Читать книгу Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia - Sebastian O’Kelly - Страница 15

Amedeo was reminded of Neapolitans piling off a crowded tram, although instead of people pushing and shoving this involved steamships. The whole of Italy’s merchant navy seemed to be choked into the harbour of Massaua forming an ill-tempered queue to disembark. On the quayside were scurrying Eritrean dock workers, and in among them, helping unload artillery, lorries and light tanks, were scores of Black Shirts. They had come to fight; but morale was high and they were eager to help. Major Ajmone Cat shouted down to a port official demanding that the Spahys should be given priority owing to the horses. He had not lost one during the ten-day voyage from Libya, and he had no intention of doing so now. When they had refuelled at Port Said, the ship and all its passengers had been covered in coal dust, but the major ordered the men to use the sea for their ablutions: the fresh water was for their mounts. In spite of the major’s impatience, the Spahys sweltered at anchor in the roads of Massaua for a day and a half, as temperatures rose to 45 degrees. Nor, alarmingly, was it much cooler at night. One by one the Spahys’ mounts were finally winched up from the hold in a canvas sling and lowered ashore into a throng of excited dockers.

The Spahys rode down the quayside of Massaua, then the biggest port in east Africa, and through the narrow labyrinthine Turkish and Arabic streets. They were arcaded to provide some protection against the unremitting sun, a device the Italians had continued in the adjoining European quarter, reminding Amedeo of De Chirico’s paintings. On the Yacht Club terraces some Europeans raised their glasses as the Spahys rode down a wide seafront avenue that led to the domed and dazzling palace built for the Turkish-Egyptian pashas, now home to the Italian governor. It was so white in the daytime sun that it strained the eyes and in front of it, defying every horticultural law of survival, was a form of lawn. Above the pedimented portico was a vast red shield with the white cross of Savoy, visible from several kilometres out at sea, which the officers saluted as they rode by.

The desert began on the city’s outskirts, stretching monotonously towards the mountains and the Eritrean hinterland. Only five kilometres out of Massaua, the major brought the column to a halt and ordered everyone to dismount and walk. The horsemen had been told not to clog up the asphalt road, along which lorries filled with infantrymen and supplies were speeding up to Asmara. Instead, the horses had to pick their way painstakingly forward across the scrubby, broken desert land, covered with rocks as though sprinkled from a castor. To speed their progress, the Spahys kept as far as possible to the wadis. Lethal torrents for a few brief weeks during the great rains of July and August, when dry they offered a smooth, sandy path.

By nightfall the column had reached the Menabrea Bridge, where the road to Asmara crossed the wadi. On the bridge’s concrete girders were incised in Piedmontese dialect the eponymous general’s exhortation to his troops: Ca custa lon ca custa (Let it cost what it cost). For not far away, on a barren little hillock at Dogali, was a marble column with an eagle bearing an olive branch: the memorial to 500 Italian troops wiped out to a man right at the beginning of Italy’s colonial adventures.

When the march resumed the next day, the ground began to rise almost immediately and the desiccated scrubland gave way to greener vegetation. The air became cooler and sweet, and within a dozen kilometres the column was riding – for the major had allowed this concession – through a landscape of woods and cultivated fields. Neat Italian villas were dotted around the hills, which echoed with the tolling bells of the Coptic and Catholic churches. At Dongollo, where a large low building proclaimed itself the source of the colony’s acqua minerale, the local Italians turned out to greet the cavalrymen, handing them bottles of water. Thereafter the route rose sharply, and kept on rising through the green, wooded mountains. One moment Amedeo and his men were following the precipitous zig-zagging road in the pleasant afternoon sun, the next the air suddenly chilled and it became almost impossible to see the rider in front: the Spahys di Libya were enjoying the unusual experience of riding through clouds. At the mountain monastery of Debre Bizen, one of the holiest Coptic sites, Major Ajmone Cat and his officers looked down over the valleys with their lingering clouds to Massaua and the Red Sea, 80 kilometres away, and beyond to the Dahlak islands, the Buri peninsula and the gulf of Zula. The Abuna Filipos had established his church here in the fourteenth century because, it was said, he preferred the roar of lions to the distraction of women’s faces. But the view itself was more splendid to Amedeo than that over the Liri Valley from Bramante’s terrace at Monte Cassino, and would summon reverence and awe in the least promising soul.

They camped on the plain beyond Asmara, and the next morning Amedeo caught a lift into the city with a passing lorry. He was astonished by what he saw. Between the Islamic world of the Red Sea, and the Africa that lay beyond, was a model Italian city, perched 2400 metres above sea level. Neat art deco villas were swathed in vivid jacaranda and bougainvillaea. The streets were paved and clean. The governor’s palace, with its shady gardens and menagerie, and the army headquarters were buildings which would not have been out of place in Rome. He had an espresso in Bar Vittoria and walked down the Corso Italia, the main thoroughfare, past pavement cafés, cinemas, restaurants and even a Pizzeria Napoli. Set in its own gardens, and behind palm trees, was an opera house, where Caruso himself had sung. A little further, on the opposite side of the tree-lined Corso, was the city’s cathedral, built in red brick in mediaeval Lombard style as though it were set in the middle of Milan.

