Читаем The World полностью

In Addis, as the Italians tried to provoke the Ethiopians at the remote Ogaden oasis of Wal-Wal, Haile Selassie refused to mobilize and appealed to the League of Nations. Britain and France, already alarmed by Hitler and keen not to drive Mussolini into a German alliance, disgraced themselves by acquiescing in the Duce’s predation.

On 3 October 1935, without any declaration of war, De Bono from Eritrea and Rodolfo Graziani from Somaliland invaded Ethiopia with 476,000 men, including 60,000 Eritrean Royal Colonials, 17,000 members of the irregular Gruppo Bande Eritrea and Somalians under Sultan Olol Dinle, along with 500 tanks and 350 planes. Of Haile Selassie’s 250,000 soldiers, only the 20,000 Imperial Guards were fully armed; he had eight operative planes, and the Italians had suborned some Ethiopian magnates.

Outside the Menelik Palace, to the beat of drums, the khaki-clad negus negust, calm and poised, reviewed his troops, his Guardsmen armed with Vickers machine guns on mules but many with sticks, spears and empty ammunition belts. As the Italians bombed Adowa, Mussolini sacked De Bono and appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, whom he ordered ‘to use gas and flamethrowers even on a vast scale’, adding, ‘Use all means of war.’ Mussolini’s pilot sons Bruno and Vittorio revelled in their bombing raids and boasted of slaughtering Ethiopians.

The emperor counter-attacked in southern Tigray but was thrown back, his troops poisoned with gas. ‘Of all the massacres,’ he recalled, ‘of this terrible and pitiless war, this was the worst. Men, women, animals were blown to pieces or burned with mustard gas, the dying, the wounded, screamed with agony.’ In March 1936, Haile Selassie and the last army in the north were defeated at Maychew by Badoglio, with 11,000 killed. The emperor retreated to pray at Lalibela’s subterranean rock-cut cathedrals before halting at Addis, where his advisers begged him not to fall into Italian hands. Badoglio declared a March of the Iron Will from the north, while Graziani, who like Badoglio had made his name massacring Libyans in north Africa, advanced from the south. In May Haile Selassie escaped Addis three days ahead of Graziani, who became viceroy. Four days later, in Rome, Mussolini appeared on the balcony of the Palazzo Veneziano. ‘Ethiopia is Italian!’ he told ecstatic crowds. ‘Adowa is avenged.’ Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed emperor of Ethiopia.

In July, Mussolini and Hitler received envoys from a rebel general in Spain. The country had been damaged by dictatorship, inequality, depression and bewilderment at the loss of empire. Its Bourbon king Afonso XIII was exiled, with the impoverished republic lethally divided between secular socialists and Catholic conservatives. Now when socialists won the election, the general, Francisco Franco, joined the rebellion. Tiny, broad-hipped and high-voiced, cautious and cunning, Franco had become the country’s youngest ever general as commander of the brutal African Legion fighting in Spain’s Moroccan colony, but now his legionaries were stuck in Morocco, allowing the Republican government to retain control of much of the country.

His envoys were lucky to find Hitler staying with the Wagners at Bayreuth. ‘That’s no way to start a war,’ the Führer exclaimed, fearing that ‘Jewish Bolsheviks in Moscow’ would seize Spain. Hitler and Mussolini airlifted Franco’s troops to the mainland, followed by 50,000 Italian troops and 16,000 Germans. The fight against Fascism attracted 40,000 volunteers, known as the International Brigades. Slowly, Stalin came round to backing the Republic, sending 3,000 advisers and armaments and launching a terror in Spain to match the one he was conducting in Russia. Franco, a murderously plodding generalissimo, failed to take Madrid but, aided by Italian and German bombing, he saw himself as El Caudillo of the Last Crusade, annihilating godless socialists. Both sides killed civilians: the Republicans shot around 38,000, but Franco shot 200,000.^* There were similarities between Spain and Ethiopia.

Graziani, now marquess of Neghelli, banned ‘racial commingling’ and, after an assassination attempt in Addis on the day Ethiopians recall as Yekatit 12 (February 1937), he unleashed Italian soldiers and Black Lion militiamen who, shouting ‘Duce! Duce!’ and ‘Civiltà Italiana!’, butchered 20,000 people. ‘Whole streets were burned down,’ their occupants machine-gunned or stabbed.