The Cost to the Victor

The cost to the Ethiopians of defeating the Italian invaders at Adowa was heavy and was paid by thou- sands of Ethiopian families from all parts of the coun- try. The full extent, of Ethiopia's loss may be judged from an account of Augustus B. Wylde, sometime British consul for the Red Sea, who reached Massawa six weeks after the battle, having been sent by the Man- chester Guardian to investigate the causes of the Italian defeat. In his book Modern Abyssina he relates that during his tour of Northern Ethiopia he was first visited at Adi Caieh by Ethiopians who gave him terrible accounts of the famine and cholera that had devastated the country as a result of the human carnage. As he approached the site of the battle, he found the familiar countryside tragically transformed.

"From a distance a hamlet on the mountain side might be seen, and looked as if it were perfect, only no people could be seen moving about, and no smoke issu- ing from the cottages. On approaching, the roofs of the huts would be found in bad repair, and on entering it, not a human being was to be seen. The doors of the building were nearly off their hinges, the torn bushes that shut the enclosures round the huts were to one side, and grass and weeds were growing everywhere; a more luxurious patch of vegetation or rank grass, about six feet length by two in breath, would mark the spot where some poor victim lay unburied. On looking into the houses they would be found as if the occupants had just vacated them, but on closer examination, when the eye got accustomed to the semi-darkness inside after the glare of the bright sunshine in the open, several skeletons would be found, either on the raised end of the hut or on a bedstead. In one hut I found five remains; one was that of a woman, as I could tell by the remains of her dress, alongside of her on the same bed lay two small skeletons, one a little larger than the other, both of the little skulls resting on the arm bones of what perhaps was their mother. Behind the door was another body, evidently a boy, the leg bones stretched out and those of the upper part of the body in a small heap. The owner of them had evidently died with his back resting against the wall; the last body was curled up near the fire-place alongside which were several empty cooking vessels. One examination of these abandoned villages was enough for me, and from this specimen I could see what this fertile country had suffered from the series of years of war, famine and pestilence." Everywhere were "burnt villages and destruction."

"The best view of Adowa," he continues, "is to be obtained from the hill on which are situated the old ruins of the Jesuit town of Fremona, which is situated to the north-west and about two and a half miles off. Two miles further off to the north is the monastic settlement of Adi Aboona, the property of the Aboona or chief of the Ethiopian Church. Although Adi Aboona is on slightly higher ground than Adowa, a good view of it is not to be got owing to an out-jutting spur from Mount Selado, which ends just vis-a-vis to Fremona. From the latter the whole panorama of the town is spread out before one, and to me after an absence of twelve years I could hardly believe that the heap of ruins and the nearly deserted houses were the same place that I had spent so many pleasant days in. With the exception of the five churches of Our Saviour, the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, Saint Michael and Saint George and some few large houses, the place seemed to be a mass of ruins and broken-down enclosures. "I had come from Aksum by the direct road and on my way the villages the nearer one got to Adowa showed what the country had gone through, as the majority of the houses were unroofed and in a tumble-down con- dition. Skulls of men and bones of animals were fre- quent, victims of the famine and the plague, and every yard from Fremona towards once happy Adowa pre- sented some fresh horror . . . here were the remains of unburied humanity, dirt, filth and corruption at every step, and, although the heavy rains had washed away parts of the fragments, and the grass was growing luxuriantly, still a sickly smell of decaying flesh per- vaded the atmosphere, and every few yards I had to put my handkerchief to my nose and go as fast as possible. I asked Schrimper if he called it healthy and a fit place to come to, and he replied, 'Oh, this is nothing to what it was ten days' ago; it was not sweet then. 'Nearing the end of the town the ground was not so bad, and at the market-place it was clean enough, and there was nothing much to grumble about; but still there was a sort of unhealthy feeling, and my spirits were down at seeing the ruins, the misery and the alteration in everything. I looked in vain for the good houses and the enclosures with their nice shady trees that used to exist at the west of the market green. Ras Aloula's fine establish- ment, that formerly covered the ledge of ground above the market, was in ruins, the bare walls and the black- ened timbers alone marking the spot where once used to be a well-ordered household . . .

"The day after my arrival at Adowa, I made the first of many visits to the battlefield, perhaps the most dis- agreeable task I ever had to perform in my life, one position being more foul smelling and disgusting than another. A burying party of Italian engineers had been allowed by the Ethiopians to come and inter the dead, but the condition of the corpses prevented them from being moved, and a few loose stones were their only covering which, instead of facilitating the decomposition, only retarded it; not half of the bodies had been attended to, and in some places, putrescent masses held together by ragged clothes marked the details of the fight . . . Bird and animal life was absent, they even could not face the horrible Golgotha, and the hyenas had long ago left the district to procure something more tempting than what the battlefield offered them ... There are some things in one's life that never can be forgotten, and this is one of them that I shall carry with me as long as I live, and shudder when I think of the thousands of white, brown and black men that lay dotted about this lovely country, that gave up their lives to gratify an election- eering policy in a far-off land'."