Читать книгу I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation - Michela Wrong - Страница 10

‘It was contrary to every book that had ever been written, but it came off.’

Lieutenant-General Sir William Platt

If you drive two hours north-west of Asmara, on what was once Mussolini’s Imperial Way, you eventually reach the town of Keren. The road takes you through eucalyptus groves, whose leaves, in the early morning, give off a heady medicinal perfume, before crossing a plateau of almost unimaginable bleakness. When it came to power in 1993, Eritrea’s new government launched an ambitious reforestation campaign and brave green saplings, their bark protected from nibbling goats by little iron wigwams, have been planted at neatly-spaced intervals along the way. But it will be decades before their handkerchiefs of shade make any impression on this glaring, denuded landscape. Much of the Hamasien highlands looks as though it was scooped up at a quarry and deposited from the tailend of a dumper-truck. With so little standing in its path, the wind is free to harry the cappuccino-coloured dust, so soft it could have been poured from a lady’s powder compact, so fine a trailing fingertip registers no contact at all. Donkeys stand motionless in the middle of the road, as though stunned into imbecility by the heat and sheer unfairness of being expected to graze off an expanse of rubble.

Keren itself is a bustling crossroads of a town, a natural meeting point for Eritrea’s various tribes. White-robed nomads bring their animals to the weekly livestock market, a moaning, bleating, piebald medley of camels, sheep and goats. City dwellers make weekend jaunts to a Holy Shrine hidden in the womb of an ancient baobab and stroll along the colonnaded street where silversmiths crouch over bracelets and rings. But Keren only makes historical sense if you keep going, through the centre and out the other side. On the edge of town, by the side of the road that points towards the border with Sudan, lies a British cemetery from the Second World War. Jump over the low wall – visitors here are too occasional for anyone to man the gates permanently – and you can pace the rows of neat white British graves, each with its own crinkly bush of red geranium. The birthday-card triteness of the mottoes carved into the stones betrays a terrible anguish for young lives abruptly ended. ‘He gave his life, forget him never, for in giving he lives for ever,’ plead the relatives of 22-year-old W Hollings, who served with the West Yorkshire Regiment. ‘With many sad regrets, we shall remember when the rest of the world forgets,’ promises the family of PFC Mapes, 26. ‘In memory’s garden, we meet every day,’ is the only consolation the mother of AV Simmons, just 18 when his life came to a sudden stop, can offer herself.

Further on, by the wayside, a grieving Madonna inclines her head in an expression of infinite tenderness. Her location is not accidental. A moment later, the road plunges, weaving and winding its tortured way through a ragged gash in the mountains which the British, mangling the local name, dubbed Dongolaas Gorge. Cliffs of bulbous brown rock crowd in on all sides, blocking out the sun, while the sheer slopes below are scattered with the rusting debris of vehicles that missed the curves. There is something oppressive about this pass, and it is a relief to emerge finally in the valley, a scrubby floodplain so dry it seems impossible water should ever run across these yellow sands. It is only when you hit the bottom and look back to where you came, that Keren’s geography suddenly becomes clear. Between you and the town a knobbly range of barren peaks now stretches, a giant amphitheatre coddling Keren in its lap. With Dongolaas Gorge offering the only easy access route across this rock wall, Keren is one of the most formidable fortresses ever thrown up by nature.

This was the sight that met a force of around 30,000 British troops as it chased Italy’s retreating army from Kassala, on the Sudanese border, east across Eritrea. It was February 2, 1941 and the first dents were being knocked into what had until then seemed like an unstoppable Nazi and Fascist war machine. In the preceding two years, Hitler had swallowed up Czechoslovakia and Poland, invaded Norway and Denmark, toppled the French government and forced the humiliating evacuation of British forces from continental Europe. Hanging on to the German dictator’s coat-tails, Mussolini had invaded Albania and Greece and used his colonies in north and east Africa to attack Egypt and eject the British from Somaliland. Afraid of losing control of the vital supply route through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean, Britain was hitting back. It had trounced Italian forces in Libyan Cyrenaica and was now sending three separate forces – one bearing with it the deposed Haile Selassie – in a vast pincer movement aimed at squeezing the life out of the marooned Italian administration in the Horn. Before the Red Sea could be made safe for Allied shipping, both Asmara and Massawa had to be captured. But between the advancing British forces and their target lay Keren.

