The Man Called Brown Condor (23 page)

The Potez sat covered with brush as he had left it. Several white-clad, elderly warriors ran from hiding to help John clear the brush away from the plane. They had been guarding the cache of gasoline.

“Thank you” was one of the few phrases of Amharic that Robinson had learned. The men nodded, stepped away, picked up their spears, and walked solemnly toward the smoldering town.

God help them! These people are going to pit spears, swords, flesh, and courage—all they have—against machine guns, planes, tanks, and artillery.

John started the Potez's engine, checked the gauges, swung the plane around checking the sky for enemies, turned into the wind, and pushed the throttle forward to the stop. The Potez withstood the bone-shaking abuse of the stone-rough field as it struggled to reach flying speed before lifting at last into smooth air lightly smeared with wisps of drifting smoke from the destroyed town.

Upon landing at the capital, Robinson spoke to no one except the driver of the waiting car. “The palace, fast!”

Driven directly to the palace, he was immediately ushered into the War Room
.
Emperor Selassie and his war cabinet stood around a huge table covered with maps. John stood awkwardly by the door a moment, the leather pouch full of reports held close to his chest with both hands. Everyone in the room turned to stare at him in silence. He diverted his eyes down for a moment, and for the first time he was aware of his appearance. He was covered in dust and dirt, his uniform and hands stained with blood, that of the dismembered torso he had fallen over and his own blood from the cut across his cheek. The wound had bled a line down the side of his face and throat, spilled over his shirt collar, and disappeared into his jacket. What those in the room saw was a mass of clotted blood and dirt stuck to the lower right quarter of his face. Fortunately, the wound looked worse than it would turn out to be.

After a moment, the royal interpreter spoke. “His Majesty will hear your report, Colonel Robinson.”

John handed over his courier pouch before describing in detail the aerial attack he had witnessed. He left out nothing: the description of the bombers, the terrified civilians, the destruction and death, everything he could remember. When he finished, there was dead silence in the room.

For a moment Selassie looked at John with deep sadness in his eyes. Seconds later, in fiery rage, the emperor slammed his fist on the table.

“In good faith we made treaties and agreements with Italy according to international protocol. They have not only violated every agreement they made with us, but the very precepts upon which the League of Nations was founded. Mussolini hasn't even bothered declaring war on us. He has slaughtered our people in Adowa when I deliberately declared it an undefended open city. The Italians could have marched in without firing a shot or dropping a single bomb. By their cowardly attack on women and children they have revealed their hand. In this undeclared and unjustified war, they aim to kill our people whether we fight or not. They are the barbarians! We will declare war! We will fight them until we can fight no longer.”

The telephone rang. An aid picked up, listened for a moment, then hung up.

“Your Majesty, Captain Mulu Asha has just landed. The Italians have not moved from their line on our southern border with Italian Somaliland. The captain is on his way here to give a full report.”

The emperor thanked John and told him to get some rest, that he would receive new orders soon.

By the time Robinson reached his hotel, he hardly had enough strength left to walk down the hall to his room. He was tired, lonely, and frightened. Safe for the moment, he could not clear his mind of the horrific images he had seen. Starkly aware that war had only just begun, John knew he had been lucky to find his aircraft unscathed and escaped. He wondered if he would be so lucky the next time. He was shaking, perhaps from lack of sleep and fatigue, perhaps from shock.

When he opened the door he was surprised to find his room spotlessly clean. There was a bowl of fresh fruit on the table by the couch. He was even more surprised when the door to his bath opened and he found himself staring at an equally surprised, slim, young woman with beautiful almond eyes. She wore a traditional white
kamis
, a long loose dress. It had a gold chain around the waist. She returned his gaze with equal questioning. She looked toward the door, then back at John. Her perplexed expression slowly turned to a shy smile.

“Please,” she said and held out her hand.

“Who are you?” John managed to ask.

