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


War-time love story set in Abyssinia, Eritrea and the Yemen 1935-1945. Amedeo Guillet is still alive and living in County Meath, Ireland. Khadija is lost.This is the story of Amedeo Guillet – an Italian calvary officer who was sent out to Abyssinia as part of Mussolini’s army to establish and command a troupe of 2,000 Spahis – or Arabic calvary. He met and fell in love with Khadija – a beautiful Ethiopian Muslim. Together they held up the British lorries heaving up the mountain road to Asmara and blew up the important Ponte Aosta. Eventually captured, Amedeo went on the run disguised as an Arab, eventually making it to Yemen, only to be thrown in jail.This is a rare view of the Second World War from an Italian perpective; particularly valuable are the chapters that tell the story of Italian resistance to the Nazis, and their subsequent withdrawal from Italy in 1943.There are few stories more cinemagraphic than this – Fascist Italy, his early years in Ethiopia commanding the Cossack-like Spahis, the brutal Abyssinian war waged by the Duce, Italian and British colonial rivalry; Amedeo led the last ever cavalry charge the British army faced (Eritrea 1941 – they were massacred by tanks and sub-machine guns), defeat and guerrilla warfare against the British; then flight, disguised as an Arab, imprisonment in the Yemen and a great love lost as he leaves his beloved Khadija behind to face her future alone and returns to Italy, to his fiancée and a career as a distinguished Italian diplomat and Arabist.Amedeo is still alive and living in County Meath, Ireland. Sebastian O’Kelly is a journalist for the Mail and Telegraph and has Amedeo’s full co-operation in writing this book.This is a very valuable and absolutely stunning story, beautifully told by O’Kelly.










AMEDEO










The True Story ofan Italian’s Warin Abyssinia

SEBASTIAN O’KELLY








GVILLET (#ulink_af22f747-349a-54d0-a73a-5cb5badb8dfb)







To Emily and Anna

‘Le due figliole’




CONTENTS


Cover (#u41803cf7-70c1-577d-ad1d-4b8569db2a08)

Title Page (#u78997ed2-4749-553b-b189-9bc67efa2afc)

Gvillet (#u88b3fcb5-af88-5009-977f-bbbd3f1227e5)

Dedication (#u93d3cf91-f01e-51d5-b600-10116d07ed56)

Epigraph (#u5c30503e-a79f-5b19-a2cc-2d79348f0403)

List of Illustrations (#u67bebf9c-48ae-539c-afc2-dd39a4fca650)

Introduction (#u7c56e6b6-bc66-5ee7-b68b-8eb3aad1220b)

1 The Prisoner (#u292f0018-9250-520b-9bf4-477f27a0dbae)

2 The Black Sword (#u7e4b7e98-3aae-51b4-af34-5cc9609d65f1)

3 The Spahys di Libya (#uf0b9bb0f-8382-5258-9085-4982ff33ef6e)

4 Riding through Clouds (#u27255daa-3c9e-59db-bdab-e87e81ceddd8)

5 The Conquest of Abyssinia (#ud8e8db21-6840-564c-be08-371342a373eb)

6 The Sword of Islam (#uf23c9433-0e27-577d-b6f6-ba4d6f9fc836)

7 Black Flames ZARAGOZA, SPAIN, MARCH 1938 (#u83237a9a-8052-5b62-a681-534ea121dc33)

8 The Viceroy (#ue462187b-2bae-526f-a3ed-ba7326e6ce2f)

9 City of Facilidas (#ua5e44095-3677-5288-be34-24cb99bac2d6)

10 Northern Chessboard (#ua67bab1e-b049-5db1-a6c0-bb66542431a6)

11 Lightning War (#u20f6c3b9-04d3-5702-b51e-d90ae14bd779)

12 The Man on the White Horse (#u2f59dbe2-2df7-5077-ac27-f3c0a6228ef8)

13 Keren (#u923230c2-a16a-5bc9-9dfa-f66d2a157873)

14 Private War (#u4d1f3cdd-b8ff-58fe-8104-296f30034cf7)

15 Major Max (#ub9e52ba2-c528-5309-9aa2-fe9d69faab91)

16 A Horse Called Sandro (#u2a62da52-bc01-5fe4-9399-419d513f111b)

17 Captain Reich (#u52e88157-89a4-5e89-936c-fd0bddd808e6)

18 Le Maschere (#u2a7af9b3-5e9c-5741-9d36-11146fe8286a)

19 The Well (#ueb098316-7314-5753-bce8-f3e87c4198a9)

20 The Smugglers’ Ship (#ub79e7b83-ae0c-53de-99e9-23503b889261)

21 Sayed Ibrahim (#u0d54946e-2fe3-5ae2-8284-6162e27890d3)

22 Captain White (#u1a4f7f44-4aff-5dff-99c5-63715cb35d13)

23 Arabia Felix (#ua4012541-a504-5027-b3e1-fab205a3e9dd)

24 Giulio Cesare (#ube7c5157-c8f8-533e-b1cd-235ad768a702)

25 Sua Maestà (#u673edb76-4787-59d8-89cf-74e35f18fefd)

26 Liberation (#u83b68cf8-5366-58ff-8faf-42206ac82659)

27 A Bracelet (#u3fbf63a7-4d63-5671-9b89-caddea00c2fb)

Epilogue (#u2485f5f4-0251-5e6f-a246-474938bd5c5d)

