Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
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the elegant seafront boulevards of Santa Lucia to the palace of the Bourbon kings, to the core of alleyways knotted around the mediaeval cathedral, where the poor lived crammed into cellars. And then he looked out beyond the city, to the great curve of the bay, where the land, once it emerged from the sea, was pulled upwards in a sharpening arc like a graph on paper, to the growling old man of Vesuvius himself.
For as long as he could, he fixed his gaze on the figure in white, and the pale, red-haired girl beside him, until they blurred with the others waving from the quay.
The ship’s steward had unpacked Amedeo’s uniforms and hung them in the wardrobe, but the sword he had carefully laid on the made-up bed. Amedeo picked it up and toyed with it in his hands for a few moments, turning it over to admire its curved shape. Every part of it was black: the steel scabbard and rings, the rather tinny hilt and the long tapering blade. His father, Baron Alfredo Guillet, when a major in the élite Mounted Carabinieri from which the Royal Bodyguard was drawn, had carried the sword in the Great War. But in the stalemate on the barren limestone hills of the Carso in Friuli, where every shellburst showered lethal fragments, men cowered in trenches, the horses disappeared and glistening cavalry sabres were dulled with acid to a matt black. Amedeo grasped the vulcanite grip, perfectly moulded to his hand, and pulled the sword free, enjoying its metallic rasp. He made a whipping cut in the air and examined the quivering blade, its point sharpened on both edges to prise through ribs and bone. It was a nineteenth-century weapon, re-fashioned for the slaughter of the twentieth.
Putting it aside, he stretched out on the narrow bed. He was going to war at last, to do what he had been training for ever since he joined the Military Academy at Modena seven years before as an eighteen-year-old cadet. But long before that he had known he would be a soldier. Arms were the family occupation of the Guillets just as others were bakers or bankers, silversmiths or peasants. His father had retired from the army a colonel, both his paternal uncles were generals, as had been his grandfather and numerous other, more remote, ancestors. Their uniformed portraits and blurred daguerreotypes hung from his father’s library wall, and their dusty treatises on military strategy filled the shelves.
Amedeo had only a vague grasp of the causes of the Abyssinian crisis. The rights and wrongs behind the border clash in which several Dubats, Italian Somali troops, and many more Ethiopians had been killed, seemed too complicated to master. So it was proving for the diplomats at the League of Nations in Geneva, who for months had been poring over yellowing maps that showed the grazing rights and waterholes in the Ogaden desert. But if Italy went to war, Amedeo would have not the slightest doubt what he would be fighting for. It did not have much to do with the exhortations of Benito Mussolini, who had whipped Italians into a frenzy of indignation as though an Ethiopian horde were storming the Campidoglio. Nor were his sentiments entirely explained by the conventional patriotism that every child learned at school, revering the trinity of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour, the prophet, the soldier and the statesman who had forged the united Italy. In a land where personal loyalties – to family, to friends – were far more important than abstract ones, the Guillets were bound to Italy’s dynastic rulers in a bond which stretched back for generations, and Amedeo fully shared the sense of obligation.
He had always been proud of his Savoyard name. In the southern cities of Bari and Messina, where his father had been posted and Amedeo spent most of his childhood, the locals mangled the pronunciation of Guillet by attempting to Italianise it. But he had never cared that he did not share the sharp consonants and prickly vowel sounds of their names. Nor, though he was teased for his northern accent, would he try to fit in by taking up their dialects. When he was a boy, he would scrutinise an old map on his bedroom wall showing the patchwork of Italian states before unification, and his attention would be drawn to the ancestral possessions of Savoy. His finger would trace the frontier from Savoie itself and then down, over the southern slopes of the Alps to Piedmont, the core of the kingdom with Turin its capital, and the name by which the state was always known in Italy. There was no natural explanation for the line, which ignored the contours of mountain ranges and the course of rivers, as it did the linguistic borders of French and Italian. Every province, every town and village, had been painstakingly acquired as the House of Savoy, Europe’s oldest and most tenacious ruling dynasty, rose from being counts to dukes to kings. Every encroachment, whether in France or Italy, had been held by force of will and blood. A fair share of it, Amedeo knew with pride, belonged to his own family.