No one remembers the battle of Keren now, except the men who fought there. Perhaps that is only to be expected. The Normandy landings were staged on beaches within reach of modern European holidaymakers, the Blitz left permanent scars on the map of London, every time Berliners gaze at their city’s skyline, they are reminded of the devastation of Allied bombing. Keren took place in a country whose name was unfamiliar even to the soldiers dispatched there to fight, in a part of the world so alien as to be virtually unimaginable to those back home, against an enemy regarded as a joke. El Alamein and Tobruk were to be the African campaigns of the Second World War remembered by British audiences, not Keren. Even Eritreans, who live amongst memorials and cemeteries spawned by the battle, are distinctly fuzzy about the details, too obsessed with their own still raw military history to show much interest in an episode logged in the general category of ‘neo-colonialist adventures’.

Yet it was a linchpin episode, on which turned a long sequence of events stretching to eventual Allied victory. The BBC’s decision to send its star reporter Richard Dimbleby to cover the battle shows it recognized that fact. But as far as the BBC was concerned, Dimbleby was covering an early bout in a mighty strategic contest, not a liberation campaign. Not for the first time, Eritrea would play unwitting host to a battle in which its citizens would be slaughtered, yet their own aspirations remained almost immaterial, of interest purely for their passing propaganda potential. The battle of Keren might have been fought on Eritrean soil, but it was plotted, planned and ultimately capitalized on in the capitals of Axis and Allied powers.

It was to prove a grinding, infinitely testing campaign in which victory against the Italians, viewed until then with amused condescension, never looked assured. ‘It was a dingdong battle, a soldiers’ battle, fought against an enemy infinitely superior in numbers, on ground of his own choosing,’ General William Platt, head of the armed forces in Sudan and mastermind behind the Eritrean campaign, later said. ‘We got down very nearly to bedrock, very nearly.’¹ Those who took part and went on to fight in the deserts of North Africa, the streets of European cities and the jungles of Burma were to recall the fighting at Keren as the most dreadful they ever experienced. ‘Physically, by World War Two standards, it was sheer hell,’ remembered Major John Searight, of the Royal Fusiliers, in a letter written after the war. ‘NOTHING I met in nine months as a company commander in NW Europe compared with it.’²

It is interesting to log the process by which the mind gives form and shape to landscape. Colonial explorers in Africa had a knack for it, baptizing waterfalls and lakes whose existence had been known to locals for centuries after childhood sweethearts and royal patrons. When the British forces arrived on the Keren floodplain they looked at the scenery with the outsider’s lazy eye. The soldiers, recruited not only from Britain but from India, Sudan and Palestine – these were the days of the British empire, after all – saw a craggy range of mountains, rising to 7,000 ft, pierced by an occasional curious nipple of rock. Foothills formed rucks in a ribbon of brown land that stretched across the horizon. From a distance, what little vegetation there was – sprays of candelabra cactus, stunted thorn bushes here and there – resembled a light dusting of pepper sprinkled by a giant hand. To the far east crouched a curious promontory resembling a squatting cat, to the far west rose a peak like a ripped-out molar.

Fear changes one’s perspective, lending what was of purely abstract interest a sudden urgent relevance. By the time the men had moved on, 53 days later, every inch of the terrain had acquired a dreadful, unwanted intimacy, more familiar to them than the soft folds of their Yorkshire valleys or the alleyways

