Jack Ludlow: The Burning Sky

Instead of advancing to aid Ras Seyoum, the army of Ras Kassa was forced into a hurried retreat, seeking and failing to avoid annihilation. Right behind the Dodge of Ras Kassa came Alverson’s Rolls-Royce, now carrying many of the personal followers of the commander, those that could hanging onto the running boards, avoiding the strafing fighters only by sheer luck, manoeuvring round bomb craters, staying ahead of gas attacks only because of those wheels. Behind them the army of Ras Kassa fell apart, dead, collapsed with massive burns to their body, or just dispersed to become useless.

Thousands survived the carnage that ensued, but no one knew how many: they were left only with the claims of the enemy. Those who got away did not join any other army, they went home, their fortitude broken like a dried reed. They had lived the myth and it had either killed them or their spirit. By the time they reached the headquarters of the reserve army, the only men Ras Kassa still commanded were his personal bodyguards.

Haile Selassie now took command, gathering all his forces for a final battle, forty years to the day since his predecessor won at Adowa, and he brought with him, to parade before the rest of his warriors, the six battalions of the Imperial Guard, men in smart green uniforms, proper boots, steel helmets, and each with a modern rifle that Cal Jardine suspected were those he had brought into the country, weapons that should have been at the front long ago.

So should the rest of what he had preserved: there was a mobile mortar section, truck-towed 75 mm field guns, twenty in number, the fast-firing, highly mobile French weapon that had been so effective in the Great War as well as an anti-aircraft unit with up-to-date Oerlikons to make sure the King of Kings was protected from the air.

‘Where the hell was this lot when we needed them, Vince?’

The bitterness of tone and the fact that it was loudly proclaimed — it had to be, given the cheering — made Tyler Alverson turn to look at Cal Jardine. His eyes were fixed on the tiny, bearded figure of the Emperor of Ethiopia, who, even in ceremonial garb, on a platform that raised him well above the ground, could not even begin to look impressive. Vince said he looked like a doorstop not a figurehead.

‘Sittin’ in their barracks, guv. Makes you wonder who we’ve been fighting for — not that ponce of an emperor?’

‘You a Bolshevik, Vince?’ Alverson asked.

‘Not bloody likely.’

‘Would these guys have made a difference, Cal?’

‘Might have done used wisely, Tyler, it’s too late to tell, but I can’t see them making much of one now.’

The American just nodded at that; no degree in maths was needed to work out that from the original forces Haile Selassie had fielded — guesses ranged from half- to three-quarters of a million men — he now only had a fraction left, while his enemies were near to their full original strength and had been reinforced. There would be a battle and maybe the Lion of Judah and some of his warriors believed in a miracle; Cal Jardine did not.

What followed did nothing to change that opinion: a week of parades, banquets and ceremonies, at a time when the advancing Italians were defensively vulnerable, threw away what little chance existed, which caused Alverson to opine that what Haile Selassie was doing was mere posturing for the hope of a future: in short, he was prepared to sacrifice anyone and everyone to maintain a tenuous claim to his throne.

By the time the attack was launched, Pietro Badoglio was ready and waiting, and the result was a foregone conclusion: the Ethiopians were routed — but it was what happened in the rear areas that occupied Jardine, Alverson and Vince. The Italian air force, not for the first time, deliberately bombed the field hospital, and one of the casualties was Corrie Littleton.

* * *

From their position observing the battle, the trio had seen the aircraft fly over and had heard the crunch of high explosives. It was only when the emperor admitted defeat and broke off the battle that they found out the extent of the damage to a hospital that had yet to start receiving casualties. It was only the needs of her bodily functions that saved Corrie Littleton.

The latrine tent for females had been set well apart from the main treatment tents, the top of which were marked with huge red crosses to tell flyers of their function. It was as if the Italians had used them as aiming points, for there were smashed bodies everywhere, orderlies of both sexes, and nothing left of beds, operating tables or medicines but wreckage around a series of deep craters.

Corrie had been found unconscious and suffering from injuries caused by blast and flying debris, with a broken arm and a gash in her back that had been covered with an antiseptic pad, then bandaged. By the time the trio got to her she was on a stretcher, while streaming past them were the broken elements of the last Ethiopian field army, and gone with them in the general panic and fear of a gas attack were what medical orderlies had survived, including the ones who had treated her.

‘You thinking what I’m thinking, Cal?’ Alverson asked, as Jardine bent over to examine her; he had seen enough battlefield wounds in his time to realise she was still very much alive but needed help.

‘There’s no doctors left, guv,’ called Vince as he approached from his inspection of the actual hospital tents; there had been two, both Ethiopians. ‘They took the full blast, poor sods.’

‘The whole thing is falling apart,’ the American added. ‘And that will include what medical services still exist.’

‘Then we have to get her to Addis, Tyler, it’s the only place with a properly equipped hospital.’

‘Cal. That’s where the Italians are going.’

‘Where else can we get help?’

‘British Somaliland sounds good to me, brother.’

Cal Jardine looked up and nodded, for he knew what Alverson was saying: it was all over bar the shouting. There was nothing left, at least in an organised sense, to stop the Italians now and they would not be kind to those who had aided their enemies. It was time to get out of the country.

‘We’d have to go through Addis anyway, it’s the only road. We’ll just have to hope Badoglio is as cautious as he has been up till now.’

‘They’re bound to bomb the Addis-to-Gondar road.’

‘I know, but unless you can find a plane, we have no choice. Vince, go back into that wreckage and see if you can find any morphine sulphate, bandages, anything we might need — you know what.’

They had to carry Corrie Littleton into the little dusty town of Maychew, which was a slow struggle. Alverson, on the advice of Cal Jardine, had parked the Rolls out of sight, which had been like a harbinger of the coming debacle, on the good grounds that if the army broke, there was no guarantee someone, regardless of the endemic honesty of the locals, would not steal his car.

The loading of their kit was hurried and, with the stretcher lashed across the rear and the three men crowded in the front, they joined the throng of people, warriors, soldiers of the Imperial Guard and fleeing civilians on the crowded road north. Even then they were pushed aside as, from behind them, came the motorised convoy of the emperor.

He, too, was in a Rolls-Royce, a beige coupe. They watched as the Lion of Judah, the King of Kings, the Emperor of Ethiopia, looking like a toy human being, drove by, his gaze unblinking and straight ahead, acknowledging no one to right or left, his face as impassive as it had been before he sent his vastly outnumbered troops into battle. Yet it was the face of a beaten man.

Just how beaten was not long in coming. Badoglio had finished the battle by gassing the survivors who had congregated around a lake, massacring thousands. The road to Addis Ababa was open.