Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
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was even more excitement at the course at Tor di Quinto when the Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, on holiday in Rome, turned out to watch, the latter chatting to Amedeo in passable French. The swashbuckling actor took photographs of him in his splendid uniform and sky-blue cloak, perhaps wondering whether Amedeo’s make-believe world were not even more fantastic than his own.
In spring 1935 Colonel Amalfi sent Amedeo away for three months to the cavalry school at Orkenyi, outside Budapest, where he could perfect his dressage, and pass on what he learned to the rest of the team. The other riders would arrive later so that they could compete with the Hungarian and German teams in a pre-Olympic session. The interval in Budapest was the most idyllic period of Amedeo’s career as a showjumping soldier. After long days spent working the horses, he and the Hungarian officers would pile into cars and head towards Budapest. They were amateurs in the true sense of the word, competing for the love of their sport. By contrast, the German team seemed to be joyless representatives of modern athleticism shepherded by a dour general, who would announce in the mess – as though, Amedeo felt, he were declaring the invasion of France – that at half past nine his riders had to retire to bed.
By the time Colonel Amalfi and the others arrived, Amedeo had another interest in his life apart from his horses. He had fallen in love, or believed that he might have done so. Maria was one of beautiful identical twins, the daughters of a minister in the regime of Admiral Horthy, the conservative dictator of Hungary.
‘How on earth can you tell them apart?’ Amalfi asked, the first time he saw them dancing together.
‘With the heart, colonnello. With the heart,’ Amedeo replied.
Brought up in a society of often stultifying conformity, he found Maria to be uninhibited and modern in a manner he had seldom encountered before. Those women he knew in Italy were either sheltered debutantes he met in society, the sisters of friends and relatives or the demi-mondaine girls found in bordellos in every town of significance to whom Italian males owed their sexual initiation. But Maria occupied a different level. They would converse in French, and Amedeo was smitten by the novelty of a woman who asserted her own point of view and did not hesitate to contradict opinions he offered of the world if she happened to disagree. She kept her thick black hair in a bob, wore a bright red slash of lipstick which stained the cigarettes she smoked with soigné elegance, and had high cheekbones and beautiful dark eyes which, to Amedeo, hinted at exotic Magyar ancestors from the steppes. Her parents allowed the two to spend long periods alone together, which would have been quite unthinkable in Italy. One afternoon, they went bathing in the Danube and Maria, in a one-piece black-and-white costume, swam through the icy water to St Margit’s Island, in the centre of the river. Amedeo struggled after her, but by the time he finally arrived and pulled himself, exhausted, onto the shore, he looked round to find that she was already swimming back again.
He was in love, he decided, which meant he had to show that he was. After the Italian riders returned to Turin, Amedeo poured out his heart in long letters to Budapest. When Maria told him she was accompanying her mother and sister to Trondheim in Norway to see the midnight sun that summer, he decided to join her. It took four days to travel across Europe to spend less than four hours at her side. Maria was delighted by the amour fou of her ardent Italian, and as she waved goodbye to the train taking him back to the south, Amedeo was besotted. He was still feeling love-struck several days after his return. It only dawned on him gradually that one word alone seemed to be on everyone’s lips: Abyssinia.
No observer of the international scene in the early Thirties would have imagined that the peace of Europe would be threatened by a dispute involving Italy’s colonies. They may not have been quite the collection of deserts that Mussolini had memorably described when he was a fiery socialist editor, but they were the plate scrapings of the imperial feast. Besides, colonial adventures were considered quite démodé by this time, the preoccupation among the British, at least, being to quieten the urges for self-government, rather than acquiring new territories. It was all such a pity that the Duce seemed determined to make an issue of a petty dispute with Ethiopia, especially as he had behaved so well in the previous thirteen years of his rule.
Not that the beginning had been at all promising. According to the Fascists’ own mythology, they had come to power after a heroic revolutionary struggle against the forces of Bolshevism and anarchy, which culminated with the March on Rome in 1922. In fact, they had done so with the collusion of Italy’s upper classes and the army, and Mussolini’s first government included such solidly reassuring figures as General Armando Diaz, commander-in-chief during the Great War, and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. In spite of these compromises, the iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois self-image of Fascism never entirely died out.
Mussolini had scraped the depths of Fascist menefreghismo – I don’t-give-a-damn-ism – during his first trip abroad to London in December 1922, barely a month after he came to power. Strutting about with his bodyguard of Fascist streetfighters, the squadristi, he cultivated the messianic pose of a man of destiny, which included a slightly imbecile, penetrating stare. His hosts in the Foreign Office were perplexed by his boorishness, and scandalised when a meeting had to be cancelled as he was holed up in Claridges with a prostitute. He followed this debut in 1923 with the bombardment of Corfu after an Italian general was murdered on the island by Greek nationalists, an action that was condemned as both brutal and unnecessary. In the years that followed, however, the regime became more settled, having weathered the storm after Fascist fanatics murdered the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, and the dictatorship that was proclaimed in 1925.
In his foreign dealings, which involved incessant conferences to mitigate the damage of the Treaty of Versailles, Italy’s young leader – Mussolini was thirty-nine when he came to power – was mercurial, unpredictable and, on occasions, constructive, as in 1932 when he urged the French not to insist on the final tranche of war reparations from Germany (the year before the Nazis came to power assisted by just this sort of grievance). The revival that the Fascists had wrought in Italy was widely admired, albeit with a degree of amused condescension. Mussolini was praised by British politicians like David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, who hailed him as ‘The Roman genius … the greatest lawgiver among living men’ in one of the hack books he wrote to keep himself solvent during the wilderness years. The pacific Sir Austen Chamberlain, the Conservative Foreign Secretary of the Twenties, became an unlikely friend, being a great believer in the League of Nations (which later Mussolini, more than any other man, helped to destroy). In his positive initiatives he was encouraged by his clear-sighted Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, who had been the art critic when Mussolini edited the daily Il Popolo d’Italia after the First World War. Well-travelled, francophile and fluent in several foreign languages, Sarfatti’s restraining influence over her lover remained strong until her allure began to fade in the mid-Thirties. But always, and doubtless to Mussolini’s great delight, the Foreign Office and the Quai d’Orsay considered him capable of a ‘mad dog act’.
Italy’s grievances in these years were that she had been promised much to enter the First World War, in particular Italian-speaking territory along the Dalmatian coast, but had received little. Instead, her expected spoils had been handed to the new state of JugoSlavia. The age of selfish empire-building was over, Britain and France declared, but then helped themselves to Palestine and Syria, which had been Turkish, and to the German colonies in Africa, dressing up some of these acquisitions as new-fangled ‘mandates’ of the League of Nations. Versailles had been a ‘mutilated peace’, declared the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who set off with his ultranationalist followers to occupy the port of Fiume in 1919 in defiance of the United States, Britain and France, as well as the feeble government in Rome. Amedeo had only been