*
After a brief stop in Port Said, where they had their first glimpse of the sort of people they were going to fight—although the fellaheen looked peaceful enough—the troop-ship proceeded down the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea. It was intensely hot, especially after the chill of the Mediterranean, and Murdoch began to worry for the horses. But after only a few more days they dropped anchor off the seaport of Berbera, which was the capital of British Somaliland.
There was not sufficient water for the Columbo to get alongside, and there were in any event no port facilities, so the squadron had to be transferred ashore by lighter. All the rest of the regiment was paraded on deck to bid them farewell, and Colonel Walters shook hands with Murdoch and the two lieutenants, as well as Sergeant-Major Hanley and Squadron Sergeant Yeald. ‘Just lock up that madman as quickly as you can,’ he told them.
‘We’ll expect you in Peshawar within three months,’ Hobbs remarked.
‘And don’t forget to have fun with those Somali bints.’ Johnnie Morton winked. ‘I’ll want a blow-by-blow description. Unless you pick the wrong one, and join us singing falsetto, of course.’
Murdoch grinned at the quips as his men were loaded into the waiting dhows, which were manned by Somalis whom he presumed could well be followers of this Mad Mullah. But it was difficult to associate these tall, dignified men with murder and mayhem.
He sent Knox ashore with the first load to supervise the landing and remained until the last man and horse had been lowered, then took his own place. The regimental band, arrayed on the foredeck of the troopship, struck up the march from Aida as the lateen sail was hoisted and the dhow pulled away from the liner’s side. Murdoch saluted Colonel Walters, feeling quite odd to be leaving the umbrella of the regiment so completely—in South Africa, when sent on patrol, one always knew one would be back in a few days. Now the entire squadron of two hundred and twelve officers and men—for he had with him farriers and medical orderlies, as well as his troopers—was his responsibility alone.
A large crowd gathered to watch the dragoons land was pointing at their weapons and their horses, especially interested in the dismantled machine gun. Waiting for Murdoch was an infantry officer, Captain Halstead of the Lancashires.
‘Good to see you, Mackinder,’ he said. ‘By Jove, you’ve a fine-looking body of men there. Now we should be able to show those devils a thing or two. Our trouble is that we’ve been kept too much on the defensive. Now, old man, the brigadier is waiting to review you.’
He mounted his horse and rode on ahead to inform the brigadier that the cavalry were on their way, and Murdoch formed up his squadron, Knox and Ramage at the head of their troops, himself, with Sergeant-Major Hanley, Sergeant Yeald, Corporal Reynolds and Bugler Andrews—a lad of seventeen—at the front of the entire squadron. Andrews sounded the command, and they walked their horses through the town in a column of twos, the street lined with people of every colour, sex and description, amongst them several obvious Europeans, while the cavalcade was followed and surrounded by cheering Arab and Somali children, as well as innumerable half-starved dogs.
Murdoch felt the sun scorching down on his pith helmet and seeming to burn its way right through his khaki tunic, and although he kept his gaze rigidly to the fore, he could not help noticing with growing concern the decrepit houses, so oddly juxtaposed with several ornate mosques, the veiled women, the bearded, grinning men. He inhaled the many odours, few of them pleasant, as he watched the dogs and chickens, goats and jackasses scattering before the approaching horses—he had not campaigned in so totally alien a society before; in South Africa, probably because they had been sent there to fight the Boers rather than the Africans themselves, one had at least had the comforting feeling that one’s enemies were likely to be more Christian than oneselves. Even if the report had not already made up his mind for him, he was coming to the conclusion that he did not like Somaliland.
*
‘Things improve in the wet season, which starts in March,’ the brigadier told him over whiskies in the mess that evening. ‘Or at least you can say they change. A lot of the natives migrate to the Ogo Highlands during the hot season, now, and return when it cools off. Mind you, the monsoon does not always actually get here. When it doesn’t, it gets hotter than ever, there’s a drought, and all manner of unpleasantnesses, cattle dying, and God knows what else.’
‘Wouldn’t that make things easier for us, sir?’ Murdoch asked. ‘Wipe out the rebels’ livestock?’
