The Burning Sky (26 page)

He had no need to tell them which boulders to lever – the biggest ones they thought they could shift. Several spears were jammed under one rock after another, which
saw them begin to shift on a hillside that in the first place held them only precariously; such boulders had, at some time, come to rest where they were from a point higher up the hills. There were others further below, and as soon as one got moving, the odd spear shaft breaking in the process, they hit those, sending into the pass a cascade of rocks in a thunderous roaring and increasing avalanche.

The turret hatch on the last tank swung open, so great was the sound even in a noise-filled compartment, while from the north came the sound of the rifle fire Jardine hoped would hold the infantry long enough for him to achieve his goal, and still the boulders were being levered, bounding down the slope to create a wall of increasing size, filling and blocking the valley floor.

The tanks must have had some kind of radio contact, because their progress stopped abruptly and the rearmost tank began to reverse to a point where it could easily turn round, with its cannon firing towards the straining and now obvious warriors as fast as the loader could manage, though at a range which made accuracy difficult. That was a policy repeated by its consorts: the idea of being trapped did not appeal.

‘Ten thalers you owe me, Tyler.’

‘Not yet, Cal. Let’s see what our friends do.’

Now it was a bit of a race: boulders were still being dislodged and the wall below was growing, but at some point the firepower of those cannon would reverse the advantage and the Ethiopians would begin to take serious casualties. Jardine was relieved to see the now-lead tank had stopped and was waiting for his fellows to make their
turn: they would come back down the pass as a unit to maximise their firepower; another error, in his view, given time was their enemy too.

‘Best pull back, Tyler, and get out of here. It’s going to get very hairy.’

‘You staying?’

‘I have to keep observing.’

‘I’m staying too, I have a wager on this.’

Another shout from Jardine brought Shalwe, and the advice was for Yoannis to get his men under any deep cover they could find, a suggestion driven home by the increasing number of shells coming their way. The Italian gunners knew which side the rocks were coming from, and where, so, stationary, they had concentrated their fire and taken more time over their aiming. As soon as they saw the cascade had been stopped, they began to move.

With clanking tracks they made their way towards what was now a serious obstacle, dozens of boulders piled on top of each other. The lead gunner had stopped firing at human flesh and was using his ammunition to blast the barrier, seeking to break it up, not with much success. Unable to observe for the incoming fire, Jardine was now counting shots, because there must be a limit to the shells a light tank could carry and the Italians were being profligate, firing off round after round, with the now-redundant drivers raking the hills with machine guns as well – pointless, given they had no targets to aim at.

The firing diminished and Jardine heard the one-engine note change to a scream, so he risked looking out. The
lead tank was climbing the face of his boulder wall, again its nose pointing nearly vertical, tracks scrabbling on the looser rocks and failing to grip. Whoever was in command had a brain: he sent a second tank to get on its backside to aid its traction, which helped and it made the top of the barrier, with Jardine’s heart sinking at the thought it was going to make it.

Having made the crest it balanced there precariously for a few seconds, before edging forward till it seemed impossible it could remain on an even keel, so far were its tracks sticking out. Then the nose dropped again with that sickening thud, but this time the forward tracks hit at such an angle they could get no traction and, in slow motion, the Fiat 3000 gently flipped over to drop on its turret and roll onto its side, rocking till it came to rest. The men inside must be seriously injured, but that was less important than that the rest of the tanks were trapped!

It was a waiting game then, cat and mouse, seeking to get the remaining tanks to use up their ammunition as the Italians were presented with seeming targets, which caused them to fire off wildly, until first one stopped and then the other two. They then tried to abandon their vehicles, the lower two-door forward hatches opening and the
two-man
crews jumping out. What greeted them was a wall of spear-carrying warriors charging downhill, screaming like banshees and totally indifferent to the fire from the Italian pistols.

One by one the tankers went down, to be slain by spear points before, like their compatriots earlier, their heads were cut off and their tanks set alight. The billowing black
smoke told the story: through his field glasses Jardine watched as the Italian infantry slowly and deliberately withdrew.

