Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
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But something was wrong. He could sense a rifle being aimed at him a split second before he heard the shot. There was a sudden pain in his left hand and at the same time Sandor leapt sharply sideways, nearly throwing him from the saddle. Amedeo looked down at his left hand holding the reins; it was covered in blood, the thumb dangling awkwardly. A dum-dum bullet had hit the pommel of his saddle, sending fragments into his hand and Sandor’s withers. He had been lucky; had it hit a fraction higher, the bullet would have torn his intestines to shreds. In the excitement of the moment, the pain was bearable and his grip still strong enough to hold his horse once he had wiped the blood off his reins. The Ethiopians at last had had enough, he saw with relief, running in panic back towards the edge of the ravine pursued through the wispy acacia trees by ululating Spahys.
But now, instead of a few hundred, there were more than a thousand enemy warriors spread across the amba. Amid them, hopelessly outnumbered, were Pittarelli’s men, supported by the squadrons of Cavarzerani and Second Lieutenant Francesco Azzi. As they plunged into the horde, Azzi was in the act of drawing his sword when he was shot through the spine and mortally wounded. ‘Avenge me!’ he shouted as he fell from his horse. To Amedeo’s astonishment, Cavarzerani was making his horse do perfect haute école dressage movements, as though he were one of Eugene of Savoy’s cavaliers at Blenheim. The horse leapt forward, kicking behind in a capriole, while Cavarzerani fired his pistol elegantly over its shoulder. Then he too was hit, falling back slumped in his saddle. Shot through the neck, he was pulled from the fray by two Spahys, who held him upright in the saddle until they rejoined the main force.
Ajmone Cat had been watching the events fixedly, holding back his men until the moment he knew for sure that he only had the enemy in front of him to deal with. Suddenly, the major took off his red cummerbund, stood in his stirrups and waved it over his head, shouting: ‘Spahys of the Bir Tagrift! Caricate! Charge!’ As the Spahys galloped past his flank, Amedeo had his squadron fall in with the charge. Faced with 350 galloping horsemen, their flowing burnous adding to their diabolic appearance – ‘like a stampeding herd of centaurs’, according to the regimental account – the Ethiopian warriors ran to the safety of the valley below.
That night the Spahys sheltered behind makeshift walls of stone on the edge of the amba, and kept their horses saddled. With darkness the resolve of the enemy returned and isolated attacks began to be made on their positions. During one of these a delirious Cavarzerani staggered out of his tent, blood spurting from his neck wound, and shouted, ‘Where’s my squadron? Where’s my squadron?’ and fired his pistol wildly in the air. Amedeo had to throw him to the ground, holding him down with his knee, while he returned the enemy fire. Three times the Spahys issued forth beyond their wall, pushing the attackers back down the ravine, where they could be showered with grenades. With more than thirty-five horsemen killed that night, and an equal number of wounded, only the uncoordinated nature of the enemy attacks saved the Spahys from annihilation.
The next morning Amedeo rode over the amba, which was strewn with corpses. Lying in the dust, he saw the old Spahy who had given him Sandor. The berrima, the evil eye on his horse’s coat, had claimed its victim after all.
Among Ethiopians it hardened into historical certainty that Ras Imru’s brilliant offensive was broken up and destroyed by the Italians deploying poisonous gas. Badoglio was sufficiently concerned by the threat to sanction the use of his most infamous weapon. But the cited example of a gas attack at this time took place in the Tekazze valley on the morning of 23 December – two days before the fighting at Selaclaca. The Ethiopians had grown used to aerial bombing, taking cover whenever aircraft flew overhead. But this time instead of bombs the planes dropped cylinders, which broke open on impact releasing a colourless liquid. Exposed hands, feet and faces were instantly burned, and some warriors were blinded. The Italian tanks may have been useless, but the effect of mustard gas was immediate. Panic set in among Ras Imru’s warriors, who scattered, even though the gas, old First World War materiel, dropped on an enemy not hemmed in by trenches, who could usually flee to higher ground, was seldom fatal. ‘It was a terrifying sight,’ Ras Imru later said. ‘I myself fled as though death was on my heels.’