The Honours Conferred Upon Amedeo Guillet (#u4a664943-3921-5ff6-b690-4417c276c24e)

Index (#u2d733f02-8e75-5b0d-a235-030b918c47aa)

Acknowledgements (#u6a5294dd-0a5d-5925-a7ac-063713aea2b8)

About the Author (#u7e7d9c50-d594-54a4-b8ce-da0cc021822c)

Praise (#uccdbb65d-ffc3-5fd0-9d59-b13b597ceeaf)

Copyright (#u5165ad67-c702-5c6c-9074-77d4e18ec392)

About the Publisher (#u8fe7e80b-8b60-5f33-817e-d4b9cee6aebc)




EPIGRAPH (#ulink_90e09526-2d4b-5f88-95b6-1d6c864a0a40)


‘On 19 January the 4th and 5th Indian Divisions crossed the frontier north of the Blue Nile … they met little resistance, though at one point a force of local horsemen, the Amharic Cavalry Band led by an Italian officer on a white horse, attempted a death-or-glory charge against their machine-guns.’



John Keegan, The Second World War




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (#ulink_aee8412b-3cde-5f39-a007-fbcc004f836f)


Beatrice Gandolfo

Khadija, photographed by Amedeo before the Second world War

The invasion of Ethiopia, October 1935: Amedeo on Sandor with the Spahys di Libya

Uncle Amedeo

Sotto-Tenente Amedeo Guillet, newly commissioned at the Cavalleggeri di Monferrato, 1931

Amedeo, in full dress uniform, 1935

Amedeo jokingly reviews some splendidly attired fellow officers

Amedeo at the Military Academy at Modena, 1928

Amedeo rides down a steep hillside during a cavalry exercise at Pinerolo

Two views of Amedeo as a competitive rider, Genoa 1934

A horseman from the Spahys di Libya

Ethiopian irregulars confront their better-armed adversaries

Realising their position is hopeless, some Ethiopian warriors take flight

The Spahys di Libya completely surround the remaining Ethiopians

Panicking warriors flee amid the Italian light tanks

The Spahys charge on, leaving the remaining Ethiopians to the Italian infantry

Italian infantry pour down the hillside and the remaining Ethiopians make a bid to escape

Ethiopian warriors parade through Addis Ababa

Marshal Badoglio arrives at the front © Ullstein Bilderdienst

Front page story …‘The punishment of Abyssinian brigands …’

Amedeo Guillet after the charge at Selaclaclà in December 1935

Haile Selassie after the defeat at Mai Ceu

The Spahys di Libya in Rome on the first anniversary of the founding of Italy’s African empire, June 1937

Antonio Ajmone Cat

The Duke of Aosta dwarfs King Vittorio Emmanuele III

Princess Jolanda and Amedeo in 1937 in Libya

Mussolini rides into Tripoli © Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contem-poranea

Mussolini, Balbo and other Fascists salute the tricolore © Biblioteca di

Storia Moderna e Contemporanea Libyan crowds greet the Duce and Italo Balbo © Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea

Mussolini on horseback surrounded by Libyan troops bearing the fasces

The Duce raises the Sword of Islam

The governor of Libya, Italo Balbo, pins a medal on Amedeo

Amedeo in Spain, beside the Fiat Ansaldo tanks

The general’s adjutant at the Italian front during the Spanish Civil War

General Frusci in the uniform of the ‘Black Flames’ division during the Spanish Civil War

A Russian armoured car captured by Amedeo and the arditi from the Spanish forces, Santander, August 1937

Rome 1938: Hitler stands beside the king; also pictured are Mussolini, Marshal De Bono, Queen Elena, Ciano, Hess, Ribbentrop and Goebbels

Barefoot, malnourished children with their heads shaven turn out for a civic ceremony in Salerno, 1937



General Graziani; and being carried away after an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa, 1937

Beatrice Gandolfo in February 1937, in medieval costume

The fortified outpost at Amba Gheorgis on the road from Gondar to Asmara

Amedeo talking to Landolfo Colonna

Amedeo welcomed by dancing women in the highlands of Begemeder, 1938

Amedeo with an important Ethiopian chief in 1939

Amedeo drilling his garrison at Amba Gheorgis in 1939

The Duke of Aosta inspects the fort at Amba Gheorgis

The garrison at Amba Gheorgis rides out, with Amedeo saluting

Amedeo and others are carried in triumph at Amba Gheorgis after a successful operation against Ethiopian rebels

The Gruppo Bande Amhara a Cavallo Group in full charge

Amedeo with his Gruppo Bande in Eritrea, 1940

Amedeo rides beside General Frusci’s car at an inspection of the Gruppo Bande in the summer of 1940

