with their 50 men. guns, and supporting units of heavy artillery.
This great assembly was encamped about Asmara and upon the cliffs
overlooking the Mareb River. It was made up of distinct elements, the
green-clad regular army formations with their wide-brimmed tropical
helmets, the black shirt r Fascist militia with their high boots and
cross-straps, their deaths head and thunderbolt badges and their
glittering daggers, the regular colonial units of black Somalis and
Eritreans in their tall tasselled red fezes and baggy shirts, their
gaily coloured regimental sashes and put teed legs above bare feet.
Lastly, the irregular volunteers or ban da who were a. group of desert
bandits and cut-throat cattle thieves attracted by the possibility of
war in the way that the taint of blood gathers sharks.
De Bono knew but did not ponder the fact that nearly seventy years
previously, the British General Napier had marched on Magdala with less
than fifty thousand men, meeting and defeating the entire Ethiopian
army on the way, storming the mountain fortress and releasing the
British prisoners held there, before retiring in good order.
Such heroics were outside the realms of the General's imagination.
'Caro.'
'The General placed an arm about the gold, braided shoulders of his
aide. 'We must compose a reply to the Duce. He must be made to
realize my difficulties.' He patted the shoulder affectionately and
his face lightened once more into its habitual expression as he began
composing.
'My dear and respected leader, please be assured of my loyalty to you
and to the glorious fatherland of Italy.' The Captain hastened to take
up a message pad and scribble industriously. 'Be assured also that I
never cease to toil by night and by day towards--' It took almost two
hours of creative effort before the General was satisfied with his
flowery and rambling refusal to carry out his orders.
'Now,' he ceased his pacing and smiled tenderly at the Captain,
'although we are not yet ready for an advance in force, it will serve
to placate Il Duce if we initiate the opening phases of the southern
offensive.'
The General's plans for the invasion, when it was finally put in hand,
had been laid with as ponderous regard to detail as his earlier
preparations. Historical necessity dictated that the main attack
should be centred on Adowa.
Already a marble monument, brought from Italy and engraved with the
words 'The dead of Adowa avenged with the date left open, lay amongst
the huge mountains of his stores.
ndary flanking attack However, the plan called for a secc, farther
south through one of the very few gateways to the central highlands,
This was the Sardi Gorge. A narrow opening that was riven up from the
desert floor, splitting like an axe-stroke the precipitous mountain
ranges, and forming a pass through which an army might reach the
plateau that reared seven thousand feet above the desert.
The first phase of this plan entailed the seizure of the approaches to
the Sardi Gorge and particularly important 1: in this dry and scalded