‘Quite the contrary,’ said Colonel Killick of the King’s African Rifles. ‘All the Mullah does then is increase his terrorism of the local sheikhs, poor chaps.’
‘Mohammad Ibn Abd Allah has been up in those mountains’—Brigadier-General Hardie pointed at the serrated peaks, blue in the distance, but in the clear, still air perfectly visible from the mess verandah—‘for eight years, would you believe it. I would give ten years’ pay to nab the beggar.’
‘What exactly are our measures against him, sir?’ Murdoch asked.
‘In the main, retaliatory expeditions. But of course we can never bring him to battle.’
‘If he raids the outlying villages, cannot we organise a defence amongst the sheikhs?’
‘Ah, now, there’s the rub. At least half of them are in league with him, think they are fighting a holy war to drive out the infidel. Trouble is, we don’t know which half. They pay the Mullah tribute, you see; or so they say. When a village is burned, it is always a result of failure to pay this blackmail. When a village is never touched, the sheikh claims it is because he makes his payments regularly. We may think he is lying, but there is no way we can prove it.’ He held up his finger as Murdoch would have spoken. ‘Don’t tell me: Lord Kitchener would soon have settled that. The misfortune is, Mackinder, that Lord Kitchener’s methods in South Africa, successful as they were, have had their repercussions. If I were to start rounding up Somali women and children and placing them in camps until their menfolk surrendered, I suspect I would be on the next boat home with nothing accomplished. Nor have blockhouses proved very effective; I simply do not have the men. I erected some up in the foothills, but when one was overrun and the garrison massacred long before a relief expedition could get there, I decided to pull them out. That’s another thing we lack, you see—railroads, or roads of any sort, for quick communication. We must hope that the Mullah makes a mistake and gives us the opportunity to force him to stand and fight. I believe it’s possible; he seems to be growing more confident, and arrogant, with every raid. And of course, now that you and your cavalry are here...’ He allowed his gaze to drift to the crimson ribbon on Murdoch’s breast; it had now been joined by the orange and blue of the Queen’s South Africa Medal. ‘Yes, what I propose is this: you will maintain your men in camp for a couple of weeks, acclimatising them to conditions here and perhaps doing some training in desert warfare—for it is just a bleeding desert out there—and then we will mount a serious reconnaissance into the Togdheer and see if we can smoke him out.’
‘Do we have any cooperation from the Italians, sir?’
‘By Jove,’ remarked Colonel Norton of the Lancashires, ‘do we just. They’re as keen as mustard, bless their hearts. But not worth a tinker’s damn as fighting soldiers. We’re better off on our own.’
*
Getting down to serious training outside Berbera was difficult, because the arrival of the squadron, commanded by three unattached and handsome young men, stirred the social life of the small British community into violent action. Murdoch and the two lieutenants were bombarded with invitations to supper parties and luncheon parties and garden parties and beach parties.
Murdoch would have declined most of these, but was dissuaded by Halstead. ‘Really must try to accept them, old man,’ his brother captain pointed out; he had apparently been told to mother the new arrivals. ‘Must keep the memsahibs happy, eh? Just don’t get hooked on any of the daughters. When you want a woman, just give me a wink.’
‘Will I want a woman?’ Murdoch asked.
‘Well...everyone does. And the local bints can be absolute charmers.’
‘When they’re not chopping bits off their prisoners, you mean.’
‘Oh, well, those are the women in the mountains. Mind you,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I’m bloody sure quite a few of them down here are the same breed. But they know their places in Berbera, and besides...no harm in getting to know the enemy, eh?’
Murdoch surmised, correctly, as it turned out, that he was about to be confronted with a whole new set of venereal problems. But in fact these were only aspects of the health question. Even if there was little malaria in the dry season—that was apparently something to look forward to when the monsoon arrived—there were other tropical ailments enough. These varied from chiggers—little insects which would burrow into the men’s toes and lay their eggs, which, if not completely removed, would fester and cause debilitating sores—to plain heatstroke, which, despite such required kit as spine pads and cloth covers for their necks, constantly had ten per cent of his strength on sick parade.