The infantry of The Gruppo Bande were made up of Yemeni mercenaries

The British invade: The Gazelle Force on the move

The West Yorks Regiment at Dologorodoc

General Nicola Carnimeo

General Frank Messervy

General Lorenzini, the ‘Lion of Keren’



Surrender of the Duke of Aosta

Lieutenant Renato Togni with the horse on which he was killed at Keru in 1941

Daifallah the Yemeni

Amedeo as Ahmed Abdullah

A rare photograph of Ahmed, Imam of the Yemen

Major Max Harari riding the captured Sandor at Asmara, autumn 1941

Major Max Harari leaving his office in Asmara

Sandor’s hoof

Captain Lory Gibbs, who opened fire on Amedeo and Khadija on the road to Ghinda

The tortured Captain Sigismund Reich

Amedeo and Beatrice finally married in Naples, 21 September 1944

Torre Cretarella

The Italian ambassador with a live cobra in New Delhi, 1971

Amedeo, ambassador to Morocco with Italian foreign minister Aldo Moro in 1969

Sir Reginald Savory with his old adversary, London 1976

Amedeo with horsemen from the president of India’s bodyguard, whom he trained to ride Carilli fashion

Amedeo embraces an elderly ascaro at the Catholic cemetery in Asmara

Amedeo beside the tomb of Renato Togni

Amedeo at the pass of Ad Teclesan, where he destroyed three British light tanks

The palace of Italian governors in Massaua, the scene of bitter fighting during Eritrea’s war of independence © Nicola Gaydon

The palace of Italian governors photographed by Max Harari in 1941

Ahmed Abdullah, the water-seller, returns to his old hideout in Al-Katmia

Amedeo in Ireland with Anna and Emily



All pictures without credits are from the private collection of Amedeo Guillet and the author




INTRODUCTION (#ulink_f3ea510c-2cb6-563b-a59a-5e767fcc5d90)


In 1995 when I was a magazine editor, I asked the great Bill Deedes of the Daily Telegraph to go to Milan to interview Indro Montanelli. In Italian journalism Montanelli, who died in July 2001, was a figure of similar stature and, like Lord Deedes, he had served in the Abyssinian war, although as a volunteer officer rather than as a newsman. I decided that I would go along too, acting as a consigliere–translator, but really to eavesdrop on their conversation.

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 …’





ONE (#ulink_dac993d6-92b6-5c23-8c85-d0a643644315)










The Prisoner (#ulink_dac993d6-92b6-5c23-8c85-d0a643644315)


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.

The senior port official, an elegant young man in robes of white silk, sat under a lean-to on the beach, where he questioned the new arrivals. He acknowledged their responses with a bored nod, and then waved them through. The stranger waited until he was the last before he approached. He stood before the low writing table, looking down at the young man, who sat on cushions and a carpet laid over the sand. He was neither a Yemeni nor a Muslim, he announced, but an Italian officer who had been fighting against the British. He was the equivalent of an amir al-alai, a colonel, who had commanded eight hundred horsemen, and he now sought refuge from his enemies in the Yemen. The official silently studied the figure in front of him. Dressed in miserable clothes with no possessions, or proof of identity, he looked like thousands of other desperate Arabs along the coast struggling to survive in difficult times. The hands were rough and callused, the weatherbeaten face scarred down the right cheek and, though his blue-grey eyes shone brightly, the whites were yellowed with malaria. But something about him, perhaps the quiet intensity with which he spoke or the levelled eyes which held his own with no sign of fear, made the young official hesitate to dismiss him. He invited the stranger to sit and tell him more, and ordered an underling to bring them tea.

To the prisoner, that interview felt like months ago, although he knew it could not have been more than two or three weeks. But for all the outside world would be aware, he could remain in the dungeon for years. All his efforts to evade the British seemed so futile now. Had he surrendered with the others, at least the enemy would have recognised his rank and kept him alive. But fortune had abandoned him and every day in the semi-darkness he was growing weaker. The glands of his groin were swollen from coping with the suppurating bullet wound to his ankle. It would not be long before gangrene set in. He had often faced death before, and he was resigned to it. In his pain and misery, it was not even unwelcome.

During the long, uninterrupted hours in the stifling cell, the prisoner’s mind wandered back to the years before the war. Already they had the unreality of a dream. Receptions and balls in Rome and Turin, Budapest and Berlin merged one with the other in a blur of shimmering silks and assorted uniforms. Loud, laughing faces of half-remembered friends – well-born army officers like himself, society women and some of Italy’s new movie stars – flashed past as though taunting him. He had been feêted then as one of Italy’s star sportsmen; the great hope of the Italian riding team in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The prisoner’s fevered mind lurched again and he felt as giddy and nauseous as he had once in Budapest when the champagne had flowed and he had been carried around the mess of the Hadek Hussars, hailed as the ‘Conqueror of Abyssinia’. And then suddenly he was standing before the diminutive figure of the Italian king at one of those awkward royal receptions for carefully chosen young people at the Villa Savoia in Rome. Vittorio Emanuele III, who had known him since childhood, was explaining in his hesitant, didactic manner the origin of the term steeplechase ‘when English lords used to gallop madly across fields from one village campanile to another’. The next moment he was being led by the arm through the scented gardens of the Castello in Tripoli by Italo Balbo, the governor of Libya, who was worried that the Duce’s new alliance with Nazi Germany would be the ruin of them all …

The odour of the shared bucket assailed the prisoner’s senses, ending his reverie and the hours of waiting in the semi-darkness resumed. His past life in fashionable society, once the fulfilment of all his ambitions, had long since been left behind, and he looked back on it now, feeling nothing, almost as though it were someone else’s.