Amedeo had thought little about the wider objectives of this war, seeing it simply in soldier’s terms: the Patria had to be defended. But now he began to embrace the imperial enthusiasm of the Duce. A people who could built a city like Asmara could transform Ethiopia from a wilderness into an empire that would echo the glory of ancient Rome. In place of the despotic Negus and feuding ras, Italy would offer law, order and progress. Settlers from the south would cultivate the land, rather than ignominiously emigrating to the slums of the United States. And the local population would benefit too from this new Pax Romana, Amedeo reasoned, receiving roads, schools and hospitals in the place of superstition, slavery and poverty. In Eritrea the achievements of Italian rule were apparent everywhere, with an infrastructure that surpassed much of Calabria and Basilicata. Why should not Ethiopia, five times the size, be transformed in the same way?

Amedeo shared the indignation felt by almost every Italian that Britain and France, their allies in the Great War, were siding with the enemy and even threatening to impose economic sanctions. That they were doing so in order to defend international agreements that Italy herself had signed was not a point he chose to dwell on. At this time of heightened emotions, old suspicions resurfaced. In the hierarchy of world powers, Italy seemed condemned to occupy a place near the bottom. For many Englishmen, it would always be the disaster-prone, comic turn of Europe. While the map of the globe was covered with British pink or French blue, Italians seemed condemned to leave their motherland only as desperate, huddled masses.

But times had changed and the demands of the new Italy, Fascist and modern, were not to be brushed aside. Whatever Mussolini’s faults, he had given Italians back their self-respect. When the Spahys’ ship had sailed through the Suez Canal, a vast crowd had been waiting on the western bank. The entire Italian community of Alexandria had turned out to cheer them on to victory. At their head was a strikingly attractive young woman, Maria Uva, wrapped in a figure-hugging tricolour, who blew kisses to them as they passed (later receiving the war’s campaign medal for her patriotic fervour).

Italy was going to take her proper place among the powers at last. In this, the Duce and the Italian people were agreed. And two nations which had the least right to tell her that she could not make an empire out of Ethiopia were Britain and France, who sat in fading glory over more than a quarter of the world.

The next day, the Spahys rode on past Asmara, through the central massif of Eritrea and down to the Lowlands that led to the borders with Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. They established their camp at Barentu, a one-street town of modest bungalows, beside an Italian infantry battalion and a ‘Gruppo Bande’ of irregular, locally recruited cavalry. All were part of the 2nd Corps of General Pietro Maravigna, who would command the western flank of the eventual invasion. For six weeks, however, the Spahys were to kick their heels on the sweltering Lowlands, and wait.

The Spahys were less soldiers in a modern army than warriors. For the most part Bedouin, they had been formed into a military unit in the same way as the Cossacks. Each trooper provided his own horse, saddlery and some arms, and was paid ten lire a day, the wage of a skilled worker in Italy. All were dressed in a flowing dark blue burnous, waistcoat and a red cummerbund and takia, a low fez with the badge of the army star. But the minutiae of military discipline was not insisted upon. When the major had dismissed the parades in Libya, the Spahys’ wives and children came on to the parade ground to relieve the men of their rifles and lead the horses away.

Amedeo was grateful for the delay. After little more than a month with the Spahys, he knew the names and faces of all eighty men in his squadron, but could only issue elementary orders in Arabic. To his surprise, he was one of the few Spahy officers who set out to learn the language, rather than rely on an Italian-speaking shumbashi, or senior sergeant. The complexity of tenses he learned from a grammar, applying the rules with the help of the regimental barber, whose Italian was excellent. When Major Ajmone Cat saw the two of them sitting in the shade conjugating verbs, he paused for a moment, nodded approvingly, and walked on.

Then there was the matter of his horse. The grey four-year-old Arab stallion had been brought across from French Tunisia just before he joined the Spahys, but had caught Amedeo’s eye immediately. He was not pretty in the way that many Arab horses are, but tough and lean, with an intelligent head, excellent conformation and lively paces. At fifteen hands high he was far smaller than the competition horses Amedeo was used to, but now his needs were different. In Ethiopia, he would require a mount that could survive off almost nothing, never go lame and endure routine marches of 60 kms a day. An old muntaz, or corporal, had bought the horse but found him too lively, for the animal was barely schooled. He was eager to exchange him. There was a suitable horse going spare from the same herd, which none of the other Spahys wanted for it carried a berrima, a spiralling whorl, on its coat. On the front of the horse the mark brought good fortune, the Spahys told Amedeo, but on the hind quarters, as it was, it meant that the animal wanted its rider’s death. The muntaz barked at the men that they should not repeat such nonsense in front of Italian officers. He handed over the young grey to the lieutenant and led away the marked horse for himself.

