Outside the car, the chill of the desert night prickled the skin of her back and flanks and thighs, and she felt the fine golden hairs come erect on her forearms. He flapped out the bed-roll and spread it on the earth. Then he returned to get her, and the heat of his body was a physical shock. It seemed to burn with all the pent-up fires of his soul, and she pressed herself to it with complete abandon, delighting in the contrast of his burning flesh and the cool desert breeze upon her bare skin.
Now at last there was nothing to prevent the range of her hands and she knew they were cold as ghost fingers on him, delighting to hear his gasp again at their touch. She laughed then, a hoarse throaty chuckle.
"Yes." She laughed again, as he lifted her easily and dropped to his knees on the bed-roll, holding her against his chest.
"Yes, Jake." She let the last restraint fly. "Quickly, quickly my darling: It was a raging, a roaring of all her senses. It was an aching, tumultuous storm that ended at last and afterwards the vast hissing silence of the desert was so frightening that she clung to him like a child and found to her amazement that she was weeping. the tears scalded her eyes and yet were as icy as the touch of frost upon her cheeks.
General De Bono's first cautious but ponderous thrust across the Mareb River, into Ethiopia, met with a success that left him stunned.
Ras Muguletul the Ethiopian commander in the north, offered only token resistance then withdrew his forty thousand men southwards to the natural mountain fortress of Ambo Aradam. Unopposed, De Bono drove the seventy miles to Adowa and found it deserted. Triumphantly he erected the monument to the fallin Italian warriors and thereby expunged the stain of defeat from the arms of Italy.
The great civilizing mission had begun. The savage was being tamed, and introduced to the miracles of modern man amongst them the aerial bomb.
The Royal Italian Air Force ranged the skies above the towering Ambas, reporting all troop movements and swooping down to bomb and machine-gun any concentrations. The Ethiopian forces were confused and scattered under their tribal commanders. There were half a dozen breaches in their line that a forceful commander could have exploited indeed even General De Bono sensed this and made another convulsive leap forward as far as Makale. However, here he stopped appalled at his own audacity, stunned by his own achievement.
Ras Muguletu was skulking on Ambo Aradam with his forty thousand, while Ras Kassa and Ras Seyoum were struggling to move the great unwieldy masses of their two armies through the mountain passes to link up with the army of the Emperor on the shores of Lake Tona.
They were disordered, vulnerable, ripe to be cut down like wheat and General De Bono closed his eyes, covered his brow with one hand and turned his head aside.
History would never accuse him of recklessness and impetuosity.
ROM GENERAL DE BONO COMMANDER OF THE ITALIAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE AT MA KALE TO BENITO MUSSOLINI PRIME MINISTER OF ITALY HAVING CAPTURED ADO WA AND MA KALE I CONSIDER MY IMMEDIATE OBJECTS HAVE BEEN ATTAINED STOP IT IS NOW VITALLY NECESSARY TO CONSOLIDATE THESE SUCCESSES' TO FORTIFY MY POSITION AGAINST ENEMY COUNTER ATTACK AND TO SECURE MY LINES OF SUPPLY AND COMMUNICATIONS." ROM BENITO MUSSOLINI PRIME MINISTER OF ITALY MINISTER OF WAR TO GENERAL DE BONO OFFICER COMMANDING THE ITALIAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE IN AFRICA HIS MAJESTY WISHES AND I COMMAND YOU TO ADVANCE WITHOUT HESITATION ON AMBA ARA DAM AND BRING THE MAIN BODY OF THE ENENMY TO BATTLE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE STOP REPLY TO ME." ROM GENERAL DE BONO TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF ITALY GREETINGS AND FELICITATIONS I WISH TO POINT OUT TO YOUR EXELLENCY THAT THE OBJECTIVE AMBA ARA DAM IS TACTICALLY UNDESIRABLE ... THE TERRAIN FAVOURS AMBUSH CONDITION OF ROADS VERY POOR ... TRUST MY JUDGEMENT ... URGE YOUR EXCELLENCY TO RECONSIDER AND TO TAKE COGNIZANCE OF THE FACT THAT THE MILITARY SITUATION MUST TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER ALL POLITICAL CONSIDERATION." FROM BENITO MUSSOLINI TO MARSHAL DE BONO PREVIOUSLY OFFICER COMMANDING THE ITALIAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE IN AFRICA HIS MAJESTY ORDERS ME TO CONVEY HIS FELICITATIONS ON YOUR ELEVATION TO THE RANK OF MARSHAL OF THE ARMY AND TO THANK YOU FOR THE IMPECCABLE EXECUTION OF YOUR DUTY IN RECAPTURING ADO WA STOP WITH THE ATTAINMENT OF THIS OBJECTIVE I CONSIDER THAT YOUR MISSION IN EASTERN AFRICA HAS BEEN COMPLETED STOP YOU HAVE EARNED THE GRATITUDE OF THE NATION BY YOUR OBVIOUS MERITS AS A SOLDIER AND YOUR STEADFAST DISCHARGE OF YOUR DUTY AS A COMMANDER STOP YOU ARE REQUESTED TO HAND OVER YOUR COMMAND TO GENERAL PIE TRO BADOGLIO ON HIS IMMINENT ARRIVAL IN AFRICA..