of their villages in the Punjab. Peaks and hillocks had been captured and lost, recaptured only to be surrendered again, as the front line juddered forwards and backwards. Each feature of the land had acquired its own distinct, tantalizing identity in the bloody baptisms that tracked the battle’s progress. Hellfire Corner, they called the point at which British troops were forced out of the shelter of the hills, exposing themselves to withering enemy fire. Above the horribly exposed plain, dubbed ‘Happy Valley’ with the squaddie’s traditional irony, towered razor-sharp Mount Sanchil. The highest peak, it ran north-west, stretching into Brig’s Peak – christened after the 11th Brigade sent to conquer it – Hog’s Back and Mole Hill. At Sanchil’s base, overlooking the mouth of Dongolaas Gorge, reared the bluff that would be named Cameron Ridge, after the Cameron Highlanders who managed to scrape a vital first position there. Across the pass, above the foothills called the Pimple and the Pinnacle, rose Fort Dologorodoc, a cluster of trenches and cement parapets enjoying panoramic views. The cat-like formation became, with a certain inevitability, the Sphinx.

The Italians had never meant to make a stand at Keren. General Luigi Frusci, governor of Eritrea, had originally planned to dig in further up the road to Asmara. Since pulling out of Kassala in January, the Italians had been consistently on the defensive, holding up the British advance when the terrain gave them the upper hand, but always pulling out before losses rose. The British soldiers had almost been caught off-guard by an ambush at a place called Keru, where an Italian officer on a white horse had led a troop of Eritrean horsemen in a wild gallop straight into the mouths of the British guns.³ Taken by surprise by what must have been one of the last cavalry charges of the 20th century, British troops had recovered just in time, tipping their cannon so that they pointed into the ground in front of the horses’ hooves. ‘It was suicide, really, but it was gallantry one wouldn’t expect of the Italians. They were totally destroyed,’ remembered Colin Kerr, an intelligence officer with the Cameron Highlanders.⁴

As his troops withdrew ever further up the Imperial Way, Frusci belatedly realized the huge advantages Keren offered and ordered his men to stop and turn. There would have been no subsequent battle, had the British forces succeeded in keeping up their momentum. But the Italians had blown up a bridge behind them; and mined the river bed. By the time the obstacle had been cleared and the British convoy trundled into Happy Valley, the dull thud of explosions was audible ahead. General Orlando Lorenzini, the ‘Lion of the Sahara’ to his men, was dynamiting the walls of Dongolaas Gorge, triggering a massive rock fall that closed off the pass. If Keren could be compared to a medieval fortress, the Italians had just rushed across the moat and pulled up the drawbridge.

Hoping to catch the Italians while they were still out of breath, British commanders ordered an immediate assault on Mount Sanchil. The Cameron Highlanders and Punjab Regiment stormed the slopes, capturing Cameron Ridge and Brig’s Peak, only to be forced off the latter by an Italian counterblast. ‘I saw a certain amount of the war after that, in various places, but the first 24 hours of Keren were about as unpleasant as any I saw anywhere,’ recalled Kerr. ‘It was incessant shelling and we were unable to reply to it because we were under observation.’ The first attack ground to a halt as a sober understanding of the enormity of the task ahead dawned. The Italians, whose ranks were being swelled by reinforcements from the rear, were now dug in. They had set up machine guns and heavy mortars on all the loftiest points in the mountain range and designated them ‘last man, last round’ positions. There was to be no surrender, only death.

In contrast with what many civilians assume, military action does not always require extraordinary degrees of personal courage. Usually, the landscape offers so many possibilities for ambushes and outflanking movements, careful advance and sensible retreat, that a soldier can convince himself he stands a fair chance of surviving. Not so in Eritrea, where the campaign would essentially be fought along one road. On that road, Keren represented the head-on confrontation that brings with it the oppressive awareness of likely death. ‘It was the first set-piece battle I’d been near. The others were skirmishes where one could dodge out of the way. Here there was no avoiding it,’ said one former artilleryman.⁵ Reconnaissance revealed that there was going to be no way of sidestepping this particular showdown: the mountain range stretched for 150 miles. ‘It was a question,’ recalled Platt, ‘of fighting this horrible escarpment somewhere or coming somewhat back. We could not live continuously under the escarpment.’⁶

When, in 2002, a British general took command of a UN peacekeeping force posted to Eritrea, he decided to use the battle of Keren as a training exercise for his under-employed troops. His aide-de-camp was ordered to dig out the 60-year-old military records, and groups of blue-capped UN officers were taken on tours of the battlefield to discuss how, facing the same logistical challenge but equipped with today’s equipment, they would plan their attack.

