Key Towns

Cupped in hills, just a mottled dun patch from the air, lies Harar, Ethiopia's second city. After miles of rocks and dust elaborated only by anthills and scrub, after more miles of hills ugly with boulders and cactus, Harar is a welcome sight. It is an ancient city state, founded by Arabs From across the Red Sea, rich in a peculiar hybrid culture expressed at one extreme by thatched roofs decorated at their pinnacles with bright enameled chamber pots, at the opposite extreme by minarets of the rigid Moslem faith. It is a community of ruinous houses girdled by a ruinous wall, but it has its two-story hotels with shower baths and roaches, and is proud of its hideous castellated palace. There are grubby plots of decaying vegetation and gardens with flowering fences of euphorbia and brilliantly colored birds. Its tedj houses, half saloon, half brothel, are marked over the doorway with a traditional red cross -- which caused some mis understanding when a Red Cross medical unit made its first appearance in town.

Wherever three or four women squat beside piles of grain and peppers, there is Harar's market place. Before the town's Law Courts there is a constant babel of dissatisfied litigants. In five minutes on any street one may see an Armenian fighting with a Hindu; an Abyssinian woman with her simian face smeared with rancid butter to keep vermin away; an old bishop who knew the strange, sad, lame poet-adventurer Rimbaud, France's Byron, when he lived in Harar; a beautiful, brown-skinned, high-breasted Harari woman carrying a load of wood on her head as if it were a tiara ; a big black with a lion cub on a leash; an Abyssinian policeman who looks ferocious with leaves stuffed in his nostrils (he just has a cold) ; a leper from the Capuchin colony outside the walls; a crisp Italian officer in a fever of hurry and worry.

In a special fever last week were the Italian soldiers stationed in Harar. For the city had become the next British objective.

Early last week the South African and British column pushing up from Italian Somaliland approached Giggiga, 50 miles east of Harar. Its supply lines were then about 600 miles long, and were potentially threatened from the east by Italians garrisoning British Somaliland, which the Italians occupied last summer. The threat was removed at the strategic moment by a British naval force which appeared off Berbera, British Somaliland's capital and main port, one midnight, and landed men and machines in two places near the town. By 9:30 a.m. they had taken it. They pushed inland at once, and by week's end had very nearly made contact with the inland column.

As soon as that column got word that British Somaliland was British again, it captured Giggiga, a nondescript one-square town of tin-and straw-roofed houses. From there the troops pushed on for Harar. Soon they reached trouble. Between Giggiga and Harar lies some grim hill country. There the motor road turns and digs through narrow denies, and the hills, with their boulders and scrub, afford plenty of cover for defenders. It is the sort of country where a handful ought to be able to hold off an army.

The big question was how many Italians were prepared to defend Harar, and how hard. It was likely that most of the Italians who had been in British Somaliland had fallen back into this area. The Italians would probably put up a stanch fight here because here--and at Cheren in Eritrea--were the last chances for strong stand: before Addis Ababa. If the British could crack the old town of Harar, they could cut the rail line, just north of Harar, from Addis Ababa to the sea.

As the southern Ethiopian road junction of Neghelli, 300 miles from Addis Ababa, fell at week's end, the British began laying pounds, shillings and pence on the line as to which of the several drives on Addis Ababa would win, place and show.

Eritrea. Pride has been scant for the homebodies of Italy lately, but last week the name Cheren filled them with it. On the high escarpment near the town known as Sancheil Briggs Peak, the Italians had put up their bravest fight of the African war. In the face of constant bombings, under steady artillery fire, nearly surrounded, some 35,000 Italians showed that they could be as stubborn as the rocky buttes they defended. They resisted British attacks, and countered with their own--losing in one a brave general named Orlando Lorenzini. General Lorenzini, who led a brigade in the Italian assault on Berbera last August, died on the day the British won it back last week.

The cosmopolitan British force at Cheren was led, and its every move was planned, by a thin-faced, Mephistophelean-appearing figure, Lieut. General William Platt, 55. An old hand on Britain's practice field of war, the Indian North-West Frontier, General Platt has for three years been Raid d'Amm (Arabic for General Officer Commanding) of the Sudan.In two of those years, his dark hair went white. Raid d'Amm Platt, who always carries a fly-whisk instead of the usual stick, has been something of a heretic in his handling of native troops: he cannot see why a white-skinned man should have any more modern equipment than a dusky-skinned man.

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