machine-gun fire and artillery barrage, their troops have stood firm,
and then engaged in furious hand-to-hand fighting; or they have moved
boldly to counter-attack, regardless of the avalanche of fire that had
immediately fallen upon them. Against the organized fire of our
defending troops, their soldiers many of them armed only with Cold
steel attacked again and again, pushing right up to our wire
entanglements and trying to beat them down with their great swords.'
Brave men, perhaps, but they were brushed aside by the huge Italian war
machine. Then at last Badoglio could come at Ras Muguletu, the war
minister of Ethiopia, with his entire army waiting like an old lion in
the caves and precipitous heights of the natural mountain fortress of
Ambo Aradam.
He loosed his full might against the old chieftain, the big
three-engined Capronis roared in, wave after wave, to drop four hundred
tons of bombs upon the mountain in five days of continuous raids, while
his artillery hurled fifty thousand heavy shells, arcing them up from
the valley into the ravines and deep gorges until the outline of the
mountain was shrouded in the red mist of dust and cordite fumes.
Up to now, the time of waiting had passed pleasantly enough for
Count Aldo Belli at the Wells of Chaldi. The addition to his forces
had altered his entire way of life.
Together with the magnificent enamelled cross around his neck,
they had added immeasurably to his prestige and correct sense of
self-importance.
For the first few weeks he never tired of reviewing and manoeuvring his
armoured forces. The six speedy machines, with their low rakish lines
and Aided turrets, intrigued him. Their speed over the roughest
ground, bouncing along on their spinning tracks, delighted him. They
made wonderful shooting-brakes, for nothing held them up,
and he conceived the master strategy of using them for game drives.
A squadron of light CV.3 tanks, in extended line abreast, could sweep a
thirty-mile swathe of desert, driving all game before them,
down to where the Count waited with the Mannlicher. It was the
greatest sport of his hunting career.
The scope of this activity was such that even in the limitless spaces
of the Danakil desert, it did not pass unnoticed.
Like their Ras, the Harari warriors were men of short patience.
Long inactivity bored them, and daily small groups of horsemen,
followed by their wives and pack donkeys, drifted away from the big
encampment at the foot of the gorge, and began the steep rocky ascent
to the cooler equable weather of the highlands, and the comforts and
business of home. Each of them assured the Ras before departure of a
speedy return as soon as they were needed but nevertheless it irked
the
Ras to see his army dwindling and dribbling away while his enemy sat
invulnerable and unchallenged upon the sacred soil of Ethiopia.
Tensions in the encampment were running with the strength and passion
of the groundswell of the ocean, when storms are building out beyond
the horizon.
Caught up in the suppressed violence, in the boiling pot of emotion,
