Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia

AMEDEO

The True Story ofan Italian’s Warin Abyssinia

SEBASTIAN O’KELLY

GVILLET

To Emily and Anna

‘Le due figliole’

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Gvillet

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 The Prisoner

2 The Black Sword

3 The Spahys di Libya

4 Riding through Clouds

5 The Conquest of Abyssinia

6 The Sword of Islam

7 Black Flames ZARAGOZA, SPAIN, MARCH 1938

8 The Viceroy

9 City of Facilidas

10 Northern Chessboard

11 Lightning War

12 The Man on the White Horse

13 Keren

14 Private War

15 Major Max

16 A Horse Called Sandro

17 Captain Reich

18 Le Maschere

19 The Well

20 The Smugglers’ Ship

21 Sayed Ibrahim

22 Captain White

23 Arabia Felix

24 Giulio Cesare

25 Sua Maestà

26 Liberation

27 A Bracelet

Epilogue

The Honours Conferred Upon Amedeo Guillet

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

EPIGRAPH

‘On 19 January the 4th and 5th Indian Divisions crossed the frontier north of the Blue Nile … they met little resistance, though at one point a force of local horsemen, the Amharic Cavalry Band led by an Italian officer on a white horse, attempted a death-or-glory charge against their machine-guns.’

John Keegan, The Second World War

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Beatrice Gandolfo

Khadija, photographed by Amedeo before the Second world War

The invasion of Ethiopia, October 1935: Amedeo on Sandor with the Spahys di Libya

Uncle Amedeo

Sotto-Tenente Amedeo Guillet, newly commissioned at the Cavalleggeri di Monferrato, 1931

Amedeo, in full dress uniform, 1935

Amedeo jokingly reviews some splendidly attired fellow officers

Amedeo at the Military Academy at Modena, 1928

Amedeo rides down a steep hillside during a cavalry exercise at Pinerolo

Two views of Amedeo as a competitive rider, Genoa 1934

A horseman from the Spahys di Libya

Ethiopian irregulars confront their better-armed adversaries

Realising their position is hopeless, some Ethiopian warriors take flight

The Spahys di Libya completely surround the remaining Ethiopians

Panicking warriors flee amid the Italian light tanks

The Spahys charge on, leaving the remaining Ethiopians to the Italian infantry

Italian infantry pour down the hillside and the remaining Ethiopians make a bid to escape

Ethiopian warriors parade through Addis Ababa

Marshal Badoglio arrives at the front © Ullstein Bilderdienst

Front page story …‘The punishment of Abyssinian brigands …’

Amedeo Guillet after the charge at Selaclaclà in December 1935

Haile Selassie after the defeat at Mai Ceu

The Spahys di Libya in Rome on the first anniversary of the founding of Italy’s African empire, June 1937

Antonio Ajmone Cat

The Duke of Aosta dwarfs King Vittorio Emmanuele III

Princess Jolanda and Amedeo in 1937 in Libya

Mussolini rides into Tripoli © Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contem-poranea

Mussolini, Balbo and other Fascists salute the tricolore © Biblioteca di

Storia Moderna e Contemporanea Libyan crowds greet the Duce and Italo Balbo © Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea

Mussolini on horseback surrounded by Libyan troops bearing the fasces

The Duce raises the Sword of Islam

The governor of Libya, Italo Balbo, pins a medal on Amedeo

Amedeo in Spain, beside the Fiat Ansaldo tanks

The general’s adjutant at the Italian front during the Spanish Civil War

General Frusci in the uniform of the ‘Black Flames’ division during the Spanish Civil War

A Russian armoured car captured by Amedeo and the arditi from the Spanish forces, Santander, August 1937

Rome 1938: Hitler stands beside the king; also pictured are Mussolini, Marshal De Bono, Queen Elena, Ciano, Hess, Ribbentrop and Goebbels

Barefoot, malnourished children with their heads shaven turn out for a civic ceremony in Salerno, 1937

General Graziani; and being carried away after an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa, 1937

