Adventure in Africa

Chicago's high-spirited Tribune, having announced that it will no longer maintain a correspondent in Rome to "take government handouts" (TIME, June 24), last week obtained from Correspondent Will Barber in Djibouti, French Somaliland, a lurid account of what goes on in neighboring Italian Eritrea as the Dictator's forces get ready to fight after the summer rains.

Excerpts: "The only people getting rich out of this affair are the British, who are selling water; Arab sailors, who have brought their dhows [native sailboats] in clusters from all other Red Sea ports for use in unloading Italian vessels, and, ironically, the Ethiopians themselves, who keep on selling coffee to the Italians. . . .

"Italian soldiers and workers sleep stark naked in the streets to escape the heat; others toil in a blistering sun without cork helmets and still others beg money from Arab sailors to buy food, which they are unable to buy with their meager pay.

"Everywhere confusion and disorder; everywhere haste, and everywhere determination to occupy the rich lands of the Ethiopian plateau--without fighting if possible, but with war if the Ethiopians resist.

"Hospitals are full and the situation haphazard. The Italians admit six deaths from sunstroke a day, and for two days there has not been water in the city.

"That is Massaua, port city in the Italian colony of Eritrea, as described today by one of the first men to reach Djibouti from Massaua, in several weeks. He is a citizen of a nation historically friendly and disposed to favor Italian aspirations.

"Premier Mussolini seems to have plunged into his Ethiopian adventure without proper preparation and perhaps with lack of knowledge of true conditions in East Africa. It looks as if he had bitten off more than he can chew.

"Italian soldiers and workers have been sent down to a steaming sun-baked port where there is hardly a tree, and water is lacking. Many of them came down without sun helmets and still dressed in their heavy European uniforms. All night long these soldiers and workers toil at discharging vessels that jam the harbor. The Italians have learned, at last, to avoid such a task as unloading ships in the day time.

"Thousands of other soldiers and workers, however, are obliged to work all day in the scorching desert country, mending roads that trucks, tanks and tractors smash to bits a few hours later as they roar through the night to the plateau at the capital of [Eritrea], Asmara."

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