang on, bouncing about in the back until it reached level road again.
Gooch looked up. ‘Who was the officer, Paddy? When they stripped him.’ Gooch leaned forward to offer a cigarette, a big man with shoulders that seemed to be bursting out of his shirt, squarely built with hands like shovels and mad dangerous eyes. ‘Who was it?’
Tully grinned. ‘Fiddleface Patey. You know the one. Long head with hollow cheeks and a big chin.’ He looked at the third man in the back of the truck. ‘You ever come across Patey, Corp?’
Corporal Harkaway didn’t appear to hear. He was a tall good-looking man with well-cut features, pale amber eyes and red hair, and at that moment his mind seemed to be on something beyond the ken of his companions. Tully looked at Gooch and shrugged.
‘Go on about Dillon,’ Gooch said. ‘It isn’t everybody gets to see a man stripped in front of the whole battalion.’
Tully obliged willingly enough. ‘They forgot to work on his stripes beforehand so they’d come off easy, and Fiddleface’s knife wasn’t very sharp. Dillon lent him his. He even helped pull ’em off. He was always polite. He’d still have been serving his sentence but for the war. They sent him out here. I expect they thought that with ten armoured cars, eight old tanks and about four thousand fellers to look after the place, British Somaliland needed every man. Especially Dillon. He knew more about soldiering than everybody else put together, Fiddleface included. They gave him back his stripes and when the Italians came into the war they made him sergeant.’
‘Somaliland’s different from England,’ Gooch agreed.
‘A good job, too. One of these days I hope to go home and I hope to Christ it won’t be the same as this bloody place.’
There was something in what Tully said. They were travelling across a hot hazy land towards the hills. Small scar-like dongas, or gullies, seamed the scorched thirsty plain which seemed to stretch ahead of them to infinity, incredibly empty, the light brown sand glistening with mica, even the few thorn bushes, grey and brittle with their skeletal branches, seeming to have only a precarious hold on life. There was no green anywhere, not a leaf or a blade of grass, the termite mounds rising like grotesque towers, from the wind-flattened, bone-white earth.
As they rattled on, they passed a solitary herdsman by a waterhole with a few goats and hairy fat-tailed sheep and a line of faltering camels, their humps shrivelled and flabby on their bony backs. Over the waterhole, vultures swung in the sky, and nearby were the graves of people who had died trying to reach it, grey acacia branches and brushwood piled on top to protect the bodies from hyenas. Despite the speed at which it was travelling, in the heat of the sun the back of the lorry was stifling.
‘It’ll be worse now the Eyeties have come into the war,’ Gooch said.
Tully nodded. British Somaliland had always been a lost little colony on the shores of the Red Sea. There had never been much contact with the outside world and now, with Hitler rampaging across Europe and France knocked out of the war, it was virtually cut off.
Gooch put his head out, squinting at the empty plain. Vast stretches of it were soft red sand too hot to walk across, others consisted of rough lava boulders which no truck could travel over without rattling itself to pieces. Small dust devils danced among the anthills and, apart from the single macadam strip they were on, the roads were merely motorable camel tracks, traditional paths trodden by Somali or Arab traders, the only arteries of commerce in the whole country away from the highway or the sea coast. It was a land fit only for nomads and fearsome for mechanized transport, and even the best of travellers were brought down by the heat, the dust, diseases such as dysentery and malaria, or stomach disorders caused by the heavily mineralized water.
Gooch seemed to be still preoccupied with the thought of the Italians. ‘Think they’ll come here?’ he asked.
‘The buggers are on the border already,’ Tully pointed out. ‘I’ve heard there are a few Germans with ’em, too. Liaison officers. To stir ’em up.’
‘If they’d been coming,’ Gooch said, ‘wouldn’t they have come in June? After they declared war? Or else when they got French Somaliland in the armistice terms?’
Harkaway smiled and spoke for the first time. ‘They’re coming all right,’ he said. ‘Why do you think they’re bombing Berbera?’
‘In answer to our raids, p’raps,’ Gooch said. ‘We’ve been laying ’em on all over the shop: Diredawa, Gura, Macaca, Asmara, Assab, Kismayu. Besides, it’s August now and the South Africans aren’t going to sit back and do nothing. That bastard up front who’s driving’s wondering if he ought to go home and join up. Grobelaar.’ He listened to the sound. ‘Who’d have a name like that?’
