Читать книгу Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia - Sebastian O’Kelly - Страница 13

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 nine at the time, but he recalled a rowing regatta at Bari, 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, Addis Ababa (New Flower). Within a year, the Italian prisoners were released unharmed. But a more severe punishment was meted out to the Tigrinian-speaking ascari of Eritrea who had fought with dogged bravery; each had his right hand and left foot amputated. Even in the Thirties these old veterans were a familiar sight on the streets of Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, hobbling in their heavy prostheses in pride of place at the head of parades.

Adowa had been the most humiliating defeat for Italy. A country that had repeatedly demanded an imperial role had been revealed, in the eyes of the world, as inadequate for the task. Feelings ran so high that the Duke of Torino, the king’s cousin, fought a duel with one of the princely Orléans family of France who had cast doubt on Italian valour. In the years after the defeat other European powers tactfully acknowledged Italy’s special interests in Ethiopia, but there was no question of it imposing its will on Menelik II, or his successors. To some degree, even before Fascism, all Italian governments wanted to avenge Adowa.

When Ras Tafari, then regent of Ethiopia and later to become Emperor Haile Selassie, visited Rome in 1924, a preoccupied Mussolini displayed his habitual lack of interest in far-flung places, accompanying the prince to official receptions with his hands in his pockets. He was in any case up to his neck in the scandal of the Matteotti murder, which very nearly undid him. The prince presented a lion to Rome’s zoo, and the Italians, without much thought, backed Ethiopia’s entry into the League of Nations, a decision they came later to regret bitterly. Britain opposed the move on the reasonable grounds that Ethiopia was not a nation, but an anarchic empire quite likely to fall apart. It had doubled in size during the scramble for Africa, absorbing Muslim principalities, such as the sultanate of Harar, and truculent tribes like the Galla.

The unasked question at Ras Tafari’s coronation in 1930, when he assumed the title of Haile Selassie, meaning the holy trinity, was whether he would be able to hold the empire together. No warrior, he had nonetheless succeeded in outmanoeuvring all his rivals to assume the crown of the Negus Negusti, the king of kings, as he would many of their children and even grandchildren by the time he was finally deposed and murdered by the Communist Dergue in 1975. As ruler, Haile Selassie’s position was similar to that of Louis XIII, surrounded by over-mighty, semiautonomous feudatories, the ras. Unlike the French king, however, he had no need of the services of a Richelieu. Thirty-eight-years old at his coronation, the emperor conscientiously set about attempting to modernise his empire. He was often thwarted – by the ras, by the conservative Coptic clergy and by his people’s modest appetite for central government – but he was a patient man who never lost sight of the main objective. He adopted the parliamentary constitution of Japan, taking its success in avoiding colonial domination as a model for Ethiopia, and he had ambitious plans to build roads, schools and hospitals. With most of the country still in the middle ages or under tribal rule, and Addis Ababa little more than a shanty town, the gulf between the emperor’s ambitions and what could be achieved was obvious to all. To hostile observers such as Evelyn Waugh, who reported on Haile Selassie’s coronation for The Times, Ethiopia and its hapless little emperor, who wanted so much to be Western, were ripe for satire.

At the end of 1934, the Ethiopians and the Italians clashed over the wells at Walwal in the Ogaden desert on the border with Italian Somaliland. In spite of dark suspicions on both sides, the incident does not appear to have been orchestrated by either Rome or Addis Ababa. With 107 Ethiopians and a fitaurari, commander of the advance guard, killed, it was serious, but it was not unprecedented; a month earlier the Ethiopians had killed a French officer on the border with Djibuti. But Haile Selassie’s decision to complain to the League of Nations turned the dispute into an international crisis. Being a believer in modernity and international law, he may simply have thought that this was the correct and proper course to follow. Or he may have already calculated that a clash with Fascist Italy was unavoidable at some time, and he might as well make the issue Walwal as any other, and milk the sympathy of the other powers as Italy was revealed as the aggressor. Either way, it was a highly dangerous strategy, for a dictator like Mussolini, who after all was ‘always right’, could never publicly climb down. At risk of being outbid by Hitler in the bellicose posturing that had been his monopoly, Mussolini thought Fascist Italy could manage a little war in Africa. And who was going to stop him? A man with his sharp political antennae knew that the old men who governed Britain, and the succession of emollient conciliators in France, would never intervene on behalf of an African potentate.

