When the Going Was Good

by Evelyn Waugh

  One of the wonders of travel is where native servants sleep. They arrive at any hour in a strange place and seem immediately to be surrounded by hospitable cousins-in-law, who embrace them, lead them home and for the rest of the stay batten upon one’s stores. Our party broke up and disappeared cheerfully into the night; all except Gabri, who did not like Jijiga. He was intensely xenophobic where Somalis were concerned; he would not eat anything himself, saying that the food was not suitable for an Abyssinian; he nearly starved us by refusing to buy provisions on the grounds that the prices were excessive.

  Mata Hari seemed to have slept in the mud, to judge by his appearance next morning, but perhaps he had merely found his fight. He came to our room in a kind of ecstasy, almost speechless with secrecy. He had news of the highest importance. He could not say it aloud, but must whisper it to each of us in turn. Count Drogafoi, the French Consul, had been thrown into prison. We asked him to repeat the name. He shook his head, winked and produced a stub of pencil and a piece of paper. Then, glancing over his shoulder to make sure he was not observed, he wrote the word, laboriously, in block capitals, DROGAFOI. It was to Drogafoi’s house, he said, that we had been the night before. They were going to shoot Drogafoi that day. They had also arrested twelve Roman Catholics; these would be sewn up in skins and burned alive. There were four Maltese popes in the town. They would probably be shot too. He would return shortly, he said, with further information, and with that and another meaning wink he tip-toed downstairs.

  In a somewhat puzzled state of mind we sat down to a breakfast of tinned partridge and Chianti. While we were still discussing what, if any, truth could be concealed in this story, the customs officer, our friend of the night before, came to introduce himself by name – Kebreth Astatkie – and to enquire about our welfare. Dedjasmach Nasebu, the Governor of Harar, was in Jijiga that day, he told us, on his way south, and would be pleased to see us. Accordingly we set out on foot for the Gebbi.

  Rain had stopped and the town presented a more cheerful appearance. It consisted of a single main square and two side streets. The single European in the town, besides the mysterious Drogafoi and the Maltese popes, was a Greek, whom Mata Hari pointed out to us, riding a bicycle.

  ‘That is the Alcohol,’ he explained; a title which, we found later, meant that he owned the local liquor monopoly.

  The Gebbi, like most Abyssinian official buildings, was a nondescript assembly of tin-roofed sheds, the largest of which had some upper rooms, reached by an outside staircase. Two half-grown lions were tethered outside the main door; the slave in charge wrestled with one of them for our benefit, and was rewarded with a thaler and a deep scratch on the thigh. There was the inevitable small army of ragged retainers, squatting on their heels, nursing their old rifles.

  We were first shown into the presence of the governor of Jijiga, Fitaurari Shafarah, an officer of the old school, who sat, surrounded by local notables, in a very small room, hung with carpets; the shutters were closed and the atmosphere was stupefying. He was a grizzled, gloomy little man who had been present at the battle of Walwal and had gained some discredit there, through being discovered, at the height of the action, squatting in his tent selling cartridges to his own troops. His own interpreter introduced us, and after the exchange of a few civilities we sat in unbroken silence for rather more than half an hour. Eventually we were led into the open and upstairs to Nasebu’s quarters. The Dedjasmach wore European uniform and spoke French. Like everyone else in Abyssinia who spoke French – with the single exception of the Emperor – he was clean shaven. He was well up in European affairs. We drank coffee together and discussed the constitution of the Committee of Five, the Committee of Thirteen, the Council of the League, and such topics as, in those days, seemed important.

  Patrick then asked him what truth there was in the story that a Frenchman had been arrested in Jijiga.

  ‘A Frenchmen arrested?’ he enquired with innocent incredulity. ‘I will ask about it.’

  He clapped his hands and sent a servant for Kebreth. They talked together for a few seconds in Amharic; then he said, ‘Yes, it appears that something of the sort has occurred,’ and proceeded to tell us the whole story, while Kebreth produced from various pockets about his person a collection of all the relevant documents.

