by Evelyn Waugh
By every post, until I told him to stop, Wazir Ali Beg sent me a budget of news.
He had no difficulty in finding other correspondents and, as the situation became darker and reporting more speculative, Wazir Ali Beg’s news service formed an ever-increasing part of the morning reading of the French, English, and American newspaper publics.
Whenever Mata Hari was out of prison, he too wrote:
‘THE ETHUPIAN NEWS OF THE 11TH SEPTEMBER
‘Troubles at 3 p.m.
‘Soldiers. Fieghts near Bazara doors some of the Soldiers entered Bazara house as some brack heads bloods come out …
‘Dagash Mazh said the Ethupian troops will assault the Italian troops before the time of the rain …
‘Dagash Mazh regarding to the lecture of the 8th advise the soldiers, regret to say, at 3 p.m. the soldiers to their misfortune and endignity on the peoples, robing the vegetables, etc.
‘Truck passed on to leg of one Somalee.
‘News from the Arabic news papers, the warfare will be between six Governments shortly.
‘Somali Merchant Mahmood Warofaih made trench in his garden and put his money, few days repeat to see his money and not found, at once come mad.’
This last trouble was by no means peculiar to Mahmood Warofaih. During the crisis it seemed to be happening all over the country. The gardener at the Deutsches Haus suffered in exactly that way and showed every sign of losing his reason until, to the disappointment of the other servants, who were enjoying the spectacle immoderately, Haroun al Raschid charitably reimbursed him.
The Foreign Press Association held occasional meetings, which were highly enjoyable, having a character of combined mock-trial and drinking bout. The Americans and French did most of the talking; the English endeavoured to collect the subscriptions and maintain some semblance of constitutional order. The Spaniard was elected a member of committee, with acclamation. The Radical made a conscientious and rather puzzled treasurer. The Americans were facetious or ponderously solemn, according as their drink affected them. There was one of them who was constantly on his feet crying: ‘Mr Chairman, I protest that the whole question is being treated with undesirable levity.’ Every now and then the French walked out in a body and formed an independent organization.
Our chief function was to protest. We ‘protested unanimously and in the most emphatic manner’ or we ‘respectfully represented to the Imperial Government’ that the cabling rates were too high, that the Press Bureau was inconveniently situated and inadequately staffed, that a Negro aviator had insulted a French reporter, that preferential treatment was given to certain individuals in the despatch of late messages, that the official bulletins were too meagre and too irregular; we petitioned to be allowed to go to the fronts, to be told definitely whether we should ever be allowed to go there. No one paid the smallest attention to us. After a time the protesting habit became automatic. The Association split up into small groups and pairs protesting to one another, cabling their protests to London and Geneva, scampering round to the palace and protesting to the private secretaries of the Emperor at every turn of events. But that was later; in these early days the Foreign Press Association showed some of the lightheartedness of a school debating society.
Week succeeded week, full of whispered rumours; more journalists and cinema men arrived. I bought a petulant and humourless baboon which lived in my room at the Deutsches Haus, and added very little to the interest of these dull days. There were rowdy evenings at Le Select and the Perroquet. The Spaniard went back to resume his duties in Paris. Patrick and I gave a dinner-party in his honour, which was overclouded for him by the loss of his sixpenny fountain-pen. ‘Who of you has taken my feather?’ he kept asking with great earnestness. ‘I cannot work without my feather.’
At last, on October 2nd, came the announcement which had been so often predicted, that general mobilization would be proclaimed on the morrow. It was preceded by the formal complaint that Ethiopian territory had been violated at Mount Moussa Ali. Notices were posted inviting the Press to attend ‘a ceremony of great importance’ which was to be held next day at the old Gebbi. Everybody knew what that meant.
It was particularly gay that evening in the bars. Next morning we all assembled at the Palace at half past ten. We were shown straight into an airless gallery and kept there.
No one knew quite what to expect, and even the most daring of the journalists had decided to wait and see what happened before composing their reports. Various almost liturgical ceremonies were expected; we were told in some quarters that the Emperor would set up his standard in person; that his crimson tent would be pitched as a rallying point for the armies; that the great drum of Menelik would be beaten, which had not sounded since 1895.