The morning coat and wing collar that Mussolini had worn since becoming prime minister were laid aside, and he squeezed himself into the first of his vast wardrobe of military uniforms, which would continue, in bewildering variety, until the end.

As the army lorry pulled out of Tripoli, Amedeo’s nerve began to falter. Zuara was only eighty kilometres away on the border with French Tunisia and they would arrive in an hour and a half. He was dreading how he would be received. The name of his new commanding officer, Major Antonio Ajmone Cat, suggested Savoyard origin, but Amedeo doubted whether that fact would make his reception any more cordial. From what he had heard, the major was tough and independent minded, well able to stand his ground before his superiors. He himself had raised the Spahys di Libya, a unit of irregular Arab cavalry, commanding them against the Libyan rebels. How he was going to react to having a general’s nephew imposed on him, Amedeo could only guess, but he wasn’t expecting a slap on the back and spumante served in the mess.

But worse, far worse, was the guilt he felt towards Colonel Amalfi. Three weeks before, he had been waiting in the anteroom of the colonel’s office in Turin. On the wall were photographs of Italy’s riding legends. Among them were pictures of the colonel, jumping a horse over a single kitchen chair – a great feat of control – and between the seats of an open-topped landau, still hitched to its horses. Amalfi’s familiar voice called the lieutenant into his office.

Amedeo announced that while he realised that the timing was extremely inconvenient, with the Berlin Games less than a year away, he had to leave the team. Italy was at war, or very nearly, and he had been called up to serve in Abyssinia. The colonel had said nothing, but gave the young lieutenant a long, scrutinising look. Every young fool in the army, and quite a few old ones as well, was pleading to be sent to join the Italian forces gathering in Africa. Almost all Amedeo’s friends were trying to transfer to regiments certain to be sent. It had become a stampede and Italy’s summer watering holes began to empty. Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s son, was going and so was his seventeen-year-old brother, Bruno, straight from school. Ciano had flown out with the Regia Aeronautica’s squadron, ‘La Disperata’, named after a Florentine Fascist squad. The Futurist poet Filippo Marinetti and neo-Nazi ideologue Roberto Farinacci had rushed to join the colours; and the royal dukes of Bergamo and Pistoia, cousins of the king, had been given commands.

It had been one blessing for the colonel that Achille Starace was off his back, having been placed in charge of a motorised column of Black Shirts. But who the hell would be left, he asked himself. Spread in front of him was a magazine feature from L’Illustrazione Italiana on the Tevere Black Shirt Division, perhaps the most bizarre unit in any European army, shortly to leave for Somalia. One legion was made up of veterans of Italy’s colonial ventures pre-1900 (hardly very encouraging, the colonel may have thought), another incorporated the war wounded, or veterans of D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume, or of the Fascist struggle before 1922. Italians from abroad, from as far afield as Australia and the United States, had formed another and there was a juvenile legion, I Goliardi, of university students. In charge was General Boscardi, who had lost an eye capturing a trench in the Great War.

But the one thing this circus lacked, in Colonel Amalfi’s mind, was one of four riders on whom he had expended months of effort in training and preparation. And Lieutenant Guillet’s excuse for not representing Italy in probably the most prestigious equestrian event in two decades was some nonsense about having been ‘ordered’ to transfer to the Spahys di Libya. It was the hypocrisy that pained Amalfi, the young lieutenant pretending that he had been called up, rather than that he had pulled every string possible to get himself sent to Africa. Floundering in the silence, Amedeo began repeating himself, and while expressing his sincere regret that he was abandoning the team, incautiously added the thought that one had to obey the call to defend the Patria.

‘Do you think I’m completely simple-minded?’ Amalfi asked, gently. ‘No more of these stories to me. I know who you have been talking to.’

The mildness of the colonel’s reproaches, coupled with his blessing in the coming war, aggravated Amedeo’s sense of guilt as he took his leave. It had not been his father, Baron Guillet, who had swung Amedeo’s transfer, for he had retired and was living at the family palazzo in Capua managing, with little enthusiasm, the family estate. Nor had Amedeo approached his bluff, bonhominous Uncle Ernesto, called in the family Zio Murat, who had been his commanding officer. He had turned instead to his Uncle Amedeo, the middle of the three Guillet brothers and the one whose career had been the most brilliant.

