by Evelyn Waugh
There were six of us, sipping iced Vichy water from our thermos flasks and gazing out bleakly upon a landscape of unrelieved desolation.
One of them had been my companion from London, a reporter from a Radical newspaper. I saw him constantly throughout the succeeding months and found his zeal and industry a standing reproach. I did not know it was possible for a human being to identify himself so precisely with the interests of his employers. The situation, obscure to most of us, was crystal clear to him – the Emperor was an oppressed anti-fascist.
My other colleague was a vastly different character. From time to time he gave us visiting cards, but we never remembered his name, and for the next few weeks he became a prominent and richly comic figure in Addis life, known to everyone as ‘the Spaniard’. He was vivacious and swarthy and stout, immensely talkative and far from intelligible in English, French, and German. His equipment, as he proudly admitted, was largely acquired at a sixpenny store. He changed his clothes in the train, putting on breeches, a pair of chocolate-coloured riding boots, and a Boy Scout’s belt and revolver holster. He then placed a tin aneroid on the seat beside him and proclaimed the changes of altitude with boyish excitement, peeling and devouring one by one throughout the journey an enormous basket of slightly rotten bananas.
It was clear to us that Spanish journalism was run on quite different lines from English. From the moment we left Marseilles he had been composing articles for his paper – one about Haifa, two about de Lesseps, one about Disraeli. ‘I have a very good history of Africa in German,’ he explained. ‘When I have nothing to report I translate passages from that. Mine is the most important paper in Spain, but it is a great thing for them to send a correspondent as far as this. They must have news all the time.’ While the rest of us were leading a life agreeably unembarrassed by the financial cares that occupy so much attention in normal travel, the Spaniard was in a chronic high fever of anxiety about his expenditure; for many days after his arrival at Addis Ababa he was to be found with a stub of pencil and sheet of paper working out how many thalers he should have got for his francs at Djibouti and brooding sceptically over the results; he was apparently an easy prey for the dishonest; his cabin, he complained, was rifled on board ship and a wad of money stolen; at Djibouti he had a still odder misfortune; he gave me his pocket-book to guard while he went for a swim and on his return maintained that a thousand francs had disappeared from it. He bewailed the loss at length and in piteous terms, saying that he was saving it for a present to his little daughter. But I made no offer to reimburse him and he soon recovered his jollity. It was a great surprise to him to discover that three of the English journalists beside myself were new and probably temporary members of our staffs and that all except one were entirely new to the work of foreign correspondent. ‘I am the most important and expensive man on my paper,’ he said.
‘English editors would not send anyone whose life they valued on a job of this kind,’ we told him.
‘I have my revolver. And the boots are snake-proof. How much do you think they cost?’
Someone suggested ten shillings.
‘Very much less,’ he said proudly.
He was one of the few people who, I really believe, thought that the coloured races were dark-skinned because they did not wash. He did not intend to stay long in Ethiopia, because, he explained, he was his paper’s Paris correspondent and it was impossible to do both jobs satisfactorily at the same time. ‘I shall merely make a rapid tour of the front on a motor bicycle,’ he said.
In the absence of any more probable alternative, it was later put about in Addis Ababa, where everyone was credited with some sinister activity, that the Spaniard was a papal spy.
The fourth member of the party was a sturdy American doctor who had come to offer his services to the Ethiopian Red Cross. With him was Mr Prospero, whom he had rescued from an indefinite sojourn in the Djibouti hotel. Mr Prospero was photographer for an American newsreel. A few weeks before he had been a contented resident in Japan, where he owned a house, a dog, had lately paid the last instalment on a saloon car, and employed his time making pictures of cherry blossom and court ceremonial. At a few hours’ notice he had been whisked away from this life of lotus eating and deposited, penniless – his funds having been cabled in advance to Addis – at Djibouti, than which there can be no town in the world less sympathetic to strangers desirous of borrowing a railway fare. His life thereafter was a protracted martyrdom gallantly but gloomily endured, which seemed to typify the discouragement which in less degrees we all suffered. At Addis he was accommodated at the Imperial Hotel in a ground-floor room immediately next to the only entrance; as more camera men arrived, they joined him there with camp beds and mountains of technical apparatus until the little room, heaped with cameras and crumpled underclothes, packing-cases of film and half-empty tins of baked beans, presented a scene hideously compounded of workshop, warehouse, and slum dormitory. I saw Mr Prospero constantly, and always in distress; now soaked to the skin pathetically grinding the handle of his camera in an impenetrable pall of rain; now prostrate under the bare feet of a stampeding mob, like a football in a rugger scrum; now lamed; now groaning with indigestion; now shuddering in high fever. He became a figure from classic tragedy, inexorably hunted by hostile fates. After we had been in Addis Ababa some time a copy of a poster arrived from America advertising his newsreel. It represented a young man of military appearance and more than military intrepidity, standing calmly behind his camera while bombs burst overhead and naked warriors rolled interlocked about his knees. In vast letters across this scene of carnage was printed:
‘O.K., BOYS, YOU CAN START THE WAR NOW. PROSPERO IS THERE.’