“Please,” she repeated, as she was often to do. It was the only word of English she knew. She stepped forward, took John's hand, and led him to the bath, which was filled with hot, steaming water. John stood mute, wondering if the girl could feel him shaking inside. Before he could decide what he should do, he found himself naked, sitting in a tub of hot water with the girl kneeling beside the tub, bathing his filthy, aching body. He was too tired to be embarrassed and too in need of company to ask questions. The girl carefully cleaned his face and frowned at the cut across his cheek. The bleeding had stopped.

Whenever the lovely young lady said “please,” he simply did as she motioned for him to do. When she finished drying him, she led him to the bed. There she smiled and gently kissed the cut on his cheek. John wanted to cry, laugh, hold her desperately close, but most of all he wanted not to be alone with the fresh images of war dancing across his mind. She moved softly next to him and he held on to her tightly. They did not speak. They did not kiss. John simply laid his head upon her breast and clung to her as a child might cling to his mother. He knew his worst fear was of fear itself, the kind that can turn a man into a coward.

She held him until he fell asleep, and then she quietly gathered his soiled uniform, laid out a fresh one on the chair next to his bed, and let herself out of the apartment.

The next day, October 6, the Italians marched into what was left of the town of Adowa. As Emperor Selassie had ordered, not a shot had been fired in defense of the town. Some of the Italian troops, looking at the bombed ruins and pitiful people, began to wonder if Ethiopia could possibly be worth a war, much less the risk of their own lives.

In Rome there was joyous celebration upon receiving the news that at last Italy had avenged its shameful defeat at the hands of Ethiopia in 1896. Church bells rang and people turned out in the streets for a victory festival. Mussolini bathed in the adoration.

At Adowa, General De Bono ordered several battalions turned out for review in formal celebration of his great military victory. The ceremony was complete with banners, bugle fanfares, drums, and motion picture crews. It was meant as a grand gesture to boost the morale of the soldiers and, of course, make General De Bono the star of Italian motion picture news. The average soldier, standing in formation after hard days of marching uphill, would just as soon have skipped all ceremony in favor of a hot meal, a cigarette, and rest.

Mindful of the hundreds of thousands of warriors that could be waiting ahead, De Bono halted the most powerful war machine Africa had ever seen in order to consolidate his forces and bring up his artillery, tanks, and supplies before preceding deeper into Ethiopia. De Bono was a cautious man.

2
It should be noted that although he left Ethiopia, Gaston Vedel and his wife fought bravely in the French underground during WW II. Both were captured by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps. Somehow they both survived. It is not known at this printing what happened to Comte Schatzberg or Baron H. H. von Engel.

O
N THE SAME MORNING
, O
CTOBER 6, THAT
G
ENERAL DE
B
ONO
was celebrating his victory at Adowa, John was having breakfast with Mulu Asha.

“When I got to my room yesterday, there was a girl there.”

“I'm glad you brought that up. I did not know quite how to approach the subject. What happened was not planned,” Mulu replied.

“You know?”

“Yes. She came to my family's house last night and told us. She is my sister's best friend. You must understand. She did not intend for you to find her there. She is no servant, my friend. She is the daughter of a chieftain, a Ras, and the former wife of a friend of mine, a student pilot. He was killed in a training accident more than a year ago.

“Word travels fast in Addis Ababa. You are better known to our people than you realize. When word came that you were back from Adowa and had gone to the palace, she and my sister took fruit and flowers and supervised two hotel servants to clean your rooms so everything would be fresh and clean. You have come a long way to help us. It was a small thing, but still something they could do to show our people's appreciation. My sister and the servants had just departed when you arrived and surprised the lady as she was leaving. When she saw you, I think she lost her head for a moment. Great God, man! You don't know how shocking you looked. She said you were covered with caked blood and dirt, there was oil and blood on your face, your uniform was torn, and you looked dreadfully shaken. She could not simply run past you out the door and leave you like that.”

“Please, what is her name? I want to see her again . . . at least to thank her.”

