Harkaway's Sixth Column

by John Harris

  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 th
emselves 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.