[u][b]Dire Dawa[/b][/u]

Nobody in the whole of the Spanish [i]Ejercito[/i] could explain how the Ethiopians had managed to stall the attack on Dire Dawa, but they had. The Africans were dug in at the center of town, fortifying their location with walls of scrap wood and steel rails anchored between ruined buildings. This battle was supposed to be over and the Africans in rout, but against the common sense of every Spanish soldier their enemy was still on the field inflicting unsettling casualties. For Alvar Panzano this was his first taste of battle. He was with the reserves that were brought in on the fifth day of combat, and he was licking his lips for the chance to prove himself. 

Colonel Honorato Inigo de Loiola led Panzano's section of the field. He was a brutal man - a Basque, who was often seen near the front line looking at enemy positions with a hungriness befitting a lion. He was middle aged, with a trimmed red beard and mustache that obscured his mouth, and there was a sinewy dark look about him. It had been his idea to take anti-armor guns meant for the African tanks and turn them on positions fortified by infantry. And it had been his idea to press an attack, an idea he expressed to the men like clockwork every day, though high command stalled and waited for some perfect moment that did not seem to be coming.

Alvar sat behind cover in the same place he had used all week. It was a crumbled mudbrick house, with a few shattered and shredded decorations on the wall, and furniture that had been blasted to kindling and cotton fluff. Alvar slept the last two nights in its walls. The first night he had shared his hiding place with the grey-eyed corpse of a young boy. He must have been ten or eleven years old, and the crusted blood on the back of the dead boy's head told exactly how he had died. Alvar wondered what kind of child let himself get stuck in the middle of a battlefield. The elderly, sure, they couldn't help it. But the young didn't get that excuse; he looked like he'd been healthy, what the hell made him stay to become a civilian cadaver? The next day the body was carted off to be burned behind the lines, leaving Alvar with more room to stretch. 

There was not enough action for Alvar. Colonel Inigo de Loiola had ordered two assaults across the rail yard, but they had come to nothing. Other brigades put pressure on the flanks, but the enemy held strong in the thin alleyways and streets at the center of town. Now the two forces were stuck, taking pot-shots at each other from deteriorating nests. 

"Command needs [i]huevos[/i]! Do you men have any spares? Maybe something left behind by the desert negros?" The Colonel said loudly so all the men on that block could hear when he arrived that morning. He looped his thumbs on his belt and walked with a smile on his face and frustration simmering in his eyes. His staff car idled nearby, and Alvar noticed two officers waiting in the backseat of that car, watching the Colonel and the troops with a pair of matching suspicious scowls. The Colonel stopped and stood in the middle of where the soldiers were gathered, and they all surrounded him as a loud buzzing wing of Spanish fighters flew over and strafed enemy positions just half a mile away. The enemy air force no longer had control of the airspace above the city, which only made the Spaniards more frustrated that the city hadn't fallen yet. 

"I think you men could take those positions easily if we all got together and attacked at once." the Colonel explained. He had heard this speech before, or variations of it at least, but it never failed to make him feel proud to the point of giddiness. Of fucking course they could take it! These were negros, they weren't supposed to be holding their own, and revanchist reminders of Coquilhatville in '55 bothered the Spaniards in the darkest moments of their constant downtime.

But no bad memories of Coquilhatville bothered the soldiers now. "Yes!" "Let's Go!" "Fuck the negros!" "God is with us." the soldiers all shouted at once. Alvar added "Let's kill them!" to the noise and watched the officers in the back of the staff car shift uncomfortably and fix their frosty gazes toward nothing at all. That told a story. In this moment, if the Colonel had asked them to follow him back home and overthrow the Prime Minister himself, Alvar wouldn't have questioned.

"This is good." Inigo de Loiola grinned mischievously under a bushy mustache. "You are men! I will see you later today. Remember what you have felt just now, because you will be able to use that soon."

