Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Read online

  Chapter 3

  YOU ALWAYS WOKE UP in the morning at Kalanka covered with slow-moving, exhausted flies dragging their way through your sweat, and the nausea soon lessened so that you learned to lie there and let the flies stay on you. It was only when they tried to get into your mouth that the anxiety mania fell upon you again and you sprang from the stale, sweat-soaked sheets. The flies liked to cluster on the edge of a cup of tea, and if you left a cup standing for five minutes there would be a struggling crust of flies drowning in it. At times during the height of the fly season you became hysterical and I once saw a friend of mine screaming at some flies, his face showing grief and hate, his left hand pressed tight over the mug of tea he was holding in his right hand. Millions and millions of flies swarmed on to us as the heat increased, and Chas lay sick under the mosquito net we had rigged up for him. Carlo was worried when he came one night and I told him that Chas had had thirty-seven bowel movements that day, and was weak and delirious, though still making his usual jokes.

  ‘Can’t they fly a plane up here for an officer as sick as this?’ Carlo asked me, his large, black eyes flashing with anger.

  ‘A plane?’ I said, ‘A plane? Why they won’t even send a truck with the rations.’ Even Chas laughed when I told him about ‘the plane’.

  At about two o’clock in the morning Carlo would come in softly in his rubber shoes and stand over Chas’s bed and study him, watching how he slept. He found some old Italian army drugs and used these on Chas, and fed him goat-meat soup, and camel milk. There was nothing else anyway. Chas, tall and strong, with thick, dark, curly hair, seemed to be fading into a pallid, thin ghost, and what he longed for most was a few bottles of cold beer, or an onion, or a slice of bread covered with real butter. We used to talk about lettuce and beetroot and fresh eggs in increasingly burning and passionate words, while Carlo listened and then said, ‘If you go on like this you’ll get dyspepsia. You’re over-eating, both of you.’

  There was nothing left to read in that place, and I was driven to reading the stack of military pamphlets I had used as an NCO, the grenade, the bayonet, the Bren, the Small Arms Manual, the two inch mortar, and that laughable answer to the Panzer Division, the .55 Boyes anti-tank rifle.

  I must have been going ‘sand-happy’ at that time, for it was a few years before I realised the enormity of the act I committed when a convoy of camels at last brought the box of money to our piece of wilderness, along with rations, mail and the booze supply.

  ‘The money’s in a big wooden chest, Effendi,’ the excited Somali sergeant came to tell me. There had been a very sullen and angry conference with the troops that morning, about money and justice and loyalty and patience, and money.

  I went down into the armoury, seized a pickaxe and ran through the sand to where the mounds of stores were being unloaded from the camels into the sand by the askaris. I forgot everything except the money for the askaris.

  The chest of cash was a splendid thing, about six feet long, a foot high and a foot wide, of solid, heavy, smooth wood, and I noticed the red seal of wax in a counter-sunk pit in the wood. That red seal ought to have slowed me up, for even now, whenever I think of it, I know I must have been as sand-happy as I was relieved and excited. I ought to have realised that this chest was addressed to the political officer, who lived across the sand dunes, and whom we hardly ever saw, and who was farther round the bend than Chas and I, at that time. He was to commit suicide in about a year’s time, finally eaten away by wilderness and loneliness and outpost duty, but at that time, as I raised the heavy pickaxe over my head, he was still in possession of a good many of his faculties, and as desperate as I to see that long awaited money. I think it must have been the sheer anxiety to show the askaris the actual, shining, heavy money, on the spot, after these months of promising, lying, borrowing from Hashim, lectures about discipline and patience, and fear of a real mutiny, that caused me to shatter that perfectly carpentered chest of specie, which I had no official right to do. Heavy white canvas bags of Indian rupees glittered in the harsh sunlight as I tore away the splintered wood. A cheer went up from the askaris, and I think we were all a little insane together at that moment. They danced round the money, cheering.