The sixth and by far the gayest of us was an Englishman who was soon, suddenly, to become world-famous: Mr F. W. Rickett. He had joined our ship at Port Said and throughout the succeeding week had proved a light-hearted companion. From the first he was invested with a certain mystery. Anyone travelling to Addis Ababa at that moment attracted some speculation. Mr Rickett spoke openly of a ‘mission’, and when tackled by the Radical on the subject hinted vaguely that he was bringing Coptic funds to the Abuna. He spoke more freely about a pack of hounds which he had in the Midlands, and when, as often happened, he received lengthy cables in code, he would pocket them nonchalantly, remarking, ‘From my huntsman. He says the prospects for cubbin’ are excellent.’ The Radical and I put him down as an arms salesman of whom large numbers were said to be frequenting Addis Ababa. In the gaudy reports of his concession which flooded the papers of the world a fortnight later great emphasis was laid upon Mr Rickett’s ‘unobtrusive entrance’ into the country and his residence at ‘an obscure boarding-house’. Nothing could have been further from his intentions or expectations. He had ordered the one luxury carriage of the Ethiopian railway and treasured the most extravagant hopes about its character – even to the belief that it contained a kitchen and cook. He had, in fact, very kindly offered me a place in it. But when we got to the station we found that we had to take our places in the ordinary coach. In the same way he had ordered a suite at the Imperial Hotel. It was only when we found there was no other accommodation, that we went to Mrs Heft’s excellent pension.
The day wore on, more oppressive after luncheon at a wayside buffet; the little train jerked and twisted through an unendurable country of stone and anthills. There were no signs of rain here, the sand was bare, the few tufts of scrub colourless as the surrounding stone; the watercourses were dry. At sunset we stopped for the night at Dirre-Dowa. I remembered how gratefully I had left it five years before. Now in the cool of the evening, with the lights of the hotel terrace revealing sombre masses of flowering bougainvillea, it seemed agreeable enough. The head of the railway police came up from the station with us for a drink. He was one of the new school of Ethiopian official – clean-shaven, khaki-clad, French-speaking. He told us the latest news from Europe. Mr Eden had walked out of the Paris discussions. That meant that England was going
to fight against Italy, he said. ‘That depends on the League of Nations,’ we said.
‘No, no. It is because you do not want Italy to be strong. It is good. You know that Ethiopia cannot threaten you. We are friends. Together we will defeat the Italians.’
We did not disabuse him; instead we accepted our temporary popularity as easily as we could, clinked glasses and drank to peace.
Next morning at dawn we resumed our places in the train and reached Addis that evening.
I little suspected what a large part in our lives that stretch of line was going to play in the coming months. I covered it six times before Christmas and learned every feature – the transition from desert to downland, the view of the lakes, the cinder fields, the Hawash gorge, the candle-lit hotel at Hawash where on every journey but this the train deposited us for the night, the station where there was an ostrich, a beggar who recited prayers, a little girl who mimed; the painted arch of the lake hotel at Bishoftou which told that the climb was nearly over and that we were in measurable distance of Addis, the silly coon-face of the ticket collector outside the window as he climbed along the running-boards to enquire who wanted to lunch at the buffet. But at this time we all assumed that, when war was declared, we should at once be isolated. On the first day Hawash bridge would be bombed and the line cut in a hundred places. We had all planned routes of escape to Kenya or the Sudan. Of the various fates which from time to time we predicted for Haile Selassie – rescue by British aeroplanes, death in battle, murder, suicide – no one, I think, ever seriously suggested what was actually to happen; that in the final catastrophe, desperate and disillusioned, betrayed by the League, deserted by his army, hunted by insurgent tribesmen, with his enemies a day’s march from the Palace and their aircraft regularly reconnoitring over his head, he would quietly proceed to the station, board the train and trip down to Djibouti by rail. The least romantic of us never suggested that.