Deeper emotions welled up inside him when his mind turned, as it always did, to the two women who loved him. Guilt mingled with longing when he thought of Khadija. He closed his eyes and saw her again standing uncertainly at the entrance to his tent, the kerosene lamp highlighting her features and casting deep dark shadows in the folds of the white shammah wrapped around her head and shoulders against the night cold. He had buried many men that day, including some of those who were closest to him. Through reddened eyes, he watched as Khadija approached his bed and, saying nothing, she pulled off his riding boots. In that moment of tenderness, when happiness and life itself seemed so fleeting, he had taken her into his arms.

He was her chief, Khadija used to tell him, and in those days he had been the all-powerful comandante, one of the most promising young officers of the Duke of Aosta, the viceroy of Africa Orientale Italiana. But after the British had defeated the Italians, extinguishing the Duce’s African empire, he had had nothing to offer her, yet she had stayed at his side. He became just a shifta, a bandit, inexplicably fighting on with a handful of his ascari after the rest of the Italian army had surrendered. Khadija was seldom far from his side, firing her ancient Austro-Hungarian carbine at the British lorries as they heaved their way up the mountain roads of Eritrea. ‘Ay zosh! Ay zosh! Up! Up!’ she would shout in Tigrinian, as the ragged band closed in to loot and kill. Her fighting with the men brought them good fortune, she would say as she curled up beside him on the straw mat of their tukul. He would watch her fall asleep, covering her naked shoulders with an old blanket and then kiss the intricate braids in which she wore her hair. In the darkness of the dungeon, the prisoner’s eyes filled with tears.

He had always tried to be honest with her, he would convince himself. From the beginning, she had known that one day they would part and that at home waiting for him was another woman; a woman whom he also loved and had asked to be his wife. Khadija would bow her head and say that she understood, but in her heart she did not stop hoping that he would never leave.

The prisoner had no idea what Beatrice Gandolfo’s feelings were for him now: whether she was still waiting for him to return, or had found someone else, or even married, he had no idea. His name had not been among those killed in action, but nor had it been on the lists the British passed to the Red Cross of Italian officers interned in prison camps throughout India, Kenya and South Africa. He was simply missing – disperso – in the void left by the collapse of Africa Orientale Italiana. Whatever Beatrice – Bice – had decided, he would not, could not, reproach her. They had known each other all their lives and the bond between them, cousins as well as lovers, was too strong to be broken.

Bice’s older sisters had always made more fuss of him than she ever did, when he stayed with them in Naples or went bathing at the Gandolfos’ summer house at Vietri. It was they who demanded to know the latest scandalous gossip surrounding Edda Ciano, the Duce’s chrome-blonde daughter, or what the royal princesses were wearing or whether he was really stepping out with the movie star Elsa Merlini, as the magazines reported. Still only in her teens, Bice would follow him intently with her dark brown eyes, smiling slightly but saying little. And when she did speak, it was as though she were gently teasing him, as if she were ten years his senior and not the reverse.

No one seemed to understand and accept his weaknesses and absurdities quite as she did. And he remembered the day, while they were sailing a little boat off the Amalfi coast, when he realised – and the thought had appalled him at first – that he was falling in love with his young cousin. Bice had swum over to the sheer rockface of the shore and, ignoring his words of caution, had climbed up to a high ledge. She looked down at him in the boat, smiled and then dived into the sea, and her long, reddish blonde hair, so unusual in a southern Italian, streamed towards him under the water.

Had fate been different, they would have shared their lives and had children, and together grown old. That she would never know what had happened to him was his saddest thought. When the fighting between the British and Italians finally came to an end, someone in Eritrea, maybe even one of the enemy officers who had pursued him, would confirm that he had still been alive several months after the fall of Asmara. But nothing more. She would never know of the dungeon on the other side of the Red Sea, which had cost him so much to cross. Here he would die and be buried and quickly forgotten as the crazed Ahmed Abdullah al Redai. And then no trace in this world would remain of the man he had been.