  ‘It’s the money,’ I said. ‘It’s here. It’s actually arrived. I’m going to pay you at once.’ To the sergeant I said, ‘Get them on parade. It’s a pay parade.’ The troops, all of them stripped to the waist, rushed off to dress for the parade. I told the sergeant to put a guard on the dump of rations. I sent a runner to tell Chas that the money had arrived, and the runner came back with a note saying, ‘To hell with the money, what about the MAIL, and the BOOZE?’ Chas was getting better.

  Chas, weak and pale, and as happy as I, got up for the pay parade which we held in the office. We wore polished Sam Browne belts, pressed khaki bush shirts and shorts, long puttees and our infantry side caps of navy blue trimmed with red cord. The askaris came in, saluted, held out their trembling hands for the heaps of silver coins as we entered up their paybooks, saluted, and rushed off into the poverty-stricken village of straw huts to buy themselves a dose of clap. When it was all finished I sent the remaining canvas bags of cash in the shattered wooden chest to the political officer, not forgetting to send with it an excited, happy note telling of the pay parade, and actually expecting an equally excited reply from the political officer saying something like, ‘I’m delighted for you all. This is wonderful. I’m paying my fellows too. What a day. Coming over tonight for drinks.’

  He came over rather earlier than I expected him, and not for drinks. He was shaking with rage when he came running into the fly-infested room in which Chas and I were toasting the world in mugs of whisky, the table covered with opened letters and bottles of beer, gin and whisky. I had only met this political officer once before. He was the first mental casualty of Somalia’s fastnesses, for me, though I did not know what was the matter then.

  ‘You’re just in time for a snifter,’ I said gaily, and still gay, determined to stay gay even though I could now see that his blue eyes were glaring threateningly from Chas to me, and from me to Chas, went on, ‘Gin or whisky? The beer’s still boiling, I’m afraid, after the trip on the camels, so gin or whisky?’

  ‘Who did it?’ he whispered, clenching his hands. ‘Who did it? It’s a bloody court-martial offence, I’m telling you. Who did it?’

  ‘Did what?’ Chas had told me that this fellow was ‘sand-happy’.

  Chapter 4

  EVEN NOW, twenty years after, as I think over that wild scene with the pickaxe under that sunglare, the askaris laughing, their thin Somali faces alight with expectation, their cries of acclamation when the pickaxe tore the wood away and revealed the snow-white canvas bags of money, even now I cannot understand how I forgot that the political officer was the one who should conduct the slow, steady, careful ritual of the reception of money, its checking, its handing out, and its meticulous recording in various books. There is no doubt about it but that it was the beginning of the intense individuality, on occasions merging into madness, which that strange landscape and its fierce peoples brought out in all of us who wandered its wastes for years. One never knew when one was acting strangely. It was only the other fellow with you, whom you noticed was acting strangely, and he noticed your erosion too, but you never mentioned it to each other.

  ‘The askaris have been over five months without pay,’ I told the infuriated political officer. ‘What’s the difference? It’s money, there are the askaris, and they’ve been paid.’ It seemed as simple as that. I know now that the long and steady struggle to keep the askaris happy had affected my judgement. The punishments one had handed out which ordinarily would have been accepted as military routine over breaches of discipline, had seemed bigger and more ruthless than they actually were, to soldiers who were soldiering without pay, and the sight of that huge chest of money had united the askaris and myself in a delirious moment of long promised justice. But I still could not explain to the politi
cal officer, how I, a junior officer well drilled and disciplined through the ranks, wearing the badge of a famous regiment, had hacked down a whole traditional area of governmental procedure – which in out-stations is government itself. But he must have seen that the two junior officers with long, thick curling hair (there were no barbers), drinks in their hands, were marooned like himself in this lunar wilderness, and, like himself, were not quite in their right minds. So, after a long and neurotic lecture on procedure, he accepted a drink. But he never really forgave me.

  Jaysee, our company commander, came back from a routine inspection of our wilderness shortly after that, and I told him about ‘the scene’ with the political officer. But even he, a soldier of much more experience than Chas and I, was too thrilled by the paying of the troops to see it as the mortal sin which had appalled the political officer.