Marshal De Bono accepted both his promotion and his recall with such good grace that it could have been mistaken, by an uninformed observer, for profound relief. His departure for Rome was completed with such despatch as to avoid by a hair's breadth the semblance of indecorous haste.
General Pietro Badoglio was a fighting soldier. He had staffed the headquarters before Adowa, although he had played no part in that debacle, and he was a veteran of Caporetto and Vittorio Veneto. He believed that the purpose of war was to crush the enemy as swiftly and as ruthlessly as was possible, with the use of any weapon at his disposal.
He came ashore at Massawa with a furious impatience, angry with everything he found, and impatient of the policies and concepts of his predecessor, although in truth seldom had an incoming commander been handed such an enviable strategic situation.
He inherited a huge, well-equipped army with a buoyant morale, in a commanding tactical position and backed by a magnificent network of communications and a logistics inventory that was alpine in proportions.
The small but magnificently equipped airforce of the expedition was flying unopposed over the Ambo mountains, observing all troop movements and pouncing immediately on any Ethiopian concentrations.
During one of the first dinners at the new headquarters, Lieutenant Vittorio Mussolini, the younger of the Duce's two sons, one of the dashing Regia Aeronautica aces, regaled his new commander with accounts of his sorties over the enemy highlands and Badoglio, who had not had close aerial support in any of his previous campaigns, was delighted with this new and deadly weapon. He listened transfixed to the young flier's descriptions of the effect of aerial bombardment particularly an account of an attack on a group of three hundred or more enemy horsemen led by a tall, dark-robed figure. The young Mussolini told him, "I released a single hundred-kilo bomb from an altitude of less than a hundred metres, and it fell precisely in the centre of the galloping horsemen. They opened like the petals of a flowering rose, and the dark-robed leader was thrown so high by the blast that he seemed to almost touch my wing-tip as I passed. It was a spectacle of great beauty and magnificence." Badoglio was happy that his new command included young men with such fire in their veins, and he leaned forward in his seat at the head of the table to peer down over the glittering silver and sparkling leaded crystal at the flier in his handsome blue uniform. The classical features and dark curly head of hair were the artist's conception of young Mars. Then he turned to the airforce Colonel who sat beside him.
"Colonel, what is the opinion of your young men in the Regia Aeronautica? I have heard much argument for and against but I would be interested to have your opinion.
Should we use the nitrogen mustard?"
"I think I speak for all my young men." The Colonel sipped his wine and glanced for confirmation at the young ace who was not yet twenty years of age. "I think the answer must be yes, we must use every weapon available to us." Badoglio nodded. The thinking agreed with his own, and the next morning he ordered the canisters of mustard gas shipped from the warehouses of Massawa, where De Bono had been content to let them lie, and despatched them to every airfield where flights of the Regia Aeronautica were based. Thousands upon thousands of the wild tribesmen of Ethiopia would come to know the corrosive dew when later they endured bombardment by artillery and aerial attack with a stoicism greater than most European troops were able to muster yet they could never come to terms with this terrible substance that turned the open pastures of their mountain fastness to fields of terror. Barefoot, as most of them were, they were pathetically vulnerable to the silent insidious weapon that flayed the skin from their bodies, and then stripped the living flesh from the bone.