Caesar in Abyssinia
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Caesar in Abyssinia

G. L. Steer

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Caesar in Abyssinia

G. L. Steer

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I have no desire, however, to belittle the military achievement of Italy in Ethiopia. I believe that an absurd excess of force was used that considering the condition of the Italian Treasury the war might have been waged more cheaply, and that the war provides no index whatsoever of the behaviour of an Italian Army, even of the organisation of an Italian Army, fighting against an equal enemy. The Italians, nevertheless, did reach their objective, Addis Ababa, within seven months of the outbreak of aggression. My task is rather in this book to show what was the strength and spirit of the Ethiopian armies sent against a European Great Power. My conclusions are that they had no artillery, no aviation, a pathetic proportion of automatic weapons and modern rifles, and ammunition sufficient for two days modern battle. I have seen a child nation, ruled by a man who was both noble and intelligent, done brutally to death almost before it had begun to breathe.The Italians do not figure much in these pages, which are more the study of the Ethiopian people under fire than of the mechanical means and processes used to destroy their resistance. The primary cause of their defeat was that they had no arms, and were allowed none. The secondary cause of their defeat was Italian air supremacy, exploited eventually by the spraying of mustard gas. The great Ras said that they could not fight the heavens or the burning rain.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781528760317

I

IN AUGUST, 1931, Dedjazmatch Gabre Mariam, formerly chief of Ras Tafari’s bodyguard and a man of trust, left Harrar, his governorship, with twelve thousand men. Fitorari Shefara left his Gibbi (government house) at Jijiga with three thousand men. The two armies marched south to clear the bandas out of the Ogaden.
For two years now the Italians had been deliberately arming certain of the more restless elements among the Somali nomads in the north of their territory with old-patterned Italian rifles. The armed men, called Dubats, were organised into bandas. Their uniform was a turban, the white to dirty Somali skirt, and the bandolier. None of your extravagant Somali tartans: these men were on service, they had work to do. The only symbol which marked them off from their fellows was the colour of a sash round their waists, green, red or blue according to the banda: that was the beginning of regimental colours for the Somalis—by now they must be playing football.
It would be unfair to the Italian of 1931 to allege that the bandas were encouraged to create frontier incidents. No frontier had been demarcated on the ground, and there were no Ethiopian troops near the one hundred mile line from the coast where it should have run, according to treaty: these conditions were enough to prevent incidents, which abhor a vacuum. The bandas were instructed simply to encroach in obedience to the policy then reigning in Rome; that of expansion into waste places in order to satisfy the elementary needs of the Italian people. Recasting Tacitus, the new CĂŠsar made a few more deserts and called them an Empire.
Great Britain enjoyed the same experience in the Sudan at much the same time, when an Italian column occupied the Oases of Kufra, far outside their frontier and within ours. The Somalis, too, were told to make for water-points, which control the thorn waste of the Ogaden.
Starting from Mustahil, where the perpetual river of the Webbe Shebeli and the dry depression of the Fafan nearly join, and from Galkayu to the East, the bandas were told to occupy the waterline of wells stretching east and west from Wardair, through Walwal, Ubertaleh, Afdub, Gerlogubi, Gorahai and Gabridihari on the Fafan. Of these Gabridihari was the northernmost point. Simultaneously parts of the Shaveli tribe, under their sultan Olol Dinle, were paid to declare themselves for Italy, and the habitable places of the Webbe Shebeli were occupied up to Imi, where the Ethiopian province of Bale begins.
The wells were only loosely held. The Dubats built their ball-like Somali huts round them and shot off their game in the dense thorn thickets. No forts were built. Only a road was made from Ferfer, an admitted Italian post, to Gabridihari, via Shellabo and Gorahai. The usual sequel, the white officer beginning to negotiate with the tribes who frequented the waterholes, had scarcely taken, its place in the chain of Imperial encroachment when the Emperor Haile Selassie, fresh from his coronation and his assumption of full powers, ordered the intruder to be driven forthwith from Ethiopian territory.
That was why the war-drums were beaten in Harrar and Jijiga, and the levy of fifteen thousand men was led south with rations for three months into a new land. Till then the deepest penetration into the Ogaden bush had been to Daggahbur, on the Tug Jerrer, one hundred and four miles south of Jijiga.
Shefara took his three thousand down to Daggahbur. Gabre Mariam marched east along the Harrar mountains to Babilli, halfway to Jijiga, where a few huts in rocky ground mark the point from which the caravan track leads to Daggahmodo. At Daggahmodo a few lone wells prick the dry region between the Webbe Shebeli and the Tug Fafan, level west of Daggahbur. Here he was joined by Shefara, who had stored food in huts at Daggahbur. The whole force trailed away south, through Jigo, to the junction of the two river beds, the wet and the dry. It was a clever move.