Beatrice Gandolfo in February 1937, in medieval costume

The fortified outpost at Amba Gheorgis on the road from Gondar to Asmara

Amedeo talking to Landolfo Colonna

Amedeo welcomed by dancing women in the highlands of Begemeder, 1938

Amedeo with an important Ethiopian chief in 1939

Amedeo drilling his garrison at Amba Gheorgis in 1939

The Duke of Aosta inspects the fort at Amba Gheorgis

The garrison at Amba Gheorgis rides out, with Amedeo saluting

Amedeo and others are carried in triumph at Amba Gheorgis after a successful operation against Ethiopian rebels

The Gruppo Bande Amhara a Cavallo Group in full charge

Amedeo with his Gruppo Bande in Eritrea, 1940

Amedeo rides beside General Frusci’s car at an inspection of the Gruppo Bande in the summer of 1940

The infantry of The Gruppo Bande were made up of Yemeni mercenaries

The British invade: The Gazelle Force on the move

The West Yorks Regiment at Dologorodoc

General Nicola Carnimeo

General Frank Messervy

General Lorenzini, the ‘Lion of Keren’

Surrender of the Duke of Aosta

Lieutenant Renato Togni with the horse on which he was killed at Keru in 1941

Daifallah the Yemeni

Amedeo as Ahmed Abdullah

A rare photograph of Ahmed, Imam of the Yemen

Major Max Harari riding the captured Sandor at Asmara, autumn 1941

Major Max Harari leaving his office in Asmara

Sandor’s hoof

Captain Lory Gibbs, who opened fire on Amedeo and Khadija on the road to Ghinda

The tortured Captain Sigismund Reich

Amedeo and Beatrice finally married in Naples, 21 September 1944

Torre Cretarella

The Italian ambassador with a live cobra in New Delhi, 1971

Amedeo, ambassador to Morocco with Italian foreign minister Aldo Moro in 1969

Sir Reginald Savory with his old adversary, London 1976

Amedeo with horsemen from the president of India’s bodyguard, whom he trained to ride Carilli fashion

Amedeo embraces an elderly ascaro at the Catholic cemetery in Asmara

Amedeo beside the tomb of Renato Togni

Amedeo at the pass of Ad Teclesan, where he destroyed three British light tanks

The palace of Italian governors in Massaua, the scene of bitter fighting during Eritrea’s war of independence © Nicola Gaydon

The palace of Italian governors photographed by Max Harari in 1941

Ahmed Abdullah, the water-seller, returns to his old hideout in Al-Katmia

Amedeo in Ireland with Anna and Emily

All pictures without credits are from the private collection of Amedeo Guillet and the author

INTRODUCTION

In 1995 when I was a magazine editor, I asked the great Bill Deedes of the Daily Telegraph to go to Milan to interview Indro Montanelli. In Italian journalism Montanelli, who died in July 2001, was a figure of similar stature and, like Lord Deedes, he had served in the Abyssinian war, although as a volunteer officer rather than as a newsman. I decided that I would go along too, acting as a consigliere–translator, but really to eavesdrop on their conversation.

The founder-editor of Il Giornale, Montanelli had split with his proprietor, Silvio Berlusconi, over his political ambitions – the tycoon had just become prime minister for the first time – and, at eighty-eight, was about to launch a daily newspaper. He and Bill Deedes were well matched. Bill, the inspiration for William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, had risen to become a cabinet minister, editor of the Telegraph and the most illustrious figure in our trade. Montanelli, who became a pressman after the conquest of Abyssinia, was purged from the Fascist Corporation of Journalists for writing with insufficient fervour about the Italian victories during the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Helsinki, to teach Italian literature, and was therefore conveniently on hand to cover the start of the Second World War. He interviewed Hitler after the fall of Poland and reported on the Finnish war from the Russian front. Back in Milan in 1944–5, he was sentenced to death for his critical writing by Mussolini’s Social Republic, but was saved by the war’s end. By the Seventies, he was equally unpopular with Italy’s extreme left, and was shot in the legs by the Red Brigades as he walked along a Milan street.