From his earliest years, he had been aware that to be Piedmontese was to be born into the élite of the Kingdom of Italy. All the best regiments – the Bersaglieri, the Alpini, the cavalry – owed their origins to the old state of Piedmont, or the Kingdom of Sardinia as it was misleadingly named in its last stages. Even in the Thirties, the officer corps and the high civil service were still drawn disproportionately from the region. Italians from elsewhere, who may have thought that their own local achievements cast those of the Alpine region into shade, resented its lingering influence at the top of society. But only Piedmont had not slept during the long torpid centuries after the Renaissance and before the national awakening, when the peninsula languished into a dreamland arcadia amid the ruins of former greatness. In Turin, the seeds of a modern state were sown, nurtured by families such as the Guillets, created barons in the seventeenth century, who lived modestly on their own lands and equated their role with public service. When the movement for national unity began after the Napoleonic wars, only Piedmont could provide the leadership to free Italy from foreign rule; it alone survived while the territories of Venice and Florence, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, and all the other smaller fragments, disappeared from the map forever.
Whenever the Italian tricolour was raised there was a reminder of this truth, for in the centre was the red shield and white cross of Savoy. To Amedeo, it was an emblem that demanded greater loyalty than the three colours themselves.
Neither the causes of the conflict with Ethiopia, nor the Guillets’ sense of dynastic loyalty, were uppermost in Amedeo’s mind as he lay in his cabin. It had been his decision to go to war; using family connections to fix a transfer to the Spahys di Libya, a regiment of colonial cavalry that was shortly to join the invasion force mustering in Eritrea. But having achieved his aim of serving under arms, he found it gave him little pleasure. Instead, a sense of guilt gnawed at him insistently as the old steamer clunked towards Tripoli. He had made a choice of a type that the Duce would doubtless describe as ‘irrevocable’, and there was no going back from it. Three weeks before, his life had seemed so simple and untroubled, as he worked his horses in preparation for the Olympics that were due to take place in Berlin in early 1936. Now, doubts and uncertainties surfaced. And he still could not quite believe that he had given up everything that he had achieved as a competition rider and had quit the national three-day eventing team. When he walked away from the training ground at Turin, he knew that the others in the team felt he had let them down and old friendships had been severed. The life he had been leading for the past five years, ever since he had been commissioned, was at an end. And they had been good years. Very good years.
With the decision made for him that he would have a military career, he had always known which part of the army he wanted to join. His older brother, Giuseppe, had opted for the artillery, but for Amedeo, who had ridden his father’s dressage horse from the age of five, it was the cavalry. Few occupations in Italy were then quite as glamorous. Only naval officers, who affected a certain inglese hauteur, or the pilots of the new Regia Aeronautica, the air force, came close. And the clothes were wonderful. Cavalry officers sauntered through piazzas wrapped in sky blue cloaks, wearing the dragoon’s helmets or the hussar’s fur busbies of the previous century. Olive-grey jodhpurs with double stripes in red were worn below a tunic that fastened at the neck, with just a hint of a white stock showing above. Riding boots, silver spurs and immaculate white leather gloves were part of the ensemble for a bella figura, even if the officers had only dismounted from a tram. And, of course, wherever they went, and at all times of the day, they held at their side their sabre. Even Amedeo had to concede that it was a little overdone, as he strapped his sword to the handlebars of his bicycle and pedalled off through the streets of Turin and Rome.
While the bright young things elsewhere were discovering jazz, experimental literature and sex, the ‘fathers’ were still in control in Fascist Italy. And Amedeo was an obedient son. The carnage of the First