Olol Dinle to the west ran away down river. The bandas to the east, at Gorahai and Gabridihari, melted into the bush. The Somali is quick, spiritually lithe. But as a fighting man he cannot stand against the terrible, organised Habash. Fifteen thousand of them on his lean flank were more than he could wait to face. So Gabre Mariam proceeded from well to well until he came to Mustahil.
There were Italians at Mustahil, and they did not budge. The army sat down for a week while the big men negotiated with the whites. Either an agreement was reached or the Ethiopian rations ran out and the buck ran away before the crackle of Ethiopian rifles. Gabre Mariam left a small garrison at Tafere Katama, “The Fighting Village,” on a rocky prow in the bush above the Webbe, a few miles across level land from Mustahil. Here the green-yellow-red of Ethiopian independence was unfurled against the green-white-red of Savoy. Gabre Mariam withdrew by Gorahai and Gabridihari along the Fafan’s sandy corridor between two thick rows of camel-thorn. At the hill of Gabridihari he established another garrison, who built the neat square houses that they had learnt to build at Jijiga and Daggahbur; for in Ras Tafari’s old province of the Ogaden and Harrar they had developed beyond the round tukuls of mud of their fatherland the plateau, or the huts entwined out of skin grass and sacking that the Somalis feel cool in.
Gabre Mariam either forgot or had no time to visit the system of wells which stretches between Ubertaleh and Wardair, including the great wells of Walwal. He therefore left in Italian hands the whole waterline running east of Gerlogubi; while the other water system which it crosses at right angles at Gorahai and which runs north and south along the Fafan was again in Ethiopian hands, which had a right to it by treaty. The Italian road between Ferfer and Gabridihari also fell into Ethiopian hands, and encouraged them to continue the lorry-track from Gabridihari northwards through Daggahbur to Jijiga—through waterpoints made famous in the subsequent war, Borkut Sasabaneh and Anale. And so it happened that the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was the first African ruler to organise a mechanised force.
The whole area was placed under the Governor of Jijiga, but its real ruler was Gerazmatch Afewerk, Director of Jijiga. Under the Imperial reforms, a director was appointed to certain provinces or municipalities to put more energy into the local governor.
Afewerk was an administrative genius. He organised military camps throughout the Ogaden and showed the Ethiopian for the first time that, given modern communications and measures of hygiene, it was an attractive place for the simple lifer. Descended himself from one of the subject races of Ethiopia, he ruled his Somalis firmly but humanely. He killed twelve of them with his sword in open battle, but it was only in full battle-heat that he ever shed blood. Spies and treacherous chiefs, whom the other side would have shot out of hand, were spared for hard labour.
In August, 1934, the month when the Emperor of Ethiopia protested against the increase of Italian military forces in Eritrea, the Italians sent a white commendatore to Walwal. Under his orders a fort was built out of material left by the Mad Mullah, ruins of whose rough pillboxes crumbling beside almost every water-hole reminded the Ogaden Somalis of their old religious solidarity, and of the time when the Ethiopian borderlands saw white men only ambushed.
Afewerk, who had a quick tactical mind, rapidly occupied Gerlogubi, barring access to the Fafan water system from the east. Tenure of the water-holes, as he knew, meant control of the Somali tribes who used them.
A small Ethiopian force now held the Ogaden for the first time. Fear of the unknown had kept them out before. Fear of the heat, to which the Ethiopian highlander takes time to inure himself, fear of fever and dysentery and of Somali treachery. The Ethiopians long believed that the water-holes were poisoned against Christians. Gabre Mariam’s expedition put an end to many traveller’s tales; they soon found that the heat was endurable, fever rare and dysentery limited to certain areas. They grew used, almost attached, to the scant grass, whirl-twisted thorn and long level hills under a sandy sky. Game was common, and the Ethiop loves to chase the antelope.
The vacuum had disappeared. The stage was manned for the incident.
On December 5th the clash occurred at Walwal, within Ethiopian territory as fixed by treaty between Ethiopia and Italy; between Italian Somalis, a white officer, aeroplanes and an armoured car on one side, and the Ethiopian bodyguard of the Anglo-Ethiopian Grazing and Boundary Commission on the other. Each side says that the other fired the first shot; certainly the Ethiopian command were entirely unprepared. Their chief, Fitorari Alemayu, was shot down leaving his tent in the first five minutes. His second in command, Shefara, a mild type with no liking for war, sold off his stock of cartridges to his troops and hustled off to Jijiga “to bury the dead in consecrated ground.” It devolved on a former interpreter of the British Consulate in Maji, who had found military service under the Emperor, to fight on. The Mohammedan Ato Ali Nur was brave, did as well as he could, at last retired on Afewerk at Gerlogubi when the armoured car which his men tried to heave over had killed more than one hundred of them and broken the swords of the rest.
