At 9:30 a.m. one day last week General Oreste Mariotti squinted from mule-back along the dry bed of the Ende River, a strip of boulders and gravel between mountainous shrub covered hills, blew his whistle and halted his column.
For four days he and his 2,000 men—stiff-fezzed Askaris and undrilled Danakil tribesmen, backed by a battery of moun- tain artillery mounted on camels—had made the most spectacular forced march of the entire Ethiopian campaign. To protect the flank of Italy's main army of the north with its spearhead at Makale, they had gone where no...
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