Guard Changed

Having conquered Ethiopia, mighty Marshal Pietro Badoglio last week joined the Fascist Party.

His Majesty Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia, had just upped Marshal Badoglio from the administrative office of Viceroy of Ethiopia to the aristocratic, hereditary dignity of Duke of Addis Ababa. It was time for the rumors that at heart Marshal Badoglio was anti-Fascist to be scotched last week, and scotched they were. Amid regal pomp the Duke of Addis Ababa drove to the Secretariat of the Fascist Party, majestically ascended its marble stair and received a card enrolling him as a member of the Fascist Party. Grizzled new Member Badoglio then barked a loud, soldierly speech in praise of Fascist works in general and in particular of Benito Mussolini, "the Duce who is the force and guide behind all our efforts!"

The new Duke was supposed to have returned to Italy primarily for kidney-stone treatment. Last week's developments explained further. Named new Viceroy of Ethiopia, to do the exhausting job of "civilizing" one of the most recalcitrant native peoples on the globe, was bristling Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, 53. The 64-year-old Duke of Addis Ababa resumed in Italy his post of Chief of the General Staff.

This abrupt shift, characteristic of Il Duce, meant that the 800,000 troops he is mobilizing in "war games" under the Italian Alps to intimidate the League of Nations when it meets late this month to discuss Sanctions will be officered directly by the military genius who did what most European military experts had called "impossible"--conquered Ethiopia in a single dry season before the rains could bog down his troops.

Change the Guard! As Dictator Mussolini girded himself last week for whatever efforts he may have to make toward smashing Sanctions, he executed once more his periodic Fascist maneuver, "Change the Guard!" This means that with arbitrary decision Il Duce shifts various Fascist leaders who serve him and Italy into new posts. Last week Dictator Mussolini began by firing himself from three of his biggest jobs: Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Colonies and Minister of Corporations.

New Foreign Minister is chubby-faced Count Galeazzo Ciano, husband of the Dictator's favorite child Edda, perhaps the only living being toward whom Benito Mussolini is somewhat overindulgent, a little soft. She wants her Count to have the glory of being Italian Foreign Minister when it comes about that Sanctions are lifted--and shrewd Benito Mussolini does not want to be his own Foreign Minister in case Italy's great diplomatic offensive fails. If Il Duce was a little soft and sweet to his daughter last week, he abandoned none of his watchful astuteness. Edda herself was in Berlin, hobnobbing with bigwig Nazis--which was the Mussolini Family's way of teasing the French and the British.

New Minister of Corporations is an old-guard Fascist who has done much of the complex, still uncompleted job of setting up the so-called "Italian Fascist Corporative State," hard-working but convivial Ferruccio Lantini (TIME, March 30 et ante). The new Minister of Colonies, Alessandro Lessona, is an old hand at them. Fascist wiseacres said Il Duce was divesting himself of three big portfolios partly because, if all goes well in Europe and Sanctions are abolished, he wants to be free to visit Ethiopia, survey his conquest.

Out of sight like a plummet dropped last week foppish Fulvio Suvich, the Undersecretary to Foreign Secretary Benito Mussolini for four years. Only last fortnight Signore Suvich was the only Italian with his chief when Premier Mussolini received at his farm the Chancellor of Austria, pious Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, and they reputedly discussed enthroning Archduke Otto at Vienna as Emperor with Princess Maria of Italy for his Empress (TIME, June 15). In the abrupt change of guard last week there seemed to be no job for Suvich, and to fill his seat as Foreign Undersecretary was recalled from Warsaw a most vigorous and scheming veteran Fascist, the journalist-diplomat Giuseppe Bastianini, Ambassador to Poland. No other Fascist knows so many foreigners in every part of the world. No other has shown so much adroitness in founding Fascist organizations overseas and adapting them to laws made by local governments, while still keeping them Fascist-hot. Suvich moreover has been supposed to advise Il Duce constantly from a pro-French and anti-German point of view. It was convenient to fire him last week as Italy's Dictator sought to throw as great a scare as possible into the new French Cabinet of Leon Blum. Radical Socialists, Socialists and Communists are Premier Blum's supporters, antiFascism a prime flame on their altar. If they are to be backed down at Geneva, if Sanctions are to be scotched, Benito Mussolini has need of all the aid he can muster. Last week in Paris, rueful Pinks and Reds said the British Foreign Office had just sent over to them a draft procedure for lifting Sanctions, asked them to "study" it.

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