The open yard seemed to stretch to eternity as Vicky ran on ahead of the Gallas. The ground was slushy, so that she sank to the ankles with each step, and the clinging red mud sucked one of the shoes off her foot. So she ran on lopsidedly her feet sliding and her knees turning weak under her.
Sara raced on lightly ahead, leaping the steel railway track, and her feet flying lightly over the muddy ground.
The edge of the forest was fifty feet away.
Vicky felt a foot catch as she tried to jump the tracks and she went down sprawling in the mud. She dragged herself to her knees. On the edge of the forest Sara looked back, hesitating, her eyes huge and glistening white in her smooth dark face.
"Run," screamed Vicky. "Run. Tell Jake," and the girl was gone into the dark forest, with only a flicker of her passing like a forest doe.
The butt of a rifle struck Vicky in the side, below the ribs, and she went down with an explosive grunt of pain into the cold red mud.
Then there were hands tearing at her clothing, and she tried to fight, but she was blinded by the clinging wet tresses of her hair, and crippled with the pain of the blow. They hoisted her to her feet, and suddenly a new authoritative voice cracked like a whiplash, and the hands released her.
She lifted her head, hunched up over her bruised belly and side.
Through eyes blurred with tears and mud, she recognized the scarred face of the Galla Captain. He still wore the blue sham ma sodden now with rain, and the scar twisted his grin, making it seem even more cruel and vicious.
The front edge of the trench had been reinforced with sandbags and screened with brush, and through the square observation aperture the view down the gorge was uninterrupted.
Gareth propped one shoulder against the sandbags and peered down into the gathering gloom. Jake Barton squatted on the firing step beside him and studied the Englishman's face. Gareth Swales's usually immaculate turnout was now red with dried mud, and stained with sweat, rainwater and filth.
A thick golden stubble of beard covered his jaw like the pelt of an otter, and his mustache was ragged and untrimmed. There had been no opportunity to change clothing or bathe in the last week. There were new lines etched deeply into the corners of his mouth, his forehead, and around his eyes, lines of pain and worry, but when he glanced up and caught Jake's scrutiny, he grinned and lifted an eyebrow, and the old devilish gleam was in his eyes. He was about to speak when from below them another shell came howling up through the deep shades of the gorge, and both of them ducked instinctively as it burst in close, but neither of them remarked. There had been hundreds of bursts that close in the last days.
"It's breaking for certain," Gareth observed instead, and they both looked up at the strip of sky that showed between the mountains.
"Yes," Jake agreed. "But it's too late. It will be dark in twenty minutes." It would be too late for the bombers, even if the cloud lifted completely. From bitter experience they knew how long it took for the aircraft to reach them from the airfield at Chaldi.
"It will clear again tomorrow Gareth answered.
"Tomorrow is another day," Jake said, but his mind dwelt on the big black machines. The Italian artillery fired smoke markers on to their trenches just as soon as they heard the drone of approaching engines in the open cloudless sky. The Capronis came in very low, their wing-tips seeming to scrape the rocky walls on each side of the gorge. The beat of their engines rose to an unbearable, ear-shattering roar, and they were so close that they could make out the features of the helmeted heads of the airmen in the round glass cockpits.
Then, as they flashed overhead, the black objects detached from under their fuselage. The 100, kilo bombs dropped straight, their flight controlled by the fins, and when they struck, the explosion shocked the mind and numbed the body. In comparison the burst of an artillery shell was a squib.
The canisters of nitrogen mustard were not aerodynamically stable, and they tumbled end over end and burst against the rocky slopes in a splash of yellow, jellylike liquid that sprayed for hundreds of feet in all directions.
Each time the bombers had come one after the other, endlessly hour after hour, they left the defence so broken that the wave of infantry that followed them could not be repelled. Each time they had been driven out of their trenches, to toil back, upwards to the next line of defence.
This was the last line, two miles behind them stood the granite portals that headed the gorge, and beyond them, the town of Sardi and the open way to the Dessie road.
"Why don't you try and get a little sleep, "Jake suggested, and involuntarily glanced down at Gareth's arm. It was swathed in strips of torn shirt, and suspended in a makeshift sling from around his neck.
The discharge of lymph and pus and the coating of engine grease had soaked through the crude bandage. It was an ugly sight covered, but Jake remembered what it looked like without the bandage. The nitrogen mustard had flayed it from shoulder to wrist, as though it had been plunged into a pot of boiling water and Jake wondered how much good the coating of greene was doing it. There was no other treatment, however, and at least it kept the air from the terrible injury.
"I'll wait until dark," Gareth murmured, and with his good hand lifted the binoculars to his eyes. "I've got a funny feeling. It's too quiet down there." They were silent again, the silence of extreme exhaustion.
"It's too quiet, said Gareth again, and winced as he moved the arm.
"They haven't got time to sit around like this. They've got to keep pushing pushing." And then, irrelevantly, "God, I'd give one testicle for a cheroot. A Romeo y Juliette-" He broke off abruptly, and then both of them straightened up.
"Do you hear what I think I hear?" asked Gareth.
"I think I do."
"it had to come, of course, said Gareth. "I'm only surprised it took this long. But it's a long, hard ride from Asmara to here. So that's what they were waiting for." The sound was unmistakable in the brooding silence of the gorge, tunnelled up to them by the rock walls. It was faint still, but there was no doubting the clanking clatter, and the shrill squeak of turning steel tracks. Each second it grew nearer, and now they could hear the soft growl of the engines.
"That has got to be the most unholy sound in the world," said Jake.
"Tanks," said Gareth. "Bloody tanks."
"They won't get here before dark," Jake guessed. And they won't risk a night attack."
No Gareth agreed. "They'll come at dawn."
"Tanks and Capronis instead of ham and eggs?" Gareth shrugged wearily.
"That's about the size of it, old son." Colonel Count Aldo Belli was not at all certain of the wisdom of his actions, and he thought that Gino was justified in looking up at him with those reproachful spaniel's eyes. They should have been still comfortably ensconced behind the formidable de fences of Chaldi Wells.
However, a number of powerful influences had combined to drive him forward once again.
Not the least powerful of these were the daily radio messages from General Badogho's headquarters, urging him to intersect the Dessie road, "before the fish slips through our net'. These messages were daily more harsh and threatening in character, and were immediately passed on with the Count's own embellishments to Major Luigi Castelani who had command of the column struggling up the gorge.
Now at last Castelani had radioed back to the Count the welcome news that he stood at the very head of the gorge, and the next push would carry him into the town of Sardi itself. The Count had decided, after long and deep meditation, that to ride into the enemy stronghold at the moment of its capture would so enhance his reputation as to be worth the small danger involved. Major Castelani had assured him that the enemy was broken and whipped, had suffered enormous casualties and was no longer a coherent fighting force. Those odds were acceptable to the Count.