Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
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money and gifts to the horsemen of the Azebo Galla, in whose lands the battle would be fought, in an effort to retain their dubious loyalty.
Knowing even the day of the attack, Badoglio summoned his best troops: elite regiments from Piedmont, the excellent Eritreans and the best of the Black Shirts, who took up position fortified behind barricades of thorn zeriba hedges. After their light artillery barrage with all the guns and mortars available, the Ethiopians hurled themselves against the Italian lines with desperate courage. Twice the Italians scythed them down.
In the third and final attack, the emperor threw in his Imperial Guard, which broke the 2nd Eritreans, forcing the Italians to counterattack with the bayonet. As his men faltered, Haile Selassie saw through the heavy rain the horsemen of the Azebo Galla prepare to intervene at last. But instead of descending on the Italians, they charged the rear of his own beleaguered warriors. Pursued by the Galla and bombed from the air, the Ethiopian retreat became a rout.
Gondar had fallen, Ras Imru was virtually a fugitive in rebelinfested Gojjam, and Beghemeder and Semien were refusing to fight at all. Many of the emperor’s closest friends and allies were dead, others had betrayed him. He faced not only the destruction of Menelik II’s enlarged empire, but the end of 2500 years of Ethiopian independence. For three days, a despairing Haile Selassie disappeared, retiring to the ancient carved rock churches of Lalibela, where he prayed. By the time he emerged, Badoglio’s renamed vanguard, the colonna di ferrea volontà – the column of iron will – was driving towards the capital.
The emperor contemplated his options. Some advised him to retreat to Gojjam, behind the Blue Nile, which the Italians could not cross until the end of the rains: or he could kill himself, as Emperor Theodore had done at Magdala when Lord Napier had called for his surrender; or he could appeal to the powers in Europe and shame them with his presence for abandoning him. To a hard-headed realist like Haile Selassie only the third course offered any practical assistance to his beleaguered country. On 2 May 1936 he and his family took the train down to Djibuti, where he sailed to England and five long years of exile.
All semblance of order in Addis Ababa went with him. Embittered and confused warriors crowded into the city, which they pillaged and burned. The European population barricaded themselves into their diplomatic compounds. The British minister, Sir Sidney Barton, a veteran of the Boxer siege of Peking, had taken no chances: his highly fortified residency was defended by a company of Sikhs.
After three days of looting, Badoglio finally arrived, riding a beautiful chestnut horse through the smouldering ruins of the city. As advance units of the Italian army paraded through the streets, the Europeans turned out to wave handkerchiefs and applaud them, as though greeting their saviours. But when the Black Shirts marched past Barton’s residency, above which flew the Union Jack, they began hooting and whistling. The British went inside.
On the evening of 5 May 1936, Mussolini strode out on to his balcony at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome and looked down on the vast crowd of upturned faces. Two searchlights had been placed in his office behind him, casting his huge, menacing shadow over the piazza. Flaming urns illuminated the white marble columns of the Altar of the Patria, and many in the heaving throng that stretched all the way down the Corso held lighted torches. A master showman was playing to the fullest house of his career, and his performance, punctuated by the crowd’s deafening roars, was faultless:
Blackshirts of the revolution, Italians and friends of Italy beyond the frontiers and beyond the sea: Listen! Today, on May 5 at 16.00 hours, Marshal Badoglio telegrammed: ‘At the head of victorious Italian troops, I have entered Addis Ababa.’ [Pause] I announce to the Italian people that the war is over! [Pause] I announce to the Italian people that peace is re-established! [Pause] It is not without a certain emotion and a certain pride that after seven months of bitter hostility, I pronounce these words. But it is necessary that it be understood that this is a Roman peace. One that expresses itself in this simple, irrevocable and definitive proposition: L’ETIOPIA È ITALIANA!
Four days later, Vittorio Emanuele III, Duke of Savoy and king of Italy like his father and grandfather before him, was proclaimed emperor of Ethiopia. For the first time in 1500 years, the streets of Rome echoed to the cries of ‘Imperatore!’
Italo Balbo, air marshal of Italy and governor of Libya, stood on a platform in the main square of Tripoli, the Italian tricolour draped over the balustrade in front of him. It was July 1936; the Libyan veterans of Ethiopia had come home and the whole city turned out to honour them. European luminaries sat in the shade, the most important behind the governor, but Tripoli’s Arab and Jewish population were also packing the streets to hail the conquering heroes. The tricolour was flying from every rooftop and shopfront, and military bands were playing patriotic tunes. The Zaptie colonial police headed the parade, some on camels, followed by Zuave infantry and, finally, the Spahys, who had had to be remounted after leaving their own horses behind in Eritrea.
Amedeo stood to attention in his crisp, white colonial uniform, his sword by his side, and his face almost invisible in the shade of his pith helmet. Beside him were Major Ajmone Cat and a Libyan colonel, all three waiting to receive medals from the governor. They approached the raised dais. Balbo decorated the senior officers first and then pinned a Bronze Medal to Amedeo’s chest, in recognition of his valour at Selaclaca. To the others’ surprise, Balbo embraced him: ‘Bravo, Amedeo.’ As Ajmone Cat marched back to the Spahys, he cast an inquisitive look at the lieutenant. Given the circumstances of his arrival the year before, Amedeo had felt it more tactful not to mention that Italo Balbo, the second most influential figure in the Fascist regime, was a close family friend.
When Amedeo received his commission as a second lieutenant in 1931 he had been posted to Udine, a provincial city in northeastern Italy with a strong Austrian flavour. Yet it was there, while serving in Uncle Ernesto’s Cavalleggeri di Monferrato, that he had met and befriended two of the era’s most extraordinary personalities. One was Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, a cousin of the king and future viceroy of Ethiopia; the other was Italo Balbo then at the height of his fame. Literally so, for as Italy’s most celebrated aviator Balbo had led a mass formation of twenty-four aircraft to the Soviet Union and to South America, and then trumped both these achievements by flying over the north Atlantic to the United States. Chicago honoured his extraordinary feat with a ticker-tape reception, and immortalised his name in Balbo Avenue, which exists to this day. Balbo’s wife was the socially elevated Countess Florio, whose family came from Udine and had long been friends with Uncle Ernesto. Through this connection, Amedeo was accepted into the intimate circle of the great aviator.
A virile figure with a sharp black beard, Italo Balbo was hugely popular in Italy, which contributed to a growing chill between him and the Duce. For he was far more than a sporting hero. Balbo was also the country’s youthful air minister who had established the Regia Aeronautica. As one of Mussolini’s most pugnacious followers during Fascism’s rise to power, Balbo had set up the squadristi street gangs, purging with brutal vigour his native Ferrara, and later the whole of Emilia Romagna, of communists, anarchists, socialists and army deserters. No other Fascist ras was so disposed to resort to the sacro manganello – the ‘holy cudgel’ – as this son of a schoolmaster who had been a highly decorated officer in the Alpini during the Great War. It was he who introduced that peculiarly Italian touch to the squadristi brawling: the forced administration of castor oil, which gave its victims a humiliating bout of diarrhoea. When Mussolini planned the March on Rome, which imposed the Fascist regime in 1922, Balbo marshalled the Black Shirts.
Over years in government, Balbo’s thuggery had been forgotten and his early Fascist fervour, which included republicanism, became more moderate. A natural leader, he