Italiani in Etiopia

Italians. He had been taking photographs of Ethiopian defences and sending the rolls of film by

secret courier to the Italian Consulate at Harar (p.74). Balfour and Waugh take photographs of all

the relevant locations, of the count himself in prison and send off excited despatches to their papers

back in Blighty.

Slowly, however, their excitement at having secured a scoop fades and by the time they arrive back

at Addis they realise that, by being absent for those few days, they have missed one of the great

scoops of the period, which was that the emperor had granted to an American consortium, led by

one Mr Rickett, the mineral concession for the entire north of Ethiopia, precisely the territory an

invading Italian army would have to cross, in a typically canny attempt to invoke international law

and get the international community on his side (p.80). In fact it failed, as a diplomatic ploy,

because the US government refused to ratify the concession and by doing so, in effect, gave the

green light to Italy to invade.

Comic characters

In Waugh’s hands every person he meets becomes a comic character: Mr Kakophilos the gloomy

Greek owner of the Hotel Splendide; Herr and Frau Heft, owners of the Deutsches Haus boarding

house, also home to two fierce geese and a pig; the Radical journalist, a high-minded reporter for,

presumably, the Manchester Guardian; Mme Idot and Mme Moriatis, French owners of the only two

places of entertainment in town and bitter enemies; Dr Lorenzo Taesas, the beady-eyed Tigrayan

head of the Press Bureau; the accident-prone American newsreel cameraman, Mr Prospero; the

avaricious Greek owner of the only hotel in Harar, Mr Caraselloss; the bibulous chief of police in

Harar; a spy Waugh hires, an imposing old Afghan named Wazir Ali Beg who roams the country

sending Waugh ever-more ludicrous reports (p.68); the spy his friend Patrick Balfour hires, who

they all nickname Mata Hari (p.69); Gabri, Patrick’s Abyssinian servant who speaks eccentric

French; the wily customs officer of Jijiga, Kebreth Astatkie; the Swiss chef hired by the emperor

who, when he doesn’t get paid for a few months, quit in high dudgeon and the emperor tried to

persuade to return by arresting his entire kitchen staff (p.93).

These aren’t people so much as a cast, the cast of a wonderful comic extravaganza. At several

points Waugh just lists the weird and wonderful types who have washed up in Addis, for their

oddity value.

There was a simian Soudanese, who travelled under a Brazilian passport and worked for an

Egyptian paper; there was a monocled Latvian colonel, who was said at an earlier stage of his life to

have worked as ringmaster in a German circus; there was a German who travelled under the name

of Haroun al Raschid, a title, he said, which had been conferred on him during the Dardanelles

campaign by the late Sultan of Turkey; his head was completely hairless; his wife shaved it for him,

emphasising the frequent slips of her razor with tufts of cotton-wool. There was a venerable

American, clothed always in dingy black, who seemed to have strayed from the pulpit of a religious

conventicle; he wrote imaginative despatches of great length and flamboyancy. There was an

Austrian, in Alpine costume, with crimped flaxen hair, the group leader, one would have thought, of

some Central-European Youth Movement; a pair of rubicund young colonials, who came out on

chance and were doing brisk business with numberless competing organisations; two

indistinguishable Japanese, who beamed at the world through hornrimmed spectacles and played

interminable, highly dexterous games of ping-pong in Mme. Idot’s bar. (p.81)

And:

Two humane English colonels excited feverish speculation for a few days until it was discovered

that they were merely emissaries of a World League for the Abolition of Fascism. There was a negro

from South Africa who claimed to be a Tigrean, and represented another World League for the

abolition, I think, of the white races, and a Greek who claimed to be a Bourbon prince and

represented some unspecified and unrealised ambitions of his own. There was an American who

claimed to be a French Viscount and represented a league, founded in Monte Carlo, for the

provision of an Ethiopian Disperata squadron, for the bombardment of Assab. There was a

completely unambiguous British adventurer, who claimed to have been one of Al Capone’s

bodyguard and wanted a job; and an ex-officer of the R.A.F. who started to live in some style with a

pair of horses, a bull terrier and a cavalry moustache—he wanted a job to.

In my review of Remote People I remarked that these collections of eccentrics and oddballs

reminded me of the Tintin books from the 1930s and 40s, a seemingly endless supply of colourfully

cosmopolitan eccentrics.

Dodgy dossier

I was fascinated to learn that the Italians compiled a dossier of grievances against Ethiopia which

they presented to the League of Nations in Geneva as justification for their invasion. It brought

together all the evidence they could muster from the legalistic to the cultural.