I joined one of the tours, tagging along as the peacekeepers scrambled part way up Cameron Ridge to survey the terrain. None of us was carrying heavy loads, but we were soon stumbling and staggering, rasping for breath. The sand churned beneath our feet, making it hard to get a grip, rocks used for leverage had a nasty habit of rolling back onto you. It was only 10.00 in the morning, but it was already 41° C. The water in our plastic bottles had turned bathwater warm. Within a few minutes, I realized, to my embarrassment, that I was on the brink of fainting. Dots were dancing before my eyes. I couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen into my lungs. The men in the group, I noticed with relief, looked no better: their faces had flushed an unbecoming gammon-pink.

‘Look around you,’ trumpeted the boisterous British general. ‘No shelter anywhere from the sniper fire. Just imagine what it must have been like.’ Our faces coated in a shiny slick of sweat, we gazed from the bare brown boulders on which the British had once crouched up to the unforgiving heights of Sanchil, where the Italians had sat waiting with their machine guns. ‘Horrid terrain to fight in,’ muttered the general. ‘Horrid.’

Few of the soldiers mustering in Happy Valley had any real idea of the ordeal awaiting them. Their advance across Eritrea had gone swimmingly up until that point, with victory tumbling upon victory and few casualties suffered on the way. ‘We were very confident. Morale was grand,’ recalled Patrick Winchester, an artillery officer with the 4th Indian Division, just 21 at the time. ‘We’d been up in the Western Desert, which was the first good thing to happen in the war. We thought “We’ll go and sort them out over there.”’⁷

Such optimism was compounded by the low regard in which the Italians were held as fighting men. The sight of thousands of Italian prisoners-of-war straggling along in dejected columns had registered on the British troops gathering in Happy Valley. Your average Itie, it was felt, was essentially a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky sort, who packed up fairly easily, showing nothing approaching the steely focus of the German. Italian equipment was lightweight and insubstantial because, in his rush to arm a ballooning military, Mussolini had cut corners and gone for the cheapest options. Often it lay unused at the depot, because the munitions from Rome did not match up with hardware on the battlefield. If the Italians nominally boasted 250,000 men in eastern Africa, Eritrean and Ethiopian ascaris accounted for 75 per cent of these forces, and their loyalty to their masters – who were only paying their wages spasmodically – was shaky. What was more, the Italians, cut off in the Horn, would inevitably face tremendous problems of resupply once they came under pressure. In trying to protect an African empire stretching across 1 million square miles, Italian forces were dangerously over-extended.

What the British troops initially failed to appreciate, however, was that those facing them were no ordinary Italian troops. The regiments and battalions sent to fight in Keren – the Savoia Grenadiers, the Bersaglieri and the Alpini – were the best Italy could muster. The moment they crossed the border with Sudan and stepped onto Eritrean soil, these men were fighting on what they considered home turf, defending Italy’s oldest colony from a foreign invader. In the case of the Alpini, they had grown up in a northern version of the mountainous terrain now confronting them. ‘What are those goats running up there for?’ a British colonel asked one of his officers on arrival in Happy Valley, spotting movement on the heights. ‘Those are not goats, sir,’ was the ominous reply. ‘They are Alpini.’⁸

The Italians had the confidence that comes with knowing you enjoy a nearly impregnable position. They held the high ground. The slopes were so rocky that the British could never dig trenches, sheltering instead behind sangars, piles of rocks that provided little protection against a direct hit. What was more, however cheap Italian hardware might be, British equipment – much of which dated back to the First World War – was ill-suited to Keren. The lumbering 25-pound guns were too cumbersome to be taken up the slopes and their long, low trajectories were most effective on flat terrain. Used in mountains, the shells either screamed harmlessly over the heads of Italians crouched on the far sides of the ridges or clipped the tops of the crests on which British troops moved, subjecting soldiers to terrifying ‘friendly’ fire. ‘To be shot up the back passage by your own guns when your rickety breast work is designed to give you protection from the front creates a paralysing terror,’ remarked Peter Cochrane, who served with the Cameron Highlanders.⁹ In contrast, the nimble Italians had pack guns that could be moved about on the backs of mules, small red grenades which were simply dropped onto advancing troops and mortars which lobbed their missiles high in the air and neatly onto British positions.

