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

Some acquaintances approached Uncle Rodolfo, and Amedeo watched him indulgently as he performed the courteous rituals. He was dressed in an outfit that he took to be the quintessence of an English gentleman at leisure, in yachting shoes, a white linen suit and a sailor’s cap, which he doffed at absolutely the correct degree of sociable nonchalance. Nu vero milordo , Neapolitans called Signor Gandolfo, mixing genuine admiration with crafty flattery. Amedeo had always felt drawn to this charming relative, whose frank enjoyment of the pleasures of the Bay of Naples was mildly disapproved by the more duty-bound Guillets. And Amedeo’s feelings of affection were reciprocated by the older man. Uncle Rodolfo looked forward to his visits whenever he was competing at riding events in Naples, and he was sensitive, too, to the family bond between them. Before they had left for the port, Uncle Rodolfo had been moved to re-tell the stories of how the kinship between Gandolfos and Guillets had come about. His father and Amedeo’s grandfather, both officers in the army of Piedmont, had fought side-by-side in the 1860s against the Austrians in the great battles of the Risorgimento, Italy’s national resurgence. After the moribund Bourbon kingdom of Naples had been swept away, and the nation finally made, the two friends had ridden like victorious conquerors into the town of Capua, where they married the daughters of its leading citizen, one of the ‘new’ Italians of the south.

But whereas the Guillets had remained Piedmontese and northern in outlook, Rodolfo Gandolfo had long since been seduced by the ways of the Mezzogiorno. Wealthy and untroubled by the need to work, he nonetheless exercised his talents as an engineer to direct the great project to drain the malarial Serra Mazzoni marshes, and once built a theatre in Capua, which he then gave to the town. But his chief passion was to sail his yacht around the Bay of Naples, assisted by his crew of three daughters, of whom Bice, aged sixteen, was the youngest.

His little cousin was becoming sophisticated, Amedeo could not help thinking, as he watched Bice exchange pleasantries with the newcomers. He had been ten when he had held her in his arms as a baby, and he still thought of her as a child, calling her Bice or Bicetta, her name in endearing diminuendo, and seldom Beatrice, still less Signorina Gandolfo. For a moment he had felt self-conscious taking leave of her on the quay, kissing her cheek chastely for the first time, rather than joshing her fondly as he had always done before.

The steamer emitted a baleful sound from its horn, which interrupted his thoughts but still failed to arouse any interest in the piazza, and the sailors began slipping the moorings. Uncle Rodolfo called out a final good luck, waving his cap, and Bice raised a white hand as the steamer eased its way past the bigger ships into the harbour.

Naples had never seemed lovelier to Amedeo than on that evening, the dying sun catching the maiolica cupolas of the churches and casting the Certosa di San Martino, high above the least salubrious quarters of the city, in a warm orange glow. Sprawling and raucous, the southern metropolis grated against his northern sense of decorum, but from the safe distance of the sea, away from the chaos, the filth and the crime, it appeared magnificent. A true capital, Amedeo conceded, and the only Italian city worthy of the term. Apart from Turin, of course. It was not his Italy, which he preferred to think of as a land of neat, modest towns in the Alpine foothills, but it was undeniably the Patria. Whatever the Italians were only two generations after the nation itself had come into being – and the current view, incessantly repeated, was that they were the heirs to Imperial Rome – they would be much less, Amedeo believed, without the humanity of this ancient, suffering city of which all Italians seemed so embarrassed, and yet proud.

His eyes swept the scene, from the elegant seafront boulevards of Santa Lucia to the palace of the Bourbon kings, to the core of alleyways knotted around the mediaeval cathedral, where the poor lived crammed into cellars. And then he looked out beyond the city, to the great curve of the bay, where the land, once it emerged from the sea, was pulled upwards in a sharpening arc like a graph on paper, to the growling old man of Vesuvius himself.

For as long as he could, he fixed his gaze on the figure in white, and the pale, red-haired girl beside him, until they blurred with the others waving from the quay.

The ship’s steward had unpacked Amedeo’s uniforms and hung them in the wardrobe, but the sword he had carefully laid on the made-up bed. Amedeo picked it up and toyed with it in his hands for a few moments, turning it over to admire its curved shape. Every part of it was black: the steel scabbard and rings, the rather tinny hilt and the long tapering blade. His father, Baron Alfredo Guillet, when a major in the élite Mounted Carabinieri from which the Royal Bodyguard was drawn, had carried the sword in the Great War. But in the stalemate on the barren limestone hills of the Carso in Friuli, where every shellburst showered lethal fragments, men cowered in trenches, the horses disappeared and glistening cavalry sabres were dulled with acid to a matt black. Amedeo grasped the vulcanite grip, perfectly moulded to his hand, and pulled the sword free, enjoying its metallic rasp. He made a whipping cut in the air and examined the quivering blade, its point sharpened on both edges to prise through ribs and bone. It was a nineteenth-century weapon, re-fashioned for the slaughter of the twentieth.

Putting it aside, he stretched out on the narrow bed. He was going to war at last, to do what he had been training for ever since he joined the Military Academy at Modena seven years before as an eighteen-year-old cadet. But long before that he had known he would be a soldier. Arms were the family occupation of the Guillets just as others were bakers or bankers, silversmiths or peasants. His father had retired from the army a colonel, both his paternal uncles were generals, as had been his grandfather and numerous other, more remote, ancestors. Their uniformed portraits and blurred daguerreotypes hung from his father’s library wall, and their dusty treatises on military strategy filled the shelves.

Amedeo had only a vague grasp of the causes of the Abyssinian crisis. The rights and wrongs behind the border clash in which several Dubats, Italian Somali troops, and many more Ethiopians had been killed, seemed too complicated to master. So it was proving for the diplomats at the League of Nations in Geneva, who for months had been poring over yellowing maps that showed the grazing rights and waterholes in the Ogaden desert. But if Italy went to war, Amedeo would have not the slightest doubt what he would be fighting for. It did not have much to do with the exhortations of Benito Mussolini, who had whipped Italians into a frenzy of indignation as though an Ethiopian horde were storming the Campidoglio. Nor were his sentiments entirely explained by the conventional patriotism that every child learned at school, revering the trinity of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour, the prophet, the soldier and the statesman who had forged the united Italy. In a land where personal loyalties – to family, to friends – were far more important than abstract ones, the Guillets were bound to Italy’s dynastic rulers in a bond which stretched back for generations, and Amedeo fully shared the sense of obligation.

He had always been proud of his Savoyard name. In the southern cities of Bari and Messina, where his father had been posted and Amedeo spent most of his childhood, the locals mangled the pronunciation of Guillet by attempting to Italianise it. But he had never cared that he did not share the sharp consonants and prickly vowel sounds of their names. Nor, though he was teased for his northern accent, would he try to fit in by taking up their dialects. When he was a boy, he would scrutinise an old map on his bedroom wall showing the patchwork of Italian states before unification, and his attention would be drawn to the ancestral possessions of Savoy. His finger would trace the frontier from Savoie itself and then down, over the southern slopes of the Alps to Piedmont, the core of the kingdom with Turin its capital, and the name by which the state was always known in Italy. There was no natural explanation for the line, which ignored the contours of mountain ranges and the course of rivers, as it did the linguistic borders of French and Italian. Every province, every town and village, had been painstakingly acquired as the House of Savoy, Europe’s oldest and most tenacious ruling dynasty, rose from being counts to dukes to kings. Every encroachment, whether in France or Italy, had been held by force of will and blood. A fair share of it, Amedeo knew with pride, belonged to his own family.