Taken in the flank, the mob broke and surged away towards the dark silence of the far slope of the valley, away from the sheets of bright white tracer and the red rows of rifle fire. Leaving their dead and wounded scattered behind them, they spread like ispilled oil across the valley floor.
The silent gunners on the far slope saw them coming, held their fire for a few more confused panic-soured moments, and then, seeing themselves threatened, they opened also. The delay had the effect of allowing the survivors of the first volley to race deeply into the fields of overlapping fire that Castelani had so cleverly planned.
Caught in the open ground, hemmed in by a murderous storm of fire, the forward movement of the mob broke down, and they milled aimlessly, the women shrieking and clutching at their children, the children darting and doubling like a shoal of fish trapped in a tidal pool, some of the warriors kneeling in the open and beginning at last to return fire.
The red flashes of the black powder were long and dull and smoky and ineffectual against men in entrenched positions; they served only to intensify the ferocity of the Italian attack.
Now the surge of uncontrolled, panic-stricken humanity slowed and eventually ceased. The unarmed women who still survived gathered their children and covered them with their robes, crouching down over them as a mother hen does with her chicks, and the men crouched also, firing blindly and wildly up the slopes of the valley at the muzzle flashes that were fading now as the sun rose and the light strengthened.
Twelve machine guns, each firing almost seven hundred rounds a minute, and three hundred and fifty rifles poured a sheet of bullets down into the valley. Minute after minute the firing continued, and slowly the light strengthened, unmercifully exposing the survivors in the valley below.
The mood of the attackers changed. From panicky, nervously strung out green militia, they were transformed.
The almost drunken elation of victorious attackers gripped them, they were laughing triumphantly now as they served the guns. Their eyes bright with the blood lust of the predator, the knowledge that they could kill without retribution made them bold and cruel.
The miserable popping and flashing of ancient muskets in the valley below them was so feeble, so lacking in menace, that not a man amongst them was still afraid. Even Count Aldo Belli was now on his feet, brandishing his pistol and shouting with a high, girlish hysteria.
"Death to the enemy! Fire! Keep firing!" and cautiously he lifted his head another inch above the parapet. "Kill them! Ours is the victory!" The valley floor, as the first rays of sunlight touched it, was covered with thick swathes of the dead and maimed.
They lay scattered singly, piled in clumps like mounds of old clothing in a flea market, thrown haphazardly on the coal pale sandy earth or arranged in neat patterns like fish on the slab.
In the centre of the killing-ground, there was still life movement.
Here and there a figure might leap up and run with robes flapping, and immediately the machine guns would follow it, quick stabbing spouts of dust closing swiftly until they met and held on the running figure, when it would collapse and roll on the sandy earth.
The warriors who still crouched over their ancient rifles, with their dark faces lifted to the slopes, were now providing good practice for the riflemen above them. The Italian officers" voices, high-pitched and excited, called down fire upon them, and swiftly each of these defiants was hit by carefully aimed fire and fell, some of them kicking and twitching.
The firing had lasted almost twenty minutes now, and there were few targets still on offer. The machine guns traversed expectantly, firing short bursts into the heaped carcasses, shattering already mutilated flesh, or tore clouds of dust and flying shale from the rounded lips of the deep water holes, from the cover of which a sporadic fire still popped and crackled.
"My Colonel. "Castelani touched Aldo Belli's arm to gain his attention, and at last he turned wild-eyed and elated to his Major.
"Ha, Castelani, what a victory what a great victory, hey? They will not doubt our valour now."
"Colonel, shall I order the cease fire?" and the Count seemed not to hear him.
"They will know now what kind of soldier I am. This brilliant victory will win for me a place in the halls-2 "Colonel! Colonel! We must cease fire now. This is a slaughter.
Order the cease fire." Aldo Belli stared at him, his face beginning to flush with outrage.
"You crazy fool," he shouted. "The battle must be decisive, crushing!
We will not cease now not until the victory is ours." He was stuttering wildly and his hand shook as he pointed down into the bloody shambles of the valley.
"The enemy have taken cover in the water holes, they must be flushed out and destroyed. Mortars, Castelani, bomb them out." Aldo Belli did not want it to end. It was the most deeply satisfying experience of his life. If this was war, he knew at last why the sages and the poets had invested it with such In glory. This was man's work, and Aldo Belli knew himself born to it.
"Do you question my orders?" he shrieked at Castelani.
"a) your duty, immediately."
"Immediately," Castelani repeated bitterly, and for a moment longer stared stonily into the Count's eyes before he turned away.
The first mortar bomb climbed high into the clear desert dawn, before arcing over and dropping vertically down into the valley. It burst on the lip of the nearest well. It kicked up a brief column of dust and smoke, and the shrapnel whinnied shrilly. The second bomb fell squarely into the deep circular pit, bursting out of sight below ground level.
Mud and smoke gushed upwards, and out of the water hole into the open ground crawled and staggered three scarecrow figures with their tattered and dirty robes fluttering like flags of truce.
Instantly the rifle fire and machine-gun fire burst over them, and the earth around them whipped by the bullets seemed to liquefy into a cascade of flying dust, into which they tumbled and at last lay still.
Aldo Belli let out a hoot of excitement. It was so easy and so deeply satisfying. "The other holes, Castelani!" he screamed. "Clean them out! All of them!" Concentrating their fire on one hole at a time, the mortars ranged in swiftly. Some of the holes were deserted, but at most of them the slaughter was continued. A few survivors of the shimmering bursts of shrapnel staggered out into the open to be cut down swiftly by the waiting machine guns.
The Count was by now so emboldened that he climbed up on the parapet, the better to view the field and watch the mortars fire on the remaining holes, and to direct his machine gunners.
The hole nearest the wadis and broken ground at the head of the valley was the next target, and the first bomb was over, crumping in a tall jump of dust and pale flame.
Before the next bomb fell, a woman jumped up over the lip and tried to reach the mouth of the wadi. Behind her she dragged a child of two or three years, a naked toddler with fat little bow legs and a belly like a brown ball. He could not keep up with the mother and lost his footing, so she dragged him wailing along the sandy earth. Straddling her hip and clutched with desperate strength to her breast was another younger infant, also naked, also wailing and kicking frantically.
For several seconds, the running, heavily burdened woman drew no fire, and then a burst from a machine gun fell about her and a bullet struck and severed the arm by which she held the child. She staggered in a circle, shrieking dementedly and waving the stump of the arm like the spout of a garden hose. The next burst smashed through her chest, the same bullets shattering the body of the infant on her hip, and she fell and rolled like a rabbit hit by a shotgun.