The Secret War

17

The land of Satan's children

Lovelace stared out into the heat haze. The blistering sun was already scorching his back and shoulders through his thin tunic. The yellow brown rocks danced and shimmered. Above them, no more than twenty yards away, peered the brutal faces of the savage Danakil’s. It was no nightmare, but reality. This was Abyssinia and an end to their mad venture before they had been two hours over the frontier of the country. A swarm of the fuzzy haired warriors were already looting the wrecked plane.

`Speak to them!' Valerie's voice came low pitched and urgent at his side. `Speak to them and tell them we're not Italians.'

He shook his head helplessly. Even if he could have said in the dialect of the tribe: `We are neutrals on our way to Addis Ababa to stop war not to make it,' he doubted if it would have made the least difference.

These barbarous Danakil’s were killers of unprotected travellers in normal times, as even then the Emperor's writ was so much waste paper more than fifty miles from his capital. He had to collect his taxes by a series of armed forays each year, and the townships of his so called Ethiopian Empire, which was six times the size of Abyssinia proper, were only kept in subjection by garrisons of Amhara soldiery. Lovelace knew the complicated system of guides and presents by which any visitor to the interior of the country had to be passed on from one local chieftain to another if he was to escape attack. Now it had filtered through to tribesmen that their country was at war they would risk attacking even armed convoys under the impression that rewards would be forthcoming for every white they slaughtered. He could speak Arabic, Urdu, `pidgin' French and `pidgin' English, and had a smattering of various other non European languages, but Danakil, or even Amharic, was utterly beyond him.

`I'm sorry,' he muttered. `I can't, and, anyhow, these people don't know one European nation from another only that it's no longer necessary even to make excuses when they murder white men.'

Christopher's thoughts were racing wildly. He was much younger than Lovelace, and this was the first time in his life that he had ever found himself outside the protection of organised law and order. At the first sight of the natives he wondered why they did not use their long, old fashioned guns or cast their tufted spears. Then he realised that the encircling ring of warriors had crawled nearer and meant to capture them alive. His next thought was the appalling one that Lovelace had had only a few seconds before. He must shoot Valerie first and himself immediately afterwards.

Lovelace had already drawn his pistol. He knew far better than Christopher the terrible mutilations and tortures that all three of them would suffer if they allowed themselves to be captured. He gazed round him, hoping desperately to find one friendly face in the ring of evil masks; a chief to whom they might offer ransom, or a semi cultured type; but they were all stupid, brutal, bestial; their black hair wild and shaggy, their eyes fierce with the lust for blood.

He raised his automatic. Sweat was pouring off his face in rivulets. With an almost superhuman effort of will he jerked the gun up behind Valerie's shoulder until it was pointing at the base of her skull behind the left ear. She would know nothing about it; feel nothing but a smashing blow and then be beyond all physical joy or pain for ever.

At that instant she turned. She could not see the pistol, but his raised arm and half crazed expression told her of his intention. Instinctively, blind terror gripped her. Her mouth fell open, her grey eyes started from her head, and she ducked with such suddenness hat she stumbled and fell forward on her knees.

Hardly a moment had elapsed since their first sight of the Danakils. As though her fall had been a signal, the native warriors gave a yell of triumph and, leaping from their cover, came dashing pell mell across the twenty yards of open ground.

In a second Valerie grasped the full horror of her situation. To fall alive into the hands of these murderous savages meant twenty deaths instead of one. Far better that Lovelace should blow her brains out. She wrenched herself round on her knees and threw her head back.

`All right!' she gasped. `Go on shoot me!'

Lovelace had let the pistol hand drop to his side. Now he raised it again until the weapon pointed at her breast. For split seconds, each of which seemed like an eternity, he strove to force himself to press the trigger.

He could have managed it before, when she was not looking; but now that she was staring up at him, her eyes riveted on his, waiting for the bullet to sear through her body, he could not.

Christopher had turned and was shouting something. His black eyes shone feverishly in a face drained of blood. His Millers' lethal gas pistol, too, was now aimed at Valerie, but her fall had lost them precious seconds, and before either of the men had time to nerve himself for his terrible act the Danakils were upon them.

At the last moment, Christopher, swerving from his purpose, swung round and discharged his weapon at one of the warriors. Lovelace kept his pistol levelled at Valerie and pulled the trigger, but a huge native leapt upon her as the automatic flashed and took the bullet in his thigh.

