Word: ethiopia
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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From Assab on the Red Sea, a second army bore straight in, parallel to the French Somaliland frontier, in an effort to cut Ethiopia's only railroad at Dire Dawa (see map, p. 18). Fighting as hard, suffering as much as the publicized troops to the north, they had captured the mountain of Mussa Ali last week and were slowly driving through desert country toward the railroad. Well aware was the Conquering Lion of Judah of the importance of this force. At Jigjiga, 65 miles from Dire Dawa, he had assembled the best equipped, best trained of his fighters...
...Cross hospital, as later claimed by Haile Selassie. *For at least 300 years various Ethiopian princes, all claiming direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, had been vainly nominating themselves Negus Negasti (King of Kings) of Ethiopia, sometimes three at a time, when Menelik (born Sahala Mariem) was born in 1844 to the King of the stock-raising Shoans and Gallas of central and southern Ethiopia. Like many another conqueror, Menelik spent his youth as the captive of his father's enemies. Not until he was 45 was he able to wangle the title of Negus...
...news that three Italian army columns had crossed Ethiopia's far northern border reached Addis Ababa last week in a crashing thunderstorm. That night little Emperor Haile Selassie talked long with his white advisers, prayed longer to his dusky Coptic God. At dawn the lean Semitic Negroes began moving down out of the eucalyptus forests toward the palace. The guards let 5,000 into the palace grounds. While the Emperor watched the mob from a window, his Chancellor Haile Wolde-Roufe read out in the Amharic tongue Ethiopia's first effort at a modern mobilization order...
...booming throbbed, swelled, seemed to shake the air. On each of the mountain tops that hang over Addis Ababa other drummers smacked their drumheads. The monotonous, terrible call to war spread out from the capital, from mountain top to mountain top, across the wild gorges, jungles and plateaus of Ethiopia, until it rolled into the capitals of the six great rases (princes), whose war drums took it up, passed it on to the great chiefs and the little chiefs. To the farthest nomadic tribes, foraging no one knew where, couriers rode out by mule and camel. "Kitet!" was the word...
...congested rage of six long months of restraint boiled up out of one of the world's most naturally savage peoples. Mobilization means nothing in Ethiopia. When the drums sound, the men go to their chiefs, the chiefs start for the enemy and the war is on. In Addis Ababa the 5,000 in the Emperor's courtyard heard the order out, solemnly applauded three times, then went into a fit. They brandished their swords, accidentally slicing off some of each other's ears and noses, spotted a nearby huddle of white news hawks and had almost...