Read Online Harkaway's Sixth Column by John Harris - Free Book Online

happened the following day and two days later it was over the Kenya border.
    The British forces there, making probes in their armoured cars to worry the victorious but still very nervous Italians, had plenty to keep them occupied, and there wasn’t a great deal of comfort. Enduring the shortages of medical supplies, cigarettes and mail, they had sat in their damp patches of borderland throughout the winter as the rain came down like stair rods, outnumbered, but - as Guidotti was well aware - utterly contemptuous of their enemy, and the information that a triumphal column put up one day had been blown down the next sent the dirty, shabby men guarding the frontier into gales of laughter.
    ‘Split it into three,’ they shouted.
    ‘Brought down a hundred yards of wall.’
    ‘Mussolini’s head almost brained the sentry guarding the flag.’
    The British general in command looked up from his papers at the man who brought the news to his headquarters.
    ‘Who did it, Charlie?’ he asked with a smile.
    Colonel Edward Charlton smiled back. He was a Rhodesian lawyer who had found himself in the army because of his services in the last war and his knowledge of the country, and his chief function was to be dogsbody for the general. With his placid nature and his washtub of a stomach he was not a fighting soldier and didn’t pretend to be.
    ‘That’s one thing we haven’t found out yet, sir,’ he said. ‘I expect we will eventually.’
    ‘What exactly happened?’
    Charlton described as much as he knew, and the general laughed.
    ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s nice to know we’ll have friends when we go back.’
    ‘Will we go back, sir?’ Charlton asked.
    ‘You bet your life we will, Charlie. But this is very much a sideshow - a bow and arrow war compared with the Western Desert. David against Goliath, if you like. All the same -’ the general frowned ‘- I wish we could get just enough elastic to make a sling, and anything that indicates we have support is welcome. Any chance of raising the locals?’
    Charlton shrugged. ‘Doubt it, sir. Our information suggests that they’ve taken to the Italians quite happily.’
    ‘Hm.’ The general frowned. ‘They always were a treacherous lot. They kept us busy for twenty years up to and after the last war. Mad Mullah. Heard of him?’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ Charlton said. ‘I have. I get the impression that the warlike spirit’s dissipated a little since then, though.’
    The general waved a hand. ‘I’m not so sure. Still it’ll be up to you to find out. Do what you can if you get the chance. The more the merrier. We haven’t all that many men.’
     

6
     
    Guidotti was inclined to consider the bombing of the victory column as an attempt by some disaffected Somali still loyal to the British to show his disapproval of the new regime. Since obviously a bomb would have had to be prepared by someone of intelligence from Berbera, however, he contacted Captain Scaroni, of the navy, in command there, and got him to set up a search. But, since the Somali intelligentsia had left almost to a man with the British in August, all that remained were the shopkeepers and traders who were perfectly happy under Italian rule, just as they would have been under any rule so long as trade continued.
    Guards were doubled, officers and NCOs were warned to be on the qui vive in case of further attempts to undermine Italian rule, but when nothing happened it was assumed that it was an isolated incident and gradually they began to relax.
    Unfortunately, just when Guidotti had decided he had everything under control again, the feud between the Habr Odessi and the Harari erupted once more, and quite by chance Colonel Piccio drove smack through the middle of a skirmish across the Strada del Duce that holed one or two lorries and caused their crews to duck hurriedly.
    Guidotti listened to Piccio’s account with a frown. The Somalis, he had soon discovered, weren’t very fussy about who was running