For the aeroplane, which dropped bombs at a considerable distance from the battle, they had a great contempt. Later it bombed Ado, where the Commission’s baggage lay, and Gerlogubi, an acknowledged Ethiopian post in Ethiopian territory. The Italians at the time denied that they had bombed Gerlogubi, but I have seen the bomb-holes and the splinters there, remote I must admit from the circular camp which was their target. Afewerk, to strengthen the morale of his troops, made a knife out of one bomb and ate his daily meals with it.
Ato Ali Nur was promoted to be Balambaras, which means captain of the hill-fort.
Signor Mussolini demanded a salute to the Italian flag and ÂŁ15,000 indemnity. The Emperor refused, recalling the terms of the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Friendship of 1928 and the Covenant of the League.
I was in the Saar, free-lancing the plebiscite, when the terms of the Laval-Mussolini agreement were announced in the Press. There was vague talk of Italy being given a free hand in Ethiopia. I remembered that only a month before the Walwal incident, when I was editing the London Letter of a great provincial paper, an innocent individual had offered me a note—based on Italian information. The Italians, it read, were alarmed for the safety of their African colonies . . . the Emperor of Ethiopia had organised a huge army in his central province of Shoa . . . its weapons were modern, and it was feared that the Emperor might proclaim a holy war. . . .
Sir John Simon was still our Foreign Secretary. It seemed certain that Italy would attempt to conquer Ethiopia. Down to the unwillingness of every European nation to stand by its commitments under the Covenant, all the circumstances were set for aggression.
I wanted a holiday in Africa. It was snowing and dirty on the cobbled tramlines at Saarbrucken: sun on yellow grass seemed better—I had to go.
Sir John Simon resigned, after Italian chances of a straight walk-over had lengthened on the silences of Stresa. On that blue, unreal lake Ethiopia was a subject for experts only. The statesmen proceeded blandly with their policy of Franco-Italian conciliation. While Italy poured material into East Africa, the statesmen could not bother themselves with an affair which was to jeopardise the whole existence of the League.
Simon’s successor showed some disposition to resist Mussolini. The dispute took upon itself the grander dimensions which the British Legation at Addis had always prophesied, which followed directly from the attitude of the Ethiopian Emperor, determined to take his stand upon the Covenant and to resist aggression.
The Italian press attack opened on Great Britain. Mr. Eden’s Zeyla offer was rejected by Signor Mussolini. I had my teeth stopped and my tonsils hauled out bodily. Leonard Barnes gave me a box of English peppermints against digestive troubles in foreign parts, and the Yorkshire Post staff bought a special solar topee draped in the Old Wykehamist colours. I was off in late June.
It was dark in Addis when we arrived. Pasteau, French diplomatic chief of the Djibouti railway, took his guns off the rack and showed me the hotel proprietor down the sights. George Mendrakos was fighting with the porters: a blow to the right, a blow to the left cleared their meagre red-turbaned heads out of the way. The Arab porters Sandford was taking them and his wife to the coast and I wondered whether they would meet again.
Then a confused impression of Joseph, the Roman Catholic interpreter who afterwards turned bandit, teaching me the Amharic for grass, tree, antelope, sky, sun, wind and mountain as they all struggled past the lazy carriage window. Tall grass, mimosa trees in green parasol, the buck leg-high amid grass and trees, twitching their tails against white rumps, and studying with young liquid eyes our little white tramway as it prattled on. The sky and sun brilliant and clear, the clouds occasional, for rains do not disturb the railway zone. At evening the wind blew zephyr-cool, and all the time to the south of us were the mountains, immobile on the splendid horizon, false bastions on which the Ethiopians relied too much.
Last night had been spent at the Hawash, another Greek hotel and bougainvillea garden in the middle of Danakil. Desert stretched from the front step, and the back step fell into the crumbling Hawash gorge, whose sides drop sheer shale into that crooked stream. Looking down, one could see the bottom of Africa, the Rift Valley at its lowest, the final boring result of immense geological effort. The world can be very dull when it is in an expansive mood, and all the Rift Valley could offer at the Hawash was its yellow rocks, ugly and irregular as a lion’s yawn. Nothing alive but lizards who lay on rocks looking ever skyward, the earth being too revolting to regard. I had turned back to the hotel, stumbled over the dead whisky bottles which border the garden path, and wakened up the countless lean cats which linger there to catch the lizards, and now and then a sleepy snake. Inside the bare hotel, from under the bottles of Zibib and Ouzo and other Greek intoxicants, proceeded a hideous angular miaow, wrenched from a cat whose small windpipe alone seemed capable of reaction to the immense weight of whisky-cases which had fallen upon it. I moved forward to release the cat. “No matter,” said the Greek barman, “he is thin enough to get out of anything,” and with this futile remark still fooling in my head I turned over in my Addis sheets, prayed briefly that I might be the same, and went to sleep in supreme discomfort.