‘He would,’ Harkaway said. He seemed to have progressed from his brooding mood to an aggressive one. ‘He’s from the Orange Free State.’
‘They’re Dutch there, aren’t they?’
‘He doesn’t seem to think so. He says they’re South African.’
Gooch thought for a moment. ‘What’s he doing driving a British army truck, anyway?’
‘He’s a Public Works Department foreman and runs the garage in Berbera for the official cars and, because everybody’s getting ready for the Italians whom you say aren’t coming, there was nobody else who knew the way. Only Grobelaar, Willie up front and one or two others. Sergeant Conyers, who was there last time, went with everybody else to the Tug Argan to stop the Eyeties.’
‘Grobelaar’s a civvy.’ It seemed to worry Gooch. ‘With a glass eye,’ he added.
Harkaway gave him a cold look. ‘If the Italians come,’ he said, ‘there won’t be any such thing as a civilian. Not even Grobelaar.’
There was a long pause, because what Harkaway said was true. There were so few Europeans in British Somaliland they’d all be in it.
‘Italians,’ Gooch announced with ponderous wisdom, ‘are treacherous bastards. What did Willie think of it?’
Willie – Lieutenant William Watson – riding in the cab with Grobelaar, the driver, his eyes everywhere, knew a little more than the three in the back and was well aware that the moment of crisis had already arrived. If Mussolini decided to launch an onslaught south from Abyssinia, there wasn’t much to stop it. The British East African countries had nothing, and the South African Air Force planes were largely old passenger transports – and German ones at that! The Brigade Intelligence Officer, in fact, had bet him the Italians would invade before August and when August had come had offered double or quits for another week, but wouldn’t go beyond that.
Restlessly, Gooch stuck his head out of the vehicle again. Not far away a range of razor-sharp hills rose in ridges, first blue, then purple, then misty grey. Up there in a cave was a hidden dump the British had set up against the possibility of invasion and when Lieutenant Watson had been given the job of destroying it he had picked Harkaway, Gooch and Tully because they were all specialists – Gooch an armourer, Tully a radio operator and Harkaway an engineer. Between them, they would make sure the job was done properly. There had to be no mistake because the Royal Navy had already prepared plans for an evacuation.
Gooch was scowling. ‘Why did they put the bloody dump so far out, anyway?’ he asked. ‘It’s right on the border.’
‘I expect the idea was to stop them before they left Abyssinia,’ Harkaway said. ‘But that was when we had French Somaliland with us. When French Somaliland was ceded to the Italians, a lot of people changed their minds.’
Tully looked at Gooch. Harkaway always seemed to know the answer to any military problem. They assumed it was because he had a friend in the officers’ mess – his educated accent seemed to suggest he might have – but in fact there was more to it than that.
‘We’ll be lucky to find it,’ Gooch grumbled.
‘I know where it is,’ Tully said. ‘I went once. You turn off into the hills when you get to Eil Dif. You ever been to Eil Dif? Used to be a trading station or something. Usual wog town with a few bigger houses where Europeans used to live. Willie said they were built by the slavers and abandoned when the ivory and ostrich feather trade fell off. The local wogs won’t live in ’em. They say they’re haunted by djinns. There’s a camel track goes up into the hills. The Habr Odessi used it to hide their animals when the Hararis came raiding.’
‘And the Yunis, the Dolbahantas, the Abos and the Wadigallas,’ Harkaway said.
‘Yeh. Them too.’
‘Well–’ Gooch shrugged ‘–it’s nice to know somebody knows his way about. Suppose we got up there and Willie fell out of the lorry and broke his neck or something. How’d we know how to get back?’
‘Grobelaar knows,’ Tully said. ‘He’s been up.’
They became silent, wondering about the future. British Somaliland was never a place for comfort and now it was totally isolated. At the best of times there wasn’t much to recommend it; now, there was even less, because the only link with the outside world was by a small weekly steamer to Aden that carried camels – and stank of them, too! – or by a small ship built for the bitter Baltic trade and not intended for the tropics. A hell-hole at any time; to get a cool bath in Berbera, you ran the taps in the evening and took your dip the following morning.
