Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O’Kelly
Читать онлайн книгу.
with teams taking part from all over the country. As the boats sped towards the finishing line, they stopped and raised their oars to allow the team from Fiume to win. The crowd erupted, cheering over and over again Viva Fiume italiana!
With some justification, Mussolini ridiculed his predecessors, who had signed a peace treaty at Versailles ‘of which a representative of San Marino would be ashamed’. The revolving-door nature of Italian governments immediately after the war had left Italy’s voice unheard. With the Duce in charge, there was little danger of that. By the early Thirties, he was a familiar figure on Europe’s political scene; a dictator but not a tyrant, and a leader who, for all his bellicose posturing, seemed to be on the side of those who sought to maintain the peace of Europe.
The Nazis’ rise to power had not interested Mussolini, in spite of the warm admiration Hitler felt for the senior dictator. The bloodletting of the Night of the Long Knives seemed to have shocked him, and the mumbo-jumbo of Nazism, its deification of Nordic Aryanism and hatred of the Jews, he thought ridiculous. The first meeting between Mussolini and Hitler at Venice in June 1934 was a disaster. ‘A gramophone with one tune,’ had been the verdict of the Duce, who also speculated wildly about the German prophet’s sexual orientation. Similar feelings were expressed by his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, then the propaganda minister, who for all his many failings – frivolous, cynical, opportunist, philandering, perhaps also a crook – had an intellectual honesty that would never entirely abandon him, and resulted in the extraordinary testament of his diaries. To journalists gathered in the bar of the Hotel Danieli, Ciano declared: ‘Hitler has just one aim: war and vengeance. For his people he is a kind of Mohammed, with the plans of Genghis Khan.’
The first of these materialised the following month when the Nazis tried to seize Austria, murdering Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, whose wife and family were spending the summer as guests of the Mussolinis at Riccione. An enraged Duce immediately mobilised Italian divisions on the frontier and Hitler backed down. Britain and France applauded from the sidelines, but in the crises that were to follow neither was prepared to act with similar resolution.
With Europe so volatile, Mussolini’s foreign admirers were perplexed by their hero’s interest in Italy’s colonies, which he had previously disdained. The most recent acquisitions had been Libya and the Dodecanese islands, centring on Rhodes, which had been wrested from the Turks in 1912. It had been a short war against a weakened enemy, vigorously opposed by most of the powers and the left in Italy, foremost among whom had been Benito Mussolini, who urged railwaymen to stop the troop trains. Little fighting had been involved, although in Libya the Italians had the distinction of being the first power to use aircraft in war. For the Greeks in Rhodes, the Italian occupation was welcomed as an improvement on the Turkish, but the advantages were less obvious to the tribes of Libya, where the conquest remained incomplete until the late Twenties. The Senussi tribesmen of Cyrenaica rebelled, resulting in a nasty little war in which operations were led by General Rodolfo Graziani. Desert wells were filled with concrete, the Beduin were rounded up, or their encampments were bombed from the air and the Senussi leader Omar al Muktar was hanged out of hand. These were the methods Graziani would later adopt in Ethiopia, and they had already succeeded in making Italy’s most celebrated colonial soldier detested by many of his senior officers.
Scarcely less arid was Italian Somaliland, which was acquired when Britain and France divided up the coast of the Horn of Africa in the 1890s. France had taken the smallest but most important bit at Djibuti, with which it hoped to control access to the Red Sea, or at least counter the British at Aden on the opposite shore. The French territory also became the entry point to landlocked Ethiopia after the development of the Djibuti to Addis Ababa railway. A longer stretch of barren mountains and sand was handed to Britain, whose administrative centre was Berbera, and then came the vast tract of Italian Somaliland down to the Kenyan border.