II

I WOKE UP EARLY, jumped out of bed, and waited for the dust to settle. Then I moved on to my wooden balcony and looked at Addis—superb. The chill of the previous day, which had descended upon our shivering khaki shorts as the train clambered past the lava at Hawash up the plateau edge, scattered before a hardy sun. Over the tin roofs and plaster lineaments of Armenian Piccadilly towered to the north Entoto, the mountain a thousand feet above Addis which Menelik chose for his first capital. Conquerors love mountain seats, from which, with a wave of the fist, one can explain, “I made it mine!” Menelik climbed down after Adowa, and planted the rambling palace on the hill to my right, in mid-Addis. To the left, behind a tattered triumphal arch, marked “Vive l’Empereur” for the coronation of Haile Selassie, stood the dim circle of St. Giorghis, Coptic cathedral built by Italian prisoners’ hands, and beyond it more mountains, dressed in grey-green eucalyptus like Entoto. Eucalyptus dangled its flat, finger-like leaves and dropped its sweet bark all over Addis.
I took a run round the hotel, under whose rustling red roof the servants in their tunic shirts and jodhpurs were now busily moving. They don’t clean your room in the Imperial Hotel; you have to bring along your own house-boy. Those who were not yet working, since their masters were still enjoying the rich, dry sleep of the plateau, huddled close to the doors on their haunches, legs wide open and knees jutting sideways, confusedly counting and recounting their cartridges until they were decided that nobody had pilfered their belts during the night. Then, in full sense of their security they began to polish their masters’ boots—very slowly. But they differed from other Africans, I thought, in the look of their faces when they were at work: quicker, more intelligent, finer features, more cunning eyes. I heard two quarrelling. They struck attitudes, held out the palms of their hands in protest, flung their shammas* over their shoulders, then brandished their right arms violently, as if throwing stones at each other. Ethiopians employ this gesture always to emphasise an assertion in a court of law. They shrieked and shouted at each other, “Ba Haile Selassie ymut.” “Haile Selassie amlak.” “May Haile Selassie die if I’m false.” “By the guardian angel of Haile Selassie.”†
On the other side of the hotel, the station in grand stucco and stone arrested and explained the longest asphalt road in Addis. From its distant balcony flew the two flags of France and Ethiopia in friendly juxtaposition, signifying the everlasting faithfulness of the more civilised to the smaller power. Beyond it and the neat long rows of customs sheds eucalyptus smothered the levels of the Shoan plain which, broken by flooded rivers bearing in general the name Akaki, settled very gently towards the Hawash. But mountains again barred the view o...

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