  Drogafoi was a Count Maurice de Roquefeuil du Bousquet, who had come to Ethiopia nine years before in search of a livelihood. For some time the police had been keeping a watch on his house. He was said to live in guilty splendour, but when Patrick and I visited his home later we found two simple and clearly impoverished little rooms. On the day before our arrival, an elderly Somali woman had been arrested leaving his house and, when she was searched, a film tube was found in her armpit, which, she confessed, she was taking to the Italian Consulate at Harar. Kebreth showed us the contents: a snapshot of some motor lorries and five pages of inaccurate information (of the kind which Wazir Ali Beg used regularly to write to me) describing the defences of Jijiga.

  The Count and Countess had been arrested and their house searched. Kebreth said it was full of correspondence with Italian officers across the frontier, and of the names of native agents who were now being rounded up. He showed us the Count’s passport and finally the Count himself, who, with his wife, was now under guard in an outbuilding of the Gebbi. As a large proportion of the Count’s agents were boys who had been educated at the mission school, unfounded suspicion had also fallen upon the Franciscan friars. We took photographs of the Gebbi and the Count’s house, of the lion cubs and the place of his imprisonment, of the slave in charge of the lions and the captain of the guard. A dramatic moment came when we expressed a wish to photograph the detective responsible for the arrest.

  ‘You wish to photograph the detective?’ said Kebreth. ‘He stands before you. It was I.’

  So we photographed Kebreth too, beaming through his horn-rimmed spectacles, and returned to Mohamed Ali’s with the feeling that we were on to a good thing. It seemed to have all the ingredients of a newspaper story – even an imprisoned ‘bride’. Moreover, there was no possibility of any other journalist having got it. We happily imagined cables arriving for our colleagues in Addis. ‘Badly left Roquefeuil story’ and ‘Investigate imprisoned countess Jijiga.’ It was now Friday morning. If we were to reach the Saturday papers it must be cabled by seven o’clock. Patrick and I feverishly typed out our reports while Charles engaged a car to take them to the nearest wireless station at Hargeisa, in British Somaliland, and Kebreth obligingly made out a pass for his journey.

  When our cables were safely on their way, Patrick and I walked out into the town and there had another stroke of good luck. It was midday and the people were trooping into the little mosque to their prayers. A car drove up and there emerged a stocky figure in a black cossack hat. It was Wehib Pasha, a Turkish veteran of the Gallipoli campaign, one of the major mystery men of the country. He had left Addis in the greatest secrecy. There had been rumours that he was bound for the Ogaden. Some said he was on a religious mission, to preach a Moslem crusade against the Italians; others that he was to be the new Moslem Ras, whose appointment was hinted at. Patrick had interviewed him in Addis and found him profoundly uncommunicative.

  His disgust at seeing us was highly gratifying. He shot into the mosque and sent his secretary-companion – an elegant Greek youth with a poetic black beard and immense, sorrowful eyes – to inform us that we were not to follow him about, and that if we took any photographs he would have our cameras destroyed. We sent Mata Hari into the mosque after him and told him to make enquiries in the market about what the Pasha was doing. The reply, which we got some hours later, disentangled from Mata Hari’s more obvious intentions, was that the Pasha had recruited a large labour gang and was leaving next day for the south in a train of lorries, to dig lion pits for the Italian tanks.

  Feeling that our trip to Jijiga had been a triumphant success, Patrick and I made our arrangements with a half-caste lorry driver to return next day t
o Harar. There remained the delicate question of whether or no we should tip Kebreth. Gabri and Mata Hari, when consulted, said of course all officials must be tipped on all occasions; Gabri alone showed some anxiety that we would give too much. Accordingly when Kebreth came in that evening for a drink with us, Patrick produced a note and with great tact suggested that we should be glad if he would distribute a small sum to the poor of the town in acknowledgement of our enjoyable visit.

  Kebreth had no respect for these euphemisms; he thanked us, but said with great composure that times had changed and Ethiopian officials now received their wages regularly.

