Two

In Machingo, the capital of Malala, Lieutenant-General Horace Hodges, DSO, commander of Hodgeforce and, when the chain of command was carried to its last link, Ginger Bowen’s commanding officer, wiped away the perspiration round his neck and slowly began to pack his pipe with tobacco.

The hotel suite he’d been given for the use of himself and his staff during the conferences in the capital was modern and cool, with sleek Swedish furniture, angular lights and drapings in muted colours, but all the modernity in the world couldn’t hide the fact that the room was far from spotless and that the streets outside, for all the square concrete buildings that had been flung up in the last twenty years, were a little unkempt and shabby. Of all the places he could have wished to be sent, Malala was probably lowest on Hodges’ list.

He didn’t even particularly like the Malalans as a race, and he found their senior officers inefficient, self-important in their newly designed uniforms, and far too full of military clichés to be easy to get on with. Circumstances had forced a Malalan Deputy Commander-in-Chief on him and he was already at the point when he couldn’t think of General Ditro Aswana without feeling ill. A political appointee, Aswana had jumped from major to lieutenant-general almost overnight during the Young Officers’ Revolution.

Hodges sighed, realising he was not alone in his dislike of the Malalan troops. Judging by the number of fights that occurred at Pepul, it seemed that the British troops shared his distaste for their allies.

He finished loading his pipe and lit it slowly, savouring the taste of the tobacco. He was a squarely built man, tall but broad enough to make his height seem considerably less, and looked not unlike Wavell in the way he stood, rigid as a monolith, with his head up and his feet planted solidly on the ground.

He turned to his Chief of Staff and indicated the radio set he’d just switched off.

‘So much for the Prime Minister,’ he said slowly. ‘What did you make of it, Stuart?’

Colonel Leggo stiffened by the table where he was studying maps, and turned quickly. He was young enough to be Hodges’ son and he looked vaguely like him, except that there was nothing about him of the unmoving stolidness of Hodges. Leggo looked as though he were of finer grain and quicker intelligence, but probably of less staying power in a crisis.

‘Excuses, sir,’ he commented shortly. ‘It ought to be accepted by now that no coloured race’s going to accept domination by a white race simply because the white race’s stronger militarily. I thought the Americans and the French had discovered that in Vietnam. I thought it had been drummed home in England by Suez.’

The general nodded. ‘Makes a difference, though, doesn’t it,’ he said, ‘when the white race has a coloured ally? Still’ – he shrugged – ‘I suppose Malala’s terms of independence did say that Britain could intervene in case of trouble, though I don’t expect anybody thought that it would be this sort of trouble.’ He sucked at his pipe for a moment, filling the air with clouds of blue smoke. ‘That was twenty years ago, too, and things are different now. The Americans have been blowing hot and cold for weeks and there’s been a hell of a divergence of policy between us and them.’ He scraped another match and sucked flame into the tobacco for a moment. ‘It’d be a tragedy for us if this half-baked affair brought that friendship to an end.’

Leggo dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. He had been aware for some time that his general was not relishing the task ahead of him.

‘Particularly’ – Hodges seemed to read his thoughts and went on to explain the way he was thinking – ‘particularly as Malala doesn’t have the best of reputations either in Africa or Europe. Let’s face it, even when they were part of the Empire, they weren’t the steadiest of troops and when they were granted independence it was practically the only place outside India where there was trouble.’

‘Braka seems pretty well in the saddle now, though, sir,’ Leggo pointed out, thinking of the long thin African with the beard and horn-rimmed spectacles with whom they had been conferring only that afternoon.

Hodges had moved to the window to stare down into the street and through the new buildings opposite to the corrugated iron roofs among the palms in the old quarter of the city. Immediately, the heat struck him, in spite of the hour, and he felt the sweat start out down his spine and under his arms.