‘I won’t mention the mustard gas they used in ’35 until last,’ said Bill conspiratorially, while we waited outside Montanelli’s office. A few minutes later, the Italian appeared, tall, donnish and a little stiff, in contrast to Bill who, at eighty-two, was a sprightly, irrepressible figure. After greeting us cordially, for he had long known of ‘Milord Deedes’, Montanelli sat back behind his typewriter, lit a cigarette and waited for what he imagined would be an amiable chat to begin.

‘Now, about the gas you used on the Abyssinians …’ Bill began, astonishing us all (and pronouncing it, to my glee, as ‘gash’).

‘Basta con il gas!’ Montanelli groaned, having heard quite enough about it in the preceding sixty years. ‘We are guilty. Guilty. Now let’s talk of something else.’

Forty minutes later, having made himself understood without any help from me, Bill was satisfied that he had got enough from the interview: a handful of telling facts about the new newspaper, a bit of background and a quote or two from ‘your man’, as he insisted on calling Montanelli. ‘Just like filling a punnet of strawberries,’ confided the indefatigable reporter.

We adjourned to a restaurant Montanelli suggested beside the Castello Sforzesco, where the two old men reminisced happily, and they trumped each other’s stories. When Montanelli remembered his friend Kim Philby, an apparently lazy and drunken correspondent during the Spanish Civil War – until the spy’s death a jar of caviar used to be sent from Moscow to Milan every Christmas – Bill recalled his bringing Mrs Philby back from Beirut to London after her husband’s defection. A government minister at the time, he was returning from the colonial handover in Singapore when he was ordered to detour to the Middle East to pick up the traitor’s wife, who sat at the back of the plane behind curtains, in purdah.

On my prompting, the talk then returned to Ethiopia in the Thirties, and the two began recalling such figures as Marshal Badoglio, Graziani, the Duke of Aosta and Haile Selassie. Both spoke lyrically of the country, its peoples, ancient culture and the beautiful women (about whom, writing in Scoop, Evelyn Waugh had caused Bill some difficulties in regard to Mrs Deedes). Also at lunch was the writer Vittorio Dan Segre, who the year before had published a brilliant, semi-novelised account of Amedeo Guillet’s guerrilla exploits, aimed at young Italians who knew almost nothing of their country’s colonial past.

‘What a magnificent man,’ said Montanelli, who had been a friend of Amedeo for many years, and about whose adventures he, too, had written in the early sixties. I was intrigued, and for a while they indulged my interest. At last, however, Montanelli raised himself unsteadily to his feet to return to the office.

‘If you want to know more,’ said the great editor. ‘You must go to Ireland …’

ONE

The Prisoner

DECEMBER 1941. HODEIDA, THE YEMEN

It was in the early afternoon when the prisoners could expect to be fed. At that time of day, a little light penetrated the subterranean gloom, while outside every living creature abandoned the cauldron of the streets. The grating rumble of a cart, the cries of bartering tradesmen and even the ululating calls of the muezzin fell silent as the sun lingered at its zenith. It was then that some women in the town gathered up scraps saved from their meal of the night before and made their way through the labyrinth of foetid passageways to the little square in front of the dungeon. From where they were, below the level of the street outside, the prisoners could not hear their approach, but they knew that their only meal of the day would shortly arrive.

All of a sudden vegetables, crusts of bread, bits of fish and fruit showered down from the bars high above, caught like motes of dust in a shaft of light. With clanking chains, the fettered men surged forward to fall on the debris, pushing each other out of the way. Some of those giving food were wives or relatives, others were responding to the Koran’s injunction to show compassion to the imprisoned. Apart from these charitable offerings, and a communal bowl of boiled rice every two or three days, the prisoners received no food, for the fact of their being where they were was proof that they had somehow transgressed, and the task of the guards was to keep them locked up, but not necessarily alive.