Addis Ababa on the eve of war seemed little changed in character and appearance from the city I had known five years before. The triumphal arches that had been erected for the coronation had grown shabbier but they were still standing. The ambitious buildings in the European style with which Haile Selassie had intended to embellish his capital were still in the same rudimentary stage of construction; tufted now with vegetation like ruins in a drawing by Piranesi, they stood at every corner, reminders of an abortive modernism, a happy subject for the Press photographers who hoped later to present them as the ravages of Italian bombardment.
There were several hotels in Addis Ababa, all, at the time of our arrival, outrageously prosperous. ‘Kakophilos’s’, at which we all assumed we should stay, was completely full with journalists and photographers living in hideous proximity, two or three to a room even in the outbuildings. It was a massive, shabby building of sepulchral gloom, presided over by the eponymous, sturdy, middle-aged, misanthropic Greek, who had taken it over as a failing concern just before the troubles. There was something admirable about the undisguised and unaffected distaste with which he regarded his guests and his ruthless disregard of their comfort and dignity. Some attempted to be patronizing to him, some dictatorial, some ingratiating; all were treated with uniform contempt. He was well aware that for a very few months nothing that he did or left undone could affect his roaring prosperity; after that anything might happen. The less his guests ate the greater his profits, and from his untidy little desk in the corner he watched with sardonic amusement the crowds of dyspeptic journalists – many of them elderly men, of note in their own countries – furtively carrying into his dining-room paper bags of fresh bread, tins of tuck and pocketfuls of oranges and bananas, like little boys trooping into tea at their private schools. Mr Kakophilos never apologized and very rarely complained. Nothing of the smallest value was endangered in the scenes of violence which became increasingly frequent as the journalists made themselves at home. When his guests threw their bedroom furniture out of the window, he noted it in the weekly bill. If they fired their revolvers at the night watchman he merely advised the man to take careful cover. Menageries of unclean pets were introduced into the bedrooms; Mr Kakophilos waited unconcerned until even their owners could bear their presence no longer. His was the chief hotel of the town and nothing could shake its status. Here, intermittently, the government posted its communiqués; here the Foreign Press Association held its acrimonious meetings; here every evening, when the wireless station was shut, we all assembled, in seedy wicker chairs in the large, bare, flea-ridden hall, to drink and grumble.
The Deutsches Haus, where Mr Rickett and I were taken, was humbler and very much more hospitable. It stood near the Splendide in a side street, but its immediate surroundings were not imposing. Opposite was a tannery run by a Russian Prince, from which, when the wind was in the wrong quarter, there came smells so appalling that we were obliged to shut our windows and scatter in different parts of the town; sometimes a lorry of reeking pelts would be left all day at our gates; once, for some purpose connected with his hideous trade, His Highness acquired a load of decomposing cows’ feet. He was a debonair figure, given to exotic tastes in dress. When he first arrived at Addis he was asked to luncheon at the British Legation and the guard turned out for him. A few days later he opened a house of ill fame. Now he was mainly, but not exclusively, interested in the fur trade. He often spoke wistfully of a convoy of girls who had been on order from Cairo since the battle of Walwal but were held up somewhere, mysteriously and unjustly, in the customs.
But though the surroundings were forbidding, the hospitality inside the gates (which were kept by a grizzled warrior armed with a seven-foot spear) was delightful. Mrs Heft was one of the Germans who had drifted to Abyssinia from Tanganyika when it was confiscated by the British government after the war. There were a large number of her compatriots in the town, mostly in very poor circumstances, employed as mechanics or in petty trade. The Deutsches Haus was their rendezvous where they played cards and occasionally dined. The Hefts could never quite get used to the disregard of small economies or the modest appetites of her new boarders. Many of our demands seemed to her painfully complex. ‘The journalists pay well,’ she confided. ‘But they are very difficult. Some want coffee in the morning and some want tea, and they expect it always to be hot.’ But she worked untiringly in our service.