Major Critini saw the smoke too, but he did not despair, for he had under his command good soldiers; trained, unlike those they faced. His men fought all day, but with commendable caution in terms of both life and the expenditure of ammunition. As the sun faded in the west, creating deep shadows, he abandoned any equipment he could not carry and began a fighting withdrawal up the pass, his troops showing admirable discipline under heavy attack, using bayonet charges where necessary to clear the way. That he lost half his remaining men on the way was a price worth paying, the alternative being to stay where he had been and lose them all.

Cal Jardine was not part of the pursuit. He, Vince and Alverson scrabbled down to the position the Eritreans had held on to all day in the heat, to look at the equipment left behind, much of it still strapped to the slaughtered mules. There was the shattered radio; the operator’s body, like those of the other casualties, had been laid in neat rows and covered with tent canvas. They were still there when the first elements of the rest of
Ras
Kassa’s forces began to pour through the Dembeguina Pass to seek to turn the flank of the Italian line and force them to retreat.

T
he northern exit of the Dembeguina Pass was, as Jardine suspected, sealed off by artillery and well-sited machine guns, and to these were added regular infantry counter-attacks. Yet even backed by bombers and strafing fighters, so great was the pressure from the peasant army, and so reckless were they for their own safety all along the front, that the pressure began to infect the enemy high command, while what the world was to call the Ethiopian Christmas Offensive left little doubt regarding what they were seeking to achieve: nothing less than the destruction of the entire Italian position in the Horn of Africa.

The right- and left-wing armies, as planned, were fighting to get between the two Italian corps that had so recently invested Mek’ele and Aksum, the aim to cut them off, leaving them to be crushed by the Ethiopian centre while the two wings began an assault to the north, into Eritrea, which, if successful, might win them more than a
second Adowa, with incalculable consequences in Rome.

Marshal Badoglio was forced to order a tactical withdrawal centred on Aksum, to shorten both his lines and his communications, aware that back in his homeland voices were being raised against the whole enterprise in Abyssinia, not least that of the man he had replaced. Such criticism was impacting on the reputation of Benito Mussolini himself, which brought forth a threat to remove Badoglio as well.

The cable he sent to save his skin was carefully worded to appeal to Il Duce’s vanity, while subtly underlining the truth: if the invasion of Abyssinia faltered or even failed, ultimate responsibility rested with the politicians as well as the army commanders, and the price for both would be high.

He had to be careful, the dictator was not a leader he had originally endorsed in 1922. Indeed, for his doubts he had spent a number of years being sidelined for his lack of zealous support for the new dispensation, and it had taken subtle manoeuvring from his many Masonic and army friends to get back into the fold; in short, he was not entirely trusted.

It was necessary to employ flattery, of course, to speak of the glory of Italy, a once-broken country raised by Mussolini to stand as equal to any in Europe. He acknowledged him as the successor to the great dictators of ancient times – Cincinnatus, Sulla and, of course, Julius Caesar – pointing out that such heroic figures had not flinched from extreme measures to subdue their enemies. Yet, sadly, the present-day sons of Italy were paying a high
price – a slight massaging to heighten the casualty figures aided him here – for the adherence to sensibilities that had only come to other colonial powers
after
they had secured their conquests.

He had at his disposal not only the means to arrest Emperor Haile Selassie’s attempts to halt the march of history, but to throw him back and utterly destroy him, as well as his armies. He also reminded his political master that any finer feelings were required to be suppressed, for they were misplaced, given he had before him enemies who could lay no claim to being civilised. Was it not the mission of the Italian people, as it had been of the other European powers, to bring the vital gift of their culture to Ethiopia and its savage tribes?

Benito Mussolini would know of what he spoke, and being the great man he was, his loyal supporter Pietro Badoglio was sure he would not recoil from what was required, would not allow the hollow and hypocritical opprobrium of the feeble democracies, of socialists, of noble, savage-loving hypocrites, or even the combined voice of the League of Nations to deflect him.

The affirmative reply came back in days and Badoglio immediately sent to Asmara for the equipment necessary to protect his own troops from the decisive weapon, then called in his air force and artillery commanders to discuss how the knockout blow he envisaged could be delivered – one that would save the Italian campaign and his position.

Cal Jardine wanted to train the Ethiopians to do a bit of trench raiding, working on the same principle now as had
been applied during the Great War: if you wanted to know the state of enemy morale and perhaps, if you were lucky, their immediate intentions, you infiltrated their lines and took prisoners, a point he had made to
Ras
Kassa, who came close to scoffing at the notion. He seemed content that, should his own warriors undertake such tasks, the slitting of Italian throats was satisfactory, reasoning that the average Italian soldier was as ignorant as any of his own men.

