ETHIOPIA: Mobilization

The news that three Italian army columns had crossed Ethiopia’s far northern border reached Addis Ababa last week in a crashing thunderstorm. That night little Emperor Haile Selassie talked long with his white advisers, prayed longer to his dusky Coptic God. At dawn the lean Semitic Negroes began moving down out of the eucalyptus forests toward the palace. The guards let 5,000 into the palace grounds. While the Emperor watched the mob from a window, his Chancellor Haile Wolde-Roufe read out in the Amharic tongue Ethiopia’s first effort at a modern mobilization order:

“Defend your country against the inferior Italian invader. . . . God will be with us. All up! For the Emperor! For the country!”

At the south entrance of the palace, a huge young Galla lifted his open hand and struck the great dull-brown Negarit (Em-peror’s) war drum. OMMMM . . . OMMMMM . . . Forty smaller kettledrums from the palace answered, rommo-mmommommommomm. The booming throbbed, swelled, seemed to shake the air. On each of the mountain tops that hang over Addis Ababa other drummers smacked their drumheads. The monotonous, terrible call to war spread out from the capital, from mountain top to mountain top, across the wild gorges, jungles and plateaus of Ethiopia, until it rolled into the capitals of the six great rases (princes), whose war drums took it up, passed it on to the great chiefs and the little chiefs. To the farthest nomadic tribes, foraging no one knew where, couriers rode out by mule and camel. “Kitet!” was the word the criers and couriers gave, ”Close ranks, unite!”

The congested rage of six long months of restraint boiled up out of one of the world’s most naturally savage peoples. Mobilization means nothing in Ethiopia. When the drums sound, the men go to their chiefs, the chiefs start for the enemy and the war is on. In Addis Ababa the 5,000 in the Emperor’s courtyard heard the order out, solemnly applauded three times, then went into a fit. They brandished their swords, accidentally slicing off some of each other’s ears and noses, spotted a nearby huddle of white news hawks and had almost mobbed the white men before the Emperor’s guards ran in between. Seriously wounded, several of the slashed were hospitalized.

The Emperor came out on a balcony and spoke:

“Soldiers, I give you this advice. Be cunning, be savage. Face the enemy one by one, two by two, in the fields and mountains. Do not take white clothes. Do not mass as now; hide and strike suddenly. Steal up, snipe and murder singly.”*

In every village compound, among the squalid mud huts, savage priests shouted the liturgy in the obscure language of Geez, slew sheep and cattle for a sacrifice and the warriors drank the hot blood. The old men shouted tall tales of past Ethiopian glories. The chiefs put on their lion-mane collars. The warriors took up their fighting arms, their wives, their pots and the village set out for the capital of the superior chief, leaving behind only the old, infirm and infantile.

Out of this half-insane killing rage of a people, observers last week asked, how much of a fighting force would meet the factory-made modern Italian army? The ruling Amharas of the Emperor’s own tribe made it 2,000,000 out of an esti mated population of 10,000,000. Actually, even if Haile Selassie could possibly pro vide an off-the-land commissary for so huge an army, he probably could not mobilize much more than half that.

As a modern nation Ethiopia is only 46 years old, nearly as young as modern Italy. Ethiopia’s Garibaldi was the late great Emperor Menelik who pulled to gether something like a nation after trouncing the Italians at Aduwa 39 years ago. Haile Selassie, a proud, disdainful poseur of an Emperor, has carried on Menelik’s nation-making work by adroit intrigue both inside Ethiopia and out. He is a usurper and keeps his cousin, the rightful heir to Ethiopia’s throne, luxuriously jailed in a remote fortress. His ac tive sovereignty covers an area running north & south from Addis Ababa along Ethiopia’s line of lakes, with a spur running eastward along the railway toward the coast.

At the moment of mobilization, Haile Selassie’s months of frantic preparation for war seemed fantastically inadequate. More or less mobilized for display and newsreel purposes were the 100,000 men of the capital district, the so-called Imperial Army. Also, four chiefs nearest the Italian advance had about 50,000 men in the field. In the hands of these men and in various mildewed warehouses were perhaps 200,000 modern rifles of miscellaneous makes, countless muskets, shotguns, blunderbusses, spears, swords and small knives. Haile Selassie had the Emperor Menelik’s treasure hoard. For a modern mechanized war, he had seven noncombat planes, two dozen or so anti-aircraft guns, some trucks and at least one tank that the Duke of the Abruzzi, cousin to Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele, had given him on a visit of Italian friendship in 1927. But, far beyond all these, he had Ethiopia’s eternal defense, one of the most tortured and inhospitable terrains on the face of the earth. On that his throne last week rested.

*Endorsing this advice, famed British Tactics Expert Captain Liddell Hart, writing for the New York Times, last week described recent formal drilling of Ethiopian troops as an ominous error. “That type of training,” warned he, “runs the risk of paralyzing their natural fighting instincts and leaving them a paralyzed target . . . with ‘tactical arthritis.’ “