The discussion in the back of the lorry stopped as they roared through a small town coiled round the rocks at the foot of the hills, a mere collection of mud huts, their roofs of straw as dry as tinder. A few Somalis, lean men with arrogant, cruel faces, studied them as they passed, their women behind them, tall and slender, their native skirts tight over their hips, watching with black liquid eyes, their children beside them, sifting sand through their fingers on the ground. An old man sat in front of the huts, picking at one of his feet, his face blank. Behind the native dwellings there were a few taller European buildings, crumbling ruins with crazy balconies, broken shutters, peeling paint and plaster, their windows empty, their roofs fallen in.
‘Eil Dif,’ Tully said.
The lorry began to grind its way uphill. It was an old vehicle and its gears were noisy. They were winding now between the stony pinnacles and towers that fringed the road away from the plain which stretched below them in a never-ending brown sheet to the south. As they climbed higher, the discussion started again and they were so busy talking, none of them was aware of the danger that was approaching. The truck was jolting over a patch of stony road and everything was rattling like a set of tin cans, the box containing Tully’s radio banging against the steel floor, the tailgate – which was an indifferent fit – providing a metallic accompaniment.
‘One Englishman’s equal to two Germans, three Frenchmen and any number of Eyeties,’ Tully was saying.
‘That’s rubbish.’
‘It isn’t rubbish.’
‘It is, you know.’
‘It isn’t, you know.’
The argument was just rising in a crescendo when the truck stopped dead, sending Tully’s box sliding to the front with Tully, Gooch and Harkaway after it. It was only as the clattering stopped that they heard the howl of an aeroplane engine.
‘Christ!’ Tully scrambled to his feet and dived for the tailgate. Somewhere in front, Lieutenant Watson was yelling for them to take cover.
As Tully, Gooch, Harkaway and Grobelaar, the driver, bolted for a patch of thorn bush on the offside of the lorry, Lieutenant Watson was running as fast as his legs could carry him from the nearside for a clump of rocks. There were two aeroplanes, both biplanes, the sun catching their varnished wings, and as they turned towards them, they saw the stub noses round the radial engines, the wheel spats of the fixed undercarriages and the W-shape of the interplane struts. The white cross on the rudders was centred by the arms of the House of Savoy and on the wings was the emblem of the fasces.
‘They’re Eyeties,’ Tully yelled above the howling of the engines. ‘You can see the firewood and chopper.’
The aeroplanes, Fiat CR42s, were heading towards them now in a shallow dive, coming nearer and nearer until they could see the brown and green speckled camouflage. Even as they saw the flash of the guns over the engine cowling, they were aware of the little row of dust spurts flung up on the left side of the lorry. As they caught up with him, Watson seemed to do a double somersault and went rolling over and over like a shot rabbit among the rocks. Tully, Gooch, Harkaway and the South African cowered in the bush as the bullets sent small cascades of dry earth trickling down the hillside on to them.
As the aeroplanes lifted into the sky, turned on their wingtips and raced away north, Harkaway raised his head and stared towards the lorry. The canvas cover showed small rents where it had been torn but otherwise it seemed unharmed. But, beyond it, Lieutenant Watson lay among the rocks in a crumpled heap, a silent dusty figure, the blood red and shining on his shirt in the sun.
Two
Watson was huddled in what seemed an impossible posture. His head was under his shoulder and his right leg was twisted up under his humped body. There were two holes in his back, both leaking blood.
Harkaway was turning him over as the others reached him. His eyes were open, though there was dust on them, as if there hadn’t been enough strength left to close the eyelids. His jaw moved as he tried to say something, then his head fell back and his body became limp. Harkaway laid him down and straightened up, wiping the blood off his hands on his shorts.
‘The bastards,’ Tully said. ‘The lying, treacherous bastards!’
‘We are supposed to be at war,’ Harkaway pointed out calmly.
There was a long silence. Gooch stared at the sky as if half-expecting the aeroplanes to return. ‘What happens now?’ he asked. ‘We’d better get back to base, hadn’t we?’
‘Why?’ Harkaway asked.
‘Because the officer’s dead.’
‘We all know what he was up to. So why not go on and do it?’
‘It’s not our bloody place to do things.’
‘Why not?’ Harkaway snapped. ‘We’ve got brains. We don’t have to have a bloody officer standing over us, saying “Do this” and “Do that” for it to be done. We’ve come to blow up a dump. Why don’t we?’