TWO (#ulink_52b25a3a-9489-5eea-b67c-a1cde59a175b)










The Black Sword (#ulink_52b25a3a-9489-5eea-b67c-a1cde59a175b)


NAPLES, AUGUST 1935

Amedeo Guillet rested his arms on the railings of the ancient steamer, taking care not to mark his olive-grey uniform, and looked towards the crowd. Ever since he had come aboard, two hours before, they had been slowly gathering, milling about in the shade under the palm trees in the piazza and beneath the glowering grey walls of the Maschio Angioino, the Angevin castle on the city’s waterfront. A dense mass was waiting expectantly at the point where the tree-lined avenue that led from the railway station entered the square, and it was there, too, that the attention of those looking down from the balconies seemed to be concentrated. Tall carabinieri, in full dress uniform of bicorn hats, distinctive white cross belts and swords, were standing together, with studied insouciance, indifferent to the excitement around them. But with Naples reinvigorated by its afternoon siesta, the sense of anticipation in the crowd carried to the quayside where the passenger ships were docked.

Amedeo was surprised at the multitude. Troop ships had been embarking all summer, yet the city seemed determined to see off the last with the same enthusiasm as it had done the first. Every so often the crowd’s steady murmur was ruptured by youths chanting ‘Eià!, Eià!, Alalà!’, the supposedly ancient Greek war cry that the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had popularised with the early Fascists. Or one of them would bellow: ‘For whom, Abyssinia?’ ‘A noi! To us!’ came the resounding reply. A noi!’ It was the latest gimmicky catchphrase put about by the propagandists of the regime. All of a sudden, a ripple spread through the crowd. A second later a roar greeted the arrival of a column of marching men. Amedeo watched as figures began scurrying across the piazza towards them, drawn like iron filings to a magnet. Flowers were thrown to the soldiers or pressed into their hands, and amid the waving and the sea of faces could be seen little flags with the green, white and red of the Italian tricolour. It must have been something like this in May 1915, Amedeo felt, when his father and uncles had gone to war.

The column was mid-way through the throng when the sound seemed to change to a loud and delighted cheer. They were the Alpini, Amedeo could see, mountain troops from the north, whose beards and peaked felt caps made them look a little like William Tell. Children edged to the front, encouraged by smiling mothers who stooped and pointed, for behind the officers and regimental flags at the head of the column were half a dozen German shepherd dogs, leather satchels strapped to their backs. Trained to carry dispatches over frozen Alpine passes, the regiment’s canine messengers were being mobilised for service on the Ethiopian ambas.

Then it was the turn of the Bersaglieri (literally ‘marksmen’) who emerged into the piazza with a fanfare of trumpets and at their customary jog, the cascades of cockerel feathers on their hats rippling through the crowd like merrymakers at carnival. It was the first time, though, that Amedeo had seen their distinctive headdress attached to tropical pith helmets. As they came through the gateway to the port, the foreground to countless paintings of the Neapolitan waterfront, a military band struck up the Hymn of the Piave. For the first time Amedeo, who had been watching unmoved by the scene, felt his emotions stir. No other song of the Great War had such resonance as this melancholic, but defiant morale-raiser, which had been sung to rally the Italian troops after the rout at Caporetto in 1917. Her allies had urged Italy to abandon the whole of the Veneto, as the Austrians, backed by German divisions, broke the front. But the king himself, Vittorio Emanuele III, had brought the shattered army to heal at the river: ‘And the Piave murmured, ‘‘The foreigner will not pass’’.’

The tune changed once more and Amedeo’s attention was drawn again to the piazza, cast in lengthening shadows as the sun gently expired over the Bay of Naples. A legion of Black Shirts had arrived, young volunteers determined to give victory in Africa a distinctively Fascist stamp. And they were singing as they came on. It was that idiotic, jaunty song that had been unavoidable for weeks, and it grew louder as the marching men approached the port:

Faccetta nera, bell’Abissina,

Aspetta e spera: la vittoria s’avvicina …

Little Black Face, beautiful Abyssinian girl,

Await and hope: victory is approaching …

Amedeo looked down to those gathered on the quay and caught Bice Gandolfo’s eye. They smiled as the men strode past in a swaggering march, swinging their bare forearms, for a black shirt, it seemed, was always worn with the sleeves rolled up. Ethiopia’s days of serfdom, they sang, would be replaced by the slavery of love. Then came the rousing finale:

Little Black Face, you will be Roman

And for a flag, you will have the Italian.

We will march past, arm-in-arm,

And parade in front of the Duce

And in front of the King!

In the cheering that followed, Bice made a dismissive little gesture with one white-gloved hand. Her father beside her, Amedeo’s Uncle Rodolfo, shouted up: ‘I am sure the king would be delighted to meet her!’ And the three of them laughed as the column headed down the quay.

From the far end of the docks, a foghorn blasted. One of the troop ships, festooned in bunting and paper streamers, was casting off. Every available space on deck was filled with cheering men, waving their hats, hurling flowers and last minute protestations of love at their women below. On the ship’s two funnels were giant, stylised, portraits of the Duce, wearing a helmet, jaw clenched in martial resolution, his head thrown back to iron out the chins. Other ships joined in the cacophony, sounding their horns, and then fireworks exploded over the city, jarring its crumbling palazzi down to their tufa foundations as they had so many times before.

