We Saw Spain Die Read Free

pathetic proportion of automatic weapons and modern rifles, and ammunition sufficient for two days’ modern battle. I have seen a child nation, ruled by a man who was both noble and intelligent, done brutally to death almost before it had begun to breathe. 10
    Moreover, as the jacket of his book proclaimed: ‘The first to arrive and the last to leave, Steer was the only correspondent who saw the campaign from beginning to end.’ His descriptions of Italian atrocities made his reputation as an intrepid war correspondent. They also ensured that, after the victorious forces of the Duce occupied the Addis Ababa on 5 May 1936, he would be expelled from Abyssinia merely eight days later, when Steer was accused of ‘anti-Italian propaganda and espionage’ on behalf of British Intelligence, and a warrant was prepared for his arrest on charges of transporting gas masks to Ethiopian troops and assisting in blowing up a road. ‘It is not surprising’, he told his newspaper, ‘that the Italians did not succeed in finding evidence to support these charges.’ The accusation derived from the fact that there had been a cargo of gas masks carried by a lorry on which he had made the perilous journey from Addis Ababa to the Emperor’s northern headquarters at Dessye, just before it was occupied by the Italians. 11 On the other hand, hints of Steer’s connections with the intelligence services would emerge from time to time.
    Steer’s nomination as special correspondent in Ethiopia had earned him the jealousy of Evelyn Waugh, who had reported for
The Times
five years earlier for the coronation of Haile Selassie, but came in August 1935 as representative of the pro-fascist
Daily Mail.
The relationship was not helped when, at their first brief encounter at a railway station, Steer failed to recognize the great novelist, taking him for just another journalist. Waugh was not exactly suited to the daily discomforts of being a war correspondent. Once, to steal a march on his colleagues, he had sent one of his despatches in Latin, a gesture which had not been well received back in London. Unlike many of his fellows, Waugh was fiercely pro-Italian, or as he described it, ‘slappers with the wops’, that is to say, on bottom-slapping terms with the Italians. He wrote to Diana Cooper: ‘I have got to hate the ethiopians more each day goodness they are lousy & i hope the organmen gas them to buggery’. Waugh was as deficient in typing skills as in the milk of human kindness.
    By his own account, Waugh was drunk much of the time in Addis Ababa and, on one occasion, he and his friend Patrick Balfour locked Steer in his room so that he would be unable to catch an important train. Bored, Waugh bought ‘a very lowspirited baboon’ which masturbated all day, and then, in the evenings, took it to the local nightclub, where it molested the whores. Steer would occasionally indulge in adolescent levity to make the time pass during interminable press conferences, and in the sterile meetings of the Foreign Press Association of which he was permanent secretary and Evelyn Waugh the minute-taker. However, he never reached the heights attained by Waugh. Indeed, Steer spent most of his time travelling all over Abyssinia and getting to know the country and its people. In October 1935, perhaps to escape Waugh, Steer moved out of the Hotel Imperial where he had been incarcerated in his room. It did him little good. Waugh and Balfour locked him in his new house and gave the key to the madame of a local bordello. Waugh’s practical joke was not the only misfortune suffered by Steer in Ras Mulugeta Bet, as his home was named. At the beginning of May 1936, it was gutted during the looting that preceded the arrival of the Italians and he had been taken in by the family of the British Minister, Sir Sidney Barton. Waugh himself never actually made it to the front, which did not distress him overmuch since hedid not take his reporting seriously. He claimed that the