Caesar in Abyssinia

I have no desire, however, to belittle the military achievement of Italy in Ethiopia. I believe that an absurd excess of force was used that considering the condition of the Italian Treasury the war might have been waged more cheaply, and that the war provides no index whatsoever of the behaviour of an Italian Army, even of the organisation of an Italian Army, fighting against an equal enemy. The Italians, nevertheless, did reach their objective, Addis Ababa, within seven months of the outbreak of aggression. My task is rather in this book to show what was the strength and spirit of the Ethiopian armies sent against a European Great Power. My conclusions are that they had no artillery, no aviation, a pathetic proportion of automatic weapons and modern rifles, and ammunition sufficient for two days modern battle. I have seen a child nation, ruled by a man who was both noble and intelligent, done brutally to death almost before it had begun to breathe. The Italians do not figure much in these pages, which are more the study of the Ethiopian people under fire than of the mechanical means and processes used to destroy their resistance. The primary cause of their defeat was that they had no arms, and were allowed none. The secondary cause of their defeat was Italian air supremacy, exploited eventually by the spraying of mustard gas. The great Ras said that they could not fight the heavens or the burning rain.

G. L. Steer (1909-1944) was one of the great war correspondents of the twentieth-century. Born in South Africa, educated at Winchester and Oxford, after an apprenticeship in journalism he went to Ethiopia in July 1935 to cover the forthcoming Italian invasion. He remained loyal to the Ethiopians and their emperor, Haile Selassie 'till the end' and helped in the latter's restoration to his throne in 1941.Two of the three books G. L. Steer wrote about Ethiopia and the Italian occupation - Caesar in Abyssinia and Sealed and Delivered - are reissued in Faber Finds. He also wrote the official history, The Abyssinian Campaigns. His masterpiece, The Tree of Gernika, is reissued in Faber Finds as well. The Tree of Gernika: a Field Study of Modern War is a first-hand account of the struggle of the Basque Autonomous Republic in the Spanish Civil War, from the burning of Irun to the fall of Bilbao. During this campaign Steer filed his most important dispatch about the destruction of Gernika (Guernica) by Nazi aircraft. In the Second World War G. L. Steer worked as an army intelligence officer: he died on Christmas Day 1944 when he crashed an overloaded jeep in Bengal.