The terrain in itself was challenge enough, but there was also the climate to contend with. On the plains, temperatures rose so high that convoys would sometimes grind to a halt within minutes of departure; radiators boiling, fit young soldiers keeling over with sunstroke. Today, the UN issues its forces in Eritrea with four and a half litres of drinking water a day. The soldiers at Keren were expected to march, run and fight on a pint a day, dysentery or no dysentery. No one wanted to waste a precious drop on washing, so teeth grew black, faces so caked with dirt soldiers often struggled to recognize one another. Rations were monotonous: dried biscuits and bully beef served in metal tins which became too hot to hold and whose instruction labels – ‘chill before serving’ – were a source of bleak amusement. In other campaigns, British forces supplemented their diet with fruits and vegetables collected on the way. Here, with the exception of the occasional guinea fowl, the landscape had almost nothing to offer. The result was a low-vitamin diet that undermined the body’s immune system. Scratch your arm on a thorn tree and within a few days it would go septic. Then the ‘desert sore’ would spread until much of the limb was a suppurating mass of pus requiring hospital treatment. The baggy shorts and kilts worn by the troops were a menace, the soldiers soon concluded: in daytime they failed to protect the legs from sun and scratches, at night the men shuddered with cold on the hillsides.

This was not to be a sophisticated campaign. With mechanized transport ruled out by the gradient, fighting often took on an almost medieval directness. When the big guns fell silent, the battle of Keren was reduced to a low-tech war in which the readiness to emerge from cover, stagger up a mountain slope and simply bludgeon a way through mattered far more than weaponry. When Italian positions were overrun, it was a question of hand-to-hand fighting, with few prisoners taken and killing done by bayonet. At one stage, an Indian brigade actually made itself shields of corrugated iron. Held over the head in true storming-the-ramparts tradition, they proved surprisingly effective in warding off the pepperpot grenades raining down from above.

Three days after the first assault on Sanchil and Brig’s Peak had failed, leaving only Cameron Ridge in British hands, Platt ordered an outflanking attempt to be made at Acqua Col, the mountain pass over which the Sphinx held watch. But commanders had only a vague grasp of how the land lay and the Rajputana Rifles were obliged to grope their way forward in the dark. The Italians, enjoying sweeping views, realized what the British were attempting well ahead of time and prepared a devastating response. After four days of fighting, both sides pulled back, exhausted.

Platt was coming under enormous pressure to wrap the Keren campaign up. In London, Winston Churchill was desperate to move British forces back to the Western Desert, to combat the growing menace posed by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The rains were due to start in a few weeks’ time – another good reason to get Keren over with. But the first two attempts had shown the town could neither be taken by surprise nor from the side. Frontal assault, the great taboo of military strategists, was going to be the only way in. British forces would have to take the mountain range the hard way: feature by individual feature. It was not a task, Platt knew, to be undertaken without a great deal of logistical preparation.

The next month was spent in a frantic whirr of activity as the British stockpiled ammunition, fuel, rations and water. Martini’s old Italian railway was extended, every available wagon, truck and mule and camel press-ganged into service as the British set up a supply chain that stretched from Port Sudan, via Kassala, all the way to Happy Valley. The troops would not attempt another push, Platt decided, until he had enough supplies to last two divisions for 14 days of sustained assault.