  Five hours’ delay next morning in getting on the road. Our half-caste driver made one excuse and then another – he had to take some mail for the government, he was awaiting another passenger, the municipal officer had not yet signed his pass. At last Mata Hari explained the difficulty; there was shooting on the road; a handful of soldiers in the manner of the country had taken to the bush and were at war with the garrison. ‘This driver is a very fearful man,’ said Mata Hari.

  Presently, when the half-caste had at last been taunted into activity by our staff, the danger passed. Less than a mile outside the town we met soldiers coming back, dragging some very battered prisoners. ‘Perhaps they will be whipped to death. Perhaps they will only be hanged,’ said Mata Hari.

  We were still in a mood of self-approval. We wondered whether any of our messages had yet arrived in London and whether Patrick had got in first with the Saturday evening edition, or I on Monday morning. We expected cables of congratulation. There was a cable for me. It said, ‘What do you know Anglo American oil concession?’ Evidently our messages had been delayed; but as there was no possible competitor, we were not alarmed. I replied ‘Apply local agent for commercial intelligence Addis’, and, still in good humour, went up to dine at the Consulate.

  Next morning there was another cable, a day old: ‘Must have fullest details oil concession.’ I replied: ‘Absolutely impossible obtain Addis news Harar.’ Before luncheon there was a third: ‘Badly left oil concession suggest your return Addis immediately.’

  It was now clear that something important had happened in our absence, which eclipsed our stories of Roquefeuil and Wehib Pasha. A two-day train left Dirre-Dowa for Addis on Tuesday morning. In low spirits Patrick and I arranged for our departure.

  Harar had suddenly lost its charm. News of the events at Jijiga had filtered through in wildly exaggerated forms; the town was inflamed with spy-mania. Mata Hari was promptly gaoled on the evening of his return. We bought him out, but he seemed to expect hourly re-arrest. The chief of police may have had some reprimand for allowing us to go to Jijiga or perhaps it was only that his cold was worse; whatever the reason, his manner had entirely changed towards us and he was now haughty and suspicious. Mr Carassellos was in a condition of infectious agitation. Half his friends had just been arrested and cross-examined under suspicion of complicity with Roquefeuil. He was expecting the soldiers to come for him any minute.

  Roquefeuil and the native prisoners arrived on Sunday night. Throughout the day on Monday, Mata Hari popped in on us with fragments of unlikely news about his trial; that he was in the common prison, that the Emperor was coming in person to supervise his execution; that he had boasted, ‘In seven days’ time this town will be in the hands of Italy and I shall be avenged.’ But the story had lost its interest for us.

  No one in Harar knew anything about an oil concession. The first information we received was at Dirre-Dowa, where a young official explained that the Emperor had leased most of the country to America. At Awash we learned that Mr Rickett was associated with the business. At Addis, on Wednesday night, we found that the story was already stale. It was a sensational story which, for a few days, threatened to influence international politics.

  Mr Rickett, as the agent of a group of American financiers, had secured from the Emperor a concession for mineral rights of unprecedented dimensions. The territory affected was that bordering on the Italian possessions over which the Italian troops would presumably seek to advance, and which, presumably, they hoped to annex.

  Had the concession been made in 1934, it is difficult to see how the United States government could have permitted Italian occupation. As it was, in Septemper 1935, with war already inevitable, the States Department at Washington intervened against the Emperor and forbade the ratification of the concession. By doing so they virtually recognized Italy’s right to conquer, for, while he was still a sovereign ruler, they refused to recognize the Emperor’s right to grant concessions within his own dominions. The Emperor had reverted to the traditional policy of balancing the self-aggrandizement of the white peoples one against another, and it failed. After that he was left with no cards to play except international justice, collective security and the overweening confidence of his fighting forces. He played the first two astutely enough; the third turned out to be valueless.