One prisoner was slower than the others. He limped painfully towards the food on the floor, holding up the chains linking his feet with a piece of rope. Around his left ankle, below the fetters he was supporting, was a dirty bandage, caked in dried blood and pus. Although he was always the last, he still managed to find something: a fish head, a torn corner of pitta or a broken cake of rice, which he would pick methodically from the floor of beaten earth. The seven or eight other prisoners – murderers, smugglers, petty thiefs, crooked traders, perhaps even the odd innocent man – had nothing to do with the stranger who called himself Ahmed Abdullah al Redai. Too much interest was taken in him by the authorities for that to be prudent. Not that he looked important or dangerous, dressed as he was in filthy clothes which fell away from his emaciated frame. But even in the depths of their oubliette they had heard about Ahmed Abdullah. While his Arabic was fluent, the accent was strong and foreign, and they knew that he was not, as his name professed, a Yemeni from the town of Reda. Some said he was a soldier from the war between the Nazarenes; while others had heard that he was a spy in the pay of the British in Aden, to the south. There were even those who believed he was a Christian.

For hours, the prisoner sat motionless in a corner of the cell, resting his back against the stone wall. Every so often he slowly raised himself and shuffled over to the communal water vat, lifting to his lips a ladle fashioned from an old tin can. A festering bucket served the prisoners’ other physical needs and he would approach it suppressing his lingering feelings of disgust. He felt bitter now, when recalling his hopes on first seeing the cloud-covered mountains of the Yemen from the sambuk which had brought him across the Red Sea from Eritrea. As the vessel beached at Hodeida, an old mufti with a white beard had been carried through the waves by two fishermen and hauled aboard. He had stood on the prow, and before the passengers could wade ashore they had been required to make the Muslim profession of faith: There is no other god but God and Mohammed is his prophet. The stranger had repeated the familiar words without feeling fraudulent, for he recited his Arabic prayers five times a day and did so sincerely.

The senior port official, an elegant young man in robes of white silk, sat under a lean-to on the beach, where he questioned the new arrivals. He acknowledged their responses with a bored nod, and then waved them through. The stranger waited until he was the last before he approached. He stood before the low writing table, looking down at the young man, who sat on cushions and a carpet laid over the sand. He was neither a Yemeni nor a Muslim, he announced, but an Italian officer who had been fighting against the British. He was the equivalent of an amir al-alai, a colonel, who had commanded eight hundred horsemen, and he now sought refuge from his enemies in the Yemen. The official silently studied the figure in front of him. Dressed in miserable clothes with no possessions, or proof of identity, he looked like thousands of other desperate Arabs along the coast struggling to survive in difficult times. The hands were rough and callused, the weatherbeaten face scarred down the right cheek and, though his blue-grey eyes shone brightly, the whites were yellowed with malaria. But something about him, perhaps the quiet intensity with which he spoke or the levelled eyes which held his own with no sign of fear, made the young official hesitate to dismiss him. He invited the stranger to sit and tell him more, and ordered an underling to bring them tea.

To the prisoner, that interview felt like months ago, although he knew it could not have been more than two or three weeks. But for all the outside world would be aware, he could remain in the dungeon for years. All his efforts to evade the British seemed so futile now. Had he surrendered with the others, at least the enemy would have recognised his rank and kept him alive. But fortune had abandoned him and every day in the semi-darkness he was growing weaker. The glands of his groin were swollen from coping with the suppurating bullet wound to his ankle. It would not be long before gangrene set in. He had often faced death before, and he was resigned to it. In his pain and misery, it was not even unwelcome.