He was beginning to be contemptuous of his enemies; like most of his fellow leaders, and not excepting the emperor himself, the success of their offensive had gone to his head: all they could see was victory while Cal Jardine could observe none of the telltale signs of imminent collapse. There were no great captures of either bodies of troops or masses of equipment, which meant the enemy before them was not beaten but holding its own.

True, the Italians had been forced to give ground, but the opinion that they had not yet lost the battle was far from welcome: native flexibility would triumph over European efficiency and they held to that opinion; if anything it was reinforced, when, with the Ethiopian Christmas Offensive effectively halted, the enemy forces sought to renew their advance south. The fighting became punch and counterpunch, like two inflexible boxers, with only local gains on both sides, quickly reversed.

Try as they did, the Italians could not break through the masses of fanatical warriors; indeed, out from their trenches and sandbagged lines they were losing a higher proportion of their men and equipment compared to
when they were purely on the defensive, adding to their woes, which was amazing given the differing levels of not just equipment but command capability both sides possessed.

The Ethiopians operated from rough-and-ready headquarters and the comparison with what Jardine had seen when captured was unavoidable: runners were used instead of field telephones and radio antennae, there were few vehicles and no smart guards, headquarters company or Pioneer Corps, just a mass of warriors squatting around in no sort of discernible order.

Nor did they have field kitchens; later they, and the survivors of a counter-attack now in progress, would be cooking over charcoal that had been carried to this place, not by a wheeled transport arm, but by donkeys or on human shoulders and heads – men, and in some cases women, who responded to an instruction to move this way or that by a series of shouted commands, acting more like a herd than an army.

He and Tyler Alverson were watching the latest foray when he mentioned the raiding problem to the American. The position they occupied, close to the Ethiopian commanders, was on a high elevation, while in front was spread the flat, rocky plateau on which the battle, a diversionary effort against a Fascist Blackshirt Division, was being blunted.

The main activity was taking place further east, the idea of this assault being to draw off artillery and air support from that more telling Italian thrust, which required that lives be sacrificed for that limited objective in a fashion
reminiscent of the old Western Front; that it was not succeeding was evident by the deep droning sound of approaching aircraft.

‘Seems to me they’re reading their own news stories,’ Alverson replied. ‘You should see the shit they are sending out through their official information channels. They’re claiming a Blackshirt division was completely destroyed by a female battalion. According to their news bureau dozens of Italian planes have been brought down, this or that place taken by assault, when, in fact, the Italians pulled out and let them have it.’

‘While the truth is not getting out?’

‘Not by anything approaching an independent voice.’

‘What about the correspondents stuck in Addis?’

‘They have taken up knitting as a protest at being kept away from the front.’ Alverson laughed at the shocked response, then added, with a sarcastic drawl, ‘But they have not, I am told, given up drinking.’

‘You’re at the front.’

‘I am blessed, Cal,’ Alverson acknowledged, nodding towards the clutch of Ethiopian commanders. ‘But getting the truth out is not easy and I am walking a tightrope. Our friends over yonder think the way to sway world opinion in their favour is to out-lie the Italians. Any hints that the truth might serve them better is not well received, and my main aim is to protect my access.’

‘So you’re peddling the lies?’

‘Not all of them, there are ways to report that let the folks reading the exaggerations see something between the lines.’

‘It must be costing a fortune to get your stuff to the Sudan.’

‘Thank the Lord it’s not my dough. But what about you? Still don’t think our friends can win?’

‘Tyler, they are doing a damn sight better than I ever dreamt was possible, but I still think they would do more damage if they let the enemy come to them. They see the loss of ground as some kind of disgrace, the failure of a sacred trust. A good field commander gives ground in order to entice his enemy on to the position on which he wants to fight, he chooses the battleground that suits his forces and tactical abilities.’

‘Which is what they did at the outset.’

‘Precisely! Look what happens when the Italians are out from their prepared positions and into open country. That’s where native numbers really count, and the more mountainous it gets the better. What they are doing now is sacrifice to no purpose, and proportionately, our friends, as you call them, are losing more men. There’s a point where an attack or even contesting the battle area ceases to have any merit, and they are weeks past that.’

