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

No one seemed to understand and accept his weaknesses and absurdities quite as she did. And he remembered the day, while they were sailing a little boat off the Amalfi coast, when he realised – and the thought had appalled him at first – that he was falling in love with his young cousin. Bice had swum over to the sheer rockface of the shore and, ignoring his words of caution, had climbed up to a high ledge. She looked down at him in the boat, smiled and then dived into the sea, and her long, reddish blonde hair, so unusual in a southern Italian, streamed towards him under the water.

Had fate been different, they would have shared their lives and had children, and together grown old. That she would never know what had happened to him was his saddest thought. When the fighting between the British and Italians finally came to an end, someone in Eritrea, maybe even one of the enemy officers who had pursued him, would confirm that he had still been alive several months after the fall of Asmara. But nothing more. She would never know of the dungeon on the other side of the Red Sea, which had cost him so much to cross. Here he would die and be buried and quickly forgotten as the crazed Ahmed Abdullah al Redai. And then no trace in this world would remain of the man he had been.

TWO

The Black Sword

NAPLES, AUGUST 1935

Amedeo Guillet rested his arms on the railings of the ancient steamer, taking care not to mark his olive-grey uniform, and looked towards the crowd. Ever since he had come aboard, two hours before, they had been slowly gathering, milling about in the shade under the palm trees in the piazza and beneath the glowering grey walls of the Maschio Angioino, the Angevin castle on the city’s waterfront. A dense mass was waiting expectantly at the point where the tree-lined avenue that led from the railway station entered the square, and it was there, too, that the attention of those looking down from the balconies seemed to be concentrated. Tall carabinieri, in full dress uniform of bicorn hats, distinctive white cross belts and swords, were standing together, with studied insouciance, indifferent to the excitement around them. But with Naples reinvigorated by its afternoon siesta, the sense of anticipation in the crowd carried to the quayside where the passenger ships were docked.

Amedeo was surprised at the multitude. Troop ships had been embarking all summer, yet the city seemed determined to see off the last with the same enthusiasm as it had done the first. Every so often the crowd’s steady murmur was ruptured by youths chanting ‘Eià!, Eià!, Alalà!’, the supposedly ancient Greek war cry that the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had popularised with the early Fascists. Or one of them would bellow: ‘For whom, Abyssinia?’ ‘A noi! To us!’ came the resounding reply. A noi!’ It was the latest gimmicky catchphrase put about by the propagandists of the regime. All of a sudden, a ripple spread through the crowd. A second later a roar greeted the arrival of a column of marching men. Amedeo watched as figures began scurrying across the piazza towards them, drawn like iron filings to a magnet. Flowers were thrown to the soldiers or pressed into their hands, and amid the waving and the sea of faces could be seen little flags with the green, white and red of the Italian tricolour. It must have been something like this in May 1915, Amedeo felt, when his father and uncles had gone to war.

The column was mid-way through the throng when the sound seemed to change to a loud and delighted cheer. They were the Alpini, Amedeo could see, mountain troops from the north, whose beards and peaked felt caps made them look a little like William Tell. Children edged to the front, encouraged by smiling mothers who stooped and pointed, for behind the officers and regimental flags at the head of the column were half a dozen German shepherd dogs, leather satchels strapped to their backs. Trained to carry dispatches over frozen Alpine passes, the regiment’s canine messengers were being mobilised for service on the Ethiopian ambas.

Then it was the turn of the Bersaglieri (literally ‘marksmen’) who emerged into the piazza with a fanfare of trumpets and at their customary jog, the cascades of cockerel feathers on their hats rippling through the crowd like merrymakers at carnival. It was the first time, though, that Amedeo had seen their distinctive headdress attached to tropical pith helmets. As they came through the gateway to the port, the foreground to countless paintings of the Neapolitan waterfront, a military band struck up the Hymn of the Piave. For the first time Amedeo, who had been watching unmoved by the scene, felt his emotions stir. No other song of the Great War had such resonance as this melancholic, but defiant morale-raiser, which had been sung to rally the Italian troops after the rout at Caporetto in 1917. Her allies had urged Italy to abandon the whole of the Veneto, as the Austrians, backed by German divisions, broke the front. But the king himself, Vittorio Emanuele III, had brought the shattered army to heal at the river: ‘And the Piave murmured, ‘‘The foreigner will not pass’’.’

