A Kind Of Courage

Part One

Because of the Treaty

One

1

There was nothing about the hills surrounding the fort to indicate that they were full of eyes, but they all knew they were there, staring down on the little group of grey-white buildings in the valley, watching silently what went on – the passage of mules in and out along the rocky paths, the arrival of tradesmen from the village, the movement of the fleet of not very modern lorries, even the mounting of individual guards, their positions, and probably even whether they stayed alert or dozed at their posts. It had been going on for weeks, though no one in Hahdhdhah had ever seen any movement that wasn’t intended to be seen.

As the sun sank and the bright brassiness of the heavens faded to jade green and then to lemon yellow, the hills remained silent, changing with the colour of the sky from drab red-brown to salmon pink and then to gold. ‘Hills’ was really a misnomer, because they were about as far from the low rolling folds of England, that they liked to remember as hills, as it was possible to be. These heights, though they could hardly be called mountains either, were still ugly eruptions on the face of the earth, in reds, pinks, violets and yellows – never green – dark screes and slopes devoid of vegetation, rising cliff on fantastic cliff, ridge on massive ridge, tower on tremendous tower, until the sharp curving wedge of the summit pierced the sky in a pyramid of baked volcanic lava; layer on layer of precipices, crags, ledges, rocks and cornices, most of them bare of growth, and all of them capable of hiding a man. It was ghostly sometimes, to stare at them, and terrible in the silence they produced. There was no sound from them, not a tree in them, not a blade of grass, and the bastions of rocks seemed sometimes to glow in the sun against the sky, as unreal as a superb stage setting, particularly in winter when the rains came and the approaching storms dragged themselves to shreds among the polished lava pinnacles.

They all knew that every niche overlooking the fortress contained a watcher, wrapped in ragged clothes and holding a rifle – some of the oldest dating back even to the First World War and as dangerous to the owner as to the intended victim – flinty eyes staring down in a constant and never-ceasing vigil.

Occasionally – and everyone in Hahdhdhah knew it was never by accident but just to convince them they were still there – a small group could be seen moving along a ledge of the hills, a small dimly seen file of men; edging cautiously along some path or across a slope, moving slowly so there should be no doubt about them being seen – and that Hahdhdhah existed only because they allowed it to exist.

As the Toweida bugler, Nalk Owdi, a stubby-featured Dharwa, sounded his evening blast in the courtyard, his face shining with the pride he felt in the possession of the gleaming copper instrument he carried and the sound it made, the group of men on the ramparts of the fortress, staring out at the silent hills, were all a little uneasy. None of them was very old and they were all aware of their lack of experience.

Of them all, Sergeant James Fox was the most experienced. Despite the fact that his permanent rank was no higher than corporal, Fox had been in the army for ever – a mechanic, an armourer, an administrator of sorts, a psychologist and an expert fighting man. But for an erratic wildness as a youngster that had lifted him up and thrown him down three or four times, Fox might have been a sergeant-major. He was a brave man, too, but he had been badly wounded in Borneo and, because he had learned that courage was an expendable thing that dwindled just a little more with every injury, he was cautious now and wary – and surprisingly sympathetic towards lesser men. His yellow wily eyes flickered as he listened to the others talking near him, reflective and interested, as became an old soldier concerned with affairs of his superior officers.

One of them, a youngster with a round cheerful face and a large yellow moustache, gestured through the embrasure. He was a newcomer to Hahdhdhah and looked it with his white knees and the pinkness of his nose.

‘Go on, Billy,’ he was urging. ‘Hazard a guess, old boy. How many do you think there are out there?’

Fox saw his commanding officer, Major William Edward Lillywhite Pentecost, stare at the hills, his eyes blank, his smooth, good-natured face thoughtful. He was a slight young man with soft fair hair and pale eyes and a straight nose which showed a distressing tendency to peel in the searing sun. His clothes fitted him neatly but his legs were thin and his knees bony and he wore his shorts longer than regulation to hide them a little. He had stalked on to the ramparts rather like a mild-mannered and disinterested stork.

‘Football team,’ he said casually. ‘At least a football team.’

‘No, seriously.’

Pentecost seemed to put a great deal of effort into hazarding a guess. ‘Couple of thousand, shouldn’t wonder,’ he offered. ‘Not less than two thousand. Perhaps ten thousand. Perhaps twenty even. Half a million?’ he ended cheerfully.

The first speaker stared over the ramparts. ‘Kids’ stuff,’ he said, but his voice was uneasy. ‘Long odds, all the same, if it comes to a scrimmage.’