After that all chance to kill each other or themselves was gone. They were borne down by a solid mass of black, stinking humanity. It was all over within one minute of the warriors having left their cover, Battered, bruised, breathless, the two white men and the girl were lugged to their feet, alive but captives, to find themselves staring half dazed into a host of hostile, brutish faces.

Without further delay they were pushed and pulled over the hot stones, past their wrecked plane and on through the wilderness.

It seemed to stretch interminably behind them and on either side, with neither tree, nor shrub, nor waterhole to break the endless monotony of sun scorched rock, but before them rose a great range of cliffs; the first step to the highlands of the interior. Black, precipitous, apparently unscalable, they towered up in the near distance, cutting sharply across the skyline.

The prisoners were being taken towards the west, and the morning sun beat down with relentless force upon their backs. Valerie had lost her hat, and only her chestnut hair, now hanging about her head in damp, tangled rats' tails, protected her from sunstroke. As she was hurried along, tripping and stubbing her toes on the hot, uneven ground in the firm grip of two perspiring natives, she thought of that; then realised how little sunstroke mattered. In a few hours she would be raving mad from the atrocities these animals in human form would practice upon her.

Lovelace and Christopher were both thinking of the same thing, and each was cursing himself for his cowardly hesitation at the moment when he might have shot her. They trudged on blindly, hastened by jabs from spear points and blows from the muzzles of ancient blunderbusses.

Before they had covered five hundred yards of their terrible journey all of them had lapsed into semi consciousness from heat, nightmare imagination, and brutal beating. The naked rocks underfoot had given way to tough, dry, desert grass and through this they were half dragged, half carried, until they arrived within hundred yards of the cliff face. There, they sensed rather than saw that they had arrived outside a village. A swarm of screaming women and a host of naked children came out to meet them, dancing and grimacing with delirious glee, while the warriors broke into a frill, unmelodious song of triumph at their capture. The village was no more than a collection of daub and wattle huts clustered together at the foot of the cliff. It was so primitive that it had not even an open space at its centre. By the nearest hut an old, old man, with a fringe of white hair round his polished skull and wizened, monkey like face, stood leaning on a staff. As the gibbering mob dragged their prisoners before him he regarded them with small, cruel, rheumy eyes for a moment, then muttered a few words in his own 'dialect. Without further parley they were jostled another twenty yards and flung head foremost into an empty hut.

Immediately the screen was pulled across the entrance it became pitch dark inside, but Lovelace caught a glimpse of Valerie's face before the light was blotted out and saw that she had fainted.

The place stank worse than any kennel; with the fixed odours of goats, pigs, and filthy humanity. Almost instantly the hundreds of fleas which infested it settled upon them.

For a long time they were too broken and bemused 'even to stir from the places where they had fallen. Lovelace, knowing what was in store for them, was thinking feverishly of the knives of the Danakil women they would cut into his shrinking flesh, when Christopher roused at last and muttered : `If they're going to ki11 us, why the hell don't they get on with it?' Lovelace knew the answer. They were being kept for a night's entertainment. It was highly probable that never before in its history had this village experienced the undreamed of pleasure which could be provided by the skilful mutilation of two white men and a white woman. If they were dead before the morning they would be lucky and the Danakils intensely disappointed. His one prayer was that they might all go mad and cease to suffer early in the game, but he forebore to voice his thoughts in case Valerie had regained consciousness.

Actually she had never quite lost it, and now she had recovered sufficiently to speak clearly again. With uncanny precision she guessed his thoughts, and said;

`It seems years since we crashed in the plane, but it can't be midday yet. That means we've got a long while to wait until sundown.'

Christopher stretched his bruised arms, clasping and unclasping his stiff fingers. Their captors had not troubled to bind them. The ghastly thought had come to him that, since his gun had gone, he had better strangle Valerie, because he loved her. As he moved she spoke again, deliberately and bitterly.

'I wish some of the people who want to go to war to save the Abyssinians were in our place now. They don't understand they can't. These brutes are worse than animals worse than reptiles even a snake doesn't bite you unless you provoke it in some way. I've never seen such fiendish cruelty as stared at me out of the eyes of these loathsome creatures when they dragged us here, and the women who met us looked even more ferocious than the men. They're not human, but soulless devils incarnate whose one delight is inflicting pain.

Her voice rose to a shrill note of hysteria.. 'I don't care any more for ideals and all the senseless nonsense that is talked about Leagues and Covenants and Treaties. I hope the Italians win! I hope they wipe these people out, man, woman and child. Destroy them and blast them limb from limb until there's not a single one of them left to pollute the decent earth they tread on.`

As she ceased speaking the first bomb fell,