It had been a long time since they had discussed the proposition Peter Lanchester had originally outlined to Cal Jardine: that trapping Mussolini in an unwinnable war might bring him and the idea of Fascism triumphant down and alter the face of European politics, heading inexorably for another murderous war.

‘I’m not too impressed with Mussolini’s boys.’

‘Their high command is useless and so are a lot of the field commanders, but some of the line officers are as good
as any in the world. Just don’t blame the boots. Most of them don’t want to be here, if you leave out the Blackshirts, all fired up with their specious ideology. But the ordinary soldiers, give or take some regulars, would rather be at home eating polenta.’

‘You sound sorry for them.’

‘If you’re going to have to fight as a bit of cannon fodder, Tyler, then let it be at least for something you care about.’

The sound of aircraft overhead made them look skywards, not least because there was no response from the anti-aircraft batteries which protected
Ras
Kassa’s base camp; they were silent and that meant the planes were friendly. There was precious little to worry about in any case – a brace of the quick-firing, spider-like 20 mm Oerlikons, coupled with bigger, longer-range 75 mm Schneiders – but it was enough, it seemed, to deter the Italian fliers. The Ethiopians saw this as cowardice; to Jardine it made sense: why risk your skin when there was an abundance of unprotected targets well away from the guns?

The flight of four Potez 25s which passed low overhead, was, Cal Jardine suspected, a high proportion of what was left of the Ethiopian air force. There had only been six of that model to start with. Facing a superior enemy it was thus rarely exposed, but now they had come into action at a time when they had the potential to inflict some real harm, which indicated forward intelligence, an asset which had been sadly lacking thus far in a tentative campaign.

A flight of a dozen Italian Savoia-Marchetti 73
trimotors
,
the ones heard droning earlier, had just begun their bombing run, which of necessity lowered their speed, aiming to hit the attacking Ethiopian infantry, so a biplane fighter which normally could not match the bombers might, by nipping into action when they were already engaged, even up the odds.

Would the SM73s abort their run, given their
lateral-firing
machine guns could not be used when bombing? The Ethiopian planes were making just enough altitude to get above and behind them – sensible, because that also took out of play the forward-firing defences. The greatest problem was a four-aircraft fighter screen overhead, and this meant, in terms of odds, what the biplanes were about was exceedingly risky; in terms of time, it was a severely limited opportunity.

Whoever commanded the Italians was not going to be deterred: he kept them on their original flight path and the first stick of bombs began to emerge from the bays. Within less than a minute from sighting the biplanes, the leading pair of Potez 25s engaged the front SM73, the other pair going after number two in the bombing line, the crunch of ground explosions mixing with the rattle of the Vickers, much muted by being aerial.

‘Fighter screen coming in,’ Alverson said, his field glasses raised high into the sunlit sky.

‘This could be a massacre,’ Jardine grunted.

The Fiat CR30s were dropping fast, the commander of the Italian bombers relying on them to allow him to release his stick; clearly he was prepared to risk damage to deliver. For the attacking biplanes, hitting something vital on a
much larger plane made of plywood was a chancy affair, though from the ground it was possible to see bits of wood flying off the fuselages of the two bombers being attacked. But it could not last: with the Italian fighters coming in fast, the Ethiopian pilots broke off and ran, the Fiats on their tail and closing, with the rear-firing machine gunners seeking to keep them at bay.

‘Got it!’ Jardine cried, for to him the air attack made little sense. The Potez 25s were too lightly armed and slow to have any real hope of downing a bomber. ‘They want to suck them into a pursuit.’

It had to have been planned in advance, for the
anti-aircraft
guns were manned and ready, with their barrels pointed forty-five degrees north. The Fiats, closing, had opened up on four aircraft losing the little height they had to get maximum speed heading for the safety of their own lines.

As soon as they were out of the target area, the
quick-firing
Oerlikons opened up on the lead Italian fighters, firing at a rate of 450 rounds per minute. Three of the pursuit planes immediately spun away and began a fast climb, but one fighter pilot obviously had only a kill as an object, for he flew through the ground fire, which now included machine guns and rifles, intent on destroying one enemy.