While the stockpiling continued, soldiers up on Cameron Ridge gritted their teeth and hung on to their precious bluff of captured land. They had never experienced conditions like this before. Italian fire was killing or wounding between 25 and 30 men on the ridge every day. Adopting a technique that would later become a way of life for the Eritrean guerrilla movement, the British forces learnt it was wisest to move at night, covering the ground in scampering crawls. Wounded soldiers would lie stifling their groans during daylight, waiting for the darkness that made evacuation possible. It took 12 men to carry one man down the mountain. There was no way of safely burying the dead, so bodies lay where they had fallen or were pushed into nearby ravines, where they blew up in the heat, attracting dark clouds of flies. Rotten odours seem to travel further in dry heat, there was no avoiding the smell. Digging latrines was out of the question, so the stench of human excrement was soon added to the sweet stink of rotting flesh. The men smoked hard to drown out the nauseous odour and when the tobacco ran out, they smoked tea leaves. At night they could hear jackals tearing at the corpses of their former friends, a sound to turn the stomach. In daytime, another local species made its unwelcome appearance. ‘There’d be a scrambling around and a rush of stones. Everyone would get in a state of tension and think this was the start of an attack, only to see the coloured behind of a baboon passing on the skyline,’ said Kerr.¹⁰

Keeping the Cameron Highlanders up on the ridge supplied with water presented Platt with a major operational challenge in itself. A train of mules had been brought in from Cyprus, but even these surefooted animals regularly lost their footing, their bodies bouncing down the slopes. In any case, there were never enough mules for the task, so the troops were enrolled as pack animals, carrying water and bullets to those on the front line.

But the Italians were also suffering. Normally, attacking forces sustain the lion’s share of injuries. At Keren, however, the hard rock surface was responsible for hundreds of deaths by indirect fire, as each landing shell sent shards of shattered stone flying in all directions. ‘My troops are exhausted both physically and morally,’ General Nicola Carnimeo, who repeatedly demanded reinforcements, warned Frusci. ‘We have had very heavy casualties and the length of the perimeter is such that the defence will necessarily be thin on the ground. If the British concentrate a sufficiently strong force, they may well smash a gap in the ring.’¹¹ Italian forces had also been thinned by desertions. The RAF had been dropping leaflets over enemy lines announcing that Emperor Haile Selassie was returning to his rightful throne in Ethiopia and calling upon the ascaris to rise up against their Italian masters. Whether the propaganda had any effect or the British bombardment was simply too ghastly to endure, hundreds of Eritrean and Ethiopian recruits were defecting.

In mid-March, Platt decided he was ready and summoned his officers. ‘Do not let anybody think this is going to be a walkover,’ he told them. ‘It is not. It is going to be a bloody battle, a bloody battle against both enemy and ground. It will be won by the side which lasts longest. I know you will last longer than they do. And I promise you I will last longer than my opposite number.’¹² As far as Platt was concerned, this represented the last throw of the dice, for he had run out of alternative schemes. ‘What will you do if it doesn’t come off?’ General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, asked him in the days leading up to the attack. ‘I’m damned if I know, sir,’ he replied. March the 15th was designated as the day of the assault, a week earlier than Platt would have liked, but headquarters were pushing. Platt quickly regretted his scheduling: the day dawned oppressively muggy. ‘I could not have chosen a worse date. Some of the efforts of the troops that day were defeated almost as much by the heat and heat exhaustion as by hostile opposition.’

As 96 British big guns opened fire and the Italians responded with a barrage of machine-gun fire and a hail of mortars, the 4th Indian Division launched a multi-pronged assault on Hog’s Back, Brig’s Peak and Sanchil, while the 5th Indian Division followed up with an attack on Fort Dologorodoc. This was the rationale behind the long weeks of stockpiling. Over the next 12 days, British artillery worked its way through a stockpile of 110,000 shells, representing, Platt later calculated, the equivalent of 1,000 lorry-loads of ammunition. Firing continually, the British were inflicting a highly effective form of psychological torture: sleep deprivation. ‘We’d be given a list of pre-arranged targets and we would go through them in chronological order through the night, keeping them on their toes,’ recalled Winchester.¹³ In that rocky terrain the shock waves bounced from cliff to cliff, numbing the brain and shattering the senses. Cochrane experienced the intolerable effect of this constant bombardment from the other side after being taken prisoner by the Italians. ‘By the second night,’ he recorded in his memoirs, ‘I would have given anything to get off the hill.’¹⁴

The West Yorkshires finally broke through on March 16, seizing first the Pimple, then the Pinnacle and finally Fort Dologorodoc. For the first time, the British could venture close enough to inspect the pile of rocks blocking Dongolaas Gorge. It proved to be nothing like as solid as feared – sappers estimated they could clear it in two days. Suddenly Keren no longer seemed quite so impregnable. ‘Keren is ours!’ declared one British commander.