Gooch sneered. ‘Listen to the gentleman ranker who knows everything,’ he said.
Harkaway’s face went stiff. Everybody knew he’d joined the army because of some private disgrace he never spoke of. He was well educated, intelligent and, from the things he said occasionally, had once been used to money. It rankled sometimes, but it never made any difference when there was anything to be done. A few of them thought the stripes he wore on his arm were there because he had influence among the officers, perhaps even because someone had known him in the old days, at least because he spoke better than the others. The truth was that Harkaway was a natural leader, and all too often they did things merely because he said they should. As they were doing now.
Gooch frowned, unwilling to concede anything. ‘You know how to blow it up?’
‘Of course I do. I helped Willie more than once.’
‘You have to get it right.’
‘I’ll get it right.’
Tully looked from one to the other but nobody had any better idea and he shuffled his boots in the sand awkwardly and looked at Watson’s body. Grobelaar picked up the dead man’s cap and placed it over his face. He was a quiet man, not old but with a deeply lined face and a cheap glass eye that stared unblinkingly at you like the glass eye of a doll.
‘I suppose we’d better bury the poor bastard,’ Tully said.
Gooch unstrapped the spade from the side of the truck and began to dig. The ground was stony and difficult and the hole they scooped out was shallow.
‘It’ll have to do,’ Harkaway said.
They laid Watson in the hole, but only after Harkaway had removed his binoculars, identity discs and watch, and been through his pockets and stripped him of anything that might be of value. There wasn’t much – a few cigarettes, a little money, and a letter from a girl in Nairobi. They also removed his boots and khaki peaked cap because they thought they might be useful and it seemed silly to put them under the soil.
As they threw the sandy earth over him, Tully looked at Harkaway. ‘Do we say a prayer?’
‘Know one?’
‘No.’
‘Then we’ll not bother. I don’t suppose he’ll mind.’
‘He wasn’t a bad bastard,’ Gooch offered as an epitaph.
Harkaway threw the boots and the cap in the back of the lorry, and shared the cigarettes and money among them. Tully offered his share of cigarettes round at once and they lit up and stood drawing at them for a while, all of them deep in thought.
So far Grobelaar had said nothing. Now he spoke. ‘Kom, kerels,’ he said. ‘Kom. Let’s go.’
They were just heading for the lorry again when Harkaway stopped. He was staring at the plain, his eyes narrowed against the sun’s glare, a handsome rangy figure with yellow foxy eyes, holding the cigarette in his fingers, the smoke dribbling from his nostrils, and as the others joined him, he gestured. Below them, heading north-east, they could see small specks trailing feathers of dust. Nobody spoke, merely watching as the specks drew closer and they could identify them as lorries. There was a long column of them, led by armoured cars.
‘Eyeties,’ Harkaway said flatly. ‘Heading for Hargeisa. From Jijiga in Abyssinia.’
By now the vehicles on the plain were passing through Eil Dif along the road they’d been travelling on themselves before they’d turned into the hills. As they watched, another CR42 flew past, just to the south, roaring along in a wide curve to reconnoitre the land ahead. They watched it as it turned and headed north-east. Soon afterwards they heard several dull thuds.
‘Bombs,’ Tully said.
The sound seemed to bring a realization of their plight. They were a hundred miles from the coast with a whole enemy army between them and safety. Not long before they’d been deriding the Italians, but it didn’t require much imagination to realize, no matter how indifferent they might be as soldiers, that there were more than enough of them to stop any attempt at escape. The future suddenly looked very bleak.
Harkaway lifted the binoculars they’d taken from Watson’s body. With them he could see the passing lorries were full of men and bristled with weapons.
‘They’ll be making for Berbera,’ he said.
‘They’re welcome to it,’ Tully said bitterly.
‘What do we do now?’ Gooch asked. ‘Give ourselves up?’ He sounded shocked.
‘Isn’t much alternative, is there?’ Tully said gloomily, only too well aware of what being a prisoner of war meant because the Italian radio had been full of the thousands captured at Dunkirk.
‘They might not get to Berbera,’ Harkaway pointed out calmly. ‘There are road blocks and demolitions, and they’re waiting for ’em at the Tug Argan gap.’
