The Major ignored them and swiftly turned his professional eye back to
the enemy. He found it was still two thousand metres out across the
plain but closing satisfactorily. He was on the point of uttering
another reassurance to his edgy gunners, when the Rolls roared through
the narrow gap in the centre of his batteries.
The Count had at that moment temporarily found his feet and replaced
his helmet on his head. Standing on the high platform of the
Rolls, his voice, powered with adrenalin and shrill with terror,
carried clearly to every gunner.
"Open fire!" shrieked the Count. "Open fire immediately! or I
will have you all shot!" and then, realizing that they should be
encouraged to remain at their posts and cover his withdrawal, he
reached frantically for inspiration and flung over his shoulder one
rousing "Death before dishonour!" before the Rolls bore him away,
still at sixty miles an hour, towards the long distant horizon.
The Major lifted his voice in a great bugling bellow to countermand the
order, but even his lungs were no match for the thunderous volley of
nine field guns fired in as close to unison as they had never been in
training. Each gunner took his Colonel at his literal word when he
said "immediately" and such refinements as laying and aiming were
forgotten in the dire urgency of firing as furiously and as fast as
possible.
In the circumstances, it was nothing short of a miracle that one
high-explosive shell found a mark. This was a Fiat troop-carrier which
emerged at that moment from the dust clouds a quarter of a mile behind
the Ethiopian armoured car. The shell was fused to a thousandth of a
second delay; it went in through the radiator, shattered the engine
block, disintegrated the driver, then burst in the midst of the group
of terrified infantrymen huddled under the canvas hood.
The engine and front wheel of the truck kept going forward for a few
seconds before beginning to roll and bounce over the irregular ground
the rest of the truck and twenty men went straight upwards,
fifty feet in the air like a troupe of maniacal acrobats.
Only one other shell came close to hitting the enemy. It burst ten
yards in front of the Hump, emptying in a towering pillar of flame and
yellow earth, and gouging a deep round crater, four feet across,
into which the speeding car plunged.
The Ras, whose head was protruding from the turret, and whose mouth and
eyes were wide open, had all three of these body apertures filled with
flying sand from the explosion and his war whoops were cut off
abruptly, as he choked for breath and tried frantically to wipe his
streaming eyes.
Gareth also had his vision abruptly closed by the pillar of flame and
sand, and he drove blindly into the shell crater.
The impact threw him out of his seat, and the steering wheel hit him in
the chest, driving the wind out of his lungs before snapping off short
at the floorboards.
With another bound, the Hump bounced jauntily out of the shell crater
with streamers of dust and shell smoke swirling about her. She was
hanging over on one side with her springs snapped off by the jolt,
and her front wheels locked firmly to one side, yet her engine still
bellowed at full power and she went into a tight right-hand circle,
around and around like a circus animal.
Wheezing for breath, Gareth dragged himself back into the driver's
seat, only to find that there was no longer a steering column and that
the throttle had jammed at the fully open position. He sat there for
long seconds, shaking his head to clear it, and struggling desperately
for breath, for the hull was filled with dust and smoke.
Another shell, bursting somewhere close beside the hull, roused him
from the stupors of shock, and he reached up, unlatched the driver's
hatch and stuck his head out into the open air. At what seemed like
point-blank range, three full batteries of Italian field guns were
firing at him.
"Oh my God!" he gasped painfully, as another volley of high explosive
erupted around the rapidly circling car, the blast jarring his eyeballs
and rattling his teeth in his head.
"Let's go home!" he said and began to hoist himself out of the narrow
hatch-way. His feet came clear of the steel flooring of the hull only
just in time to save every bone below his knees in both legs from being
shattered into small fragments.
a thousand yards away across the plain Major Castelani was fighting for
control against the panic that the Count had instilled in his gunners.
They were loading and firing with such single-minded passion that all
the other refinements of gunnery were completely forgotten. The layers
were no longer making a pretence of seeking a target, but merely
jerking the lanyard at the very moment the breech block clanged shut.
Castelani's bellows made no impression on the half deafened and almost
completely dazed gunners. The Count's last injunction to death had
shattered their nerves completely and they were all of them beyond
reason.
Castelani dragged the nearest layer from his seat behind the gun