The tune changed once more and Amedeo’s attention was drawn again to the piazza, cast in lengthening shadows as the sun gently expired over the Bay of Naples. A legion of Black Shirts had arrived, young volunteers determined to give victory in Africa a distinctively Fascist stamp. And they were singing as they came on. It was that idiotic, jaunty song that had been unavoidable for weeks, and it grew louder as the marching men approached the port:

Faccetta nera, bell’Abissina,

Aspetta e spera: la vittoria s’avvicina …

Little Black Face, beautiful Abyssinian girl,

Await and hope: victory is approaching …

Amedeo looked down to those gathered on the quay and caught Bice Gandolfo’s eye. They smiled as the men strode past in a swaggering march, swinging their bare forearms, for a black shirt, it seemed, was always worn with the sleeves rolled up. Ethiopia’s days of serfdom, they sang, would be replaced by the slavery of love. Then came the rousing finale:

Little Black Face, you will be Roman

And for a flag, you will have the Italian.

We will march past, arm-in-arm,

And parade in front of the Duce

And in front of the King!

In the cheering that followed, Bice made a dismissive little gesture with one white-gloved hand. Her father beside her, Amedeo’s Uncle Rodolfo, shouted up: ‘I am sure the king would be delighted to meet her!’ And the three of them laughed as the column headed down the quay.

From the far end of the docks, a foghorn blasted. One of the troop ships, festooned in bunting and paper streamers, was casting off. Every available space on deck was filled with cheering men, waving their hats, hurling flowers and last minute protestations of love at their women below. On the ship’s two funnels were giant, stylised, portraits of the Duce, wearing a helmet, jaw clenched in martial resolution, his head thrown back to iron out the chins. Other ships joined in the cacophony, sounding their horns, and then fireworks exploded over the city, jarring its crumbling palazzi down to their tufa foundations as they had so many times before.

It seemed more like a wedding than war, and the small cluster of friends and relatives gathered at the quay beside Amedeo’s ship were the guests whom nobody knew. With half the Italian army being shipped to Eritrea and Somaliland, little fuss was being made of the old steamer that plied between Naples and Tripoli, the capital of Italian Libya. Amedeo had urged his uncle not to see him off. It would take the chauffeur at least an hour to pick his way back through the crowds to the Gandolfos’ palazzo on the Via dei Mille. But the older man had insisted and Bice, to his surprise, had wanted to come too. Amedeo felt grateful now that they had done so. For although he was bound for Libya, his final destination was the same as that of the cheering men. He, too, would be going to war in Abyssinia if, as seemed inevitable, war it turned out to be.

Some acquaintances approached Uncle Rodolfo, and Amedeo watched him indulgently as he performed the courteous rituals. He was dressed in an outfit that he took to be the quintessence of an English gentleman at leisure, in yachting shoes, a white linen suit and a sailor’s cap, which he doffed at absolutely the correct degree of sociable nonchalance. Nu vero milordo, Neapolitans called Signor Gandolfo, mixing genuine admiration with crafty flattery. Amedeo had always felt drawn to this charming relative, whose frank enjoyment of the pleasures of the Bay of Naples was mildly disapproved by the more duty-bound Guillets. And Amedeo’s feelings of affection were reciprocated by the older man. Uncle Rodolfo looked forward to his visits whenever he was competing at riding events in Naples, and he was sensitive, too, to the family bond between them. Before they had left for the port, Uncle Rodolfo had been moved to re-tell the stories of how the kinship between Gandolfos and Guillets had come about. His father and Amedeo’s grandfather, both officers in the army of Piedmont, had fought side-by-side in the 1860s against the Austrians in the great battles of the Risorgimento, Italy’s national resurgence. After the moribund Bourbon kingdom of Naples had been swept away, and the nation finally made, the two friends had ridden like victorious conquerors into the town of Capua, where they married the daughters of its leading citizen, one of the ‘new’ Italians of the south.