The drum was there; we could hear it clearly from our place of confinement, beating a series of single thuds, slow as a tolling bell. When eventually the doors were thrown open and we emerged on to the terrace, we saw the drum, a large ox-hide stretched over a wooden bowl. It may or may not have belonged to Menelik; all the whites said that it had and Mr David politely agreed.
A flight of stone steps led from the terrace to the parade ground, where a large, but not very large, crowd had assembled. They were all men. Over his shoulder I watched a journalist typing out a description of the women under their mushroom-like umbrellas. There were no women and no umbrellas; merely a lot of black fuzzy heads and white cotton clothes. The Palace police were trying to keep the crowd back, but they pushed forward until only a small clearing remained, immediately below the steps. Here Mr Prospero and a half a dozen of his colleagues were grinding away behind tripods.
The drum stopped and the people were completely silent as the Grand Chamberlain read the decree. It took some time. He read it very loudly and clearly. At the end there were three concerted bursts of clapping. Then the men made a rush for the Palace; it was unexpected and spontaneous. They wanted to see the Emperor. Most of them had swords or rifles. They flourished these wildly and bore down upon the little group of photographers, who, half fearing a massacre, scuttled for safety, dragging along their cumbrous apparatus as best they could. The crowd caught poor Mr Prospero, knocked him down and kicked him about, not in any vindictive spirit, but simply because he was in the way. One of them eventually put him on his feet, laughing, but not before he had sustained some sharp injuries.
Upstairs the decree was being read to the journalists in French by Dr Lorenzo. He could not make himself heard above the shouting. He stood on a chair, a diminutive, neat, black figure, crying for attention. A great deal of noise came from the journalists themselves. I had seldom seen them to worse advantage. Dr Lorenzo had in his hand a sheaf of copies of the decree. The journalists did not want to hear him read it. They wanted to secure their copies and race with them for the wireless bureau. Lorenzo kept crying in French, ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, I have something of great importance to communicate to you.’
He held the papers above his head and the journalists jumped for them, trying to snatch, like badly brought up children at a Christmas party.
The soldiers had now worked themselves into high excitement and were streaming past, roaring at the top of their voices.
Lorenzo led a dozen of us into the Palace, where in comparatively good order he was able to make his second announcement. He was clearly in a state of deep emotion himself; the little black hands below the starched white cuffs trembled. ‘His Majesty has this morning received a telegram from Ras Seyoum in the Tigre,’ he said. ‘At dawn this morning four Italian war planes flew over Adowa and Adigrat. They dropped seventy-eight bombs, causing great loss of life among the civilian population. The first bomb destroyed the hospital at Adowa, where many women and children had taken refuge. At the same time Italian troops invaded the Province of Agame, where a battle is now raging.’
The excitement barely survived the transmission of our cables. By afternoon the cheering crowd had melted away and was dozing silently in their tukals. Shutters were pu
t up on the Greek-Italian grocery store and a guard posted before it, while at the back door journalists competed with the French Legation to buy the last tins of caviare.
That afternoon and evening we drove round the town in search of ‘incidents’, but everything was profoundly quiet. News of the bombardment of Adowa was now all over the bazaars, but it seemed to cause little stir. Adowa was a very long way off. Practically no one in Addis had ever been there. It was known to them by name, as the place where the white men had been so gloriously cut to pieces forty years before. It was inhabited by Tigreans, a people for whom they had little liking.