‘They’ll never stop ’em,’ Gooch said. ‘Watson reckoned they had twenty-five thousand men for Somaliland. We’ve got the King’s African Rifles, the Black Watch and a few odds and ends. They’ll be in Hargeisa by tomorrow and in Berbera in a week. Only one thing to do.’
‘You fancy spending the rest of the war in a prison camp?’ Harkaway asked.
Gooch was silent. He’d heard the same broadcasts Tully had heard. ‘How long will the war last?’ he asked eventually.
‘The last one went on for four years.’
The thought of four years’ imprisonment obviously didn’t appeal much. Gooch stared at the end of his cigarette for a while, then he looked at Harkaway.
‘What you getting at, Squire?’ he asked. ‘You’re obviously getting at something.’
Harkaway shrugged. ‘Why destroy the dump?’ he said. ‘There’s everything we want there. Weapons. Food. Water. Petrol. Why don’t we go there, then decide what to do?’
‘Such as what?’
Harkaway thought for a while. ‘Well, we’ve got more than enough explosive to blow in the front of the cave,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we use some of it to blow up the road to the Tug Argan?’
There was a long silence.
‘What for?’ Tully asked.
‘Stop the Italians.’
‘You want to win the VC or something?’
Harkaway smiled. ‘There’s that bit they call the Wirir Gorge,’ he said. ‘A nice big bang there and the Italians in front will be cut off.’
‘Not for long, I’ll bet.’
‘No,’ Harkaway agreed. ‘But it might help.’
It seemed to make sense and didn’t seem too dangerous.
‘We can always chuck our hand in later if there’s no alternative,’ Harkaway went on. ‘We might even think of a way of getting down to Kenya.’
The dump was at a place called Shimber Addi, a natural stronghold in the Bur Yi range which rose a thousand feet from the plain. On the peak of the hill was an old fortress built of stone, complete with firing slits and machicolations, which had been used at the beginning of the century by Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, the Mad Mullah, in his campaigns against the British. The place was intersected by deep ravines covered everywhere with boulders and thick scrub. Up here the desert gave way to a greener land with giant cedars and flowers, and the ravine sides were honeycombed with caves capable of sheltering large numbers of men and animals. During the days when Abdullah Hassan had been defying the might of the British Empire the bush round the fort had been cleared to provide a field of fire but it was growing back now and the fort had been destroyed both by bombing and by the pick-axes and crowbars of British soldiers when the Mullah’s power had crumbled.
The dump was in one of the largest caves, and the narrow entrance was between two tall pillars of stone. They shifted the rocks that had been piled in the entrance and stood staring into a large cool vault with numerous passages running off to a series of smaller caves.
Harkaway shone a torch. Among the piles of crates and cases along the walls of the caves were a few animals’ skulls as if the place had been inhabited at some point by a leopard, but they found they were better off than they had thought.
‘Stew,’ Tully said, peering at labels. ‘Tinned carrots. Tinned peas. Tinned potatoes. Christ, we’ve got everything we need here! There’s even some canned beer. And – Jesus! – whisky!’
‘That’ll be for the officers.’
‘Petrol. Fags. Toilet powder. Blacking. Blanco.’ Tully’s head turned. ‘Typical of the army. Make sure you’re healthy and don’t get heat sores, but make sure also you’ve got the means to shine your boots and whiten your webbing.’
Their spirits were beginning to lift. Suddenly the prospect of being marooned behind the whole of the Italian army didn’t seem too bad. Shimber Addi was pretty inaccessible – as the Mad Mullah had decided thirty years before – it wasn’t desert, and there was food.
‘What else is there?’ Harkaway asked.
‘Grease,’ Gooch said. ‘Gun oil. To make sure your bundook works proper. Water down at Eil Dif.’
Harkaway was studying the crates. ‘Two Brens,’ he said. ‘Two water-cooled Vickers. Four Lewises. They must have been in a hurry to get to the Tug Argan to leave this lot here. You reckon they’re all right, Gooch?’
‘They look it.’ Gooch was bending over the crates, a crowbar in his hand. ‘They’ll need cleaning – they’re covered with grease – but they seem all right. There must be a couple of hundred rifles here.’
‘Good ones?’
‘Depends what you call good. Most of ’em seem to be single-shot Martinis. Old as God. Recoil like a kick in the face. Big bore. Soft-nosed bullet. Used to use ’em on the North-west Frontier for native levies.’