But whereas the Guillets had remained Piedmontese and northern in outlook, Rodolfo Gandolfo had long since been seduced by the ways of the Mezzogiorno. Wealthy and untroubled by the need to work, he nonetheless exercised his talents as an engineer to direct the great project to drain the malarial Serra Mazzoni marshes, and once built a theatre in Capua, which he then gave to the town. But his chief passion was to sail his yacht around the Bay of Naples, assisted by his crew of three daughters, of whom Bice, aged sixteen, was the youngest.

His little cousin was becoming sophisticated, Amedeo could not help thinking, as he watched Bice exchange pleasantries with the newcomers. He had been ten when he had held her in his arms as a baby, and he still thought of her as a child, calling her Bice or Bicetta, her name in endearing diminuendo, and seldom Beatrice, still less Signorina Gandolfo. For a moment he had felt self-conscious taking leave of her on the quay, kissing her cheek chastely for the first time, rather than joshing her fondly as he had always done before.

The steamer emitted a baleful sound from its horn, which interrupted his thoughts but still failed to arouse any interest in the piazza, and the sailors began slipping the moorings. Uncle Rodolfo called out a final good luck, waving his cap, and Bice raised a white hand as the steamer eased its way past the bigger ships into the harbour.

Naples had never seemed lovelier to Amedeo than on that evening, the dying sun catching the maiolica cupolas of the churches and casting the Certosa di San Martino, high above the least salubrious quarters of the city, in a warm orange glow. Sprawling and raucous, the southern metropolis grated against his northern sense of decorum, but from the safe distance of the sea, away from the chaos, the filth and the crime, it appeared magnificent. A true capital, Amedeo conceded, and the only Italian city worthy of the term. Apart from Turin, of course. It was not his Italy, which he preferred to think of as a land of neat, modest towns in the Alpine foothills, but it was undeniably the Patria. Whatever the Italians were only two generations after the nation itself had come into being – and the current view, incessantly repeated, was that they were the heirs to Imperial Rome – they would be much less, Amedeo believed, without the humanity of this ancient, suffering city of which all Italians seemed so embarrassed, and yet proud.

His eyes swept the scene, from the elegant seafront boulevards of Santa Lucia to the palace of the Bourbon kings, to the core of alleyways knotted around the mediaeval cathedral, where the poor lived crammed into cellars. And then he looked out beyond the city, to the great curve of the bay, where the land, once it emerged from the sea, was pulled upwards in a sharpening arc like a graph on paper, to the growling old man of Vesuvius himself.

For as long as he could, he fixed his gaze on the figure in white, and the pale, red-haired girl beside him, until they blurred with the others waving from the quay.

The ship’s steward had unpacked Amedeo’s uniforms and hung them in the wardrobe, but the sword he had carefully laid on the made-up bed. Amedeo picked it up and toyed with it in his hands for a few moments, turning it over to admire its curved shape. Every part of it was black: the steel scabbard and rings, the rather tinny hilt and the long tapering blade. His father, Baron Alfredo Guillet, when a major in the élite Mounted Carabinieri from which the Royal Bodyguard was drawn, had carried the sword in the Great War. But in the stalemate on the barren limestone hills of the Carso in Friuli, where every shellburst showered lethal fragments, men cowered in trenches, the horses disappeared and glistening cavalry sabres were dulled with acid to a matt black. Amedeo grasped the vulcanite grip, perfectly moulded to his hand, and pulled the sword free, enjoying its metallic rasp. He made a whipping cut in the air and examined the quivering blade, its point sharpened on both edges to prise through ribs and bone. It was a nineteenth-century weapon, re-fashioned for the slaughter of the twentieth.

Putting it aside, he stretched out on the narrow bed. He was going to war at last, to do what he had been training for ever since he joined the Military Academy at Modena seven years before as an eighteen-year-old cadet. But long before that he had known he would be a soldier. Arms were the family occupation of the Guillets just as others were bakers or bankers, silversmiths or peasants. His father had retired from the army a colonel, both his paternal uncles were generals, as had been his grandfather and numerous other, more remote, ancestors. Their uniformed portraits and blurred daguerreotypes hung from his father’s library wall, and their dusty treatises on military strategy filled the shelves.

