Excrept from the Crown and the Pen by Dr Bereket Habte Selassie Pages 338-339
The head of the camp was Sebhat Efrem who told us that we would leave the following morning in the company of five hundred traineers travelling to Shahel. On 6 March we started at 5 am. We Passed Gedghed a 7 and arrive at Lab Riverbed at about 9.30. Many of the traineers were tired hungry and above all dying of thrist. All we had for breakfast was a cup of tea each, and morale was beginning to be a problem. We left Laba at 4 p.m. and an hour later arrived at Mai Ule, where we spent the night, then rested all the morning and part of the afternoon. The next day, March 7 ( the fourth day of the march) we left Mai Ule at 3.30 pm it was a cloudy afternoon so the heat was less oppressive. Walking behind camel loaded with provisions of rice, suguar, and tea, we marched for seven hours non-stop and reached thenext water point called Ablet, at the foot of dry riverbed called Abarara. We spent the night there a spring was supposed to be found; we were all dying of thirst and dug in the sand only to find that there was not much water to drink. We left Ablet and walked for seven hours and reached another water point called MeEtIr. This leg of the journey was probably the toughest, because the hot sand heated the plastic Kongo and burned our feet. Our guide was changed; we were now in the care of one Teklu Berhe, an Asmara lumpen. Who openly boasted of having knifed an American soldier to death after a bar brawl. Teklu seemed more compassionated than Solomon in treating the trainees who complained and threatened to give up the walk. He reasoned with them, encouraging them to hang on and promising that there would be plenty of water and food at the next water point-knowing full well that it was not true. We had become close, and he told me with a smile Journey’s end at last we reached our destination, Blequat at 7 pm on Tuesday March 11 after we started from BaHri Bara I would find out months later that they did survive and had become physically fit and adept at desert warfare. Moreover they had turned a corner, having been purged of what their trainers called drummed into them during months of training. Whatever else one might say about Marxism it had a powerfull mobilizing capacity, promising the world to the oppressed masses and at best making them a potent weapon of struggle or at worest an instrument of the inordinate ambitions of unscrupulous individual. Crown and the Pen by Dr Bereket Habte Selassie pp 315-316