Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 138: Second Italo-Ethiopian War - V

The road to Amba Aradam narrowed into a series of switchbacks carved into the edge of Ethiopia’s spine.

Italian convoys crawled through clouds of dust.

By dawn on 14 October, forward patrols of the 4th Alpini Division reached the lower ridges of the Amba Aradam massif.

General Emilio De Bono, now cautious after Mekele, halted his vanguard short of the cliffs.

From a forward command tent beneath a camouflaged tarp, he surveyed the range.

"This is a fortress built by God," muttered his chief engineer, binoculars fogging in the morning mist. "We can’t flank it."

De Bono gave a single nod. "Then we’ll climb it."

High above them, Ras Seyoum Mengesha watched the advance from behind stacked rocks and scrub camouflaging his riflemen.

Over the past week, his men had dragged supplies through goat trails and hidden granaries deep within caves.

"The Italians will come slow," he told his captains. "They will think cliffs make them safe. We’ll make cliffs into fire."

Ambush teams were already in place armed with bolt-action rifles, old Martini-Henry muskets, and makeshift grenades crafted from oil tins and blasting powder.

Spears had been buried along paths at waist-height, shielded with dry brush.

On the night of 15 October, under moonlight that bathed the ridge silver, an Italian patrol of 90 men attempted a covert ascent along the southeastern trail.

They never returned.

Ethiopian scouts triggered a rockslide from above.

As the lead Alpini were crushed beneath boulders, others ran into spear traps.

When a flare gun fired, Ethiopian riflemen opened up in crossfire.

Screams rang into the ravines.

"Hold your fire!" shouted one Italian lieutenant, already wounded.

The response came in Amharic: "Your fire held us at Mekele. Now we return it."

By morning, only a few survivors limped back, their faces bloodied, their hands raised.

De Bono’s report recorded 90 casualties.

His margin for error was shrinking.

Far south, in the Ogaden, General Rodolfo Graziani wasn’t waiting.

On 16 October, he ordered the first wide-scale deployment of chemical weapons.

Five Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 bombers departed the Italian airfield in Baidoa.

Their payload canisters of mustard gas.

Their target Gorahai and surrounding pastoral lands suspected of sheltering Ethiopian fighters.

They dropped the gas across a two-kilometer zone.

White smoke clung to thorn bushes and low hills.

Within minutes, herds of goats collapsed.

Children emerged from tukuls screaming, eyes red, skin blistered.

Mothers vomited as they ran for water that had already been contaminated.

By evening 400 were dead.

Many more blinded.

Graziani, reading the field report, merely nodded.

"We bleed them until they accept their place in the new order."

Back in the north, the fighting around Amba Aradam continued into the week.

The Italians brought in mountain climbers from the elite Alpini regiments.

Some were trained in the Dolomites, veterans of rock and snow.

Now, they scaled vertical ascents under rifle fire, hammering pitons into granite while comrades above flung down grenades.

But Ras Seyoum’s men adapted.

On 18 October, Ethiopian fighters lit small fires at night, visible from afar.

Drawn by the light, Italian platoons advanced only to walk into stone-lined kill zones where riflemen waited with patience and no mercy.

Flamethrower teams were called in.

On 19 October, Italian engineers located a tunnel complex suspected of hiding resistance.

They advanced with flamethrowers slow, masked, steady.

Liquid fire hissed and roared into the caves.

Smoke poured out like ink.

The screams inside did not.

By the 21st, Mussolini was losing patience.

A telegram from Rome to De Bono was clear:

"You advance like a professor grading essays. War is not a lecture. It is conquest. Deliver us victory, or be replaced."

De Bono read the message in silence.

Then he looked at the valley below.

"Then we burn time to gain ground."

Rain arrived on 22 October.

The kind that made maps useless and boots heavier than rifles.

In the highlands near Enda Maryam, Ras Imru launched an audacious assault.

At dawn on the 23rd, 3,000 men, armed with muskets, shotels, axes, and the last of their bullets, charged an Italian garrison dug into the hilltop.

The Italians, well-entrenched and armed with Breda machine guns, held their line.

They fired until barrels glowed.

The Ethiopians closed the gap fifty meters, then thirty but were cut down in swathes.

By the end of the day, over 2,000 Ethiopians were dead.

Ras Imru wept over the corpse of his brother.

Elsewhere on the front, De Bono’s sappers moved carefully through abandoned Ethiopian trenches.

In one cave, they found three wounded fighters and a priest.

The priest begged for mercy, claiming he’d hidden no weapons.

He was executed on the spot.

Two of the fighters were shot as they lay.

One corporal, shaking, lit a cigarette afterward.

"They’re just men," he said.

"No," his lieutenant corrected. "They’re symbols. And symbols must be erased."

On 24 October, heavy fog rolled in across the highland passes.

Italian observers lost visual contact with Ethiopian movement.

Recon planes were grounded.

But artillery kept firing blind.

"We shoot into clouds," one gunner muttered. "And pray the clouds bleed."

By midday, Italian forward patrols entered a village near Enda Maryam.

The huts were deserted.

Chickens clucked aimlessly.

On a wall, an Ethiopian phrase had been smeared in charcoal:

"We are gone, but not far."

Within an hour, a landmine an oil drum rigged with shrapnel and fuse wire detonated beneath the lead truck.

Screams rang as metal tore flesh.

A second blast followed.

Seven dead.

Ten wounded.

As engineers began to defuse what remained, snipers opened fire from a hillock to the east.

One bullet struck the field radio operator in the jaw.

His scream was brief.

His radio crackled and died.

In desperation, the Italians burned the village.

Back at Amba Aradam, Ras Seyoum regrouped with his surviving officers.

Supplies were low.

Ammunition had to be counted bullet by bullet.

Yet his men held.

A young lieutenant asked him, "How do we fight tanks with knives?"

Ras Seyoum handed him a grenade. "You don’t aim at the tank. You aim at the man who drives it."

He turned to a map drawn in charcoal and goat’s blood.

"Tonight, we cut their lines again. Not to win. But to remind them we are still here."

In the southern Ogaden, Graziani’s campaign continued with brutality masked as efficiency.

On 25 October, his men captured a cluster of wounded Ethiopian irregulars hiding near a dried-out wadi.

They were unarmed.

Some had bandaged limbs.

One Italian major ordered their execution.

"They’re saboteurs," he said. "Their wounds are proof of battle, not surrender."

The prisoners were lined up and shot.

In Rome, such reports were never filed.

Only progress metrics, kilometers taken, villages cleared, resistance "pacified."

But word spread in the highlands.

In a monastery near Lake Ashenge, a monk read the report from a passing soldier.

He knelt before an icon of Saint George and whispered, "God sees what the world ignores."

That night, in an Ethiopian dugout a boy no older than fifteen wrote in a torn school notebook.

"Today, I saw my uncle die. He did not beg. He did not curse. He only asked me to live longer than him."

He closed the book and wrapped it in cloth, hiding it beneath a loose rock.