Thus they claimed the emperor had signed a contract giving an Italian firm the job of building a

railway from Addis to the coast but in the event gave the work to a French company. They

complained that Ethiopia had breached various clauses of the 1928 Treaty of Friendship between

the two states. The new arterial road, which was specifically provided in the 1928 agreement,

joining Dessye with Assab was abandoned and, instead, Selassie concentrated in opening

communications with the British territories in Kenya and Somaliland. The construction of a wireless

station at Addis Ababa was undertaken by an Italian company, heavily subsidised by the Italian

government, but on completion was handed over to the management of a Swede and a Frenchman.

They documented slights, insults, abuse and even the arrest of Italian citizens.

The Italians accused Ethiopia of what we would nowadays call ‘human rights abuses’, namely the

fact that slavery and slave-raiding were universal (and this isn’t a bootless accusation; Waugh meets

many officials or rich Ethiopians who are accompanied by one or more slaves). The Italians claim

that justice, when executed at all, was accompanied by torture and mutilation; the central

government was precarious and only rendered effective by repeated resort to armed force; disease

was rampant, and so on.

How similar to the ‘dodgy dossier’ assembled by our own dear government and presented to the UN

and the nation to justify our attack on Iraq back in 2003.

The state of Ethiopian prisons was confirmed by Waugh who made a horrified visit to one,

discovering prisoners manacled to the walls of tiny hutches by chains which barely let them crawl a

few yards into a courtyard to catch a little sun, no food or water provided, the prisoners surviving

amid their own excrement. It was ‘the lowest pit of human misery’ he had ever seen (p.94)

The feverish press pack attend various ceremonies connected with the week-long festival of

Maskar, some officiated over by the emperor, understanding little or nothing of what was going on.

Waugh becomes so bored he buys a baboon who, however, turns out to be ‘petulant and

humourless’, and ‘added very little to the interest of these dull days’ (p.101)

The war

War finally broke out – that’s to say Italy invaded northern Ethiopia without any formal declaration

of war – on 3 October 1935. It immediately resulted in a ramping up of baseless rumours and

shameless speculation. The Italian forces consisted entirely of natives; a Red Cross hospital full of

women and children had been obliterated by Italian bombing; the Italians were deserting in droves.

All turned out to be utterly false.

The absurdity intensifies. The press pack in Addis is remarkably isolated from the front and the

outside world. Therefore they routinely find themselves discovering by telegraph or even in

newspapers, events which are happening in the war they’re meant to be covering. Waugh discovers

a perverse law is at work: the London editors imagine stereotyped scenes, for example riots at the

Addis railway station as desperate refugees fight their way onto the last train out of town weeks

before anything like that happens; so that when there finally is something approximating to fights to

get onto what everyone believes (erroneously, as it turns out) will be the last train, the newspaper

editors aren’t interested: it’s old news even though it’s only just happened. Again and again Waugh

has the dizzy experience of seeing the media-manufactured fictions precede the facts, creating ‘an

inverted time lag between the event and its publication’ (p.113).

Eventually the press pack begin to discuss leaving. The most experienced foreign correspondent

does in fact depart. Waugh embarks on another visit to Harar where there is a serious interlude

when he talks to venerable Muslim elders of the town, who tell him, at some risk to themselves,

how saddened they are by the attrition of the Muslim culture and customs of the place by the

swamping Abyssinian Christians with their drunkenness, prostitution and corruption. It is to

Waugh’s credit that he listens and retails their concerns with sympathy.

Back in Addis he discovers the press have been granted permission to head north to the town of

Dessye, nowadays called Dessie. He decides to travel there with the Radical journalist and they buy

a knackered lorry off a shifty looking Syrian. In the event the outing is a total farce. At the first little

town on the way they are pulled over and given the third degree by the officious chief of police who

their servant, ‘James’ buys off with a half pint of whiskey. But a few hours drive further along the

road, at Debra Birhan, the shabby mayor and chief of police conspire to forbid their further

progress. When they return from the chief’s shabby office they find the locals have built barricades

of stone in front and behind their lorry. They are obliged to spend the night camping there, and in

the morning the chief removes the barricade behind them and obliges them to trundle back to Addis.

Oh well.

Barely have they got back than the Press Office gives the entire press corps permission to travel to

Dessie, so now our heroes set out on the same road but this time accompanied by many other cars

and lorries packed with journalists and are not hindered or stopped.

In other words, Waugh at no time gets anywhere near a front, sees no fighting, doesn’t even hear the

roar of distant artillery, never sees an enemy airplane. The text is entirely about the fatuity of the

press corps and the obstructiveness of the Ethiopian authorities.

The emperor arrives at Dessye which would thenceforward be his headquarters for the war, until, in

the spring, he was forced to flee the Italian advance, driving fast back to Addis, then catching the

train to the coast and then by ship into exile.

By now it was December and the European press and American film companies were bored of the

lack of action, cove