With that, the Colonel climbed in the staff car and drove off. The officers with him did not seem too interested in him, and they continued to stare at nothing until the car had disappeared behind a corner and Alvar could no longer see them. Inigo de Loiola left the soldiers at a rise and with nothing to do; cock blocked, like all of their girlfriends had arrived, given them a few sucks, and then abandoned them right there with their wet shafts bobbing unfinished in the air. There was fight in them now, and nothing to do with it. Alvar grabbed his rifle and went into a nearby building some other soldiers were using as cover in their sporadic shooting match with the Ethiopians.

It was unnervingly quiet, where all the fighting was far away. There were other men in here, some with guns and others with larger anti-armor rifles. The later were long, unwieldy guns that shot high-caliber rounds normally meant to bore through the armor of a tank. They were using them now because the Ethiopians had spent most of their armor in the opening fight, and the men knew an anti-tank round would make a pretty little mess out of an unarmored infantryman. Most of Alvar's comrades looked vigilantly out the window, though a few gave him a suspicious glance before going back to whatever they were doing before. They were covered in grime the same color as their brown desert combat fatigues, where only the whites of their eyes seemed to be clean. Alvar took a position at a window and gingerly looked out at the rail yard.

All sounds of combat seemed to be elsewhere, echoing far away. This was the center of the battlefield, and like the heart of a storm, all the violence surrounded it while leaving that center in an unsettling calm. It was a short decline to the railyard, where the African rail used to lay. All that was left were old wooden ties. At the top of the rise was a multi-story apartment building the enemy held as their fortification. The small but steep hill that rose to meet the apartment was covered in brush. There was a wide bridge off to the side that crossed the yard, wide enough a tank could easily cross it. That was what made this place so vital - there were few places in this part of the town Spanish armor could use to move further in. They had already tried it though. The Ethiopians had rocket launchers and mortars in the game, and they had already exploded one tank in the center of the bridge so that the Spaniards now had to take control of the position before they could move more armor up to fight.

"How do you spell [i]'testament'[/i]?" Alvar heard a soldier from C Company talking to one of his comrades. He knew their company for the scorpion patch they sewed to their uniforms. He lost track of their conversation for a moment when he looked out and took a peak at the railyard below again. The indentations left by the pulled tracks could still be seen. Spanish corpses strew the field without ceremony. He saw where one man had been shot clear through the head, and his body lay lifeless against a rail tie.

"I don't know what to write." Alvar overheard the man speak again. He tuned back into the conversation in the broken house between the soldiers in C Company. There was an awkward sort of giddiness in the other man's voice. "I suppose I should leave my college fund to my sister, you know? She is younger. She can use it."

"That is a good idea." his comrade said mildly. Alvar looked over to them. One was writing on a scrap of paper propped on his knee while the other watched out the window and calmly smoked a cigarette.

Nothing continued to happen. Alvar moved over to where the men of his platoon were standing, and they did their best to ignore him. Bastards. He hated them for how they treated him. They still hadn't gotten over the gossip from Djibouti, and most of the men ostracized him. It was rare for him to look at their faces and not imagine his fingers on their throats, choking them so fierce that their skin peeled beneath the force of his grip. 

"Fonseca." Alvar greeted in a bland voice.

"Fuck." Fonseca muttered back. He had his eye aimed down the barrel of an anti-tank rifle, and he did not look up at Alvar.

"Can I try out the anti-tank gun? You can take a break, take a piss or..."

"Fuck off Panzano." Fonseca muttered. Alvar turned tomato red. Piece of shit! Bitch! Alvar seethed. The dishonor of the way he was treated! "[i]Me cago en la leche de la puta que te date la luz.[/i]." he growled.

"Fuck off Panzano." Fonseca repeated before Alvar got his last syllable out. 

