Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
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unharmed. But a more severe punishment was meted out to the Tigrinian-speaking ascari of Eritrea who had fought with dogged bravery; each had his right hand and left foot amputated. Even in the Thirties these old veterans were a familiar sight on the streets of Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, hobbling in their heavy prostheses in pride of place at the head of parades.
Adowa had been the most humiliating defeat for Italy. A country that had repeatedly demanded an imperial role had been revealed, in the eyes of the world, as inadequate for the task. Feelings ran so high that the Duke of Torino, the king’s cousin, fought a duel with one of the princely Orléans family of France who had cast doubt on Italian valour. In the years after the defeat other European powers tactfully acknowledged Italy’s special interests in Ethiopia, but there was no question of it imposing its will on Menelik II, or his successors. To some degree, even before Fascism, all Italian governments wanted to avenge Adowa.
When Ras Tafari, then regent of Ethiopia and later to become Emperor Haile Selassie, visited Rome in 1924, a preoccupied Mussolini displayed his habitual lack of interest in far-flung places, accompanying the prince to official receptions with his hands in his pockets. He was in any case up to his neck in the scandal of the Matteotti murder, which very nearly undid him. The prince presented a lion to Rome’s zoo, and the Italians, without much thought, backed Ethiopia’s entry into the League of Nations, a decision they came later to regret bitterly. Britain opposed the move on the reasonable grounds that Ethiopia was not a nation, but an anarchic empire quite likely to fall apart. It had doubled in size during the scramble for Africa, absorbing Muslim principalities, such as the sultanate of Harar, and truculent tribes like the Galla.
The unasked question at Ras Tafari’s coronation in 1930, when he assumed the title of Haile Selassie, meaning the holy trinity, was whether he would be able to hold the empire together. No warrior, he had nonetheless succeeded in outmanoeuvring all his rivals to assume the crown of the Negus Negusti, the king of kings, as he would many of their children and even grandchildren by the time he was finally deposed and murdered by the Communist Dergue in 1975. As ruler, Haile Selassie’s position was similar to that of Louis XIII, surrounded by over-mighty, semiautonomous feudatories, the ras. Unlike the French king, however, he had no need of the services of a Richelieu. Thirty-eight-years old at his coronation, the emperor conscientiously set about attempting to modernise his empire. He was often thwarted – by the ras, by the conservative Coptic clergy and by his people’s modest appetite for central government – but he was a patient man who never lost sight of the main objective. He adopted the parliamentary constitution of Japan, taking its success in avoiding colonial domination as a model for Ethiopia, and he had ambitious plans to build roads, schools and hospitals. With most of the country still in the middle ages or under tribal rule, and Addis Ababa little more than a shanty town, the gulf between the emperor’s ambitions and what could be achieved was obvious to all. To hostile observers such as Evelyn Waugh, who reported on Haile Selassie’s coronation for The Times, Ethiopia and its hapless little emperor, who wanted so much to be Western, were ripe for satire.
At the end of 1934, the Ethiopians and the Italians clashed over the wells at Walwal in the Ogaden desert on the border with Italian Somaliland. In spite of dark suspicions on both sides, the incident does not appear to have been orchestrated by either Rome or Addis Ababa. With 107 Ethiopians and a fitaurari, commander of the advance guard, killed, it was serious, but it was not unprecedented; a month earlier the Ethiopians had killed a French officer on the border with Djibuti. But Haile Selassie’s decision to complain to the League of Nations turned the dispute into an international crisis. Being a believer in modernity and international law, he may simply have thought that this was the correct and proper course to follow. Or he may have already calculated that a clash with Fascist Italy was unavoidable at some time, and he might as well make the issue Walwal as any other, and milk the sympathy of the other powers as Italy was revealed as the aggressor. Either way, it was a highly dangerous strategy, for a dictator like Mussolini, who after all was ‘always right’, could never publicly climb down. At risk of being outbid by Hitler in the bellicose posturing that had been his monopoly, Mussolini thought Fascist Italy could manage a little war in Africa. And who was going to stop him? A man with his sharp political antennae knew that the old men who governed Britain, and the succession of emollient conciliators in France, would never intervene on behalf of an African potentate.