  On our return to Addis Ababa we found the temporary white population still further increased. Before the outbreak of war the number of accredited journalists and photographers was rather more than a hundred. They showed almost every diversity which the human species produces. There was a simian Sudanese, who travelled under a Brazilian passport and worked for an Egyptian paper; there was a monocled Latvian colonel, who was said at an earlier stage of his life to have worked as ring-master in a German circus; there was a German who travelled under the name of Haroun al Raschid, a title, he said, which had been conferred on him during the Dardanelles campaign by the late Sultan of Turkey; his head was completely hairless; his wife shaved it for him, emphasizing the frequent slips of her razor with tufts of cotton wool. There was a venerable American, clothed always in dingy black, who seemed to have strayed from the pulpit of a religious conventicle; he wrote imaginative despatches of great length and flamboyancy. There was an Austrian, in Alpine costume, with crimped flaxen hair, the group leader, one would have thought, of some Central-European Youth Movement; a pair of rubicund young colonials, who came out on chance and were doing brisk business with numberless competing organizations; two indistinguishable Japanese, who beamed at the world through horn-rimmed spectacles and played interminable, highly dexterous games of ping-pong in Mme Idot’s bar. These formed an exotic background that was very welcome, for the majority of the regular pressmen were an anxious, restless, mutually suspicious crowd, all weighed down with the consciousness that they were not getting the news.

  It was a disheartening quest. The situation throughout the whole of September was perfectly clear. Everyone was waiting for Italy at her own convenience to begin the war.

  There were reports from all over the country of extensive troop movements. The order for general mobilization had not been made. The news of its promulgation was cabled back almost daily by one or other of the special correspondents: ‘War drums beating in the North – the Emperor raises the Standard of Solomon.’ Almost daily enquiries came from Fleet Street, ‘What truth general mobilization?’ Like almost every important event in the war it was so often anticipated and so often denied that, when it actually happened, it had lost all its interest.

  No answer was given to our applications for leave to travel. We were obliged to rely for information about what was happening in the interior upon the army of Greek and Levantine spies who frequented Mme Moriatis’s bar. Most of these men were pluralists, being in the pay not only of several competing journalists at once but also of the Italian Legation, the Abyssinian secret police, or both.

  The railway station was a centre of minor information. Half the white population and practically all the Press were on the platform for each departure. There was seldom any very sensational occurrence; sometimes an Indian would be arrested smuggling dollars; there were always tears; once or twice an Abyssinian dignitary left on an official mission, attended by a great entourage, bowing, embracing his knees, and kissing him firmly on his bearded cheeks. At any time there was a fair amount of rough and tumble at the Ad
dis terminus between Arab porters and station police. This served to give colour to the descriptions of panic and extravagant lamentation which were dutifully cabled to Fleet Street.

  The arrivals in the evening were more interesting, for anyone visiting Addis at this season was a potential public character, perhaps another Rickett. Two humane English colonels excited feverish speculation for a few days until it was discovered that they were merely emissaries of a World League for the Abolition of Fascism. There was a Negro from South Africa who claimed to be a Tigrean, and represented another World League for the abolition, I think, of the white races, and a Greek who claimed to be a Bourbon prince and represented some unspecified and unrealized ambitions of his own. There was an American who claimed to be a French viscount and represented a league, founded in Monte Carlo, for the provision of an Ethiopian Disperata squadron, for the bombardment of Assab. There was a completely unambiguous British adventurer, who claimed to have been one of Al Capone’s bodyguards and wanted a job; and an ex-officer of the R.A.F. who started to live in some style with a pair of horses, a bull terrier and a cavalry moustache – he wanted a job too. All these unusual characters were good for a paragraph.

  There was also a mysterious and, I am now inclined to believe, non-existent force of Yemen Arabs which made a fitful appearance in our despatches. By some accounts they were still in the Yemen and were waiting orders for the attack from the Imam of Sana. They were to cross the Red Sea in a fleet of dhows, fall upon Assab and massacre the garrison. Another version had it that they were already in Addis, organized as a fighting corps. They were constantly reported as parading at the palace and offering their arms and fortune in the Emperor’s service. There was in fact a number of venerable old traders from the Yemen, dotted about the bazaar quarter. If two of them sat down together for a cup of coffee it was described as a military consultation.