The brightly hued chattering people below him seethed outside the flare-lit open-fronted shops where the Syrian traders squatted, their corpse-faces impassive but their restless eyes not missing a single move of the black hands over the goods they sold. A Creole clerk went past, one of the new Africans in his smart starched suit of dazzling drill and white topee, staring down his nose at a Hausa trader in a dusty pyjama-cloth robe and shabby gold-embroidered smoking cap who brushed against him as he hurried by. Pushing arrogantly past the trader’s calabashes, the clerk elbowed his way between the labourers with their strident banjo voices and slapping feet and the mammies with their Madras head kerchieves and the hideous Mother Hubbards, which had been forced on them generations before and had not yet entirely disappeared.

The melon-slice grins over the baskets of fruit and the paper-stopped ginger-beer bottles brought a smile to Hodges’ face because he loved Africa for its colour and its rawness and its noise, though he had little liking for the new Africans like the Creole clerk, who had swept away all the old tribal loyalties and dignities without replacing them with anything better. The thought reminded him abruptly of Leggo’s comment on Braka.

‘Do you think so?’ he asked. ‘Do you really think he’s consolidated himself?’

He was thinking of the private instructions he’d received from the Foreign Office before he’d left England. ‘Watch Braka,’ they’d said. ‘We’re not sure he’s very safe.’

Neither was Hodges. They’d been greeted warmly enough, apart from a few banners in the streets and a brick bouncing on the car bonnet, which Braka, all affability and smiles, had explained away with the suggestion that the sight of white faces was still inclined to incur African wrath. There’d been willing co-operation, however, in the setting up of the base at Pepul where Malalan soldiers had been marched out of their camps and the green and white flag had been replaced by the Union Jack. There had been a formal handing over and a review of British troops, and a great deal of speech-making by Braka and a lot of hot air about friendship, ties with Britain and the need to honour the sanctity of treaties. It hadn’t cut much ice with Hodges. He knew from the Foreign Office that Braka had been influenced less by noble sentiments than by the several million pounds which had been hurriedly placed at his disposal to bolster up an unstable economy.

Hodges frowned, uneasy in spite of himself. Ever since he’d joined the Army as a young soldier in 1940, he’d dreamed of an independent command, but now that he was in command, he wasn’t so sure that reality had come up to his dreams. When he’d had his dreams, there’d been an army, but now his command consisted of a few companies from two or three first-line regiments – all of them under strength because the clause in the National Service Act which let out craftsmen provided only the sort of men this type of regiment wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole – and a hotch-potch of other battalions, hastily brought up to strength by intakes from depots all over the country, entirely devoid of pride or a feeling for tradition, and transported by over-age vehicles scraped up from every vehicle pool in the United Kingdom and a few more places besides.

He thought of his orders and how they were framed. ‘You will enter King Boffa Port and in conjunction with Malalan troops, will undertake operations aimed at re-occupying the base there. If necessary, Khanzian forces will be engaged and destroyed. Casualties on both sides to be kept to a minimum.’

Hodges considered the signal for a moment. Leggo had not yet seen it, but Hodges had spent several days considering it. Once he received the preparatory signal, it only required the code word, ‘Dash’, to put the whole thing in motion, but the idea implicit in the last sentence was that he was to do the job without anybody getting hurt. In the climate of rising temperatures and cooling personal relationships in Africa, someone at home had got cold feet at the last moment and they were asking him now to drive a military machine with all the brakes on. They preferred to call the operation a police action instead of war, but the academic difference in terminology meant only that the politicians had felt that, because of political expediency, the planning should be done in London and had changed the arrangements a dozen times, with the result that Hodges’ initiative was now constrained within a narrow limit. He was to fight a battle under a directive which said ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’.

 

He pushed his uneasy thoughts aside and picked up a photo interpretation laboratory file, marked with the red seal of Intelligence. The photographic enlargements inside showed a view of King Boffa Port taken from a big R5. As it had floated with blunt-ended wings on the thin upper air at 40,000 feet, the pilot checking his instruments and flicking the lever that had started the cameras whirring in the slender body of the machine, it had shown on the Khanzian radar screens as nothing more than a blurred blip.

‘How old are these, Stuart?’ Hodges asked.

