Prevail by Jeff Pearce

Author:Jeff Pearce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

The train for the exiles arrived late in Djibouti, and Haile Selassie emerged, bareheaded, dressed in white, save for his brown cape. Empress Menen was heavily veiled and apparently overcome with emotion. Reporters noted how fatigued and thin Haile Selassie looked, and then, being professionals, pestered him with questions. “I did not desert my people,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “It was not fear of continuing the war, but I saw the impossibility of my unarmed and brave warriors competing with modern weapons, especially gas. I therefore left to avoid further bloodshed and destruction.”55

There were more embarrassments and humiliating complications to endure. An Italian tried to photograph the Emperor, but Haile Selassie’s guards moved in to intercept the man and blows were exchanged right in front of their consulate. When the royal party wanted to send telegrams to Addis Ababa, they were refused by the Djibouti post office. The British authorities wouldn’t let everyone onboard the ship heading up the Red Sea. Forty-seven of the eighty-plus Ethiopians had to stay behind.

It could have been worse. Britain’s ambassador to Italy, Eric Drummond, had been lobbying to pawn off Haile Selassie and his retinue altogether on the French: “In view of high feelings against us here, I should feel considerably happier if the French could be induced to take the major part of the responsibility for the Emperor’s journey to the Suez.”56 The French said no.

If it wasn’t apparent before, it was becoming starkly clear that the Ethiopian royals were no longer in charge of their own fate. Bugles from Senegalese troops were sounded as the Emperor and his family got into cars to take them to the docks, and a somber crowd waited in the smothering heat for just this sad spectacle. There was the empty pomp of a gun salute, and then a launch took the imperial family out to the HMS Enterprise, which was to bring them to Haifa in British-held Palestine. From there, they would go on to Jerusalem.

It would be years before Haile Selassie set foot again on Ethiopian soil.

* * *

On May 5, the riots in Addis Ababa finally ended. Marcel Junod emerged from his last hiding spot at the French embassy and found the streets “silent and deserted,” with smoke still rising from burned-out buildings and corpses among the ruins. There were carpets and other furniture debris strewn about the gardens of the Imperial Palace. “Even the [other] hospitals were empty,” Junod wrote later. “The wards had been ransacked and the dispensaries rifled. The patients had all disappeared, taking material and medicaments with them.”57

In the middle of the afternoon, the whole city could hear a long, reverberating rumble, which grew steadily louder. Marcel Junod wandered, as did others, over to the British legation, where the Bartons and a crowd of curious foreigners stood out front. From the steps of the embassy, they could see a great cloud of dust in the distance. George Steer stood near the Union Jack at the legation’s gates,

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