The Somalis were strangers in the main to ordered government, and until Fascism the Italians seemed happy to leave them in this state. But in 1923 one of Mussolini’s closest supporters, Cesare De Vecchi, arrived at Mogadishu as governor. A former university professor from Piedmont who had fought bravely in the Great War, De Vecchi was a man of some ability who was to hold a wide ensemble of portfolios during the regime, being governor of Somalia, Minister of Education and, finally, governor of the Dodecanese. Known and respected by the Guillets – his son was a cavalry friend of Amedeo’s – De Vecchi was one of those in the Fascist hierarchy who reassured conservatives, and his dedication to the monarchy was unquestioned. He set about introducing an efficient colonial administration in Somaliland, which by 1939, had an Italian population of 8,000 living amid 1,200,000 natives.
But the jewel in the crown was Eritrea, named after the ancient Greek for the Red Sea, through which the Italians had long hoped to control Ethiopia, the only significant part of Africa as yet uncolonised. But here their ambitions had gone disastrously wrong. A Genoese entrepreneur, Michele Rubattino, bought the port of Assab in 1869 from a local potentate so that his ships could penetrate the Indian Ocean without paying to use British harbours. In hesitant steps, the Italians enlarged the boundaries of their possession. General Oreste Barattieri, a veteran of Garibaldi’s Thousand, was sent to Eritrea in the 1890s with orders from the combative prime minister Francesco Crispi, a Sicilian who had also been a Garibaldino, to enlarge its borders at Ethiopia’s expense and create a vast Italian colony. Protectorate status was to be imposed on Ethiopia, in an arrangement similar to that of the British in Egypt.
At first, Barattieri was highly successful, exploiting the power vacuum in the region. The Mahdi rising in the Sudan, which led to the death of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885, had ended the Egyptian presence on the Eritrean coast and in the southern Sudan. The dervishes then turned their attention to the Christian infidels of Ethiopia. A bloody battle was fought, from which the Ethiopians emerged victorious, but in the mêlée the last Tigrinian emperor, Johannes, was killed. After bitter civil war, the throne passed to the first emperor of the Amharic-speaking Shoan dynasty, Menelik II, named after the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba who had founded the empire 2,500 years before.
Barattieri, meanwhile, quietly expanded the borders of Eritrea, finding the Tigrinians who made up the bulk of its population more disposed to submit to Italian rule than to Shoan. He pushed on to the oasis of Kassala in the Sudan and deep into Tigre. But he finally went too far when his incursions approached the holy city of Axum, the religious and cultural heart of the Ethiopian empire, where the Ark of the Covenant was supposedly housed.
Menelik’s response was to issue a chitet, the imperial summons to war. With his army of 100,000 warriors he annihilated 2,000 Eritrean ascari led by Major Toselli at Amba Alagi, deep within Ethiopia. Urged on by Crispi, and in danger of being recalled to Rome with his reputation in tatters, Barattieri recklessly moved forward from his defences in the Eritrean highlands to confront the enemy. With an army of 16,000 men, and fifty-two cannon, the largest European force ever deployed in a colonial war in Africa, the Italian general was confident that victory would be his.
At dawn on 1 March 1896 Menelik attacked the four columns of Barattieri’s army, which had become separated in the mountain passes above Adowa, perhaps owing to some confusion with the maps. One column was immediately surrounded and a second, rushing to its aid, was caught on the move and wiped out, its general killed. Soon the entire Italian army was faltering under attacks from waves of warriors brandishing swords and leather shields, led by officers wearing lion manes. Rifle fire rained steadily down on the Italians from the ambas, the table-flat mountain plateaux which typify the Ethiopian landscape. Empress Taitu herself supervised the firing of six modern cannon, comforted by a statue of the Virgin. In an operatic touch, she prevailed upon the emperor to hurl the 25,000-strong Shoan reserve at the stricken Italians.
Three columns were washed away by waves of warriors. Barattieri himself rallied the Alpini and Bersaglieri. But in the midst of the carnage, he explained at his court martial – at which he was acquitted – ‘my heart was being torn in two, as I despaired of ever being able to give an order or of getting it carried out’. Although he managed to hack his way back to Eritrea, and rally what remained of his army, two generals were left dead on the field, with 260 officers and almost 4,000 men. A further 1,900 men were captured, including one general, and were led in triumph to Menelik II’s capital,