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THE FRONT: Bloody Gorge

3 minute read
TIME

At 9:30 a.m. one day last week General Oreste Mariotti squinted frommule-back along the dry bed of the Ende River, a strip of boulders and gravel between mountainous shrub covered hills, blew his whistle and halted his column.

For four days he and his 2,000 men—stiff-fezzed Askaris and undrilled Danakil tribesmen, backed by a battery of moun-tain artillery mounted on camels—had made the most spectacular forced march of the entire Ethiopian campaign. To protect the flank of Italy’s main army of the north with its spearhead at Makale, they had gone where no white men had ever gone before, skirting the blazing Danakil Desert, then up over the bitter cold highlands facing the Derdega Mountains. One thing General Mariotti knew: Degiac Kassa Sebat was ahead of him with an indefinite number of well-armed Ethiopians and he would attack as soon as the Italian column got near enough. The gorge seemed a likely place, for a ridge ran straight across it about 200 yards ahead.

Degiac Kassa and General Mariotti thought alike. Before the General was able to unlimber his camel guns, volley upon volley of rifle fire echoed from the cliffs. Skirmish lines went out, runners raced for munitions, support. Colonel Belli, the General’s second-in-command, ran forward to help the mountain battery, got bullets in a hand and knee.

All day the deep gorge rang with battle. Three other Italian officers were wounded but fought on while the Ethiopians stubbornly resisted the Italian advance. At nightfall, with the battle line 7,000 feet up in the mountains, the Ethiopian line suddenly broke. Through field glasses General Mariotti could see the Ethiopians scrambling like goats still higher up the mountain, disappearing to the south. At dawn the Askaris rallied for agrandiloquent charge with bayonets and curved swords. That afternoon Azbi was captured.

On both fronts skirmishes were going on all week long. Italy’s southern army under General Graziani retreated 100 miles from the position it had taken at Daggah Bur and Sassa Baneh fortnight ago to consolidate communications, then advanced again on the same towns.

Old Emilio de Bono, the Italian Commander-in-Chief. waiting to be relieved of his command rode ten miles beyond Makale toward Alaji, next important town in the Italian advance from the North. Through his huge staff telescope he could see it distinctly. He and the respectful officers round him knew that the General, about to become a Marshal, would never enter it as an Italian commander. Then the old man, leaving his Chief of Staff, General Melchiade Gabba, in command, drove through cheering lines of blackshirted Italian workmen along the roads they had just built, toward the coast and Italy.

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