Amedeo had only a vague grasp of the causes of the Abyssinian crisis. The rights and wrongs behind the border clash in which several Dubats, Italian Somali troops, and many more Ethiopians had been killed, seemed too complicated to master. So it was proving for the diplomats at the League of Nations in Geneva, who for months had been poring over yellowing maps that showed the grazing rights and waterholes in the Ogaden desert. But if Italy went to war, Amedeo would have not the slightest doubt what he would be fighting for. It did not have much to do with the exhortations of Benito Mussolini, who had whipped Italians into a frenzy of indignation as though an Ethiopian horde were storming the Campidoglio. Nor were his sentiments entirely explained by the conventional patriotism that every child learned at school, revering the trinity of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour, the prophet, the soldier and the statesman who had forged the united Italy. In a land where personal loyalties – to family, to friends – were far more important than abstract ones, the Guillets were bound to Italy’s dynastic rulers in a bond which stretched back for generations, and Amedeo fully shared the sense of obligation.

He had always been proud of his Savoyard name. In the southern cities of Bari and Messina, where his father had been posted and Amedeo spent most of his childhood, the locals mangled the pronunciation of Guillet by attempting to Italianise it. But he had never cared that he did not share the sharp consonants and prickly vowel sounds of their names. Nor, though he was teased for his northern accent, would he try to fit in by taking up their dialects. When he was a boy, he would scrutinise an old map on his bedroom wall showing the patchwork of Italian states before unification, and his attention would be drawn to the ancestral possessions of Savoy. His finger would trace the frontier from Savoie itself and then down, over the southern slopes of the Alps to Piedmont, the core of the kingdom with Turin its capital, and the name by which the state was always known in Italy. There was no natural explanation for the line, which ignored the contours of mountain ranges and the course of rivers, as it did the linguistic borders of French and Italian. Every province, every town and village, had been painstakingly acquired as the House of Savoy, Europe’s oldest and most tenacious ruling dynasty, rose from being counts to dukes to kings. Every encroachment, whether in France or Italy, had been held by force of will and blood. A fair share of it, Amedeo knew with pride, belonged to his own family.

From his earliest years, he had been aware that to be Piedmontese was to be born into the élite of the Kingdom of Italy. All the best regiments – the Bersaglieri, the Alpini, the cavalry – owed their origins to the old state of Piedmont, or the Kingdom of Sardinia as it was misleadingly named in its last stages. Even in the Thirties, the officer corps and the high civil service were still drawn disproportionately from the region. Italians from elsewhere, who may have thought that their own local achievements cast those of the Alpine region into shade, resented its lingering influence at the top of society. But only Piedmont had not slept during the long torpid centuries after the Renaissance and before the national awakening, when the peninsula languished into a dreamland arcadia amid the ruins of former greatness. In Turin, the seeds of a modern state were sown, nurtured by families such as the Guillets, created barons in the seventeenth century, who lived modestly on their own lands and equated their role with public service. When the movement for national unity began after the Napoleonic wars, only Piedmont could provide the leadership to free Italy from foreign rule; it alone survived while the territories of Venice and Florence, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, and all the other smaller fragments, disappeared from the map forever.

Whenever the Italian tricolour was raised there was a reminder of this truth, for in the centre was the red shield and white cross of Savoy. To Amedeo, it was an emblem that demanded greater loyalty than the three colours themselves.

Neither the causes of the conflict with Ethiopia, nor the Guillets’ sense of dynastic loyalty, were uppermost in Amedeo’s mind as he lay in his cabin. It had been his decision to go to war; using family connections to fix a transfer to the Spahys di Libya, a regiment of colonial cavalry that was shortly to join the invasion force mustering in Eritrea. But having achieved his aim of serving under arms, he found it gave him little pleasure. Instead, a sense of guilt gnawed at him insistently as the old steamer clunked towards Tripoli. He had made a choice of a type that the Duce would doubtless describe as ‘irrevocable’, and there was no going back from it. Three weeks before, his life had seemed so simple and untroubled, as he worked his horses in preparation for the Olympics that were due to take place in Berlin in early 1936. Now, doubts and uncertainties surfaced. And he still could not quite believe that he had given up everything that he had achieved as a competition rider and had quit the national three-day eventing team. When he walked away from the training ground at Turin, he knew that the others in the team felt he had let them down and old friendships had been severed. The life he had been leading for the past five years, ever since he had been commissioned, was at an end. And they had been good years. Very good years.