Fourth or fifth in Italy’s military hierarchy, Uncle Amedeo was an exceptional man who, during the Great War, had twice received the Kingdom of Italy’s highest military decoration, the Ordine Militare di Savoia. For officers only, it was an acknowledgement of ability to command as well as of outstanding valour. To win one ensured an officer’s straight path to the top; to win two was almost unheard of. Good-looking, and a familiar figure in Roman society, Uncle Amedeo had definite presence and whenever the family gathered both Amedeo’s father and Uncle Ernesto deferred to him. He was a man of wide culture as well as a full army corps general. Benedetto Croce, the philosopher, was an intimate friend, as was Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of radio, while D’Annunzio had dedicated a book to the general as ‘the purest embodiment of the Latin genius’.

Before 1914, Uncle Amedeo had once been in love with an American woman, but for reasons no one in the family fully knew it had come to nothing, and he had remained single. As a result, his family feelings concentrated on the children of his older brother, and particularly on the youngest boy, his namesake. In childhood, Amedeo had always felt over-awed in the presence of his distinguished relative, but as he grew older he became closer to his uncle than any other man, and almost all his ambitions were spurred by a desire to win his respect and good notice.

During an evening together in Rome, Amedeo poured out his thoughts. All his life there had been talk of the League of Nations heralding an era of peace. Now there was going to be war: Italy’s African colonies were at risk from the Ethiopians. He had to be a part of it. It was the aim of all the training he had received, and what he had joined the army for.

Uncle Amedeo took seriously his nephew’s request to transfer to the Spahys. He was not sure about this war which Mussolini had set his heart on. All Italy seemed agreed that it was necessary except a few dissidents on the left, whose opinion could be ignored. But the consequences in Europe were more troubling. Britain and France, firmly against it, were threatening Italy with economic sanctions if the war went ahead. Not that Mussolini seemed to care. Like the popular newspaper editor he, at heart, always remained, the Duce couldn’t see further than the next day’s headlines, and fighting the ‘black hordes of barbarism’ was a story with legs. Uncle Amedeo was worried how the regime was beginning to change, its tone increasingly hectoring and bombastic. A report had recently arrived on his desk with a memo from the Duce: ‘Victory is ensured by the aggressive spirit of the army.’ To which he had added laconically, ‘And good artillery.’

The morning after his meeting with his nephew, the general summoned his adjutant into his office and the cogs of Italy’s military machine began to turn. A week later a note arrived for Major Antonio Ajmone Cat in Libya from the Ministry of War informing him that he was about to receive a new lieutenant.

The sun was going down and there was a cool breeze blowing across the desert by the time Amedeo arrived at Zuara. A cluster of officers, mostly Spahys, sat talking on the terrace of the neat white bungalow that served as the mess. Major Ajmone Cat, wrapped in the bright blue burnous of the Spahys, was recounting a story that had now become part of the regimental mythology. At the height of the action at Bir Tagrift, the last battle against the rebels in Tripolitania, his horse had been shot from under him, and a mysterious Spahy had given him his own, complete with its high-sided Arabic saddle. But afterwards no one could say who this man was, nor did anyone come forward to reclaim the horse. His men were convinced that the Spahys, and their commander, were watched over by a benign spirit, or marabut. Whether true or not, it was their belief, the major concluded, urging the officers never to make light of such superstitions in front of the men.

Amedeo hovered at the edge of the group waiting for the story to end. He took a deep breath, walked forward and made his sharpest Modena salute before the major, then presented himself.

‘Ah yes, Lieutenant Guillet,’ the major replied coolly, while the other Spahy officers adopted expressions of uninterest. ‘I’ll be frank with you, Guillet. You are the only officer I have not chosen for this unit. I don’t doubt your qualities, but everyone else has earned his right to be here. Try to learn the ropes as soon as you can.’

Amedeo stammered a reply, his cheeks burning. It had been a short and sharp public humiliation, but the major was not the sort to prolong it. To Amedeo’s relief at that moment an old friend from Pinerolo, Lieutenant Luigi Cavarzerani, clapped him on the back and breezily welcomed him to the regiment. The other officers had heard of Amedeo’s riding successes, and received him without resentment. He had got off lightly, they assured him once the major had left. Two other young officers, for whom strings had been pulled, had been sent straight back to Italy.