THE FRONT: Solemn Hours

Soon after dawn in Asmara, Eritrea, Il Duce’s Son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano climbed into his flying clothes and stepped out to start the war personally. Seven huge Caproni bombers, black against the pale morning light, were already lined up; their engines idling. Il Duce’s two sons, Bruno and Vittorio, now lieutenants in the air force, saluted, and took their places. Overalled mechanics crouched under each plane, screwing fuses in gleaming rows of high explosive bombs. In his pilot’s seat Count Ciano opened the throttle, then waved his hand as a signal. The seven great planes wheeled and took off together due south for Ethiopia and the mountains of Tigré.

One hundred miles and three-quarters of an hour after the takeoff they were through the black mountain peaks; below them lay Aduwa, scene of Italy’s most galling defeat 39 years before, junction of the caravan routes of northern Ethiopia; Aduwa, to capture which Benito Mussolini had sent 280,000 men 2,500 miles at a cost of $160,000,000. Sprawled over three hills Aduwa was a collection of low-walled huts, some thatched, some roofed with corrugated iron, that housed some 3,000 souls. Count Ciano squinted down through his bomb sights and pulled the trigger.

One of those huts was being used as a hospital by Swedish missionaries,* and in it at the time of the raid was a U. S. Negro aviator from Chicago, John Robinson, known to correspondents as “The Brown Condor of Ethiopia.” Condor Robinson’s task was to ferry dispatches from Addis Ababa to provincial Ethiopian commanders in an ancient monoplane. Back in Addis Ababa last week he was able to give foreign correspondents an accurate description of the first casualties of the war. Said he:

“I was sitting in the Swedish hospital chatting with some of the doctors when we heard a sudden whistling sound. I said, ‘That’s a bomb.’ I was only joking at first but for some reason we all ran outside.

“I immediately ran toward the airdrome and I saw terrified women and children flocking to the hospital where they thought they would be safe. They were mistaken about being safe. That’s why they were killed.

“The bombing was indiscriminate and it also was inaccurate.

“I saw a squad of soldiers standing in the streets, dumbfounded, looking at the airplanes. They had their swords raised in their hands.”

Back at the Asmara base, hours later, Count Ciano proudly showed that he too had been under fire. There were two little bullet holes in the tail of his plane.

Forty miles from Aduwa, at the frontier, the sound of those bombs reached Italian troops already on the march. In the darkness, long before the bombers had left their Asmara base, white-bearded old General de Bono, commander-in-chief, had gone with his chief-of-staff, General Melchiade Gabba, and other staff officers to a cleared mountain top from which they could have an unobstructed view of the frontier river, the Mareb, and the rude camel tracks leading up to the mountains and Aduwa.

Snug-buttoned in thick greatcoats against the night cold the Generals paced up and down in the darkness puffing glowing cigarets until the sky paled and they could see. With the morning light it looked as if the plains below were on fire. Long streamers of smoke led out in parallel columns from the Italian camp to the river, then across to the mountains beyond. Dust clouds from the feet of marching men.

Whippet tanks were the peak of each column. Then came a fan-shaped formation of red-fezzed Askaris carrying auto-matic rifles, searching every inch of the ground for pitfalls, every rock for snipers. Then the main advance: infantrymen in single file slogging along the gutters and the centres of the rude roadways jammed with trucks, caissons, field pieces, and long lines of swaying supercilious camels. Labor battalions, stripped to the waist, were mixed right in with the marching men. As the infantry advanced they sprang to work building roads for the heavy trucks to follow, singing:

With the whiskers of the Negus we will make a little brush to polish up the boots of Benito Mussolini.

Over the river, the Italians formed three columns. The left one swung east to Adigrat in an effort to encircle Aduwa from the left. To General de Bono, peering at maps, puffing cigarets on his cool mountain top, came the word: Adigrat had been captured almost without opposition. Italians sweeping into the town found it deserted of everything but old men, women and children, all of them painfully undernourished. The country had been swept bare of food for the warriors now hiding in the mountains. On to Aduwa!

