Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
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he had made a stand. Beside him were two dead Ethiopians. Inside lay the body of Signora Rocca, who had been stripped naked and had had one breast cut off. Her husband lay dead and castrated beside her. Only Colloredo had not been mutilated, perhaps in tribute to his valour.
Ajmone Cat turned to Amedeo. He was to gather up his squadron and pursue the enemy through the night in the direction of Adi Ghilte. These were Ras Imru’s men, and at some point they would make for the Tekazze valley and the bulk of his forces.
Grey mist swathed the village as Amedeo and his men approached at first light the next day. A brushwood wall surrounded the tukuls, the faint shapes of their thatch roofs discernible in the half light. In the centre stood two high juniper trees in front of the stone church. Amedeo rode through the open gate, told his men to spread out and search all of the houses, and then approached the church with eight or so horsemen. A priest emerged, in a faded red cape and a tall hat, covered in intricate braid. Amedeo kissed the cross which the priest held up to him and dismounted.
Speaking through the Tigrinian interpreter who accompanied the Spahys, the priest said he had seen no sign of the men the comandante was pursuing. Ignoring his protests, Amedeo entered the small stone church followed by his Muslim troops. A solitary figure was kneeling before the altar, over a wooden hatch in the floor. He was a leper, the priest explained, who came to pray before the rest of the village was awake. Amedeo scrutinised the priest’s face for an instant and decided he was lying. He drew his revolver and shouted at the kneeling figure to move aside. Guns at the ready, the Spahys opened the wooden door and went down into the crypt below. They emerged carrying some Italian rifles and a metal hatch from one of Captain Crippa’s tanks destroyed at Dembeguina a month before, which was now being kept as a trophy in the church.
At that moment, they heard gunfire from the edge of the village. Amedeo ran outside to find that his look-outs were being shot at by a band of a hundred Ethiopians. On foot and on horseback, the Spahys charged, driving the enemy back. They retreated to a large cave in a rockface that overshadowed the village. After a fierce exchange of fire, the Spahys began to close in on their adversaries. Back in Italy, incensed by the Gondrand massacre, the scene was later made famous by Beltrami, whose Boys’ Own style illustrations appeared on the cover of Domenica del Corriere magazine. The Spahys, wrongly depicted wearing fezes, were being led by an unrecognisable Amedeo, in a pith helmet and khaki. The perpetrators of the Gondrand massacre were ‘exemplarily punished’, readers were assured.
But before the Spahys could finish off the men in the cave, the sound of more shooting came from the far side of the village. Hundreds of figures, each carrying a rifle, were running towards them. Amedeo ordered his squadron to mount up and they rode off as fast as they could. When he got to higher ground, Amedeo looked back towards the village with his field glasses. There were about a thousand armed men below, far too many for his Spahys to deal with.
Time and again Haile Selassie had told his ras to avoid pitched battles with the better-armed enemy, and fight instead as guerrillas. But throughout its history the empire had always saved itself by staging a large, decisive battle. In this manner they had defeated the mahdi, and many other Muslim aggressors, as well as the Italians at Adowa. But against Badoglio’s powerful, and comparatively well-armed forces, such tactics were disastrous. By the time the Italians stormed Amba Aradam, there were eight thousand corpses strewn over the mountain as a result of aerial and artillery bombardment, which Ethiopians claimed included the use of gas. Ethiopian morale had crumbled before the Italians advanced up the slopes. Black Shirts were given the honour of raising the flag on the mountain peak and their war cry ‘Eia! Eia! Alalà!’ resounded over the ambas.
The retreat that followed turned into a rout as the shattered Ethiopians were harried from the air, and then the Raya Galla turned on their detested Shoan overlords. Among those killed by the wrathful tribesmen was Ras Mulugueta, Haile Selassie’s minister of war, and the commander of his now non-existent ‘army of the centre’.
