Eighth Month

On Jan. 7, 1868 a walrus-mustached British General named Robert Cornells Napier landed on the coast of Eritrea with 32,000 men, six cannon and a herd of baggage elephants. Into Ethiopia they marched to punish Emperor Theodore for the torture and imprisonment of a group of British officers. Three months later the British column had fought its way some 400 miles inland and had defeated Theodore's tribesmen at Magdala. Emperor Theodore promptly blew his brains out with a revolver presented to him by Queen Victoria. By June 18, five months after the expedition had started, the last British soldier had left Africa, and Britain's Ethiopian campaign was successfully over.

This week Italian troops were entering their eighth month of active warfare in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa was still 140 miles ahead of the nearest Italian column. Emperor Haile Selassie was neither killed nor captured. Crown Prince Asfa Wassan had returned to Addis Ababa to take over the Government under orders from his father. Remnants of the Imperial Guard drifting back to the Capital still had their rifles, bags of dried peas and the capacity to put up a fight. In the south things were different. The bloodiest battle of the entire War was raging last week around a collection of water holes and mud huts known as Sassa Baneh. There lean, wily Ras Nassibu had stationed legions of his best men, entrenched in an elaborate series of fortifications dug under direction of the onetime Turkish General Wehib Pasha. Four columns under General Graziani were attempting to surround the town, batter it to submission. Charging again & again through thorn bushes and over huge boulders, men from Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco fell never to rise again, for leading the central column under a General Frusci was a regiment composed largely of Italian-American volunteers.

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