‘Perhaps it won’t,’ Pentecost said.

‘Let’s hope not,’ the youngster with the moustache agreed. ‘Just thinking about ’em’s enough to give you burning spots on the mind.’ His eyes narrowed as he stared again at the hills. ‘It really lays our ghoulies on the line, doesn’t it? I’ve heard the bastards are real balls of fire when it comes to aggression.’

‘That’s what I heard, too,’ Pentecost agreed. He spoke with feeling. Like Fox, he was as well aware as anyone that they were outnumbered by the hidden watchers, and that it was a matter of great moment just how aggressive they might be.

Because the fortress of Hahdhdhah was due to be evacuated, and Pentecost knew – as Fox knew, as they all knew – that if those watchers in the hills chose to make it so, their departure could be made not only difficult but well-nigh catastrophic.

2

Despite the howl of protest from the merchants who were on to a good thing with the British presence in the Trucial State of Khalit, despite the wail of woe from the reactionaries in Westminster about the country ditching its friends, the British Government’s instructions were clear. The Prime Minister had made them clear in a preliminary order which had been passed via the Khaliti Command at the coast to all outposts in the country. ‘After the date of departure no British agent is to be kept in the country; the fortresses of Hahdhdhah, Umrah, Maria, Dhafran, Khowiba and Aba el Zereibat are no longer to contain British Army officers.’

It was clear and unequivocal, and the government of Khalit in Khaswe had been obliged to accept that they could now no longer keep guard over the Toweida Plain, their frontier north of Dhafran. No Khaliti or Toweida Levy could be expected to stand for long with only Toweida officers, and there weren’t enough Dharwa Scouts from the grim hills to the south to hold it in their place. Umrah, Aba el Zereibat and Hahdhdhah were to be evacuated and their troops concentrated under Khaliti officers at Afaija, Khowiba and Dhafran. And of the lot, none were so glad to leave as the garrison at Hahdhdhah.

‘We are only here because of the treaty made between previous sultans and previous British governments’, the Prime Minister had said, and Fox could quote him because every time he thought of his wife in England he found it was printed on his heart in encouraging letters of gold, ‘but we are aware of the anachronisms and the strong feelings of nationalism in the Middle East and we are leaving because we have been asked to leave. Pending the finalisation of the new agreement, we have given instructions for withdrawal.’

Fox’s fingers strayed to the comforting shape of the revolver he wore in a webbing holster on his belt. Prime Ministers’ instructions were sometimes easier to issue than carry out.

His yellow eyes flickered towards Pentecost and he saw him stare at the empty hills again, a small frown wrinkling his brows. There were no sheep up there, and no goats, and no sign of any herdsmen from the village, and the lower slopes were silent with the approaching silence of the night.

Standing on the wooden tower at the west corner of the fort, Fox looked round him, approving of the trivial ceremony of the guard changing in the courtyard just below. Fox liked ceremonial, considering it gave a little swagger to a military life that had become increasingly dull in recent years. Pentecost was aware of his tastes and to please him, Fox knew, he kept a Toweida pony in the stables. It was no bigger than a rat but it gave Fox great joy when Pentecost reviewed his troops mounted.

Looking up, he saw that Pentecost was clearly disquieted by the stillness, as they all were at this time of the evening. Somehow, during the day, when the sun hung in the brassy bronze sky like a molten ball, it didn’t matter so much. Then, the very brightness of the sky and the glaring quality of the light gave a certain amount of reassurance. It was in the evening, when the sun disappeared and the hills changed colours – changed shape even, with the moving shadows – that Fox remembered all the stories they’d ever heard of this part of the Middle East – the ruthlessness of the Hejri tribesmen from the Khusar country to the north, their joy at torturing their captives, and their unswerving, unrelenting hatred of anything non-Arab that made their tenure of Fort Hahdhdhah such an uncomfortable one.

Pentecost was thinking of the stories, too, he knew. Fox knew how Pentecost ticked. He had served with him in Aden, Ireland and Dhafran to the south of the Dharwas, and over the years had learned to interpret the flicker of an eyelid and the slightest gesture he made, even before he spoke. Fox was the perfect sergeant, ready with advice if it were wanted, silent when not wanted, but he was also something a little more. He’d been with Pentecost so long, he felt he even knew how his brain worked.

Staring over the wall again, surprised how uneasy he felt, Fox realised that the hills were having an hypnotic effect on the officer. He wrenched his gaze away from them with what seemed to Fox to be a physical effort, and moved to the other side of the tower to stare towards the south across the plain.