‘Two months.’ Leggo lifted his head to reply.

‘Is that the best they can do since they took the job from Admiral Hoosey and gave it to that damn lackey of the Prime Minister’s? Ask for fresh ones.’

Leggo nodded, turning to his maps again, his fingers tracing across the sheets the coloured blocks of the harbour installations and mole at King Boffa Port. He looked up sharply.

‘Are the swing bridges strong enough for tank regiments’ new Senators, sir?’ he asked.

‘So the Planning Committee says,’ Hodges affirmed.

‘And are we to expect the lock gates to be in operation?’

Hodges shrugged. ‘Planning Committee says no,’ he growled. ‘I say yes.’

‘Do you really think the Khanzians can work the harbour installations on their own, sir?’

‘I’m damn sure they can,’ Hodges rapped. ‘The Egyptians worked the Suez Canal. There’s not much difference.’

Leggo nodded. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘And we know they’ve got Russian experts to help them.’ He wiped from the chart a droplet of perspiration that had fallen from the end of his nose. ‘I’m not sure I like the way the Russians have been sending arms to Africa, sir,’ he said. ‘Some of ’em might have reached Khanzi.’

Hodges grunted. ‘Russian arms are the least of our troubles, Stuart,’ he said. ‘My worries are much closer to home. Let’s have a drink and a look at those returns.’

Leggo handed him a pink file, then turned away and poured him a whisky and soda while Hodges stared at the papers, frowning.

‘Lot of sickness in the 4th/74th,’ he said sharply, the regimental titles offending his eye as he read. Since the Army had been expanded again, all but the crack regiments had lost their regional identities and had reverted back to numbers, and now, with the linking of regiments, nobody was certain where traditions and loyalties lay.

‘Perhaps it’s this climate, sir,’ Leggo said, handing him the glass. ‘A lot of ’em haven’t been out of England before. They’ve had no chance to get acclimatised.’

‘Neither did we in 1940,’ Hodges grunted. ‘But the sick returns never looked like this.’

‘Lots of youngsters, sir,’ Leggo pointed out. ‘They don’t measure up as well as the older chaps.’

‘Never did,’ Hodges grunted. ‘Trouble is, there aren’t enough“older” chaps these days. Only too-young recruits and too-old Reservists. The Army’s not been the place for a man to consider a profession for some years now.’

‘We didn’t do too well at Suez, sir,’ Leggo admitted.

‘We did damn well against the Nazis, though,’ Hodges snapped.

Leggo stared at the general’s back and said nothing. Leggo was one of the new wave of officers who were coming to the fore and, though he was very fond of Hodges, he sometimes thought the old boy harked back a little too often. Modern soldiers just wouldn’t wear the kind of conditions he’d experienced in the Nazi War. What had sufficed in 1940 these days only stirred up trouble.

Hodges turned over a sheet. ‘Crime’s up,’ he commented.

‘Mostly trivial stuff,’ Leggo explained.

‘It’s the small stuff that shows what they’re made of,’ Hodges snapped.

He was fond of Leggo but sometimes he thought the younger officer was a bit too conscious of creature comforts. Too much concern with comfort, he considered, had helped to make the Army a soft one. There hadn’t been much comfort in the desert in 1940 and there’d been very little wrong with that army.

He opened a folder inside the file. The first thing that caught his eye was a bitter report from his parachute brigadier, complaining about the aircraft they were having to use and the fact that half his men were in need of practice drops; and a similar one – even if not quite so bitter – from the tank brigadier. Trying to prepare for a war that was not a war in an atmosphere of peace that wasn’t quite peace had revealed a state of military unpreparedness that was staggering.

He made up his mind abruptly and tossed aside the file. ‘Call a conference of brigade commanders when we get back tomorrow, Stuart,’ he said abruptly. ‘I want to talk to them.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Leggo had his head down as he made a note on his pad and the general couldn’t see the wry look on his face. ‘Any agenda?’

