It was with a wrinkled and shaking hand that the seventy-year-old general, white of hair, weak of eye and bereft of resolve, signed the order that would send his troops across the Mareb river the next morning. Then he went to the new cathedral of Asmara to confess his sins and ask for God’s help, which should be forthcoming in a noble endeavour designed to tame the savage and put an end to heretical barbarism.
Every night round the fires and food, on the way from the coast, Cal Jardine had listened to tales extolling the greatness of Ethiopia: of a two-thousand-year-old empire fluctuating in size but never overcome, of a race of warriors of such numbers and prowess that not even modern weapons could defeat them. The religion that sustained their belief in themselves came from Jerusalem and it was to that city they ascribed the purity of their faith, brought to ancient Aksum by Menelik, the son of the legendary Solomon and Sheba, bearing with him the Ark of the Covenant, the chest which contained the tablets given to Moses by God.
‘So you see, Captain Jardine,’ Ras Kassa Meghoum had intoned, ‘we cannot be beaten, for we have God on our side.’
In response he regaled the ras and his American guests with the tactics necessary to fight a more powerful enemy, not only citing his own experiences in Iraq, but alluding to the campaign fought in Ireland by the late Michael Collins as a prime example of the effect of insurgent tactics. Naturally, the military opinions of Geoffrey Amherst had been well aired but they were wasted on Ras Kassa.
‘Our Lion of Judah will not be in favour of what you have called a war of attrition, Captain Jardine. He will seek to win a great victory like Adowa and every Ethiopian warrior will support him.’
‘Every one, Ras?’
That was not a subject they discussed much; if it came up at all, everyone had adhered to the fiction that Haile Selassie was totally secure on his imperial throne. Jardine threw a rock into that still pool and the ripples of his words soon became evident in the older man’s features.
‘There are those who think themselves better suited to the title he holds than he, that is true, but they are tiny in number. He commands the loyalty of most of the nobility and they will follow where he leads.’
‘And his own vanity?’
‘That is an inflexible word to employ, Captain.’
‘Ras Kassa, I do not know the emperor but I have made some study of the history of your country and you have told me more. Tewodoros killed himself rather than let my fellow countryman, General Napier, take him prisoner. Menelik was advised to avoid battle and went against that advice; in short, his victory at Adowa was close to a fluke. Haile Selassie is heir to those two and many more and I worry he will seek to emulate one or the other. Nations have myths — God knows, the land of my birth has them in spades — and it is not just populations that are goaded by them. Rulers, too, are seduced.’
‘You know this?’ The ras had replied as though it was a fiction.
‘I was told by a man with a very fine mind and a keen eye for history.’
‘Odd — so few Europeans know anything about our history.’
‘But he was right, was he not?’
‘Menelik trusted in God, and God provided, for he was King of Kings and so is Haile Selassie.’
Jardine wondered how much Ras Kassa knew of the intentions of his emperor and the field commanders, suspecting that to be more than he had ever let on, for, when gently questioned by Tyler Alverson, he had shown great skill, once he had imparted what he wanted to tell, in being politely evasive not only about that, but his own future role in the conflict.
This caused Jardine no disquiet: such things were not really of any concern to an outsider, though it had frustrated the American who, with his journalistic eagerness, could not see he would be the last person to be told of any upcoming Ethiopian movements; he was wanted as a mouthpiece for one side, not as a neutral observer.
Ras Kassa was inclined to close any discussion with a statement like, ‘You will see, Captain Jardine, and so will you, Mr Alverson, the Italians will regret what they do as they did forty years ago.’
The news of the invasion reached the caravan when they were a day’s travel from the city of Harar, so high and hard a place to get to they had intended to bypass it. The information was delivered, as had been that of the Ancient Greek victory at Marathon, by a barefoot runner, who, having imparted the information to Ras Kassa, went on his way to tell the warriors of village after village, probably all the way to the eastern border.
Weary and filthy after ten days of travel, the caravan was rushed up steep gradients to the provincial capital, the well-being of the camels of less vital moment than that what they carried should be made available to the defending army. Ras Kassa then commandeered every motor lorry in Harar to get the weapons to the railhead of Dire Dawa.
That was the junction on the Djibouti-Addis Ababa rail line where control of the traffic passed from the French, who had constructed it, to the Ethiopians, who depended on it, so the guns could be quickly freighted to the northern front, where they could be of most use. Given it would take a very powerful man to get them on to the trains and through Addis, Ras Kassa would travel with them.
The whole country had been awaiting the invasion but it had not been totally mobilised to withstand it: the Imperial Ethiopian Army, when fully up to strength, was made up mostly of farmer-warriors. It was these the Italians would have to overcome, and they had been tilling their fields and tending their flocks before the call to arms came.
In essence, once the lorries were loaded and on their way, Cal Jardine’s job was over and he had telegraphed Peter Lanchester in code to tell him so. Delivery had been made and it was time for the Ethiopian leader to depart, an invitation to join him and receive the personal thanks of the Lion of Judah for his efforts declined. He said his farewells outside the palace of the Provincial Governor, where the engine of Ras Kassa’s vehicle was already running.
As well as the load the lorry carried, some of the warriors who had escorted them from the coast were hanging onto the sides, their rifles slung over the shoulders; it was going to be a rough and slow journey but it was very noticeable how much trouble they had taken to wash their shammas: all were brilliantly white again, as they had been when first Jardine clapped eyes on them. As a uniform colour in a modern war it was stupid.
‘Captain Jardine, I cannot thank you enough and neither can my country, and not only for the weapons you have brought. You have turned my personal following into a body of men who can stand comparison with the regular troops of the Imperial Army.’
Reacting to those words involved a degree of dissimulation: the ras was talking rubbish. The men of whom he spoke were enthusiastic, not competent, while he had learnt too few words in their language to turn them into anything else. He had been training them in batches, each morning while the camels were being loaded, though without the opportunity to do much more, like giving them lessons in the most basic tenets of infantry tactics. If all were now comfortable with a modern pattern rifle, there had been no time to move on to the more potent weapons of machine guns and 50 mm mortars.
‘You will leave Ethiopia?’
‘Not yet,’ Cal Jardine said, before adding, with a degree of dissimulation, ‘I have undertaken to help Miss Littleton rescue her mother, whom we hope is in Gondar, but she fears might be in Aksum.’