The heat on the Eritrean Lowlands was nothing compared with the desert after Massaua, but humid and heavy so soon after the rains, it turned the horses sluggish by midday. With a rifle over his back, for there were leopards and lions on the Lowlands, Amedeo rode his young horse across the plains green with vegetation and through woods of acacia and sycamore. Every two or three hundred metres he would have to cross a wadi, for these streams of dry sand streaked down from the mountains and spread across the Lowland landscape like blood vessels in a slab of meat. Often accompanied by Cavarzerani, he would make for a wadi, shaded by a huge and majestic baobab tree. The sandy river bed provided a serviceable manège to school the horses, and with the corners marked out by large stones, Amedeo carried out the training exercises he had learned at Pinerolo. As the horse trotted and cantered around him on a lunge rein, the wadi echoed with his onomatopoeic endearments: piccolone, poppolone, coccolone, bello bello …

Amedeo would have chosen to name his new horse after Maria, his Hungarian amour, whose photograph he carried in his wallet. But as the horse was a stallion, like all the Spahys’ four hundred mounts, he lamely decided to name him after her father Sandor, the diminutive of Alexander.

By mid-September Major Ajmone Cat despaired that the war would ever start. He kept the Spahys occupied, sending out regular patrols to the border with the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. But before even a shot had been fired they were rapidly deteriorating. Most of the officers, including Amedeo, had already gone down with malaria, but far worse in the major’s view was the loss of eighty horses to mandef, a form of pneumonia picked up when they grazed. He had had to remount an entire squadron on Ethiopian horses, the Dongolai, which were virtually ponies.

The major was not alone in his frustration. Among officers in the invasion force muttered criticisms began to be directed towards the commander-in-chief, General Emilio De Bono. White-bearded and already sixty-nine years old, the general was an engaging character who worked a masterful charm on the ordinary soldiers, his figlioli. A distinguished general in the Great War – and the author of popular humorous books – he had been a Fascist from the beginning. Providing the movement with precious respectability, reassuring the king and the army, De Bono was one of the four quadrumvirs of the National Fascist Party, a long-standing confidant of Mussolini who was owed much. But as a conquering commander, he was never wholly convincing. And with the awful memory of Adowa always at the back of his mind, he wasn’t going to budge until the Duce had sent enough men to cover all possible contingencies. On occasion, Amedeo visited De Bono, a great friend of his Uncle Amedeo, at his headquarters in Asmara, and found the old general quite immune to the impatience of his subordinates and his political master in Rome.

Haile Selassie had cause to be grateful to his dilatory adversary as the diplomatic temperature rose alarmingly in Europe. Italian aggression would be met by force, Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Foreign Secretary, declared forthrightly in Geneva on 11 September. A few days later the British Home fleet was mobilised and sent to the Mediterranean; and the Italian fleet returned from the Dodecanese to La Spezia.

Feverish preparations for war continued in Addis Ababa. The emperor’s Swedish senior military advisor, General Virgin, had had to retire owing to altitude sickness – a common difficulty – but the army cadets’ training continued under Captain Viking Tramm. Belgian officers, meanwhile, introduced the imperial guard to the rudiments of modern warfare. In addition, scores of adventurers and assorted misfits eager to fight the Italians poured into Addis Ababa. Among them were a sixty-two-year-old English master of foxhounds, Major Gerald Burgoyne (later killed driving an ambulance) and Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, ‘the Black Eagle of Harlaam’, who on arrival proceeded to crash one of the emperor’s half dozen aircraft.

More valuable, perhaps, was a growing bivouac of foreign journalists and newsreelmen, who had arrived to report the war from the Ethiopian viewpoint. Though Evelyn Waugh, now accredited to the Daily Mail, was of the view that the sooner the Italians marched into Addis Ababa the better – ‘I hope the organmen gas them to buggery,’ he wrote to Diana Cooper – the sympathy of the world was with the dignified little emperor. Nowhere more so than in Britain. Sylvia Pankhurst, having previously espoused the cause of women’s suffrage, revolutionary socialism and unmarried mothers – she was one herself – rallied to the emperor. Loathing Italian Fascism – her lover was a leftwing dissident and journalist Silvio Coria – she soon demonstrated that Haile Selassie could not have wished for a more energetic propagandist. Although she had never met the emperor and knew nothing of Ethiopia, the justice of his struggle against a totalitarian enemy stirred within her a righteous wrath. In the years that were to follow, she would ensure, more than anyone else, that the plight of Ethiopia was never far from the public mind.

In Rome, meanwhile, a chapter closed on the career of another remarkable woman, as Margherita Sarfatti gave her former editor and lover her parting advice: ‘You have enough to colonise in Apulia, Sicily and Calabria … If you go into Ethiopia you will fall into the hands of the Germans and you will be lost. If we have to pay for the empire with the ruin of Europe, we will pay too high a price.’

At 9pm on 2 October 1935 the cathedral bells in Asmara began to toll. Catholic and Coptic churches across the colony followed suit, their peals echoing down to the small parish at Barentu. Major Ajmone Cat summoned his officers and told them to prepare to cross the frontier at dawn.