“My friend, it is best that you not know who she is for now. She is a little afraid to see you. And there is her family to consider. Her father is . . . well, a high ranking official. This is no ordinary lady. You will have to wait and see. Besides, my commander, it appears that you and I are going to be very busy flying from here on out.”

“Well, damnit! I must have some sort of name for her . . . what is the Ethiopian word for ‘lady'?”

“If she was single it would be
weiserit
for miss, but since she is a widow you would address her as madame. The word is
weisero
.”

“All right. Tell her I don't have to know who she is, but I desperately want to see her, to be with her when there is time. We don't have to be seen by anybody. I won't embarrass her. Will you tell her that for me? Maybe the three of us could meet together, we could always have a chaperone. Do you understand the word chaperone?”

And so they did when there was time. The three met to dine or picnic, sometimes at the farm of their friend Ras Tamru. John learned some words of Amharic and his
weisero
learned a little English, but she did not reveal her true identity and John never asked. He just knew he needed her. In the months that followed, she provided him with beauty and peace when his world was filled with the ugliness, frustration, and horror of war.

The following morning, Paul Corriger joined John and Mulu at the Akaki airfield, which was commonly referred to as simply the new airfield. The first few years of flying activity in Addis Ababa had taken place on the racetrack and polo grounds. However, the foreign diplomatic set had been so irate at this interference with their Sunday sport that the emperor finally gave in to their complaints and ordered a landing field constructed on the outskirts of the capital.

“Paul,” John asked, “how many aircraft are flyable?”

“Demeaux says it's a good day. We have ten that might get off the ground—two Fokker F-Vllb/3m, the Farman F-92, five Potez 25s, the Breda Ba15, and one Junkers W33c. Demeaux is doing the best he can. Parts are scarce. We have trouble getting them past the French customs at Djibouti. I'm surprised they let shipments of fuel through.”

“Ten flyable planes and eighteen pilots, the new ones with less than a hundred and fifty hours total time. The Italians have two hundred modern planes and well-trained pilots. Not very good odds. When our planes are gone, daily contact with the front will be gone.”

“Why worry?” Mulu said. “When the planes are gone, most of us will be gone.”

“That's a happy thought.”

“I'm just trying to be logical.”

“The army still has a few field radios,” Paul suggested, trying to change the subject.

“I've seen 'em,” Robinson answered. “One man cranks a generator by hand while another works a telegraph key. In the mountains they often have trouble reaching the next relay station and those have trouble contacting the radio at the palace. As far as international traffic goes, there is one commercial station downtown. It's always busy with government traffic and three dozen news reporters fighting to get their stories out. I've been told the American consulate has just received a transmitter. Cornelius Van Engert begged Washington for one because he was frustrated trying to get his official traffic out through the commercial one in town. What they sent was an old transmitter and generator that came from an obsolete submarine from the Great War. Four American sailors came with it to keep the thing working.”

Mulu brought up a subject he had tried before. “The Potez 25s came with machine guns but the army took them.”

John sat down at his desk. “I know there's been talk of arming our planes, but adding guns would be like putting spiked collars on rabbits to fend off dogs. If they catch us rabbits, they'll shoot us out of the air, guns or no guns. Their IMAM RO 37 is at least thirty miles an hour faster than a Potez 25. If we put a gun, ammunition, and gunner in the back cockpit, the extra weight will slow us down even more. The Italians know we don't have a real fighter. We're messengers. That's our job. We can carry a message from the front in hours that would take runners days to deliver. Every month, every week, every day we have even a single plane left is important. We have to convince every pilot we have how important he is and that his only chance is to run if he sees a speck in the sky.”

“We have told them,” Paul answered.

“Well tell 'em again, dammit! Who went out this morning?”

“Bahru Kaba to the south, Asfaw Ali north. Tesfaye is transporting fuel to the southern front at Neghelle, and Mishka Babitcheff is here on standby,” Corriger replied.