The evacuation worried Pentecost. It was common knowledge that Abel el Aziz el Beidawi and his gang of Hejri-Zihouni cut-throats were waiting in the hills among the unseen watchers, and the reputation of Aziz was enough to make the Toweida Levies Pentecost commanded tremble in their uniforms.

Pentecost had worked at the Toweida language, and he knew that the Hejri were a narrow-minded people with a temperament heavily overlaid with defiance. Unlike the Toweidas who came from the plains and were more civilised, they had no arts beyond war. The Khusar country and the Rass Mountains where they came from – known in the south as Bleidas Siba, the country of the lawless – was an area where food was so scarce fat men were rare and even the upper classes looked underfed. The most effective bribe north of the Urbida Hills was a good meal, but despite this, all the Hejri prophets – and there were hundreds of them – had always driven their people north, arguing that they belonged to the wilderness, not to the city. And their unintelligible passionate yearning for freedom had kept them there rather than accept the domination of Khaswe on the coast as the Toweidas had. Most Hejri reims – lean-shanked warriors carrying a rifle and wearing a curved Berber dagger at their waist – would rather have died of proud starvation in the sparse hills than live in comfort in the plain.

They were a race of vast upheavals who continued to convulse both themselves and the area by their politics – even more these days when the border had been for years what passed in the area for quiet. They were a people of instinct, little religion and a great deal of failure. Save in one sphere alone – battle, murder and sudden death, at which they were acknowledged experts. And the best of them all at the game was Abd el Aziz el Beidawi.

3

Aziz el Beidawi had married a dozen times and been wounded twice as often. He was reputed to have slain as many Khaliti and Toweida soldiers with his own hands as he had wounds – to say nothing of more than one white man who had had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the right time. His joyous love of battle had reduced his tribe to a shadow of its former strength because, in addition to being at loggerheads with the Khaliti and the Toweidas, he was also careful to preserve a state of constant enmity, not only with the Jezowi, the Khadari, the Muleimat and the Shukri, his neighbours along the Dharwa Mountains to the south, but also with the Hassi and the Dayati, who were his neighbours to east and west in the Urbida Hills and who, when it suited them, formed part of the Hejri nation, one of the two great clans of Khusar.

Aziz was the last of the robber barons. There were no more like him. All the others had succumbed to nationalism, become involved in the production of oil, or gone over to modern methods of war and dressed themselves in olive green or khaki battledress, hung about with hand-grenades. Aziz alone scorned the modern world. Not for Aziz the new standards of the West. He had stuck to the old ones rigidly and, because the tribal systems of the Hejri had never broken down, he had retained an enormous pride in himself and his people.

Unfortunately, this pride did not permit peace, and Pentecost was very much concerned about the dash they were going to have to make across the wide Toweida Plain when the day of evacuation came. None of the lorries was new and they were under-established for radios, both receivers and transmitters, and would have to be prepared for the almost certain appearance of the wild Zihouni horsemen across their path. There was a great deal of the Toweida Plain, and beyond the village of Hahdhdhah, ten minutes’ lorry ride away, there was little else until the River Sufeiya.

A flat plateau fifteen hundred feet above sea level, in summer Toweida was a scorching bowl. In winter it was a wind-swept waste, puddled by the rain into a quagmire and frozen by icy winds that came from the north. On the south flank, the land dropped slightly in dusty folds to the Dharwa range, a craggy line of mountains that barricaded the country towards Khaswe and the sea. The road from the coast and the capital of Khalit passed through Dhafran and the narrow Fajir Pass then rose slowly to the River Sufeiya, and wound across the Toweida Plain to the village of Hahdhdhah, the fortress, and the Addowara Pass through the Urbida Hills and the Rass Mountains to Khusar and its capital, Makhrash. At Dhafran it was crossed by the dusty road that led east and west to the frontiers of the sullen sliver of land that made up the Trucial State of Khalit; with Umrah at one end, and Aba el Zereibat at the other, and Afarja and Khowiba between guarding the tracks to the north, all of them out-of-date tollgates built by Victorian soldiers and political agents to hold back the northern tribes – the Hassi, the Dayati and the Zihouni of the Hejri nation, and the Deleimi tribes of Tayur, Hawassi and Dayi, and all the attendant clans and septs that made up the whole murderous Khusar people.