It seemed more like a wedding than war, and the small cluster of friends and relatives gathered at the quay beside Amedeo’s ship were the guests whom nobody knew. With half the Italian army being shipped to Eritrea and Somaliland, little fuss was being made of the old steamer that plied between Naples and Tripoli, the capital of Italian Libya. Amedeo had urged his uncle not to see him off. It would take the chauffeur at least an hour to pick his way back through the crowds to the Gandolfos’ palazzo on the Via dei Mille. But the older man had insisted and Bice, to his surprise, had wanted to come too. Amedeo felt grateful now that they had done so. For although he was bound for Libya, his final destination was the same as that of the cheering men. He, too, would be going to war in Abyssinia if, as seemed inevitable, war it turned out to be.

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.

From his earliest years, he had been aware that to be Piedmontese was to be born into the élite of the Kingdom of Italy. All the best regiments – the Bersaglieri, the Alpini, the cavalry – owed their origins to the old state of Piedmont, or the Kingdom of Sardinia as it was misleadingly named in its last stages. Even in the Thirties, the officer corps and the high civil service were still drawn disproportionately from the region. Italians from elsewhere, who may have thought that their own local achievements cast those of the Alpine region into shade, resented its lingering influence at the top of society. But only Piedmont had not slept during the long torpid centuries after the Renaissance and before the national awakening, when the peninsula languished into a dreamland arcadia amid the ruins of former greatness. In Turin, the seeds of a modern state were sown, nurtured by families such as the Guillets, created barons in the seventeenth century, who lived modestly on their own lands and equated their role with public service. When the movement for national unity began after the Napoleonic wars, only Piedmont could provide the leadership to free Italy from foreign rule; it alone survived while the territories of Venice and Florence, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, and all the other smaller fragments, disappeared from the map forever.

Whenever the Italian tricolour was raised there was a reminder of this truth, for in the centre was the red shield and white cross of Savoy. To Amedeo, it was an emblem that demanded greater loyalty than the three colours themselves.

Neither the causes of the conflict with Ethiopia, nor the Guillets’ sense of dynastic loyalty, were uppermost in Amedeo’s mind as he lay in his cabin. It had been his decision to go to war; using family connections to fix a transfer to the Spahys di Libya, a regiment of colonial cavalry that was shortly to join the invasion force mustering in Eritrea. But having achieved his aim of serving under arms, he found it gave him little pleasure. Instead, a sense of guilt gnawed at him insistently as the old steamer clunked towards Tripoli. He had made a choice of a type that the Duce would doubtless describe as ‘irrevocable’, and there was no going back from it. Three weeks before, his life had seemed so simple and untroubled, as he worked his horses in preparation for the Olympics that were due to take place in Berlin in early 1936. Now, doubts and uncertainties surfaced. And he still could not quite believe that he had given up everything that he had achieved as a competition rider and had quit the national three-day eventing team. When he walked away from the training ground at Turin, he knew that the others in the team felt he had let them down and old friendships had been severed. The life he had been leading for the past five years, ever since he had been commissioned, was at an end. And they had been good years. Very good years.

With the decision made for him that he would have a military career, he had always known which part of the army he wanted to join. His older brother, Giuseppe, had opted for the artillery, but for Amedeo, who had ridden his father’s dressage horse from the age of five, it was the cavalry. Few occupations in Italy were then quite as glamorous. Only naval officers, who affected a certain inglese hauteur, or the pilots of the new Regia Aeronautica, the air force, came close. And the clothes were wonderful. Cavalry officers sauntered through piazzas wrapped in sky blue cloaks, wearing the dragoon’s helmets or the hussar’s fur busbies of the previous century. Olive-grey jodhpurs with double stripes in red were worn below a tunic that fastened at the neck, with just a hint of a white stock showing above. Riding boots, silver spurs and immaculate white leather gloves were part of the ensemble for a bella figura, even if the officers had only dismounted from a tram. And, of course, wherever they went, and at all times of the day, they held at their side their sabre. Even Amedeo had to concede that it was a little overdone, as he strapped his sword to the handlebars of his bicycle and pedalled off through the streets of Turin and Rome.

While the bright young things elsewhere were discovering jazz, experimental literature and sex, the ‘fathers’ were still in control in Fascist Italy. And Amedeo was an obedient son. The carnage of the First World War had not dented the army’s social allure, nor was there a feeling that a generation had been betrayed and led to senseless slaughter. On the contrary, the wider population, though resistant to Fascism’s efforts to make a cult of war, viewed Italy’s victory at the side of Britain, France and the United States as a source of pride, and believed that the common sacrifice of 600,000 dead had moulded the nation at last. Under the regime, the role of the army was even more exalted than had been the case in 1915, and at the top society’s rituals continued unchanged as though a reprise of the belle époque.