‘No.’ Hodges spoke sharply. ‘I just want to put the breeze up ’em a bit. There’s too much sickness and too much crime, and not enough work being done. Too many can’t-be-doners and better-notters among the regimental commands. They’ve got to pull their socks up a bit. We’ll spring a surprise inspection on ’em when I get back. That ought to make ’em jump. Calhoun wants a bit of stiffening and I think Dixon could do with a rocket up the backside. He’s got it in him but he’s too damn lazy by a long chalk. He’s fine on computer stuff but not so hot on the two-legged animal. I didn’t want him anyway. I wanted Tom Southey.’

‘What happened to Brigadier Southey, sir?’ Leggo asked.

‘He got diverted at the last moment – together with the brigade’s ack-ack guns. Ship’s engines failed. They said it was sabotage and sent me Dixon instead.’

‘Been rather a lot of that, sir,’ Leggo observed.

Hodges grunted. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said. ‘This thing’s been a nightmare. We’re badly armed and under-trained. Dixon’s short of ack-ack and field artillery, and most of Calhoun’s weapon carriers are in Scotland with Tom Southey. Our transport’s largely civilian, scraped up from anywhere we could get it, together with a few lorries we’ve raised in Malala and paid for at enormous cost, and we’ve no maps of Khanzi but a lot of old rubbish supplied by Braka. Where did they come from, anyway?’

Leggo gave a twisted smile. ‘Bus routes or something, sir, I suspect.’

Hodges snorted. ‘They got us here too damn quick, Stuart. I’ve never seen such a shambles in my life. War Office might have pulled their fingers out a bit.’

Leggo’s smile widened. ‘They punctiliously informed you of your promotion to lieutenant-general, sir,’ he pointed out.

‘And signally failed to keep me informed of the changes in plan.’

Hodges’ eyes fell on the file in his hand, and his mind moved restlessly over his problems. ‘Stuart,’ he asked suddenly, ‘how many coloured men have we in Hodgeforce?’

Leggo looked up, startled by the question. ‘Around ten per cent, sir,’ he said. ‘I can make it more exact, if you wish.’

Hodges considered the figure. When the first of the coloured recruits had found their way into the Army it had been considered unusual but, more and more, as Englishmen aimed for the high wages offered by industry, the Army had had to fall back on the more willing coloured immigrants; and now, with the return of National Service, British-born Africans and Jamaicans had been swept into the Forces with their white comrades.

As it happened, they had turned out to be excellent soldiers with a liking for that army ceremonial which was anathema to most white men, but Operation Stabledoor had raised a problem with them that nobody seemed to have considered in Whitehall where they were merely names on a list.

‘I wonder if they’re all right,’ Hodges said.

Leggo lifted his head again. ‘All right, sir?’

‘Dammit, Stuart, their fathers and forefathers came from this strip of coast! Even the West Indians! They must have some fellow-feeling for the Khanzians. I wonder if we can rely on ’em.’

Leggo thrust out his lower lip thoughtfully. ‘I’d say you could rely on them as much as, if not more than, some of their white colleagues, sir,’ he said after a pause.

‘Perhaps you’re right at that.’ Hodges seemed to dismiss the thought. ‘Let’s get down to stirring up these battalion commanders. Make the conference the day after tomorrow when these blasted politicians have finished with me. They should have ironed out a few faults at Pepul by then, with the embarkation rehearsal.’

‘Very well, sir.’

‘You’d better fly up there yourself tonight and have a look at it. I can manage here with Lyall and Fraschetti. See the Senior Naval Officer and the Support Committee and the AOC and find out how it’s gone. You can fly back and report to me here.’

Leggo, who was none too eager to return to the discomforts of Pepul, just managed to refrain from pulling a face.

‘Very good, sir. Anything else?’

‘No, Stuart. And Stuart…’

‘Sir?’

‘Do me a favour and take that supercilious look off your face for a change.’ Leggo’s face set at once in an expression of smart attention. ‘It probably doesn’t worry you half as much as it does me, but I don’t like what I see. I was at Suez, and I don’t fancy being humiliated twice in a lifetime.’