He was a trifle premature. Realizing that Dologorodoc represented a fatal breach, Carnimeo tried repeatedly to recapture the fort, sending wave upon wave of Savoia Grenadiers and native troops unsuccessfully against the position. As bodies piled up at the fort perimeter, Italian morale began to waver. It nearly buckled entirely when the popular Lorenzini, said by the ascaris to be immortal, was killed reconnoitring the ground for a seventh counterattack. Italian units were now down to two-thirds of their original strength. But British nerves were also starting to go. On the crests, young men who knew they were about to die penned farewell letters to their parents. Casualties were running so high that drivers, orderlies and mess sergeants were being mustered to form new companies thrown into the fray. ‘There was a nasty moment when one or two people got so-called shell shock and we had to take a very firm line,’ remembered Kerr. ‘It started spreading, demoralization is very infectious. There are moments when you simply have to say “Go back where you came from and don’t come running down here.” At heart we all wanted to turn away. It was only pride or shame or a sense of responsibility that kept you going.’¹⁵

In the early hours of March 25, the British played their final card. Two brigades attacked on either side of Dongolaas Gorge, one unit working its way silently along what proved to be a poorly-barricaded railway tunnel high on the ridge, the other moving up from Fort Dologorodoc. By the morning of March 27, a last desperate Italian counterattack had been repulsed and sappers had cleared the pass. The guns fell silent as white flags shot up from Italian soldiers on the peaks. With his units in tatters, Frusci had ordered a withdrawal, congratulating his soldiers for their heroism in a florid declaration. ‘Our many dead, who include one general and five senior officers, remain in Keren as armed guards and a warning to the enemy. We have left Keren only temporarily,’ he promised, unconvincingly. ‘We will soon return there and the sacred flag of our country will once again flutter in the light of our future glory.’¹⁶

If Platt had fulfilled his pledge to last longer than his opposite number, it had only been by a hair’s breadth. The British had come within a whisper of calling off the assault. The general later confessed that in the last three days of the battle, his reserves had shrunk to just three tanks. ‘A company commander said to me when he heard that, “Was that quite sound sir?” No, it was contrary to every book that had ever been written, but it came off.’¹⁷

The battle of Keren was over and with it, Italy’s most spirited military performance of the Second World War. The official Italian tally was 3,120 dead – a total that characteristically omitted around 9,000 Eritrean and Ethiopian ascaris who had fallen alongside their European comrades.¹⁸ British forces, which had pulled off what was as much a quartermaster’s as a soldier’s victory, had lost between 4,000 and 5,000 men.¹⁹ Added together, both sides had probably sustained more than 50,000 casualties, averaging out at around 1,000 dead and wounded each day. ‘It was incredibly tough, and it is a source of wonder how we ever succeeded,’ an officer in the West Yorkshire Regiment later recalled. ‘It will never, like some battlefields of the First World War, look small and insignificant, but will stand always, huge and rugged, the gateway to Eritrea.’²⁰

