One Capital, One Throne

WAR

In Ethiopia, after the great Italian victory of Marshal Badoglio on the North Front (TIME, Feb. 24), the routed Ethiopian army of Ras Mulugheta was retreating in moderately good order across Tigre Province last week, but the fate of stragglers was hard.

Tigre tribesmen apparently considered that the authority of Emperor Haile Selassie in their province had been shattered and that any of his soldiers not natives of Tigre were fair game. As an exhausted straggler would stumble into a village last week, angry spearmen would rush out to ask "Ane men? Who are you?" If the straggler answered in any Ethiopian tongue except the Tigrean dialect he was killed.

Next obstacle to the Italians, towering 11,000-ft. Mount Alaji did not fall last week as Marshal Badoglio put every available soldier to working on roads and perfecting his service of supply for a fresh offensive. In Rome numerous Italian Senators heard the Papal Secretary of State, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, deliver an address which kept Fascists on pins & needles in their anxiety to hear that the Holy Father had at last come out wholeheartedly for Italy's war. They considered this to have come to pass when Cardinal Pacelli hailed Dictator Mussolini as "not only the Head of the Government but a most cultured Restorer of Imperial Rome." However the Papal Secretary of State some minutes later closed with these ringing assertions: "Rome is God's City! . . . Rome was by Providence ordained and prepared to be the Capital of the World. . . . Rome has one Throne--that of the Pope! One flag-- the Cross!"

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