for profound relief. His departure for Rome was completed with such
despatch as to avoid by a hair's breadth the semblance of indecorous
haste.
General Pietro Badoglio was a fighting soldier. He had staffed the
headquarters before Adowa, although he had played no part in that
debacle, and he was a veteran of Caporetto and Vittorio Veneto. He
believed that the purpose of war was to crush the enemy as swiftly and
as ruthlessly as was possible, with the use of any weapon at his
disposal.
He came ashore at Massawa with a furious impatience, angry with
everything he found, and impatient of the policies and concepts of his
predecessor, although in truth seldom had an incoming commander been
handed such an enviable strategic situation.
He inherited a huge, well-equipped army with a buoyant morale, in a
commanding tactical position and backed by a magnificent network of
communications and a logistics inventory that was alpine in
proportions.
The small but magnificently equipped airforce of the expedition was
flying unopposed over the Ambo mountains, observing all troop movements
and pouncing immediately on any Ethiopian concentrations.
During one of the first dinners at the new headquarters, Lieutenant
Vittorio Mussolini, the younger of the Duce's two sons, one of the
dashing Regia Aeronautica aces, regaled his new commander with accounts
of his sorties over the enemy highlands and Badoglio, who had not had
close aerial support in any of his previous campaigns, was delighted
with this new and deadly weapon. He listened transfixed to the young
flier's descriptions of the effect of aerial bombardment particularly
an account of an attack on a group of three hundred or more enemy
horsemen led by a tall, dark-robed figure. The young Mussolini told
him, "I released a single hundred-kilo bomb from an altitude of less
than a hundred metres, and it fell precisely in the centre of the
galloping horsemen. They opened like the petals of a flowering rose,
and the dark-robed leader was thrown so high by the blast that he
seemed to almost touch my wing-tip as I passed. It was a spectacle of
great beauty and magnificence." Badoglio was happy that his new
command included young men with such fire in their veins, and he leaned
forward in his seat at the head of the table to peer down over the
glittering silver and sparkling leaded crystal at the flier in his
handsome blue uniform. The classical features and dark curly head of
hair were the artist's conception of young Mars. Then he turned to the
airforce
Colonel who sat beside him.
"Colonel, what is the opinion of your young men in the Regia
Aeronautica? I have heard much argument for and against but I would be
interested to have your opinion.
Should we use the nitrogen mustard?"
"I think I speak for all my young men." The Colonel sipped his wine
and glanced for confirmation at the young ace who was not yet twenty
years of age. "I think the answer must be yes, we must use every
weapon available to us." Badoglio nodded. The thinking agreed with
his own, and the next morning he ordered the canisters of mustard gas
shipped from the warehouses of
Massawa, where De Bono had been content to let them lie, and despatched
them to every airfield where flights of the Regia Aeronautica were
based. Thousands upon thousands of the wild tribesmen of Ethiopia
would come to know the corrosive dew when later they endured
bombardment by artillery and aerial attack with a stoicism greater than
most European troops were able to muster yet they could never come to
terms with this terrible substance that turned the open pastures of
their mountain fastness to fields of terror. Barefoot, as most of them
were, they were pathetically vulnerable to the silent insidious weapon
that flayed the skin from their bodies, and then stripped the living
flesh from the bone.
This single decision was one of many made that day by the new
commander, and signalled the change from De Bono's humbling, but not
unkindly civilizing invasion, to the new concept of total war war with
only one objective.
MUSSOlini had wanted a hawk, and he had chosen well.
The hawk stood in the centre of the lofty second-storey headquarters
office at Asmara, He was too consumed with furious impatience to sit at
the wide desk, and when he paced the tiled floor,
his heels cracked on the ceramic like drum beats. The elasticity of
his stride was that of a man far younger than sixty-five.
He carried his head low on boxer's shoulders, thrusting his chin
forward a heavy chin below a big shapeless round nose, a short-cropped
grey mustache and a wide hard mouth.
His eyes were deep sunken into dark cavities, like those of a corpse,
but their glitter was alive and aware as he worked swiftly through the
lists of his divisional and regimental commanders,
assessing each by one criterion only, "Is he a fighting man?" Too
often the answer was "no,", or at the least uncertain, so it was with a
fierce pleasure that he recognized one who was without question a
hard-fighting man on whom he could rely.
