‘Who dat?’
‘It’s a very old children’s story, but in this case it’s Corrie Littleton.’
‘You have a real down on her, Cal, don’t you?’
‘I think you’ve got that the wrong way round.’
‘She’s a feisty dame, for sure, but she’s not a bad person, though I will grant that her mother is a pain in the ass.’
‘So where is she?’
‘Right now she’s helping to set up a field hospital with a Spanish doctor and driving Ras Kassa mad asking for supplies and equipment. That French pilot guy is doing his best to get stuff into her.’
‘I bet he is.’
‘Jealous?’
‘In your dreams.’
‘If you two cats would stop spitting at each other you might find you could get along.’
‘That is what I need to do, Tyler — we move out at dawn, so get your head down.’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘Tyler, I know you’ve been around some, and in a few hairy places, but this is going to be real bloody. We’re attacking prepared positions, sandbagged lines, trenches with machine guns, artillery that is already ranged — and that leaves out planes which will be strafing us all day long.’
‘Cal, you’re not suggesting I should stay at home?’
‘No, just be careful. I just had a vision of you ending up in Corrie Littleton’s field hospital, that’s all.’
‘Hell, I’ll be right alongside Ras Kassa.’
‘Tyler, that old bastard is set on sticking a spear into an Italian arse and twisting it. Being next to him once his blood is up could be the most dangerous place on the battlefield, bar none.’
‘Boy, that would be some photograph, Cal.’
All along the Ethiopian front lines, in a chilled pre-dawn, a mass of movement was under way, close to two hundred thousand men pressing forward like pale white ghosts in three separate armies. Any observer looking into their eyes would not have seen fear, for it was not present. They might have seen excitement and anticipation; they would most certainly have heard the soft sound of prayers from deeply religious warriors. As the first hint of light touched the eastern sky the Italian artillery opened fire, dropping shells in front of their lines, for they did indeed know what was coming. Soon there would be bombers and fighters overhead.
With Vince Castellano at his side, Cal Jardine had moved out in the hours of darkness. They were just behind Yoannis and Aswaf, the leaders of the men they had trained, moving towards their chosen objective, the Dembeguina Pass: a narrow, heavily defended defile that was a critical part of the Italian defences.
The aim was to get behind the Italians holding the head of the pass and, acting in conjunction with the local assault, drive a wedge into the Italian positions which, exploited, could threaten the whole security of their line, which would draw in more troops to hold it and thus create weaknesses elsewhere that the rest of the army could take advantage of.
Jardine was troubled: Pietro Badoglio had tempted the army of Haile Selassie into the kind of battle that should have been fought in reverse. He knew from bitter experience the cost of attacking prepared positions, yet he could also feel that excitement, like his blood was coursing through his veins at a faster pace, which half-pleased him and half-appalled him: was it right that a man, any man, should seemingly so love war that he actively sought it out?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Tyler Alverson was now in possession of a powerful pair of binoculars so he could see when Ras Kassa Meghoum’s forward elements hit the Italian line at first light. They did so with such force and in such numbers that the enemy were forced away from their natural line of retreat north-east, falling back instead into the confines of the Dembeguina Pass, through which they could rejoin their compatriots. What Alverson could not see was that which lay behind them, the two thousand men led by the two fitawraris Yoannis and Aswaf, sent by the ras on the suggestion of Cal Jardine to cover just such an eventuality.
The Italian commander, Major Angelo Critini, was a bit of a ruffian but a good soldier, if not a popular one amongst his fellow officers, given he was inclined to remind them that their duties extended beyond the needs of their personal comforts and that, if they failed to care for their men, their men could hardly be expected to care for them. This was not news most of his peers wished to hear, nor did his superiors care much for such reminders, moving him to the position of senior major in a battalion of Eritrean askaris, seen as something of a push aside in the snobbish army of which he was a member.
Critini had two reasons to be happy: first, his colonel, a cavalryman, was absent having his crippling haemorrhoids seen to in Italy. Secondly, he was a fighter, and he knew that when it came to combat, the askaris would be in the forefront: there were going to be casualties and the high command would rather sacrifice native troops than the boys from home.
A professional soldier, Critini had fought his first serious engagement in the Great War as a newly commissioned lieutenant at the battle of Caporetto, where the Italian army, poorly led and bled white by twelve repeated and futile assaults on the Austrian lines of the River Isonzo, was nearly destroyed by an unexpected combination of battle-hardened Germans released from the Eastern Front by the collapse of imperial Russia, backing up the more feeble Austrians, an attack that had led to a confused, bloody and costly retreat.
He was in retreat now from his prepared positions before a set of hills, but, even if the sheer numbers of those who had begun the assault had forced him away from his natural route of disengagement, he was not worried. Seeing the mass of warriors he faced, who seemed indifferent to risk, and to avoid being outflanked before he could retire into the pass, he sent forward the six Carro Veloce L3/35 tanks he commanded to slow the enemy advance with machine-gun fire and retired behind their twin 8 mm guns in good order.
It was only then he discovered he had been out-thought: lying on the hillsides of the pass through which he intended to retire were elements of the enemy he had no idea were present; they had got behind him during the night by crossing the high hills on foot, and they now sent down a withering fire from two machine guns onto his battalion, that followed by sporadic but steady rifle fire.
Unbeknown to Critini, they did not all have rifles, for if they had, assailed by two thousand of them, he would have suffered an immediate and near-total massacre. He was spared that because he faced a force armed mostly with spears and bows, something he realised as arrows began to drop in amongst his forward elements and the dozens of mules carrying his supplies.
The commands he then issued were crisp and orderly, something Cal Jardine watched with appreciation through his field glasses. He did not know the man in charge, but his actions told anyone with a military brain the fellow knew his job. He did not panic, nor did he allow his troops to. Critini, himself on horseback, immediately ordered his men and animals forward into what seemed like a maelstrom, accepting the casualties he suffered in both areas as unavoidable to get them to a point where, with decent cover, the terrain favoured him.
Dismounted, he then calmly formed them up in a hedgehog defence, which would be hard to break through, and, stripping his remaining mules, set up his own machine guns to rake the hillsides. He also managed to salvage a number of mortars. Jardine immediately requested Yoannis’s machine guns to cease fire in order to conserve their very limited ammunition, which produced a pout on the face of the nearest fitawrari: he disliked having an advisor along and he was not in the least affected by a mortar round landing nearby, which severely wounded some of his men.
Drawing a heavy sword, Yoannis shouted, through Shalwe, the interpreter, ‘We attack now and kill them all.’