The feared escarpment had gone from insurmountable threat to just another geological feature. The Pimple, the Pinnacle and the Sphinx were no longer of any interest to the British soldiers who had crouched in the dust, trying to guess what hidden gullies and unexpected ridges – the dips and bumps that held the key to survival or destruction – lay ahead. As instructions were shouted, equipment packed and trucks and tanks jostled, nose to tail, for their place in the grey-green caterpillar working its way up Dongolaas Gorge, past the inevitable anti-climax that was Keren itself, the men were already forgetting a landscape they would never see again. For many, there was a dreamlike quality to the sudden telescopic shift in focus. ‘It always surprised me, in any battle, how limited one’s life was while the battle was going on,’ remarked Kerr. ‘You knew every stone for the next 50 yards. It always struck me as extraordinary how when a battle ended, like in Keren, how the next day the birds were there, peace reigned, the place was in a bit of a mess, suddenly there were trees and everyone walking about and standing up in daylight and one wondered at how different it was from yesterday, a different world entirely – what had we been doing all those weeks? At one moment somewhere is a battlefield and life is being lost right and left. And the next day, total peace and silence.’²¹ The convoy roared through Keren – ‘a pathetic little town’, commented Richard Dimbleby, before putting it out of his mind forever – and ground on to Asmara.

Frusci was to stage a series of rearguard actions further up the Imperial Way, but his men had lost their stomach for the fight. The trouble with Maginot lines, as military strategists know, is the symbolic significance they come to acquire in the eyes of those who shelter behind them. When they collapse, so does the notion of further resistance. The Italians knew that they were not going to stumble on a better position than Keren, and Keren had gone. A few days later, Dimbleby, who had given his radio listeners a crisply eloquent account of the campaign, watched open-mouthed as a small touring car loaded with Italian officers and dignitaries, waving a large white flag, drove past him. They had come to negotiate a surrender. On April 1, Asmara was declared an open city, saving its elegant boulevards from the ravages of British artillery. Massawa fell a week later. After half a century of occupation, the Italians had lost their first-born colony, and with that defeat the surrender of Ethiopia to the south became a matter of time.

Mussolini’s new Roman Empire was imploding, and Eritrea’s surrender freed up the troops Wavell desperately needed. They were allowed only the briefest of breathing spaces before being whipped away to fight Rommel. Had Keren not fallen when it did, British morale, bruised by Dunkirk and the Blitz, might never have recovered. Its conquest was a small but crucial part in turning the tide of the Second World War, from a position where a vast Nazi empire seemed a certainty to a point where Allied victory was for the first time conceivable.

Strikingly absent from this whole strategic picture – staggeringly absent, indeed, from all the vivid veterans’ memories and detailed military reports on Keren – is any mention of the people most immediately concerned by the events of 1941: the Eritreans themselves. The British soldiers who fought in Keren struggle to recall a single encounter with a local, an unsurprising lacuna, perhaps, given that until Asmara, Eritrean towns had either been bombed or marched through by the Allies, but never occupied or administered. Asked about the Eritrean countryside, one officer mused, ‘There was no countryside, really,’ as if he had been marching across a blank vista. What the invaders retained was the impression of a landscape bereft of people, stripped of vegetation, a moonscape so desolate it seemed the ideal setting for a war. As for the Italians, the words they ordered to be carved on the white gravestones erected over the tombs of every Eritrean and Ethiopian who fell at Keren say it all. ‘Ascaro Ignoto’ – ‘Unknown Ascaro’. The Italians didn’t even know the names of the natives who died for them.

The post-independence Kenyan politician Tom Mboya used to recount how a white customer once poked her head into the office where he was sitting working, looked around, and said: ‘Ah, nobody here,’ as an example of how colonial assumptions about authority rendered blacks effectively invisible. There are echoes of the Tom Mboya experience for the Eritreans at this juncture in their history: to the outside world they seemed as insubstantial and transparent as the chill mountain air. Despite all the promises made in the leaflets sprinkled by the RAF, Britain had not invaded Eritrea to free the natives from colonial rule. It had fought the battle of Keren for strategic reasons that stretched far beyond Eritrea’s borders and bore no connection to local wishes, a matter of supreme indifference, at this stage, to London.

It is a view of the world reflected in the story that has passed into Eritrean history concerning Keren. In a way, it doesn’t really matter whether the tale is apocryphal or not, because it says so much about the gathering cynicism of a people who had come to understand their country was no more than a proxy location for a war, this merely a dress rehearsal of the great fight between Fascism and Liberal Democracy that would be concluded elsewhere.