To Amedeo and the Spahy officers – including Ajmone Cat, whose brother was the commander of the Regia Aeronautica in Ethiopia – it was a shameful act. The Ethiopians may have been fighting dirtily, killing prisoners and castrating the dead – neither of which had been a feature of the Adowa campaign in 1896 – but that did not justify the use of gas. The Spahys had fought the enemy hand to hand all’arma bianca, ‘white weapons’ of swords and bayonets, and had won. To bomb them with gas, a weapon Italy had declared in 1926 that it would never use, tainted the Spahys’ victory. Some weeks later, as the horsemen rode down the valleys towards Hamle, they came across villagers with burns on their hands and faces. The doctors of Appiotti’s division treated the blistering wounds as best they could. The use of gas proclaimed the Ethiopians’ victimhood in this vicious war, for although the Italian army tried to keep the bombings secret, and great efforts were made by diplomats to obfuscate the issue, the news leaked out.
Many times Mussolini had spoken of his hatred of mandolin-playing Italians, given to gaiety and laughter; he loathed too, as Ciano sniggeringly recalled in his diary, museums filled with Raphaels and Leonardos, instead of enemy flags. Italians should aspire to be feared rather than liked, the Duce declared. As his pilots bombed and gassed tribesmen from the impunity of the air, the latter part of his wish was fulfilled.
With Ras Imru’s offensive checked, Badoglio resumed his meticulous preparations for attack. Facing a fluctuating horde of up to 100,000 Ethiopians, who were picking the country clean without any prospect of re-supply, he had no intention of rushing matters. Meanwhile, the Regia Aeronautica bombed and strafed anything that moved on the narrow mule tracks between the front and the emperor’s headquarters at Dessie, 270 miles south. Like a good First World War general, Badoglio concentrated a mass of artillery in front of the enemy stronghold at Amba Aradam, and set about pounding it for weeks, again using gas.
With no movement on the front, the Spahys, badly mauled at Selaclaca, were relegated to policing duties far behind Italian lines. Thousands of labourers and Black Shirt volunteers were building a network of roads in northern Tigre that stretched all the way back to Eritrea. But this conquered territory was still far from secure. Late one afternoon, near Axum, the Spahys came across an encampment of two hundred Italian workmen with the Gondrand construction enterprise. Huge bulldozers were parked behind a barbed wire enclosure, where neat rows of tents had been erected. A powered water pump operated a washroom with showers, and from the kitchen wafted the aroma of pasta al forno. The men were building a road and among those supervising them was Count Enrico di Colloredo Mels, an engineer whom Amedeo had befriended at Udine, when he was serving with his Uncle Ernesto’s regiment. The Spahys stopped and watered their horses, while Colloredo invited the officers to have a glass of marsala and something to eat. As they sat and chatted, Amedeo was surprised when an attractive Italian woman joined them. She was the wife of the project manager, Signor Rocca, who had decided to join her husband, believing that Tigre was safely in Italian hands.
Colloredo himself seemed less convinced, asking Amedeo quietly whether he could spare some bullets for his revolver. He handed over a box of fifty and the Spahys rode on. A couple of hours later, darkness had fallen and they were beginning to unsaddle and make camp when they heard gunfire down the valley. Ajmone Cat ordered the Spahys to mount again.
‘Whenever you hear shooting, it means that a friend is in danger,’ he said, leading the column into a fast canter, their path lit by a full moon.
The whole encampment seemed to be on fire. Flames were licking around a bulldozer, several tents were burned out and the camp, so orderly that afternoon, had been plundered. Broken boxes of supplies, upturned beds and clothing lay scattered between the tents. And amid the destruction lay the bodies of the dead and dying labourers, all of whom had been castrated. A dozen of the straggling looters were still behind the barbed wire, running in terror from one end of the camp to another as the Spahys cantered into the enclosure. A few succeeded in scrambling over the wire into the darkness, while the rest were shot.
Only one workman had survived the massacre, having thrown himself over the barbed wire perimeter and climbed a tree. Amedeo