  We got out the drinks and wound up the sandy, rusty Italian gramophone and put on our three records. We had played them hundreds of times and they were now worn out, fine dusted sand in their grooves, but they helped to produce that careless, wild back-ground to our drink and talk. One record was by Edmundo Ros and his Rumba Band, called ‘Blen Blen Blen’, another was a strange, quavering, queer male voice against a background of drums and trumpets imploring a woman to walk the hills and heather with him, together, forever, and we used to sing this with him while the drink lasted. It says something for merciful time that I have completely forgotten the third record.

  Jaysee came and saw the troops on parade, and approved. We sent for Hashim and paid him for the loans and the dates. There was still nothing to read and it was about that time that an askari brought me the skeleton of an Italian machine-gun he had found in the sand dunes. That machine-gun, and its companion, kept me sane for the rest of my stay in that God-forgotten place. We were short of automatic weapons and I told Jaysee that I thought I could remedy this shortage if I could only find the rest of the weapons where the retreating Italians had thrown them. There was plenty of the particular ammunition in the armoury and I knew that the machine-gun parts must be lying in the sands of the dunes. The askaris became as obsessed as myself in the search. None of us had ever seen this type of machine-gun before. It was a medium of nine millimetre calibre, a Schwarzlose from the Austrian Waffen Fabrik Steyr, part of the material captured by the Italians during the First World War. All I had to begin with was the barrel and the body casing with its traversing handles and trigger, and wandering in those rolling dunes one heard cries of triumph as askaris found parts of the gun, and one day two of them came staggering in with the heavy tripod itself. In the evenings we sat for hours in the armoury with the growing set of parts, learning by experiment how they fitted into the gun. The sergeant, now as obsessed as myself, used to haunt the dunes in his spare time, searching for a piece of steel we knew must fit into a long, curiously shaped groove which ran along the right side of the body casing. I knew it must be the piece that forced the oil-spray on to the working parts.

  The sergeant was of a tribe considered inferior, by the askaris, to the noble tribes to which they themselves belonged, and Chas and I had opposed all their efforts to have him transferred, to have him disgraced, to cause him to appear a thief, a despot, an upstart, a mistake made in the chain of command; for them, command was dependent on nobility, which depended on tribe, and the sergeant was from one of the tribes of the Juba river in the far south. He was stronger, more intelligent and firmer in character than all of the askaris who so resented his command. And, worse, for they loved good looks, he was handsome.

  They tried everything they could think of to bring him down, until one day I told them on parade, while the sergeant was absent, that even if the vendetta went on for a hundred years they were going to lose it, and that if ever the sergeant was transferred it would be to become a sergeant-major over other noble tribes. The sergeant himself had come to us one day, tired and dispirited that particular day, and asked us if we thought it was really worth all the trouble that he should stay sergeant over these tribal fanatics. ‘That depends on you,’ I told him. ‘There’s no tribal gradation in the particular kind of infantry we’re evolving in this country now. It’s all a matter of military talent, nothing else. You’ve got it. Use it. Dominate them. Don’t let them cow you back into what is supposed to be your inferiority of status. A soft touch here, a heavy hand there. Don’t give up. You’ve got the makings of a sergeant-major in you.’ The hysterical aristocrats among the askaris, brainless, brave, never gave up their scheming to destroy their sergeant. It was their hobby.

  Remembering that quietly bitter struggle with tribal mania, I looked now, twenty years later, at the glaring, sunbaked Somali coast and thought of all the other struggles with it we had had in the two hundred thousand square miles of its interior, which we had controlled and administered with useless weapons, battered and broken down trucks, spavined camels, and I recalled all the suicides and strange insanities which had broken so many of our friends in isolated parts of the great wilderness.