A sharp and quick roar from overhead cut them off. "Mortars!" somebody shouted. With that call, everybody dove for cover. The shells landed all along that block, sending up dust and pulverized brick and causing it to rain down all around. Alvar had his head buried into the ground so that he did not see the strikes, but he could feel them. Every hit caused the ground beneath his face to vibrate in an ominous way. When it was done, the sudden cacophony gave way to that strange war-time version of silence that had been in place before. He could hear moaning somewhere outside of the building. 

Everyone looked up cautiously, one man after another. There was a fog of thick particles that obscured everything at first. They could see how the walls had been shifted and scarred by the blast. Finally, as each man got his bearings, his eyes would inevitably drift to the corner where one of the men who had been sitting silently moments earlier now lay as a casualty of the war. His arms were twisted and broken, and the skin on his face had been burned away so completely that it looked like it had been flayed with a knife. He was dead, there was no doubt about that.

Gunshots rang out from the other side of the tracks. Everyone scrambled back into their positions. Bullets scattered debris, punching into walls and into the dirt. In the next moment the Spaniards were returning fire.

Alvar peaked out at the apartments on the enemy side of the tracks, looking hungrily for the enemy. The Spaniards returned fire like contestants at a shooting gallery. Alvar aimed his rifle and shot at a few quick flashes of enemy silhouettes. How great would it be to try this with a tank rifle?

"Fonseca." Alvar started meekly.

"Fuck off." he replied predictably enough. When Fonseca pulled the trigger, the resulting explosion sounded heavy and hollow, and the kick-back stirred the dirt beneath them. Alvar didn't have time to rage. He took a few shots before the shooting gallery came to an end. Everything went back to battlefield quiet. Nobody said a word. The entire scene felt heavy from the fresh corpse in the corner of the room. Two of the men got up and carried the dead man away, though the ground was still stained with his blood.

Very little gunfire was exchanged the rest of that morning. The noontime sun brought with it equatorial heat, and it made the Spaniards listless and bitter. Nobody said a word. They had canned meat when it came time to eat, using the peel-away lids as makeshift spoons.

Hours went by, or at least it felt like hours. Alvar listened to the sounds of battle for a while. They were distant patters of gunfire, the scream of fighter planes over head, and the deep resonances that could belong to either explosions or collapsing rubble. It all blended together soon enough until he felt exactly like a bored youth at an extended fireworks show, though when a shell landed nearby it never failed to wake him up and pique his awareness to a fevered level for a while. He wondered if they would ever take an Ethiopian city without destroying it. Maybe the Ethiopian capital, the name he always forgot? He briefly thought of his cousins, and the possibility of maybe finding a prostitute in the city, but the idea made him feel uncomfortable and he dropped it from his mind as quick as he could.

It was sometime in the afternoon when they heard another staff car drive up, and the men of the regiment crawling from their hiding places to greet it. That must mean Colonel Inigo de Loiola, everyone seemed to know that instinctively, that could be seen in everyone's eyes. It was one part hope, two parts dread, and another part a sort of relief knowing that their lives hadn't completely stalled and they could move on to the next task.

"Men." Alvar saw the colonel standing like a prophet among his flock. "I have a job for you. How would you all like to kill some negros?"

That was it! Men shouted their support, but it all ran together and Alvar didn't pay attention. He didn't even notice what he himself added, though he knew he shouted something too. When everyone was huddled around, the Colonel explained.

"I have told your officers where to go, but I feel I must tell you. There is a near-dry riverbed which leads behind the enemy and would let us cut them off, but we cannot get our armor through there. The enemy is holding the position from the steeple of a church..."

--

Their regiment moved along the sides of the streets, walking slowly and hunched over like big cats on the hunt. Who knew where the enemy might be hiding? His eyes were wide and open to every small movement all around. 

There was no real street-plan to most of Dire Dawa. People had built their houses wherever seemed good at the time, and the result was curving streets where walls and overhanging mudbrick buildings blocked lines of sight. This helped the Spaniards in some ways - their approach would be difficult to spot. But it also gave the city a labyrinth quality. Alvar could [i]feel[/i] the distance between him and the place he had started, every meter adding to a sense of uncertainty and a fear that he couldn't find his way back if the worst happened. His head swam, and his hands clenched his rifle like it was the golden thread that would lead him back.