The Europeans, Levantines and Americans, on the other hand, fell into a cold sweat of terror. The Emperor’s white adviser had at this time organized a daily tea party of specially sympathetic correspondents. This group became a centre from which Ethiopian propaganda radiated. On the afternoon of October 3rd, ‘the Leaker’, as he was familiarly known, gave it out that an air raid was expected on Addis that evening. The effect was galvanic. One group of journalists hastily concluded a deal for the lease of a mansion immediately next door to the Italian Legation. They packed up their stores and luggage and their accumulations of trashy souvenirs and set off in secrecy to their new home. Unfortunately they were contravening a municipal bye-law which forbade a change of address without previous permission. I cannot help suspecting that Mr Kakophilos must have tipped off the police; there was a touch of saturnine triumph in the air with which he welcomed their return, an hour later, under guard, to his hotel. A similar fate befell a neurotic young Canadian who set out to hide on the top of Mount Entoto. Other journalists took refuge in outlying missions and hospitals, or shared their bedrooms with their chauffeurs for fear that, when the alarm came, they might find their cars usurped by black women and children. Others are said to have sat up all night playing stud poker in gas masks. Timidity was infectious. A passing motor bicycle would have us all at the window staring skywards. A few hardened topers remained sober that evening for fear of sleeping too heavily. But the night passed undisturbed by any except the normal sounds – the contending loudspeakers of the two cinemas, the hyaenas howling in the cemetery. Few of us slept well. The first two hours after dawn were the most likely time for a raid, but the sun – at last it was full summer – brought reassurance. After a slightly strained week-end we settled down to our former routine. On Monday night there was a bacchanalian scene at Mme Idot’s, where, among other songs of international popularity, ‘Giovanezza’ was sung in a litter of upturned tables and broken crockery.
The communiqué, read in dramatic circumstances by Dr Lorenzo, asserted that the first bomb of the attack had fallen on ‘the hospital’, destroying it and killing many women and children. When we began to look for details, our doubts were aroused whether there had ever been a hospital there at all. No such thing existed as a native hospital; no Red Cross units had yet appeared in the field; the medical work of the country was entirely in mission hands. The headquarters of these organizations knew nothing about a hospital at Adowa, nor did the Consulates know of any of their nationals engaged there. The publication of the news was already having the desired effect in Europe; a letter, which caused great amusement when it reached us, appeared in The Times expressing the hope that ‘the noble nurses had not died in vain’, but at Addis Ababa suspicions were aroused that our legs were being pulled. Mr David and Dr Lorenzo, when pressed, had to admit that they knew no more than was disclosed in the first bulletin; there had been a hospital – it was now destroyed, they maintained stoutly, and added that it was clearly marked with the red cross; apart from that they had no information.
But suddenly, from other sources, a flood of detail began to reach us. There was an Abyssinian servant who had been treated there two years ago for a pain in his leg by a great number of American doctors and nurses; the hospital was a fine building in the centre of the town.
There was a Greek who knew the place well. It was managed by Swedes and lay at a short distance along the Adigrat road.
There was a Swiss architect and government contractor – a jolly fellow, married to a half-caste; he was responsible for most of the ugliest of the recent public buildings – who was able to give Patrick confidential but absolutely authentic information about the nurse who had been killed; she was of Swedish birth but American nationality; she had been blown to bits. He had heard all about it on the telephone from a friend on the spot.
The most circumstantial story came from an American Negro who was employed as aviator by the Ethiopian government. I met him at his tailor’s on the Saturday morning, ordering a fine new uniform. He had been at Adowa, he claimed, at the time of the bombardment. More than this, he had been in the hospital. More than this, he had been drinking cocoa with the nurse five minutes before her death. She was a handsome lady, thirty-two years old, five foot five in height. They had been sitting in the hospital – clearly marked by the red cross – when the first bomb had fallen. The airman’s first thought, he said, was for the safety of his machine, which was lying a mile outside the town. Except for himself and the doctor there were no other men in the town. It was populated solely by women and children. He had lain near his aeroplane for some hours while the bombs fell. The Italians had flown very badly, he said, and bombed most erratically (‘Mr Waugh, do you realize, I might have been killed myself?’). Eventually he had returned to see the place demolished and the nurse dead. He had then flown back to Addis, where the Emperor had been deeply moved by his story.
Cables were soon arriving from London and New York: ‘Require earliest name life story photograph American nurse upblown Adowa.’ We replied ‘Nurse unupblown’, and after a few days she disappeared from the news.
We still believed that the railway was doomed. On Tuesday the 8th ‘positively the last’ train left for Djibouti. There was something very like a riot at the station as frantic refugees attempted to board it, and the station police locked out legitimate passengers who had reserved their places. For the first time the scene approximated to the descriptions which, as early as August, had been filling the world’s Press. It was now too late to be of interest – another example of the inverted time lag between the event and its publication which marked all our professional efforts in the country.
