ITALY-ETHIOPIA: War Cream & Peace Tea

ITALY-ETHIOPIA

War Cream & Peace Tea

Confident Romans cooled themselves amid last week’s heat with Italy’s newly named “Ethiopia Ice Cream”—chocolate with pistachio nuts. Even Benito Mussolini’s most scornful critics, Europe’s Socialist and Communist Press, admitted that he has now fired his people with exultant zeal for conquering Ethiopia, plus hopes of absorbing Austria as a later move to ”restore the Universality of Rome!” In the general rush to enlist now sweeping Italy’s languid, aristocratic youth even the Dictator’s baby-faced son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, last week planned to quit his peculiarly vital desk-job as Minister of Press & Propaganda to become a flying ace.

Meanwhile hoary but dynamic old General Emilio de Bono, one of the Big Four of the March on Rome and now Governor General of Italy’s East African colonies, sent to Rome the first precise report on what has been done in the past six months to turn sleepy little ports in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland into deadly advance war bases.

Major Italian air bases have been increased from three to nine, air landing fields from ten to 26. At Massaua in Eritrea, the main Italian war base commanding Northern Ethiopia and uncomfortably close to British interests in the Sudan, war paraphernalia were being unloaded last week at the rate of 4,000 tons per day. Forty new Italian locomotives had just been unloaded and General de Bono was stepping up the strategic railway from Massaua to Asmara, increasing transportation facilities daily. Upland Asmara, few months ago a town of 4,500, last week was a teeming city of 65,000.

Snapped an aide-de-camp of Governor General de Bono: “Anybody who thinks Mussolini is only bluffing should ride over the strategic highways and bridges we have built and are building. Italy does not spend millions and bring 125,000 men to Africa for bluff!”

In French Somaliland, next door to bristling Italian Eritrea, the French naval sloop Dumont d’Urville, mounting five and one-half inch guns, ominously arrived last week, anchored to command the French harbor of Djibouti, connected by rail with Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. All week freight cars from Addis Ababa were jam-packed with goods shipped out by frightened foreign merchants in Ethiopia who closed their stores, hoped to keep their goods in storage on French soil until better times. French Premier Pierre Laval, realizing the extreme delicacy of French Somaliland’s situation, appointed last week as its Governor General his close personal friend, M. Silvestre Teris, one-time Governor of Cambodia in French Indo-China.

In Djibouti the French colony shrugged as onetime U. S. Charge d’Affaires at Addis Ababa William Perry George displayed a brand new. diamond-studded gold watch emblazoned with the portrait of Emperor Power of Trinity who had given it to him “as a token of exceptional friendship.” The watch was wasted, Frenchmen opined, noted with fresh shrugs that the new colony of U. S. correspondents at Addis Ababa gathered around His Imperial Majesty last week and joined in a solemn toast to Peace drunk in weak tea.