Amedeo’s outlook on the world perfectly complemented his anachronistic uniform and he fitted seamlessly into the make-believe, hand-kissing Ruritania of Italian society in the early Thirties. These were the last of Mussolini’s ‘years of consensus’, when the country seemed at ease with itself, the violence of the Fascist takeover in 1922 long forgotten and the leap into the abyss yet to come. There were no strikes, no social unrest and apparently no discord. Opponents of the regime either quietly left the country, or, if they openly defied it, were sent into internal exile, al confino, in the remote South. But on the whole, Italian Fascism, like the Catholic Church, contented itself with outward conformity, and seldom looked too closely at the real feelings that lay within. As for Amedeo, the strongest reproach he felt towards the regime was resentment that officers in the Fascist Milizia, the Duce’s private army of Black Shirts, were able to box three competition horses on trains free of charge, while he, a regular cavalry officer, could only box two.

Besides, there was always the king. Diffident and awkward and not quite five foot tall, Vittorio Emanuele III was hardly an inspiring figure for most ordinary Italians, although there were times, as during the First World War, when they loved him. Throughout his forty-six year reign, that spanned meeting Queen Victoria to suffering the snubs of Allied liaison officers at the close of the Second World War, he remained an enigmatic, and often barely visible head of state. But with the Fascists presiding over an ever-changing theatre of varieties, his presence at the top of society reassured many and what he represented was held in respect.

On occasion Amedeo was invited to little receptions at the Villa Savoia in Rome, where the royal family lived in preference to the grander Quirinale. Princess Jolanda, eight years his senior and the oldest daughter, whom he had known since childhood, became a close friend. An intrepid amazzone – as modern women riders were called, for they rode astride – she shared Amedeo’s passion for horses and his talent, once beating him in a jump-off when they competed against each other. He would join her set when riding out with the Rome Foxhunt, the fashionable winter pastime introduced in 1836 by Lord Chesterfield who, wearying of his wife’s convalescence from tuberculosis, had shipped his hounds from England. The hunt would gallop under the arches of aqueducts, and wait at the coverts as the hounds sniffed about the ancient ruins that abounded in the Roman campagna.

Amedeo was also friendly with the affable Crown Prince Umberto and his intellectual wife, Maria José of Belgium, whose lack of enthusiasm for Fascism was the subject of widespread gossip. There had been a dinner in a rambling Alpine castle above Pinerolo, after which they all had played a version of hide-and-seek, and the woman who would be the last queen of Italy gave herself away by squealing from behind a tapestry. He was fond, too, of the shy Princess Mafalda, newly married to the German Prince of Hesse, who offered sweet words of consolation whenever Tenente Guillet arrived, as was often the case, bruised or with an arm in a sling after a fall. He would bow over her hand and click his heels, little imagining that within a decade no trace would remain of his Ruritania, nor that Mafalda would die half-starved and abandoned in the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Whenever Amedeo was presented to the king and Queen Elena they would welcome him warmly, and ask after his family, for the Guillets could always be depended on. With such old Savoyards, the royal family were certain of a devotion that was never guaranteed in wider Italian society. The kings of Italy tried, but never quite succeeded, in gathering up all the strands that had brought the nation together in 1860. By placing themselves at the head of the Risorgimento, the House of Savoy took uninvited charge of a national movement that was both liberal and republican in origin. A minority in parliament, which included ministers, never accepted the monarchy, and even the Fascist Party had a strong, albeit silenced, republican wing. The dynasty – which ruled by grace of God and the ‘will of the nation’ – had also made enemies among conservatives, especially the Catholic Church, whose territories, and Rome itself, the new kingdom had absorbed. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 had reconciled the Vatican to the Italian state, but no king of Italy ever received the papal blessing of a coronation in church. Nonetheless, the majority of Italians, especially the army, were loyal to a institution that, however imperfectly, had united the country. And none more so than those families from the dynastic heartlands of Piedmont and Savoy.

As a sportsman, Amedeo was not a household name, but nor was his fame confined solely to the army. Newspapers carried his photograph and reported his triumphs at showjumping and eventing competitions in Turin and Rome, Udine and Naples – a city he visited so often that the Gandolfos gave him a room of his own in their apartment. Before the Olympics, his principal ambition had been to enter his big Irish grey, Riario, in the English Grand National but events had always intervened. Instead, he contented himself by twice coming second and once third in the Grande Steeplechase di Roma, the most important in the Italian season, watched by the royal family from their pagoda-like box beside the course at Tor di Quinto. He also came second in 1934 in the Coppa del Duce, which was becoming almost equally prestigious, receiving a hearty handshake for his efforts from Mussolini.

But these achievements did not match being selected for the Olympic team. The regime, fully aware of the popular appeal of sport and its importance in terms of international prestige, expected much of the four riders. Although training was left to the army, Achille Starace, Secretary General of the National Fascist Party, was kept closely informed of their progress. Afanatic to physical fitness as well as for elaborate uniforms, he was a stickler for correct Fascistic speech and ‘Roman’ salutes and, as a result, the butt of endless jokes. But he ran the Italian Equestrian Federation well, and was himself a competent, albeit flashy rider. On his visits to the team, he would park his Alfa Romeo sportscar in the middle of the sand school and then jump over it on his horse.