Badoglio then turned his attention to Tembien, a seemingly impregnable mountain stronghold which fell after a daring night climb by the Alpini. Finally, it was the turn of Ras Imru, whose army of 25,000 was still facing off the 2nd Corps of General Maravigna. The battlefield was again Selaclaca, and again the Spahys were in action. Ras Imru’s guard and the levies of Ayelew Birru fought with great courage but, outgunned and outnumbered, were finally worn down. The Ethiopian general extricated his exhausted men under cover of night, but the Italians caught up with them the next day. As they tried to cross the Tekazze, aeroplanes dropped incendiary bombs which set light to the woods on the edge of the river, ‘rendering utterly tragic the plight of the fleeing enemy’, Badoglio wrote.
With the Spahys at the forefront, General Maravigna set off in pursuit of the remnants of Ras Imru’s army, which had fled over the highlands of the Semien. With a landscape like a parched Switzerland, its tallest peak Ras Dascian 15,000 feet high, the Amhara heartland of the Semien should have been impregnable. But Ayelew Birru, lord of Gondar, had had enough and no efforts were made to resist the advancing Italians. When Amedeo rode into mountain villages, the local priest would emerge carrying the community’s cross. Then the women would be sent out to dance in supplication to the newcomers. Finally, the men would appear.
It was a walkover, and Amedeo would bless the smiling multitude with the sign of the cross feeling like a visiting cardinal.
Poised to enter Gondar, once Ethiopia’s capital, the Spahys were suddenly ordered to halt. This prize, the most impressive city in Ethiopia with its stone palaces and forts, was to be taken by Achille Starace and his tardy motorised column of Black Shirts. When Ajmone Cat protested, General Maravigna signalled back: ‘We cannot always say no to Rome.’ The Spahys waited for several days until they saw Starace’s dust trails in the desert to the west, pounding his path towards Gondar. Remembering him well from his days when training for the Olympics, Amedeo could imagine the secretary-general of the National Fascist Party enjoying his moment of glory to the full, encouraging his 3400 men with eccentric exhortations. ‘We are a poor nation,’ Starace told them. ‘That is good, for it keeps our muscles firm and our shapes trim.’ Not like the portly inglesi, whose digestions had been ruined by centuries of wealth and, as a result, ‘their brains were addled’.
Great resentment was felt throughout the regular armed forces at the regime’s efforts to make the war a Fascist victory. Ciano, who liked to compare the excitement of war with the sexual act, received a Silver Medal for making a forced landing in a field. He deserved the Gold Medal for having the gall to accept it, said the journalists accompanying the invasion force. Nonetheless, a second Silver Medal followed after Ciano pointlessly touched down at Addis Ababa airfield, flying off quickly when the machine guns opened up. Even less deserving was Roberto Farinacci, the influential anti-conservative Fascist. He was widely ridiculed throughout the army after he too received a Silver Medal for bravery when wounded – whereas he had, in fact, blown his hand off with a grenade trying to catch fish in Lake Tana.
By mid March 1936, Haile Selassie had lost the northern half of his empire, while Graziani was pushing forward to the ancient Muslim city of Harar through the Ogaden desert to the south. The defeats of Amba Aradam, Tembien and Selaclaca had been crushing. In despair, the emperor wrote a message to Ras Imru, that never arrived for it was intercepted by the Italians:
If you think that with your troops and with such of the local inhabitants as you can collect together you can do anything where you are, do it. If, on the other hand, you are convinced of the impossibility of fighting, having lost all hope in your front, and if you think it better to come here and die with us, let us know of your decision … From the League [of Nations] we have so far derived no hope or benefit.
Ignoring his own advice about guerrilla warfare, the emperor resolved on one last desperate battle on the shores of Lake Ashangi. He rallied his forces at Mai Ceu, surrounded by the greatest names of the empire, princes whose fathers, like Haile Selassie’s own, had defeated the Italians at Adowa forty years before or, as in the case of Ras Kassa, had actually fought there themselves. Haile Selassie’s presence revived the Ethiopians’ flagging morale and even the day chosen for the attack, 31 March, was deemed auspicious; according to the Coptic calender, it was St George’s Day,