Nobody spoke. The reports of gunfire came closer. Their officers led them by hand signals - motion to that alley, or across that yard. When they reached open spaces and crossroads, Alvar's heart pounded, and he could feel the nerves of his comrades. They would inspect the situation, divide in two or three groups, dash across the space, and continue their prowl with each grouping on a different road. The first few times were quiet, but on the third crossroad when it was only Alvar and his platoon, their luck changed.

The bullet struck the dirt beneath Corporal Fonseca's feet. When he reached the other side, he immediately opened fire in the direction of the enemy, and the rest of the Spaniards came across one by one. The enemy took a few more shots, but nothing struck.

Fuck yes! This was living. They were getting closer.

The church soon came into sight. They could see it above the shorter huts. Alvar was looking at it when he heard a short-lived report of assault-rifle fire down the street. His head whirled to catch his fellow Spaniards falling into cover. A fire-fight ensued. Enemy lead chewed through the weak wooden furniture and wicker walls that decorated the outside of the homes. Alvar couldn't see the enemy. He could hardly tell where they were shooting from, aside from a vague direction. No matter. He shouldered his gun and fired. 

The shooting continued, back and forth, a single undistinguished roar. When they realized the other side wasn't firing back, there was no time. Their position must be confirmed to their enemy now. The slow prowl was over, and the Spanish soldiers rushed forward in a sprint.

From then on, it was like they had crossed the event horizon; everything moved faster and faster. The first fight had been with a single Ethiopian - a man in beige fatigues with a white du-rag instead of a helmet. He had been killed by a shot to the neck, and the dead man's blood fled him quickly so his skin became grey. Alvar stared at him when they passed, and he would have stopped if things weren't in such a hurry. The fight was moving quicker.

It was one gunfight after a next in punishing succession. A Spaniard took a bullet to the belly and fell over into a pathetic, crying heap of wounded man. He held his hands to the wound as if he were trying to keep his blood inside, but it was clearly no use. One soldier stayed with him to return him behind the lines, and the rest dashed forward in the advance.

They reached the church. It was in an open area where there was a plaza filling the twenty meters or so between the church and the start of the residential maze. On the other side was the riverbed, running thin with water. Snipers were already at work from its steeple, pinning down platoons which had approached from separate streets. 

"[i]Fuego[/i]!" the order was called as a scream so everybody could hear. Gunfire spewed from all around, and the church almost seemed to yawn from the attack. White plaster dust exhaled from its structure. When the volley was done, Alvar's platoon advanced. They burst into the church. Corporal Fonseca shot the first negro. The stone floor was littered with bleeding corpses. A gold-painted Ethiopian Cross on the wall had been turned to kindling. When he saw a bloodied negro writhing on the floor beneath him, Alvar smiled wide and drove his bayonet through his forehead. He felt the skull crumple, and the man die.

Alvar didn't notice he was the only man smiling among the serious and focused faces in that room.

With that, they had the church. The steeple had been cleared before Alvar could look up. But there was no time to get excited. The Ethiopians from the other side of the shallow river came at them now. There was no time to think. The Spaniards took positions at shattered windows.

The Ethiopian counter attack was a futile thing. They charged across the river and were gunned down like soldiers during the Great War. Their blood flowed into the river in thin streams. Alvar realized the church was not under any real danger, but he joined the fusillade greedily, hoping to bag him a few more negro kills before he was done.

It was the advancing Spanish armor that ended that. They moved up the river, somber as a funerary procession, and the weight of them crushed the bodies in the stream into a bloody mush.

"Why the fuck didn't we do this before." Fonseca spat, wiping the sweat from his brow. Alvar hadn't thought about that until now. Why the fuck was Inigo de Loiola the only officer in this army that knew how to attack?