The camera men were even more unhappily placed than the correspondents. Their apparatus rendered them conspicuous and most of the native soldiers had an exaggerated idea of the value which their portraits might be to the enemy. The cinema companies in particular had invested huge sums in their expeditions and were getting very little in return for it.
One group of cinema men purchased the good will of a chief who was encamped with his men in the hills behind Addis and were able to stage some fairly effective charades of active service. Later at Dessye the ‘Ethiopian Red Cross’ lent itself to a vivid imposture, staging a scene of their own heroic services under fire, with iodine to counterfeit blood and fireworks and flares for a bombardment. One prominent photographer had brought out with him a set of small bombs which he was able to discharge from his position at the camera by means of an electric cable. He had some difficulty explaining them at the French customs and I do not know if they were ever used. Those who had worked during the Chinese wars – where, it seemed, whole army corps could be hired cheaply by the day and even, at a special price, decimated with real gunfire – complained bitterly of the standard of Abyssinian venality.
The white population of the town pursued their normal routine. Mme Moriatis showed signs of despair, spoke daily of a massacre, and tried to persuade her husband to pack up. One evening, when she was showing a French version of Peg o’ My Heart, her cinema was visited by the picturesque retinue of one of the provincial magnates, who came with women, bodyguard and two half-grown lions who were left on the steps in charge of his slaves. The brief run on the bank came to an end. The thaler went up in value; the engine drivers of the railway did a brisk trade in smuggling silver. Various statesmen and warriors returned
from exile and were reconciled to the Emperor. The French population organized itself in a defence corps. Issa tribesmen shot down an Italian aeroplane and hid for days, not knowing if they had done well or ill. An Egyptian prince arrived to establish a Red Crescent hospital. The Yemen Arabs were reported to be active. We eked out our despatches with such small items of news. Already some correspondents began to talk of leaving, and the most distinguished veteran actually left. The rest of us centred all our hopes on the long-deferred trip to Dessye. Various dates – the anniversary of his accession, St George’s Day – were suggested as the time of the Emperor’s departure.
At the beginning of November the long-awaited permission to go to Dessye was at last granted. Enthusiasm for the trip simultaneously began to wane. It was said that the Emperor would not in fact go there; that it was a ruse to get the pressmen under close observation and out of harm’s way; that there would be no wireless facilities; that the big southern campaign would begin in our absence. In the end only a small number of those who had been clamouring for permission decided to avail themselves of it. The Radical was among them, and he and I agreed to travel together.
As soon as this was known we became a centre of interest. All the boys at the Deutsches Haus, and the girl of no fixed occupation who pottered about the outbuildings, giggling, and occasionally appeared in the bedrooms with a broom, applied to accompany us. A saturnine Syrian, named Mr Karam, who had lately formed the habit of waylaying me on Sunday mornings after Mass and asking me to drink coffee with him, offered to sell us a motor lorry. The trouble about this lorry was that it did not in fact belong to Mr Karam. He had secured an option on it from a fellow Syrian and hoped to resell it at a profit. This was not clear until later, when he suffered great embarrassment about the spare parts. We said we would not take the lorry until it was fully equipped; he promised to equip it as soon as the agreement was signed. It was only when we went with him to the store that we discovered that he could not get the spare parts on credit, and could not pay for them until we had paid him an instalment of the price. There was a further embarrassment. We demanded a trial run up Entoto to test the engine. He could not get the petrol for the trip. In the end we filled up the tanks. James, my interpreter, who was not getting the rake-off he expected and had consequently taken up a suspicious attitude to Mr Karam, reported in triumph next morning that Mr Karam had hired out the lorry to a building contractor and was consuming our petrol. Poor Mr Karam was merely trying to raise the money for a new tyre. In the end we hired the machine for a month, at what I suspect was very near its full purchase price. From that moment Mr Karam was obsessed by anxiety that we would make off with his lorry. He hung about the garage, where a gang was at work enhancing its value with a covered top and built-in boxes for petrol cans, pathetically canvassing our signatures to bits of paper on which we guaranteed not to drive beyond Dessye. It happened that the various agreements were made out in my name. When, a month later, the Radical and I separated and I returned to Addis Ababa in another car, poor Mr Karam’s suspicions became feverish. He was convinced that there had been a plot against him and that the Radical had deserted with his lorry to the Italians.