‘I expect that’s what they’re doing here,’ Harkaway said. ‘In case they raised native troops who never aim properly anyway.’ He bent over the boxes. ‘Plenty of ammunition,’ he went on. ‘All types.’
‘They made it good and secret,’ Tully said, staring about him. ‘Nobody’s been here.’
‘If they had, we’d have been out long since stopping a massacre.’ Harkaway was peering about him, his eyes alert and interested. ‘This country’s full of warriors and they’d as soon kill as look at each other.’
It didn’t take them long to get a fire going. There were four large Primus stoves but Harkaway suggested that, since they had no idea how long they were likely to be there, it might be a good idea to conserve their supply of paraffin for the hurricane lamps, and there were plenty of dried thorn bushes about. With the aid of twigs, they soon had a billycan of water boiling. They were even beginning to feel cheerful and, since it was their first day and Watson’s unexpected death had shocked them a little, it didn’t seem amiss to have a can of beer each.
‘It’s hot enough for two,’ Gooch pointed out.
‘One,’ Harkaway insisted. ‘We might be here a long time.’
As they prepared the meal they were all busy with their thoughts. Harkaway sat by the fire, staring at the flames, and Grobelaar perched on a rock overlooking the plain, playing a nostalgic Afrikaner tune on a harmonica. Gooch, the armourer, was quietly rubbing at his rifle with a cloth while Tully crouched over the radio. He had discovered that a bullet had struck the transmitter so that, while they could hear what was happening, they couldn’t tell anyone where they were or what had happened. There seemed to be a lot of radio traffic and it was clear there was a lot of panic on the road towards Berbera.
By the following day, the suggestion Harkaway had made of harassing the Italians seemed to have lost its point because most of the twenty-five thousand Italians heading for Berbera were already between them and the British, anyway.
‘We could still blow up the road,’ Harkaway said.
Nobody argued. Three of them were regular soldiers, two of them nearing the end of their career when the war had broken out and, though Harkaway was the youngest, he was also the natural leader of the group, with a brisk no-nonsense manner that nobody ever questioned. Even Grobelaar knew the facts as well as any of them. He had arrived in Berbera from Cape Town donkey’s years before and had worked with the army since the war had started the previous year, a good mechanic who knew his job, stoop-shouldered from bending over engines but with an anxious look always on his face as if he constantly expected to be let down. The few officials in Berbera he’d dealt with had always been urging him on with ‘Come on, Piet, you can do it,’ when they wanted him to repair their vehicles out of turn, but they’d never invited him to eat with them, had never offered him anything more than an occasional beer, and his worried expression seemed to suggest that if he’d ever realized how difficult his job would be, he’d never have taken it on.
Two days later they were still there, still trying to decide what to do. By this time they had learned from the radio that Hargeisa had fallen and that the Italians were heading for the Tug Argan Gap while the Royal Navy was preparing for the evacuation to Aden. Abyssinians, Arabs, Indians, even some Somalis, with their wives and families, had gone rather than accept Italian rule. Civilians and administrative officials had also left and the base personnel were now aboard the ships to make room for the troops who would be arriving from the last-ditch defences that had been constructed in the hills.
Since there was nothing they could do, they made themselves comfortable. It wasn’t all that difficult because even in Berbera there had never been either fresh milk or butter and most things had come out of cans, and in the hills the thirsty climate of the plain and the sea-coast gave way to one that was equable, even invigorating. There was grass here instead of sand, box trees, acacias, a variety of flowering aloes with crimson and yellow blossoms, gum, myrrh and frankincense. In some sheltered spots there were junipers or wild fig trees, and in a few of the gorges even maidenhair, while everywhere there were euphorbias lending an artificial stage-like effect with their candelabra branches and dark creased trunks.
‘All we need is a few girls,’ Tully pointed out cheerfully. ‘They’re not bad, these Somalis. Slim. Nice hips and taut little tits.’
‘Just try and take one,’ Harkaway said quietly, ‘and their brothers’ll have your balls off quick as light.’
‘Yeh – well–’ Tully considered this. ‘Of course, you could do it proper. They’d sell you one.’
‘Twelve camels is about the going rate, I believe.’