The question of coping with the heat was compounded by the very necessary training in desert campaigning, an aspect of soldiering which neither he nor his men had ever encountered before. In South Africa it had been considered a fact of life that an army, or a division, or a brigade, or a regiment, or even a squadron, moved in close proximity to its supply line, be it by road or train, or, in the case of Lord Roberts’ famous turning movement, wagon train, and that it was suicidal to cut loose from that essential source of food and water. In Somalia this was apparently necessary for several days at a time, and it was therefore important for every man to learn how to survive under these conditions.
According to the veterans from the Lancashires, this was much easier than might have been supposed. There was, for instance—so they claimed—always water to be found in even the desert, if one knew where to look and was prepared to dig; the old rivers were sometimes as deep as ten feet below the surface, but they were usually there, wherever any positive vegetation showed itself. Murdoch equipped a section in each troop with spades.
Then it was necessary to relearn the technique of the heliograph, as telephone wires were impractical over the huge distances they would be covering; and to make the acquaintance of Hassan, the somewhat supercilious Somali, tall, dignified, oval faced, who was to be the squadron guide and indeed mentor, once they left civilisation behind.
It was not all work, however. Murdoch endeavoured to keep his men’s minds off women as much as possible by organising cricket matches for their leisure hours. He himself was introduced by Halstead into the pleasures of hunting, for there were lions in the vicinity, driven closer to the town by the scarcity of game in the dry season. One evening they actually bagged two, although Murdoch felt like a murderer when he gazed at the proud, tranquil features, the enormous power and agility he had so carelessly destroyed.
Halstead also felt that Murdoch should be entertained in other ways, despite his patent lack of interest. Only a week after the squadron’s arrival, Murdoch returned home from a supper party one evening, with Tom Knox, to find Reynolds in a very agitated state. ‘Captain Halstead was here, sir,’ he explained, ‘and...well, there’s this person to see you.’
Murdoch frowned at him. ‘Person?’ He opened the door of his quarters—this was a permanent encampment with wooden barracks and offices—and, followed by Knox, looked around his small lounge, nostrils twitching as he inhaled an unfamiliar and not unattractive scent. Then he opened the bedroom door, and by the light of the lantern hanging from one of the joists above his head—for the sake of coolness there was no ceiling—saw that his bed was occupied by a woman.
‘Good Lord,’ Knox commented. ‘Shall I go?’
Murdoch opened his mouth and then closed it again, because she was a very attractive woman indeed, really hardly more than a girl, he supposed, with light brown skin, hair black as midnight, matching her eyes, nose somewhat large and definitely hooked, but sitting well over the thin mouth and the pointed chin. And beneath, as she threw back the covers and revealed herself, entrancingly firm breasts and seductive thighs, with short, but muscularly slender legs.
‘You like?’ she asked, looking from one officer to the other.
Murdoch took off the forage cap that was regulation wear with his undress blues, and scratched his head. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he inquired.
‘I am Mulein,’ she replied. ‘I speak English, all good.’
‘And who sent you here?’
‘Jimmy Halstead.’ She stretched, then nestled into the bedclothes, spreading her legs and bringing them back together, slowly and seductively. ‘You come feel Mulein?’ she invited.
She was certainly a temptation. But even if he had not been quite off the female sex, he had come here to fight these people, not sleep with them. ‘No,’ he said.
Mulein frowned and sat up. ‘You no like?’
‘I am sure you are absolutely charming,’ Murdoch told her. ‘But I am very tired. Corporal Reynolds?’
‘Sir!’ Reynolds had been hovering outside the door. ‘Would you be good enough to escort this young lady from the premises? I suppose she should be escorted from the camp. It would help, Mulein, if you were to put some clothes on.’
She glared at him, her nostrils flaring, her lips drawing back from her fine white teeth almost in a snarl. Then she got out of bed and draped her hair around her shoulders, in an instant totally concealing herself; like most Somali women, as opposed to the Arabs, she did not wear the yashmak, although presumably she was a Muslim.
‘Thank you,’ Murdoch said. Now go with the corporal.’