With the decision made for him that he would have a military career, he had always known which part of the army he wanted to join. His older brother, Giuseppe, had opted for the artillery, but for Amedeo, who had ridden his father’s dressage horse from the age of five, it was the cavalry. Few occupations in Italy were then quite as glamorous. Only naval officers, who affected a certain inglese hauteur, or the pilots of the new Regia Aeronautica, the air force, came close. And the clothes were wonderful. Cavalry officers sauntered through piazzas wrapped in sky blue cloaks, wearing the dragoon’s helmets or the hussar’s fur busbies of the previous century. Olive-grey jodhpurs with double stripes in red were worn below a tunic that fastened at the neck, with just a hint of a white stock showing above. Riding boots, silver spurs and immaculate white leather gloves were part of the ensemble for a bella figura, even if the officers had only dismounted from a tram. And, of course, wherever they went, and at all times of the day, they held at their side their sabre. Even Amedeo had to concede that it was a little overdone, as he strapped his sword to the handlebars of his bicycle and pedalled off through the streets of Turin and Rome.

While the bright young things elsewhere were discovering jazz, experimental literature and sex, the ‘fathers’ were still in control in Fascist Italy. And Amedeo was an obedient son. The carnage of the First World War had not dented the army’s social allure, nor was there a feeling that a generation had been betrayed and led to senseless slaughter. On the contrary, the wider population, though resistant to Fascism’s efforts to make a cult of war, viewed Italy’s victory at the side of Britain, France and the United States as a source of pride, and believed that the common sacrifice of 600,000 dead had moulded the nation at last. Under the regime, the role of the army was even more exalted than had been the case in 1915, and at the top society’s rituals continued unchanged as though a reprise of the belle époque.

Amedeo’s outlook on the world perfectly complemented his anachronistic uniform and he fitted seamlessly into the make-believe, hand-kissing Ruritania of Italian society in the early Thirties. These were the last of Mussolini’s ‘years of consensus’, when the country seemed at ease with itself, the violence of the Fascist takeover in 1922 long forgotten and the leap into the abyss yet to come. There were no strikes, no social unrest and apparently no discord. Opponents of the regime either quietly left the country, or, if they openly defied it, were sent into internal exile, al confino, in the remote South. But on the whole, Italian Fascism, like the Catholic Church, contented itself with outward conformity, and seldom looked too closely at the real feelings that lay within. As for Amedeo, the strongest reproach he felt towards the regime was resentment that officers in the Fascist Milizia, the Duce’s private army of Black Shirts, were able to box three competition horses on trains free of charge, while he, a regular cavalry officer, could only box two.

Besides, there was always the king. Diffident and awkward and not quite five foot tall, Vittorio Emanuele III was hardly an inspiring figure for most ordinary Italians, although there were times, as during the First World War, when they loved him. Throughout his forty-six year reign, that spanned meeting Queen Victoria to suffering the snubs of Allied liaison officers at the close of the Second World War, he remained an enigmatic, and often barely visible head of state. But with the Fascists presiding over an ever-changing theatre of varieties, his presence at the top of society reassured many and what he represented was held in respect.

On occasion Amedeo was invited to little receptions at the Villa Savoia in Rome, where the royal family lived in preference to the grander Quirinale. Princess Jolanda, eight years his senior and the oldest daughter, whom he had known since childhood, became a close friend. An intrepid amazzone – as modern women riders were called, for they rode astride – she shared Amedeo’s passion for horses and his talent, once beating him in a jump-off when they competed against each other. He would join her set when riding out with the Rome Foxhunt, the fashionable winter pastime introduced in 1836 by Lord Chesterfield who, wearying of his wife’s convalescence from tuberculosis, had shipped his hounds from England. The hunt would gallop under the arches of aqueducts, and wait at the coverts as the hounds sniffed about the ancient ruins that abounded in the Roman campagna.