Pentecost had been in Hahdhdhah now for three months, aware always of its uselessness and the strain it put on him. He thought of his wife, occupying a shabby flat down in Khaswe on the coast, separated from him by the need to remain with their two small children, enduring the loneliness and the separation and trying hard though never entirely successfully to keep out of her letters the frustration she felt, the need for him, and the fears of living in a hostile foreign community, waiting only for the day when he was allowed to depart from Hahdhdhah and return to her bed.

And, thank God, he thought fervently, that time wasn’t far distant. The evacuation had been hanging over them now for weeks. A provisional date had even been fixed and the removal of stores had already commenced.

But Hahdhdhah was no sinecure. Fox had once suggested that it had been thrown up by a cross-eyed water-carrier with a penchant for treachery, and he was probably right. It was badly planned and badly sited and had been built in the days when it had been felt that a solitary fortress was sufficient to keep a whole countryside in check. It was hideously and hopelessly out of date – a wide but shabby stone-and-wood square surrounding a few thatched-roof mud huts. There were quarters for the men and the native and white officers and NCOs, a store, a gaol and an armoury and four wooden towers to look out over the plain. And apart from a bazaar, stables, stores and a Toweida brothel outside, that was about the lot. Whitewash and sweeping brushes had done wonders with it, but it was still not a place to keep a countryside under surveillance.

It had been built by the present Sultan of Khalit’s grandfather – long after the treaty with the British had established the frontier along the Dharwa Hills. In one of his minor wars with the northern peoples, to his surprise he had been more successful than anyone had expected and had thrust his territory outwards, erecting Hahdhdhah Fort as a symbol of his strength and as a warning to the Khusar tribes.

Modern weapons had ended all that, however, and for years Hahdhdhah had been nothing more than a storehouse and training station for the northern units of the Sultan’s roving frontier regiments and the Toweida and Juf Levies he used north of the Dharwas – supplying them with the not-very-new machine guns, rifles and mortars which were really all that were of much use among the year-gashed hills and mountains along the border of the Sultanate.

Once, Hahdhdhah had guarded the camel route, but these days camels had given place to lorries, and the flavour of decay which was obvious everywhere on the coast was even clearer in Hahdhdhah, because no one believed in the frontier any more.

The feeling of the approaching end was obvious even in the attitudes of the Toweida Levies who, for the most part, made up the garrison of Hahdhdhah. Stiffened by eighty men of the Dharwa Scouts, reliable Khaliti men from the mountains to the south, the Toweida Levies were neither good soldiers nor enthusiastic supporters of the Sultanate.

‘Ethnically, they’re as Hejri as the Khusar hill tribesmen,’ Pentecost had been told at Dhafran as he had left for the north. ‘Only the Sultan’s war made them anything else.’

They were shabby, ignorant and dirty; careless with their weapons and even more careless with their hygiene so that when Pentecost had arrived there had been a sick bay full of sullen men.

‘They look to me, sir,’ Fox had commented, ‘as though they’re not fit to be commanded by a dustcart driver.’

Pentecost had nodded gravely, unsmiling. From that moment, as he had well known, he had been on his own. Sultan Tafas, down in Khaswe, was far more concerned with other matters and was still desperately hoping that the discovery of oil in his territory might help subdue with a sudden influx of wealth the unruly elements that caused him so many sleepless nights. But, with the aid of two other British officers, Captain George Gould Lack and Captain James Frederick Minto, and three sergeants, Pentecost had managed to bring the hygiene into line, had emptied the sick bay and had even managed to give, by means of drill and a lot of patient good nature, the men under his command a little pride in themselves. Under the high scream of commands from Fox, who was his acting sergeant-major, Sergeant Stone and Sergeant Chestnut, the garrison had actually begun to look like a command fit to be led by a major.

Not that Pentecost was really a major at all. He was actually a junior captain who had been given a temporary step-up in rank on his attachment two years before to the Khaliti army. Under the terms of the treaty, while British troops were not allowed north of the Dharwas into the disputed Toweida Plain, officers and NCOs could be seconded to the border forces, ostensibly for training and instruction, and to help them exert their authority, the appointments carried extra rank. Lack, who was there for no other reason than to superintend the removal of the ageing arms that filled the armoury, and Minto, who had been encouraged to apply for the attachment to Khalit because he had already spent most of his career being sent on courses to get him out of his colonel’s hair, were really only lieutenants. Sergeant Fox, Sergeant Chestnut and Sergeant Stone – known as the Holy Trinity or Animal, Vegetable and Mineral – had also been upped in rank to make them the superiors of the native troops they were to command.

