new lines etched deeply into the corners of his mouth, his forehead,
and around his eyes, lines of pain and worry, but when he glanced up
and caught Jake's scrutiny, he grinned and lifted an eyebrow, and the
old devilish gleam was in his eyes. He was about to speak when from
below them another shell came howling up through the deep shades of the
gorge, and both of them ducked instinctively as it burst in close, but
neither of them remarked. There had been hundreds of bursts that close
in the last days.
'It's breaking for certain,' Gareth observed instead, and they both
looked up at the strip of sky that showed between the mountains.
'Yes,' Jake agreed. 'But it's too late. It will be dark in twenty
minutes.' It would be too late for the bombers, even if the cloud
lifted completely. From bitter experience they knew how long it took
for the aircraft to reach them from the airfield at Chaldi.
'It will clear again tomorrow Gareth answered.
'Tomorrow is another day,' Jake said, but his mind dwelt on the big
black machines. The Italian artillery fired smoke markers on to their
trenches just as soon as they heard the drone of approaching engines in
the open cloudless sky. The Capronis came in very low,
their wing-tips seeming to scrape the rocky walls on each side of the
gorge. The beat of their engines rose to an unbearable, ear-shattering
roar, and they were so close that they could make out the features of
the helmeted heads of the airmen in the round glass cockpits.
Then, as they flashed overhead, the black objects detached from under
their fuselage. The 100, kilo bombs dropped straight, their flight
controlled by the fins, and when they struck, the explosion shocked the
mind and numbed the body. In comparison the burst of an artillery
shell was a squib.
The canisters of nitrogen mustard were not aerodynamically stable,
and they tumbled end over end and burst against the rocky slopes in a
splash of yellow, jellylike liquid that sprayed for hundreds of feet in
all directions.
Each time the bombers had come one after the other, endlessly hour
after hour, they left the defence so broken that the wave of infantry
that followed them could not be repelled. Each time they had been
driven out of their trenches, to toil back, upwards to the next line of
defence.
This was the last line, two miles behind them stood the granite portals
that headed the gorge, and beyond them, the town of Sardi and the open
way to the Dessie road.
'Why don't you try and get a little sleep, 'Jake suggested, and
involuntarily glanced down at Gareth's arm. It was swathed in strips
of torn shirt, and suspended in a makeshift sling from around his
neck.
The discharge of lymph and pus and the coating of engine grease had
soaked through the crude bandage. It was an ugly sight covered, but
Jake remembered what it looked like without the bandage. The nitrogen
mustard had flayed it from shoulder to wrist, as though it had been
plunged into a pot of boiling water and Jake wondered how much good the