The morning coat and wing collar that Mussolini had worn since becoming prime minister were laid aside, and he squeezed himself into the first of his vast wardrobe of military uniforms, which would continue, in bewildering variety, until the end.
As the army lorry pulled out of Tripoli, Amedeo’s nerve began to falter. Zuara was only eighty kilometres away on the border with French Tunisia and they would arrive in an hour and a half. He was dreading how he would be received. The name of his new commanding officer, Major Antonio Ajmone Cat, suggested Savoyard origin, but Amedeo doubted whether that fact would make his reception any more cordial. From what he had heard, the major was tough and independent minded, well able to stand his ground before his superiors. He himself had raised the Spahys di Libya, a unit of irregular Arab cavalry, commanding them against the Libyan rebels. How he was going to react to having a general’s nephew imposed on him, Amedeo could only guess, but he wasn’t expecting a slap on the back and spumante served in the mess.
But worse, far worse, was the guilt he felt towards Colonel Amalfi. Three weeks before, he had been waiting in the anteroom of the colonel’s office in Turin. On the wall were photographs of Italy’s riding legends. Among them were pictures of the colonel, jumping a horse over a single kitchen chair – a great feat of control – and between the seats of an open-topped landau, still hitched to its horses. Amalfi’s familiar voice called the lieutenant into his office.
Amedeo announced that while he realised that the timing was extremely inconvenient, with the Berlin Games less than a year away, he had to leave the team. Italy was at war, or very nearly, and he had been called up to serve in Abyssinia. The colonel had said nothing, but gave the young lieutenant a long, scrutinising look. Every young fool in the army, and quite a few old ones as well, was pleading to be sent to join the Italian forces gathering in Africa. Almost all Amedeo’s friends were trying to transfer to regiments certain to be sent. It had become a stampede and Italy’s summer watering holes began to empty. Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s son, was going and so was his seventeen-year-old brother, Bruno, straight from school. Ciano had flown out with the Regia Aeronautica’s squadron, ‘La Disperata’, named after a Florentine Fascist squad. The Futurist poet Filippo Marinetti and neo-Nazi ideologue Roberto Farinacci had rushed to join the colours; and the royal dukes of Bergamo and Pistoia, cousins of the king, had been given commands.
It had been one blessing for the colonel that Achille Starace was off his back, having been placed in charge of a motorised column of Black Shirts. But who the hell would be left, he asked himself. Spread in front of him was a magazine feature from L’Illustrazione Italiana on the Tevere Black Shirt Division, perhaps the most bizarre unit in any European army, shortly to leave for Somalia. One legion was made up of veterans of Italy’s colonial ventures pre-1900 (hardly very encouraging, the colonel may have thought), another incorporated the war wounded, or veterans of D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume, or of the Fascist struggle before 1922. Italians from abroad, from as far afield as Australia and the United States, had formed another and there was a juvenile legion, I Goliardi, of university students. In charge was General Boscardi, who had lost an eye capturing a trench in the Great War.
But the one thing this circus lacked, in Colonel Amalfi’s mind, was one of four riders on whom he had expended months of effort in training and preparation. And Lieutenant Guillet’s excuse for not representing Italy in probably the most prestigious equestrian event in two decades was some nonsense about having been ‘ordered’ to transfer to the Spahys di Libya. It was the hypocrisy that pained Amalfi, the young lieutenant pretending that he had been called up, rather than that he had pulled every string possible to get himself sent to Africa. Floundering in the silence, Amedeo began repeating himself, and while expressing his sincere regret that he was abandoning the team, incautiously added the thought that one had to obey the call to defend the Patria.
‘Do you think I’m completely simple-minded?’ Amalfi