  Just over there on the right, behind that jagged cliff of yellow hot rock was where Sergeant Elmi and I had nervously and excitedly set up the completed machine-gun, the askaris assembled thirty yards behind us to watch the firing, or the explosion – none of us knew which it would be. You cannot tell how an unknown machine-gun will work until ammunition passes through it. Sergeant Elmi was number two on the gun. I was number one. We were laughing as we stood ready for the drill, waiting for my command of ‘Take Posts!’

  I had cleaned and oiled every part of the gun after many doubtful assemblings of the parts sieved out of the sands during those obsessed months. I had put a gauze through the barrel – a gauze should only be used through a barrel as a last resort, and on the order of an officer – and it was pleasant being an officer and using one’s own gauze at one’s own will. I had selected the best of the coiled machine-gun belts in the armoury, and had even learned to work the Steyr-model belt-loading machine which we had found lying in a heap of old rifle parts. ‘Take posts!’

  Would the oil-spray work properly? Would the cooling system in the water jacket function if I fired a lot of ammunition, if the gun did not explode?

  ‘Ready, Effendi,’ Sergeant Elmi said from where he lay beside the tripod. I pressed my thumbs against the thick red trigger, the traversing handles so different in shape and function from the Vickers machine-gun which the fanatical and patient Sergeant-Major Breen had taught me night after night in those cold, dank gun pits in Britain after Dunkirk.

  ‘Cracks like a bloody whip. Fires all day,’ he used to shout when he sat down to instruct me. ‘Hold up an army for ten years.’

  I narrowed my eyes as if expecting a blast of metal into my face and pressed home the trigger for a burst of five rounds, and the gun obeyed. I could see the strike of the rounds in the sandhill three hundred yards to our front. A cheer went up from the askaris, for even though the low caste sergeant and the white officer who so perversely supported him in power, were firing the gun, it was our gun, having been salvaged by all of us, and it worked – even when I held the trigger down and fired a burst of thirty rounds. I fired the whole belt, and slabs of the hillside crumbled and collapsed under the blasts of fire.

  Everyone volunteered to serve in the machine-gun platoon, and those who were chosen served willingly under Sergeant Elmi. They never let him forget that they were superior to him in caste, ridiculous as always in their doing so, for he was far their superior in brain and character, and as a soldier within the unit in which their whole life was lived, he was their superior officer and they obeyed him.

  One of them had come to me one night, passionate, rolling his eyes, thin Somali hand on heaving chest, to tell me that he would no longer serve under this sergeant from a slave tribe, and that he was going to run away unless I altered things.

  ‘You want to run away?’ I asked him.

  ‘If I am to go on serving under this man from the Rahanwein (the river tribes of the south), yes, E
ffendi.’

  ‘You can strip off your uniform right here and now,’ I told him. ‘Strip naked, and you can go.’ I waved to the two hundred thousand square miles of desolation behind us. ‘Go. I will burn your paybook. You can vanish. Take off your uniform and vanish.’ He laughed with amazement, disbelief, until he understood that I was serious. Then he came to attention and said that he did not want to go, even if I did mean that I would turn him loose in the desert, naked except for his noble blood and his parasitical pedigree and his vanity. That vanity would be only of use in an action when its owner decided to show that he was braver than all the slaves from the river.

  Now, the soothing bells were ringing for lunch as the ship lurched down past Cape Gardafui. Where were they all now, those quarrelsome, faithful, fanatical, patient askaris? Where was Chas? Where was Jaysee, and Carlo, and Sergeant Elmi? Did he ever become sergeant-major, or did one of the nobles plant a knife in him one day when all that soldiering time was over and the Somali wastes became their own again?

  Drinking the pale Salaparuta from Sicily down in the ship’s dining-room I wondered how I would find Kenya, after seven years away from it, but Kenya could not get through the screen of flooding memories of the Somali country which the sight of that barren coast had evoked in me. I wondered if I could get permission to go ashore in Mogadishu, the old headquarters of the vast insane asylum we had been lost in. In that ocean of scrub and shale one had been like a flea on a blanket, an aching speck whose eye had turned more thoughtfully, fearfully, inwards, as month after burning month went by among those hostile wastes.