She was a housewife of formidable efficiency. Daily from dawn until noon a miniature market was held on the steps of the dining-room. Half a dozen native hawkers squatted patiently, displaying meat, eggs, and vegetables. Every half-hour she or Mr Heft would emerge, disparage the goods, ask the price, and, in simulated rage, tell the salesmen to be off. Eventually, when it was time to start cooking luncheon, she made her purchases.
Mr Heft had a deafening little car, which at any moment of the day or night he would take out for our use. There was also a hotel taxi, which the bearded chauffeur used as a crèche for his baby. When his services were required he would whisk the infant out of the back seat and nurse it as he drove.
There were two geese loose in the yard who attacked all comers. Mr Heft was always promising to kill them, but they were still alive when I left the country. There was also a pig, which he did kill, from which Mrs Heft made a magnificent abundance of sausages and pâtés. The food, for Addis, was excellent. Mr Heft hovered over the tables at meal times watching all we ate. ‘No like?’ he would say, in genuine distress, if anyone refused a course. ‘Make you eggies, yes?’
The Hefts’ bedroom opened from the dining-room, and it was there that everything of value in the house was kept. If one wanted change for a hundred thaler note, an aspirin, a clean towel, a slice of sausage, a bottle of Chianti, the wireless bulletin, a spare part for a car, a pack of cards, one’s washing or one’s weekly bill, Mrs Heft dived under her bed and produced it.
The Deutsches Haus soon became the headquarters of most of the English journalists and photographers. We employed our own servants, decorated our rooms with monkey-skin rugs from the Russian Pr
ince and native paintings from the itinerant artists, and were, on the whole, tolerably comfortable. The Americans, more Baedeker-minded, stayed resolutely with Mr Kakophilos.
There were two places of entertainment in the town, Le Select and the Perroquet, usually known by the names of their proprietors, Moriatis and Idot. Both had a bar and a talking cinema. Mme Idot had also a kitchen and put it about that her cooking was good. From time to time she would placard the town with news of some special delicacy – Grand Souper. Tripes à la mode de Caen – and nostalgic journalists would assemble in large numbers, to be bitterly disillusioned. She came from Marseilles, Mme Moriatis from Bordeaux. They were bitter rivals, but while Mme Moriatis affected ignorance of the other’s existence, Mme Idot indulged in free criticism. ‘Poor woman!’ she would say. ‘What does she think she is doing here? She should go back to Bordeaux. She has a face like Lent.’ M. Moriatis was a very handsome cad-Greek; M. Idot a hideous cad-Frenchman. Both, by repute, whipped their wives, but Mme Idot professed to enjoy it. Mme Idot shed an atmosphere of false gaiety, Mme Moriatis of very genuine gloom. One talked gravely to Mme Moriatis about the beauties of France and the wickedness of Abyssinian character; she was always apologizing for the inadequacy of her entertainment and one tried to encourage her. ‘It is not chic,’ she would say very truly. ‘It is not as I should like it. If the Italians were here we should have dancing at the aperitif time and upstairs an hotel with bathrooms – completely European.’ Everyone pinched Mme Idot and slapped her behind, told her that her films were unendurable and her wines poisonous. Le Select had pretensions to respectability and occasionally held charity matinées attended by members of the diplomatic corps. There was no nonsense of that kind about the Perroquet. Both prospered on the contrast, because, after an hour in either place, one longed for the other.
Most visitors to Addis Ababa arrive feeling ill. I had mild dysentery and a heavy cold, and lay in my room for two days, dizzy, torpid and acutely miserable, until a series of peremptory cables from Fleet Street roused me to a sense of my responsibilities: Require comprehensive cable good colourful stuff also all news, shortly followed by Please indicate when can expect comprehensive cable, followed by Presume you are making arrangements getting stuff away and What alternative means communication in event breakdown?