Italy was not a country associated with an outstanding equestrian tradition, yet in the early years of the twentieth century it transformed the whole approach to riding. At the cavalry school at Pinerolo, outside Turin, Federico Caprilli evolved his theories of the ‘forward seat’, training riders to move with the horse, especially over cross-country and jumps. When the Italian cavalry, on modest mounts bought during the annual trawls through Ireland, began setting showjumping records of more than two metres high, the rest of the world took notice. By 1930, when Amedeo spent a year at Pinerolo, the school offered the best training in horsemanship available anywhere at that time. Mixed among the Italian officers in olive-grey were the uniforms of several other European countries, as well as the United States, Mexico and even Japan.

Colonel Francesco Amalfi, the Olympic team’s trainer, whittled down a shortlist of riders from the cavalry, the Black Shirts and the horse artillery from ten, to eight, until finally settling on four, among whom was Amedeo. The colonel had been one of Caprilli’s star pupils, and on the walls of the vast art nouveau manège at Pinerolo, named after the maestro and of the dimensions of a railway terminus, were the records that Amalfi himself had set as a showjumper before the First World War. From the moment of his selection, Amedeo’s regimental duties with the Cavalleggeri di Monferrato, whose commanding officer was his Uncle Ernesto, were reduced to a minimum.

Instead, his life became a hectic round of competitions up and down the country, as he trained two horses to the standards in showjumping, dressage and cross-country that he was likely to encounter in Berlin. The shelves in his bedroom were weighed down with little silver cups and, as his fame spread, a fashionable claque turned out to watch him, headed by Carlo Colonna of the grand Roman family, whom he had befriended at military academy. Amedeo would cross the winning post cheered on by society women, such as Giuliana Rota, later to marry one of the sons of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, and Clorinda, daughter of Admiral Thaon di Revel, the navy chief, who enjoyed the title of Duca del Mare, the ‘Duke of the Sea’. For a while his photograph advanced from the sports pages to the gossip columns as he was linked as a flirt, of Elsa Merlini, one of Italy’s earliest talkie film stars. There was even more excitement at the course at Tor di Quinto when the Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, on holiday in Rome, turned out to watch, the latter chatting to Amedeo in passable French. The swashbuckling actor took photographs of him in his splendid uniform and sky-blue cloak, perhaps wondering whether Amedeo’s make-believe world were not even more fantastic than his own.

In spring 1935 Colonel Amalfi sent Amedeo away for three months to the cavalry school at Orkenyi, outside Budapest, where he could perfect his dressage, and pass on what he learned to the rest of the team. The other riders would arrive later so that they could compete with the Hungarian and German teams in a pre-Olympic session. The interval in Budapest was the most idyllic period of Amedeo’s career as a showjumping soldier. After long days spent working the horses, he and the Hungarian officers would pile into cars and head towards Budapest. They were amateurs in the true sense of the word, competing for the love of their sport. By contrast, the German team seemed to be joyless representatives of modern athleticism shepherded by a dour general, who would announce in the mess – as though, Amedeo felt, he were declaring the invasion of France – that at half past nine his riders had to retire to bed.

By the time Colonel Amalfi and the others arrived, Amedeo had another interest in his life apart from his horses. He had fallen in love, or believed that he might have done so. Maria was one of beautiful identical twins, the daughters of a minister in the regime of Admiral Horthy, the conservative dictator of Hungary.

‘How on earth can you tell them apart?’ Amalfi asked, the first time he saw them dancing together.

‘With the heart, colonnello. With the heart,’ Amedeo replied.

Brought up in a society of often stultifying conformity, he found Maria to be uninhibited and modern in a manner he had seldom encountered before. Those women he knew in Italy were either sheltered debutantes he met in society, the sisters of friends and relatives or the demi-mondaine girls found in bordellos in every town of significance to whom Italian males owed their sexual initiation. But Maria occupied a different level. They would converse in French, and Amedeo was smitten by the novelty of a woman who asserted her own point of view and did not hesitate to contradict opinions he offered of the world if she happened to disagree. She kept her thick black hair in a bob, wore a bright red slash of lipstick which stained the cigarettes she smoked with soigné elegance, and had high cheekbones and beautiful dark eyes which, to Amedeo, hinted at exotic Magyar ancestors from the steppes. Her parents allowed the two to spend long periods alone together, which would have been quite unthinkable in Italy. One afternoon, they went bathing in the Danube and Maria, in a one-piece black-and-white costume, swam through the icy water to St Margit’s Island, in the centre of the river. Amedeo struggled after her, but by the time he finally arrived and pulled himself, exhausted, onto the shore, he looked round to find that she was already swimming back again.

He was in love, he decided, which meant he had to show that he was. After the Italian riders returned to Turin, Amedeo poured out his heart in long letters to Budapest. When Maria told him she was accompanying her mother and sister to Trondheim in Norway to see the midnight sun that summer, he decided to join her. It took four days to travel across Europe to spend less than four hours at her side. Maria was delighted by the amour fou of her ardent Italian, and as she waved goodbye to the train taking him back to the south, Amedeo was besotted. He was still feeling love-struck several days after his return. It only dawned on him gradually that one word alone seemed to be on everyone’s lips: Abyssinia.




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