Sebastian O’Kelly - Amedeo - The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia

The founder-editor of Il Giornale , Montanelli had split with his proprietor, Silvio Berlusconi, over his political ambitions – the tycoon had just become prime minister for the first time – and, at eighty-eight, was about to launch a daily newspaper. He and Bill Deedes were well matched. Bill, the inspiration for William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop , had risen to become a cabinet minister, editor of the Telegraph and the most illustrious figure in our trade. Montanelli, who became a pressman after the conquest of Abyssinia, was purged from the Fascist Corporation of Journalists for writing with insufficient fervour about the Italian victories during the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Helsinki, to teach Italian literature, and was therefore conveniently on hand to cover the start of the Second World War. He interviewed Hitler after the fall of Poland and reported on the Finnish war from the Russian front. Back in Milan in 1944–5, he was sentenced to death for his critical writing by Mussolini’s Social Republic, but was saved by the war’s end. By the Seventies, he was equally unpopular with Italy’s extreme left, and was shot in the legs by the Red Brigades as he walked along a Milan street.

‘I won’t mention the mustard gas they used in ’35 until last,’ said Bill conspiratorially, while we waited outside Montanelli’s office. A few minutes later, the Italian appeared, tall, donnish and a little stiff, in contrast to Bill who, at eighty-two, was a sprightly, irrepressible figure. After greeting us cordially, for he had long known of ‘Milord Deedes’, Montanelli sat back behind his typewriter, lit a cigarette and waited for what he imagined would be an amiable chat to begin.

‘Now, about the gas you used on the Abyssinians …’ Bill began, astonishing us all (and pronouncing it, to my glee, as ‘gash’).

‘ Basta con il gas! ’ Montanelli groaned, having heard quite enough about it in the preceding sixty years. ‘We are guilty. Guilty. Now let’s talk of something else.’

Forty minutes later, having made himself understood without any help from me, Bill was satisfied that he had got enough from the interview: a handful of telling facts about the new newspaper, a bit of background and a quote or two from ‘your man’, as he insisted on calling Montanelli. ‘Just like filling a punnet of strawberries,’ confided the indefatigable reporter.

We adjourned to a restaurant Montanelli suggested beside the Castello Sforzesco, where the two old men reminisced happily, and they trumped each other’s stories. When Montanelli remembered his friend Kim Philby, an apparently lazy and drunken correspondent during the Spanish Civil War – until the spy’s death a jar of caviar used to be sent from Moscow to Milan every Christmas – Bill recalled his bringing Mrs Philby back from Beirut to London after her husband’s defection. A government minister at the time, he was returning from the colonial handover in Singapore when he was ordered to detour to the Middle East to pick up the traitor’s wife, who sat at the back of the plane behind curtains, in purdah.

On my prompting, the talk then returned to Ethiopia in the Thirties, and the two began recalling such figures as Marshal Badoglio, Graziani, the Duke of Aosta and Haile Selassie. Both spoke lyrically of the country, its peoples, ancient culture and the beautiful women (about whom, writing in Scoop , Evelyn Waugh had caused Bill some difficulties in regard to Mrs Deedes). Also at lunch was the writer Vittorio Dan Segre, who the year before had published a brilliant, semi-novelised account of Amedeo Guillet’s guerrilla exploits, aimed at young Italians who knew almost nothing of their country’s colonial past.

‘What a magnificent man,’ said Montanelli, who had been a friend of Amedeo for many years, and about whose adventures he, too, had written in the early sixties. I was intrigued, and for a while they indulged my interest. At last, however, Montanelli raised himself unsteadily to his feet to return to the office.

‘If you want to know more,’ said the great editor. ‘You must go to Ireland …’

DECEMBER 1941. HODEIDA, THE YEMEN

It was in the early afternoon when the prisoners could expect to be fed. At that time of day, a little light penetrated the subterranean gloom, while outside every living creature abandoned the cauldron of the streets. The grating rumble of a cart, the cries of bartering tradesmen and even the ululating calls of the muezzin fell silent as the sun lingered at its zenith. It was then that some women in the town gathered up scraps saved from their meal of the night before and made their way through the labyrinth of foetid passageways to the little square in front of the dungeon. From where they were, below the level of the street outside, the prisoners could not hear their approach, but they knew that their only meal of the day would shortly arrive.

All of a sudden vegetables, crusts of bread, bits of fish and fruit showered down from the bars high above, caught like motes of dust in a shaft of light. With clanking chains, the fettered men surged forward to fall on the debris, pushing each other out of the way. Some of those giving food were wives or relatives, others were responding to the Koran’s injunction to show compassion to the imprisoned. Apart from these charitable offerings, and a communal bowl of boiled rice every two or three days, the prisoners received no food, for the fact of their being where they were was proof that they had somehow transgressed, and the task of the guards was to keep them locked up, but not necessarily alive.

One prisoner was slower than the others. He limped painfully towards the food on the floor, holding up the chains linking his feet with a piece of rope. Around his left ankle, below the fetters he was supporting, was a dirty bandage, caked in dried blood and pus. Although he was always the last, he still managed to find something: a fish head, a torn corner of pitta or a broken cake of rice, which he would pick methodically from the floor of beaten earth. The seven or eight other prisoners – murderers, smugglers, petty thiefs, crooked traders, perhaps even the odd innocent man – had nothing to do with the stranger who called himself Ahmed Abdullah al Redai. Too much interest was taken in him by the authorities for that to be prudent. Not that he looked important or dangerous, dressed as he was in filthy clothes which fell away from his emaciated frame. But even in the depths of their oubliette they had heard about Ahmed Abdullah. While his Arabic was fluent, the accent was strong and foreign, and they knew that he was not, as his name professed, a Yemeni from the town of Reda. Some said he was a soldier from the war between the Nazarenes; while others had heard that he was a spy in the pay of the British in Aden, to the south. There were even those who believed he was a Christian.

For hours, the prisoner sat motionless in a corner of the cell, resting his back against the stone wall. Every so often he slowly raised himself and shuffled over to the communal water vat, lifting to his lips a ladle fashioned from an old tin can. A festering bucket served the prisoners’ other physical needs and he would approach it suppressing his lingering feelings of disgust. He felt bitter now, when recalling his hopes on first seeing the cloud-covered mountains of the Yemen from the sambuk which had brought him across the Red Sea from Eritrea. As the vessel beached at Hodeida, an old mufti with a white beard had been carried through the waves by two fishermen and hauled aboard. He had stood on the prow, and before the passengers could wade ashore they had been required to make the Muslim profession of faith: There is no other god but God and Mohammed is his prophet. The stranger had repeated the familiar words without feeling fraudulent, for he recited his Arabic prayers five times a day and did so sincerely.