He was beginning to be contemptuous of his enemies; like most of his fellow leaders, and not excepting the emperor himself, the success of their offensive had gone to his head: all they could see was victory while Cal Jardine could observe none of the telltale signs of imminent collapse. There were no great captures of either bodies of troops or masses of equipment, which meant the enemy before them was not beaten but holding its own.
True, the Italians had been forced to give ground, but the opinion that they had not yet lost the battle was far from welcome: native flexibility would triumph over European efficiency and they held to that opinion; if anything it was reinforced, when, with the Ethiopian Christmas Offensive effectively halted, the enemy forces sought to renew their advance south. The fighting became punch and counterpunch, like two inflexible boxers, with only local gains on both sides, quickly reversed.
Try as they did, the Italians could not break through the masses of fanatical warriors; indeed, out from their trenches and sandbagged lines they were losing a higher proportion of their men and equipment compared to when they were purely on the defensive, adding to their woes, which was amazing given the differing levels of not just equipment but command capability both sides possessed.
The Ethiopians operated from rough-and-ready headquarters and the comparison with what Jardine had seen when captured was unavoidable: runners were used instead of field telephones and radio antennae, there were few vehicles and no smart guards, headquarters company or Pioneer Corps, just a mass of warriors squatting around in no sort of discernible order.
Nor did they have field kitchens; later they, and the survivors of a counter-attack now in progress, would be cooking over charcoal that had been carried to this place, not by a wheeled transport arm, but by donkeys or on human shoulders and heads — men, and in some cases women, who responded to an instruction to move this way or that by a series of shouted commands, acting more like a herd than an army.
He and Tyler Alverson were watching the latest foray when he mentioned the raiding problem to the American. The position they occupied, close to the Ethiopian commanders, was on a high elevation, while in front was spread the flat, rocky plateau on which the battle, a diversionary effort against a Fascist Blackshirt Division, was being blunted.
The main activity was taking place further east, the idea of this assault being to draw off artillery and air support from that more telling Italian thrust, which required that lives be sacrificed for that limited objective in a fashion reminiscent of the old Western Front; that it was not succeeding was evident by the deep droning sound of approaching aircraft.
‘Seems to me they’re reading their own news stories,’ Alverson replied. ‘You should see the shit they are sending out through their official information channels. They’re claiming a Blackshirt division was completely destroyed by a female battalion. According to their news bureau dozens of Italian planes have been brought down, this or that place taken by assault, when, in fact, the Italians pulled out and let them have it.’
‘While the truth is not getting out?’
‘Not by anything approaching an independent voice.’
‘What about the correspondents stuck in Addis?’
‘They have taken up knitting as a protest at being kept away from the front.’ Alverson laughed at the shocked response, then added, with a sarcastic drawl, ‘But they have not, I am told, given up drinking.’
‘You’re at the front.’
‘I am blessed, Cal,’ Alverson acknowledged, nodding towards the clutch of Ethiopian commanders. ‘But getting the truth out is not easy and I am walking a tightrope. Our friends over yonder think the way to sway world opinion in their favour is to out-lie the Italians. Any hints that the truth might serve them better is not well received, and my main aim is to protect my access.’
‘So you’re peddling the lies?’
‘Not all of them, there are ways to report that let the folks reading the exaggerations see something between the lines.’
‘It must be costing a fortune to get your stuff to the Sudan.’
‘Thank the Lord it’s not my dough. But what about you? Still don’t think our friends can win?’
‘Tyler, they are doing a damn sight better than I ever dreamt was possible, but I still think they would do more damage if they let the enemy come to them. They see the loss of ground as some kind of disgrace, the failure of a sacred trust. A good field commander gives ground in order to entice his enemy on to the position on which he wants to fight, he chooses the battleground that suits his forces and tactical abilities.’
‘Which is what they did at the outset.’
‘Precisely! Look what happens when the Italians are out from their prepared positions and into open country. That’s where native numbers really count, and the more mountainous it gets the better. What they are doing now is sacrifice to no purpose, and proportionately, our friends, as you call them, are losing more men. There’s a point where an attack or even contesting the battle area ceases to have any merit, and they are weeks past that.’
It had been a long time since they had discussed the proposition Peter Lanchester had originally outlined to Cal Jardine: that trapping Mussolini in an unwinnable war might bring him and the idea of Fascism triumphant down and alter the face of European politics, heading inexorably for another murderous war.
‘I’m not too impressed with Mussolini’s boys.’
‘Their high command is useless and so are a lot of the field commanders, but some of the line officers are as good as any in the world. Just don’t blame the boots. Most of them don’t want to be here, if you leave out the Blackshirts, all fired up with their specious ideology. But the ordinary soldiers, give or take some regulars, would rather be at home eating polenta.’
‘You sound sorry for them.’
‘If you’re going to have to fight as a bit of cannon fodder, Tyler, then let it be at least for something you care about.’
The sound of aircraft overhead made them look skywards, not least because there was no response from the anti-aircraft batteries which protected Ras Kassa’s base camp; they were silent and that meant the planes were friendly. There was precious little to worry about in any case — a brace of the quick-firing, spider-like 20 mm Oerlikons, coupled with bigger, longer-range 75 mm Schneiders — but it was enough, it seemed, to deter the Italian fliers. The Ethiopians saw this as cowardice; to Jardine it made sense: why risk your skin when there was an abundance of unprotected targets well away from the guns?
The flight of four Potez 25s which passed low overhead, was, Cal Jardine suspected, a high proportion of what was left of the Ethiopian air force. There had only been six of that model to start with. Facing a superior enemy it was thus rarely exposed, but now they had come into action at a time when they had the potential to inflict some real harm, which indicated forward intelligence, an asset which had been sadly lacking thus far in a tentative campaign.
A flight of a dozen Italian Savoia-Marchetti 73 trimotors, the ones heard droning earlier, had just begun their bombing run, which of necessity lowered their speed, aiming to hit the attacking Ethiopian infantry, so a biplane fighter which normally could not match the bombers might, by nipping into action when they were already engaged, even up the odds.
Would the SM73s abort their run, given their lateral-firing machine guns could not be used when bombing? The Ethiopian planes were making just enough altitude to get above and behind them — sensible, because that also took out of play the forward-firing defences. The greatest problem was a four-aircraft fighter screen overhead, and this meant, in terms of odds, what the biplanes were about was exceedingly risky; in terms of time, it was a severely limited opportunity.