‘You are sheet,’ Mulein remarked.
‘Take her away, Reynolds.’
Reynolds approached her cautiously. ‘No scratching now,’ he warned.
‘When I scratch you, white man, you die,’ Mulein hissed at him. She stared at Tom Knox for a moment, then went through the doorway.
‘Out of the camp, George,’ Murdoch reminded Reynolds.
He undressed and got into the bed himself. But sleep was difficult. The sheet was warm from her body, and the pillows smelt of her perfume.
*
Next morning he intended to remonstrate with Halstead, but to his surprise, Halstead remonstrated first.
‘Really, old man, Mulein is quite a catch. I got her for you specially. She’s no common lint, you know. Her father is a sheikh, out in the desert, close to the mountains.’
‘And the daughter of a sheikh is a whore?’
‘Well...I gather she fell out with the old man when he wanted her to marry someone she didn’t like, and she refused. She’s not cheap, you know. She cost me one pound three shillings for the night.’
Murdoch felt in his pocket and handed over the money.
‘Well, thanks,’ Halstead acknowledged. ‘But the fact is, I’m afraid you will have upset her. She’s, well...she’s very useful. She goes out into the desert, into the mountains, in fact, quite regularly, and brings back some quite useful information.’
‘You mean she’s a spy.’
‘You could say so.’
‘For us, or, for the Mullah?’
‘Why, for us, of course.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right.’
‘I say, old man, I have been here somewhat longer than you. If she is annoyed, well, there could go a useful contact. And she’s certain to ruin your reputation in the bazaars,’ he added.
‘So I’ll keep out of the bazaars,’ Murdoch agreed. ‘But Halstead, if you don’t mind, old man, I’ll select my own bedmates from now on.’
*
Ten days later the brigadier decided to make his move; reports had come in from the native police of several villages being raided and looted only fifty miles in the interior, and he wanted to carry out his campaign and be back in Berbera before the rains started in earnest—it was already the first week of February.
He assembled al
l his officers in the mess for a chat. ‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘we know that the Mullah is in the field, and at last reports not far away. Of course we also know that he moves quickly and may have withdrawn some distance, and we also know, those of us who have been here for some time, that it is nearly impossible to bring him to battle, because of his superior mobility. But I think. we may at last have a factor which will enable us to force the issue. I refer of course to the arrival of the Royal Western Dragoons.’ He paused to give Murdoch an encouraging smile.
‘Now, gentlemen, the format will be the same as last autumn. We are turning out in response to attacks upon friendly villages. It is important that we behave in our usual manner, so as not to arouse the Mullah’s suspicions. We will therefore pick up the trail wherever it can be found, and follow it. Odds are one to a hundred it will lead to Sheikh Rahman’s village, as it always does, and that Sheikh Rahman will tell us he has not been attacked because he always pays his tribute regularly.’
‘Sheikh Rahman is Mulein’s father,’ Halstead whispered to Murdoch. ‘A right bastard.’
‘I’d give a month’s pay to be able to prove he was working for the Mullah,’ Brigadier-General Hardie went on. ‘But... we shall see. Now, gentlemen, once we have picked up the trail, the dragoons will push on ahead of the main body. This will seem a natural enough move to the enemy. I think you could let yourself get up to twenty-four hours ahead of us, Captain Mackinder. No further, and you must always have in mind a suitable defensive position, with water, where you can make a stand. You will be, in effect, the bait of a trap.
‘You should be able to travel fast enough to keep up with the Mullah’s force. My hope, and my belief, is that when he discovers he cannot throw you off his trail or leave you far behind, as he invariably does with foot soldiers, he will turn back and seek to annihilate you. You will then, keeping in constant heliographic communication with the brigade, select a suitable defensive position and hold it until we arrive. I realise that the Mullah will have the option of breaking off the engagement as he becomes aware of our approach, but if we can get within striking distance of him we may be able to accomplish something. And of course, the more you can involve him in attacking you, the more difficult it will become for him to disengage. I know that I am asking a great deal of your men, captain. Are they up to it?’
The Regiment Page 20