The greatest modern army Africa has ever seen was about to show its might against an unfortified cow village, and back in Rome editors plated great victory headlines for their papers and crowds milled through the streets, eager to celebrate. But hours passed, and the news did not come.

What happened was that the Ethiopians were beginning to fight. Shrewdly they had waited until the Italian advance was slowed and tangled in the narrow mountain passes. Heavy trucks were tearing impassable ruts in the new roads almost as quickly as they were built. Artillery could not unlimber or deploy. Tanks were jammed between boulders. Then from behind thorn bushes and through the mud walls of shepherd huts came the raking fire of Ethiopian snipers. Each one of these Ethiopian hornet’s nests had to be wiped out-by infantrymen alone. For the time being the machine age had gone haywire.

For 24 hours the Italian advance was held up, then, well satisfied, the Ethiopians slunk further back into their mountains to try again. Belatedly the Italian flag went up on the ruins of empty Aduwa. First troops into the town were the 84th Infantry of the Gaviana division, who received the honor of leading the assault because they were the first troops to be sent to East Africa. With them they carried a strange piece of equipment, a fragment of a Roman column, brought all the way from Italy to be propped up in the market square of Aduwa in memory of the dead of 1896. By this time Rome’s desire to celebrate was slightly chilled. How many had been killed? Whose sons were gone? When would the first casualty lists be published? Angrily reproved II Duce’s war office:

“Our losses in the capture of Aduwa have been entirely insignificant. Casualty lists will be published in due time.” All the publicity, flag waving and glory went to the capture of Aduwa, but this advance, due south from Asmara was not necessarily the most important in the Italian campaign. Two other Italian armies were in the field last week biting their way too into Ethiopia without benefit of foreign war correspondents.

From Assab on the Red Sea, a second army bore straight in, parallel to the French Somaliland frontier, in an effort to cut Ethiopia’s only railroad at Dire Dawa (see map, p. 18). Fighting as hard, suffering as much as the publicized troops to the north, they had captured the mountain of Mussa Ali last week and were slowly driving through desert country toward the railroad. Well aware was the Conquering Lion of Judah of the importance of this force. At Jigjiga, 65 miles from Dire Dawa, he had assembled the best equipped, best trained of his fighters, was preparing to make what many people believe to be the only formal battle of the campaign in defense of the railroad.

Not by accident was it that Italy’s third claw was put in charge of her ablest colonial general. General Rodolfo Grazi-ani, hard bitten veteran of many a Libyan skirmish, was plowing north last week from Italian Somaliland at the head of mixed Italian and colonial troops. The terrain he will have to cross is a shade easier than that facing the other two armies, but the distance to his base, Mogadishu on the Indian Ocean, is almost twice as long, the difficulties of water, food and supplies almost twice as great. It is against him that Ethiopians have their best chance of a counterattack into Italian territory. Among the Ethiopian commanders opposing General Graziani last week is one of the most picturesque characters in the country, the former Turkish General Wehib Pasha (see p. 21).

*Not a Red Cross hospital, as later claimed by Haile Selassie. *For at least 300 years various Ethiopian princes, all claiming direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, had been vainly nominating themselves Negus Negasti (King of Kings) of Ethiopia, sometimes three at a time, when Menelik (born Sahala Mariem) was born in 1844 to the King of the stock-raising Shoans and Gallas of central and southern Ethiopia. Like many another conqueror, Menelik spent his youth as the captive of his father’s enemies. Not until he was 45 was he able to wangle the title of Negus Negasti for himself. By thoroughly defeating the Italians at Aduwa, soon afterward, he made the title mean something. He proceeded to yank together a true empire by a series of bloody conquests, notably against his father’s Gallas, was extremely conciliatory to Britain, died in 1913, leaving a treasure of 10,000,000 gold Italian lire and his succession to be settled by a new series of civil wars.