Staring at the hills, Pentecost found he wasn’t sorry to be leaving. He was a modest, not-too-clever young man who liked to read poetry and modestly didn’t consider himself especially brave or even especially good at his job. But, at that moment, despite his anxieties, he was feeling rather pleased with himself. Life had not been worth living in Hahdhdhah when he’d arrived, and his troops had tended to hug the shelter of the walls with the tenacity of men who were fond of life. He had changed all that. Zaid Fauzan, the oldest of the Toweida officers, a grizzled warrior who was a Dharwa, anyway, and claimed to be fifty-three though he was probably sixty-three, was a born soldier, and having at last found someone to follow, he had backed Pentecost up to the hilt.

He and Fox had started football matches between the Toweidas and the Dharwas, and between the native clerks, drivers and store-men and the Hahdhdhah villagers – since they all played in bare feet there was little need for equipment – and Pentecost had even taken the chance of allowing the men into the village. This had particularly pleased Int-Zaid Mohamed, one of the junior Khaliti officers, because his wife came from the area and she’d moved up with her daughter to a house near to the drab huddle of buildings across the plain. In a very short time there had been a marked difference in the bearing of the garrison. Although their uniforms were still falling off their backs and their German leather equipment was never complete, and though Fox, Chestnut and Stone had always seemed to concentrate their efforts only on teaching them how to make tea according to the exacting standards of the British Army, they had become – if not expert – at least sound with their weapons.

Pentecost had deserved his success. And, though he didn’t know it at that moment, he was to be presented with an enormous stroke of luck.

4

Hahdhdhah village was a drab place built of mud brick on high earth mounds with a few palm gardens. The narrow streets were shaded with an occasional tamarisk or cypress, and a few melons, marrows, cucumbers, grapes and tobacco were grown, m addition to withered oranges and the inevitable dates. Once Hahdhdhah had been much bigger but, with the constant danger from the north, the families had moved away. Some of the houses had crumbled and some of the palm gardens were neglected, but there were still enough sullen villagers clinging to their scrap of soil to support the fort with eggs, vegetables, goats’ milk and fresh meat.

The Toweidas were an indifferent people, however – the very opposite of the leaner northern tribes – and they knew that so long as they expressed no opinions and did no more than charge excessive prices for their produce, no raiding Hejri reim would ever blame them. As a result, the place was a hotbed of spies and Aziz kept men there to watch the movements in the fort.

Since, however, the information about Aziz that reached Pentecost was always sparse, Pentecost himself had fallen into the habit of making a regular visit to the village elders. It was always ceremonial and the headman always offered a seat on his carpets, and coffee or mint tea in the mud-washed huts. But while they talked over the charcoal braziers, Pentecost was able to keep his eyes open, watching for anything that might indicate that Aziz was taking the initiative. And on this particular day, with the evacuation of Hahdhdhah presumably not far in the future, he noticed at once the three lean pale-eyed men standing quietly in the shade of the trees not far from the coffee mortars. Though their cloaks were not black and they kept their tribal beads covered, he knew instinctively that they were Zihouni reims.

It was while he still watched the three men that Fox appeared with the news that there had been an accident.

‘One of our chaps?’ Pentecost asked.

‘No, sir.’ In front of the headman, Fox was the picture of punctilio. ‘One of theirs. Knocked down. Broke his leg. Bloody fool didn’t look where he was driving.’

This had all the makings of trouble and Pentecost drew his breath in sharply.

‘Our vehicle?’ he asked.

‘No, sir.’ Fox grinned, knowing exactly how Pentecost’s mind was working. ‘Village bus.’

Pentecost smiled his relief He knew the vehicle. It moved about as fast as an elderly camel, was appallingly maintained and worn out before its time. Its load invariably exceeded the maximum permitted weight by a great deal, which made it even less manageable on the steep slopes down to Dhafran, and the excess of parcels, boxes, bundles, sacks, bales and trussed goats crammed on top made it into a vast, unstable, up-ended pyramid that wobbled, wavered and wandered as its uncertain wheels and even more uncertain tyres jolted and lurched over the rocky road.

‘That’s a bit of luck, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What happened to the driver?’

‘He was carried away unconscious.’ Fox grinned. ‘I think the victim had a lot of friends.’

‘And the victim?’

Fox looked sideways at him. ‘I slapped a guard over him so they couldn’t take him away,’ he said. ‘He puzzled me, sir. He’s only a kid and he told Ali, the interpreter, that he came up from the Sufeiya area to help his uncle grow marrows. Personally, sir, I think he’s a bloody liar.’

Pentecost nodded. He had a great regard for Fox’s