Gooch was silent for a moment. ‘Or a rifle,’ he said slowly. ‘We’ve got plenty of them.’
Ten days later they had still made no effort to move because there seemed to be even less point than there had been earlier. At the Tug Argan a desperate battle was being fought and they could hear the thump of bombs and the thud of artillery. Occasionally, they saw Italian aircraft looking for targets, and the main road below the hills was swarming with Italian troops. The native bandas were constantly moving up and down it, wild strong-looking woolly-headed men in white robes criss-crossed by cartridge belts, more than willing to fight, and it seemed better not to try their patience too much. The conquest of Somaliland seemed assured now and perhaps it would be easier to stay put until the dust had settled.
The chief problem was boredom. They hadn’t much to say to each other. They were all too different and Harkaway was distinctly unforthcoming. But he always had been unforthcoming and they put it down, as everybody did, to his past. Harkaway’s past had been mentioned in whispers in the bars and canteens in Berbera but never to Harkaway. Again and again, it slipped out, in references to people he knew, to hunt balls, to taxis when everybody else rode in buses, and for the most part his friends had exchanged glances and said nothing. Now he was brooding over something. Though the others didn’t know it, he was becoming ambitious. He could see no future in merely hiding from the Italians, and was itching to do someone some damage. In his lumpish, awkward, aggressive way, Gooch resented Harkaway’s aloofness but there was nothing he could do about it. If Harkaway chose to ignore them, then that was exactly what he did.
‘He’s all right,’ Tully said in answer to Gooch’s grumbles. ‘He just gets things on his mind. What do you think about the situation, Kom-Kom?’
Grobelaar shrugged and gave a shadowy, cobwebby smile. ‘Alles sal regt kom,’ he said.
‘What’s that mean, you Dutch bastard?’
‘It means everything will work out.’
The fight at the Tug Argan went on. Every day the Italians surged forward to break the British grip, so their mechanized columns could burst through to the coast, and since there were just too many of them, positions were being encircled and the British were slowly having to withdraw, first from one hill, then from another.
But the troop embarkation in Berbera had already begun and, as men withdrew from their positions and headed for the coast they were taken on board ship while the Italians were still licking their wounds in the hills. The town was full of burning vehicles and by 17 August, less than a fortnight from the beginning of the Italian advance, the men on the hills above Eil Dif learned that the convoys were finally at sea and heading for Aden. Somaliland was lost.
‘What now?’ Gooch asked heavily. Automatically, his eyes turned to Harkaway. The idea of blowing up the road seemed entirely pointless now and what was in his mind was merely a means of getting south to Kenya.
Tully wasn’t listening. He was staring about him. ‘You know,’ he observed unexpectedly, ‘it’s worth a bit, this lot.’
‘What lot?’ Gooch asked.
‘This lot here. Two Vickers water-cooled, two Brens, four Lewises, fifty-four Enfield rifles, a bit out of date but still working, one hundred and fifty Martinis, very out of date but also still working, four mortars, two pack guns, a few land mines, several boxes of grenades, and Christ alone knows how much small arms ammo. Seems a pity to blow it all up. Think what it’d be worth if we could sell it.’
Gooch frowned. ‘Who’d buy it?’
‘The wogs.’ Tully gestured. ‘For hunting. They’d jump at it. There’s game around. Especially up here. Dik-dik and gerenuk. I’ve seen ’em. Perhaps bigger stuff even. All we have to do is show ’em how to use ’em.’
There was a long silence. ‘It belongs to the army,’ Grobelaar ventured.
‘Not now, mate,’ Tully said. ‘They abandoned it.’
‘How do they pay?’ Gooch asked. ‘I haven’t much use for bloody camels. There’s no call for ’em in Islington, where I come from.’
Tully smiled. ‘There’s silver, old son. Silver bangles. Silver anklets. Silver necklaces. You’ve seen ’em. They’d give silver for a rifle.’
Gooch looked about him uncertainly and Tully went on eagerly. ‘We could make a fortune,’ he said. ‘Make our pile, head for Djibouti with a camel or two and use some of it to hire a boat to get to Aden. We could head for Khartoum. Live there in luxury. Nice house. A few birds. Perhaps we could even get down to Portuguese East Africa. They’re neutral there and I bet there are a few skulking there already to avoid the war. We could live like lords.’