During the long, uninterrupted hours in the stifling cell, the prisoner’s mind wandered back to the years before the war. Already they had the unreality of a dream. Receptions and balls in Rome and Turin, Budapest and Berlin merged one with the other in a blur of shimmering silks and assorted uniforms. Loud, laughing faces of half-remembered friends – well-born army officers like himself, society women and some of Italy’s new movie stars – flashed past as though taunting him. He had been feêted then as one of Italy’s star sportsmen; the great hope of the Italian riding team in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The prisoner’s fevered mind lurched again and he felt as giddy and nauseous as he had once in Budapest when the champagne had flowed and he had been carried around the mess of the Hadek Hussars, hailed as the ‘Conqueror of Abyssinia’. And then suddenly he was standing before the diminutive figure of the Italian king at one of those awkward royal receptions for carefully chosen young people at the Villa Savoia in Rome. Vittorio Emanuele III, who had known him since childhood, was explaining in his hesitant, didactic manner the origin of the term steeplechase ‘when English lords used to gallop madly across fields from one village campanile to another’. The next moment he was being led by the arm through the scented gardens of the Castello in Tripoli by Italo Balbo, the governor of Libya, who was worried that the Duce’s new alliance with Nazi Germany would be the ruin of them all …

The odour of the shared bucket assailed the prisoner’s senses, ending his reverie and the hours of waiting in the semi-darkness resumed. His past life in fashionable society, once the fulfilment of all his ambitions, had long since been left behind, and he looked back on it now, feeling nothing, almost as though it were someone else’s.

Deeper emotions welled up inside him when his mind turned, as it always did, to the two women who loved him. Guilt mingled with longing when he thought of Khadija. He closed his eyes and saw her again standing uncertainly at the entrance to his tent, the kerosene lamp highlighting her features and casting deep dark shadows in the folds of the white shammah wrapped around her head and shoulders against the night cold. He had buried many men that day, including some of those who were closest to him. Through reddened eyes, he watched as Khadija approached his bed and, saying nothing, she pulled off his riding boots. In that moment of tenderness, when happiness and life itself seemed so fleeting, he had taken her into his arms.

He was her chief, Khadija used to tell him, and in those days he had been the all-powerful comandante, one of the most promising young officers of the Duke of Aosta, the viceroy of Africa Orientale Italiana. But after the British had defeated the Italians, extinguishing the Duce’s African empire, he had had nothing to offer her, yet she had stayed at his side. He became just a shifta, a bandit, inexplicably fighting on with a handful of his ascari after the rest of the Italian army had surrendered. Khadija was seldom far from his side, firing her ancient Austro-Hungarian carbine at the British lorries as they heaved their way up the mountain roads of Eritrea. ‘Ay zosh! Ay zosh! Up! Up!’ she would shout in Tigrinian, as the ragged band closed in to loot and kill. Her fighting with the men brought them good fortune, she would say as she curled up beside him on the straw mat of their tukul. He would watch her fall asleep, covering her naked shoulders with an old blanket and then kiss the intricate braids in which she wore her hair. In the darkness of the dungeon, the prisoner’s eyes filled with tears.

He had always tried to be honest with her, he would convince himself. From the beginning, she had known that one day they would part and that at home waiting for him was another woman; a woman whom he also loved and had asked to be his wife. Khadija would bow her head and say that she understood, but in her heart she did not stop hoping that he would never leave.

The prisoner had no idea what Beatrice Gandolfo’s feelings were for him now: whether she was still waiting for him to return, or had found someone else, or even married, he had no idea. His name had not been among those killed in action, but nor had it been on the lists the British passed to the Red Cross of Italian officers interned in prison camps throughout India, Kenya and South Africa. He was simply missing – disperso – in the void left by the collapse of Africa Orientale Italiana. Whatever Beatrice – Bice – had decided, he would not, could not, reproach her. They had known each other all their lives and the bond between them, cousins as well as lovers, was too strong to be broken.

Bice’s older sisters had always made more fuss of him than she ever did, when he stayed with them in Naples or went bathing at the Gandolfos’ summer house at Vietri. It was they who demanded to know the latest scandalous gossip surrounding Edda Ciano, the Duce’s chrome-blonde daughter, or what the royal princesses were wearing or whether he was really stepping out with the movie star Elsa Merlini, as the magazines reported. Still only in her teens, Bice would follow him intently with her dark brown eyes, smiling slightly but saying little. And when she did speak, it was as though she were gently teasing him, as if she were ten years his senior and not the reverse.