Days of Emperor and Clown: The Italo-Ethiopian War 1935-1936

The book vividly recalls the half incredulous dismay with which most people outside Italy greeted Mussolini's act of brigandage. In 1923 he had warmly sponsored Abyssinia's admission to the League of Nations, despite the notorious addiction of some of her leading citizens to slave‐owning and slave‐trading. Five years later he had concluded with the Abyssinian Government a treaty which pledged both countries to refer any dispute between them to arbitration. By the terms of an earlier treaty with France and Britain, Italy was in any case debarred from taking in Abyssinia any action detrimental to British of French interests. Mussolini claimed that, so far as France was concerned, the French Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval had informally released him from that obligation. But he failed to convince even the most cynical observer that the British had joined the French in giving him a license to make war on his protege.

The book also reminds us that the wrong done to Abyssinia evoked protests which earlier colonialist ventures in Africa had failed to elicit, and that these were not directed solely at its perpetrator. (Many Englishmen, indeed, were just as angry with their own Government for not preventing the crime as they were with Mussolini for committing it.) Britain and France, it was said, ought to have deprived Mussolini's troops in East Africa of supplies, either by closing the Suez Canal to Italian shipping or by giving a lead to members of the League of Nations willing to put an embargo on trade with Italy.

Laurence Lafore, using material assembled over a long period by the late James Dugan, gives a lively, well‐documented account of the conflict and the events that led to it.