Chapter 131:

Words : 1232 Updated : Sep 17th, 2025

Chapter 131: "War makes its choices early.”The sun over Sicily was pitiless. At a dry valley north of Siracusa, dust rose through the wind like ash. Italian Fascist engineers had turned a barren land into a mock battlefield for the Blackshirt militias. S~eaʀᴄh the Novёlƒire.n(e)t website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality. Cacti were used to simulate dense brush, old farm huts were reconstructed to resemble Ethiopian tukuls, and loudspeakers played recordings of tribal drums and war cries at full volume. The training was not ceremonial. It was chaos. Colonel Vincenzo Lisi stood on a small hill, binoculars raised, eyes scanning the maneuver drill below. Blackshirt soldiers some barely twenty scrambled under barbed wire, crawled through trenches flooded with waste water, and practiced flanking maneuvers against wooden targets marked with Amharic script. Lisi turned to his adjutant. "Mark every man who hesitates. Send them back to Palermo. We don’t need parades in East Africa. We need hounds." "Yes, sir." A loud bang cut through the smoke. One of the trainees had tripped a live concussion grenade used for shock simulation. Two others hit the ground and froze. Lisi sneered. "You freeze in Ethiopia, you don’t go home in a crate you rot in a ditch." He walked toward the instructor line and raised his voice. "Understand this in the jungle, the highland, the dust you will not find medals. You will find disease. Mud. Silence. And warriors who don’t care for our flags. You will not be facing uniforms. You will be facing people. And you must unmake them." There was no applause. One conscript approached Lisi later, covered in mud. "Sir," he asked quietly, "is it true the Abyssinians use poison?" Lisi smirked. "No, private. They use memory. That’s worse." Thousands of miles away, in the hard soil of southern Italian Somaliland, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani leaned over a dusty map spread across an oil drum. Around him, Italian officers stood at attention in sweat-soaked uniforms. "We are not pacifying," Graziani said. "We are erasing." His boot ground into the dirt. "This border is fiction. These hills fiction. What exists is what we choose to hold." An officer interrupted, "Marshal, the tribal councils in Afder are resisting. They’ve cut telegraph lines and refuse to hand over conscripts." Graziani didn’t blink. "Then we turn off the taps. No water in, no grain out. Seal the perimeter. Those hills will surrender when the vultures return." He circled a set of points on the map. "Five holding camps. One here near Dolo. Another west of Ferfer. Use barbed wire, timber if you must. Separate by age and sex. Any protest, dissolve the camp." The officers hesitated. "And Geneva?" "What Geneva?" Graziani snapped. "Geneva is for men who lose wars." Nearby, trucks unloaded wooden crates marked "AGRICULTURAL SUPPLIES." Inside were mortar shells, tear gas grenades, and rolled barbed wire. By nightfall, engineers began digging trenches not for defense but for control. In Harlem. At a small union hall on 135th Street, Reverend Elias Brown stood at the front of a packed room, waving a telegram in one hand. "They heard us," he said, "but they refuse to answer." Frederick Toussaint stood beside him angrier, holding a sheaf of papers petition signatures. "Fifth letter sent. Third one ignored," he said. "Not even a statement. The White House is quiet. But we won’t be." From the back of the room Annabelle Court stood. "We organize. We print more. Schools. Churches. Let every block in this city know Ethiopia stands alone except for us." Murmurs of agreement rippled across the room. Brown raised the telegram again. "We say this now if Ethiopia is abandoned, the Black world must never forget who walked away first." A student called out, "What do we do next?" Toussaint smiled grimly. "We write a sixth." In Addis Ababa, rain fell like judgment. Emperor Haile Selassie stood at the palace window, watching the courtyard flood with muddy water. The storm soaked the helmets of his Imperial Guard, but they stood firm. Captain Desta entered with a cloth-wrapped document. "Your Majesty. Another letter from Harlem. This one went to every member of Congress." Selassie opened it slowly. The language was clear, strong, heartfelt. Like the last four. He handed it back. "They shout. Again. Louder than any diplomat." "They ask if we’ve received support." "Tell them the rifles they sent never arrived. Only their courage did." Desta placed the letter aside. "We have reports from Somali border posts. Graziani is building detainment zones. Civilian villages cleared. Bombers moving into Eritrea." "And the British?" "No comment." "French?" "Less." Selassie turned. "Then the West has chosen silence. We must now become noise." He stepped toward the map table, pointing at Adwa, Makale, and the Bale Mountains. "I want field teams embedded in every village. Priests, elders, former soldiers. If the army breaks, the land must fight." Desta hesitated. "And the diplomats?" "Tell them we are closed for negotiation." Back in Sicily, night drills continued. Lisi ordered blackout conditions no fires, no noise. Recruits stumbled in total darkness through obstacle fields with thornbrush and tripwires. A sergeant barked orders from a ditch. A recruit panicked when he heard distant chanting played over a loudspeaker a recording of Ethiopian battle hymns collected from old colonial reports. He froze. Lisi appeared out of the dark like a ghost, slammed the butt of his revolver into the mud beside the soldier, and hissed. "That sound is your future. Learn it. Fear it. Then kill it." By midnight, six men had dropped from exhaustion. Three would be transferred. Two would be discharged. One would not wake up. The medical officer found him face down in the dirt. "Heatstroke," he reported. Lisi simply said, "War makes its choices early." Back in Addis, Selassie met with the Council of Nobles by candlelight. Their faces were stern and voices low. "We must move the treasury," one said. "No," Selassie replied. "We move it, and the people believe we have lost already." "But the roads may be cut." "Then bury it." The men fell silent. "Let the invader find only dust and debt," Selassie continued. "Not our soul." Another noble asked, "Will we fall back to Dessie?" Selassie answered, "We do not fall. We shift. The Lion of Judah has many hills." A priest nodded. "Then may the invaders find us in every shadow." Selassie touched the table gently. "They will come with maps. We will give them ghosts." Back in Harlem, Toussaint lit a cigarette on the stoop of the union hall. He watched the kids play kickball in the alley. One of them wore a paper crown someone had told him about Haile Selassie at school. Brown came out beside him, holding a cup of bitter coffee. "They’ll remember this," Brown said. Toussaint exhaled. "So will Ethiopia." Back on the Somali frontier, Graziani raised his glass of gin beneath the stars and stared toward the hills. "To October," he said. His officers murmured, "To Rome." Inside his tent, the map of Ethiopia was pinned across the wall, marked not with borders, but with erasure. At the Lion’s Palace in Addis, Selassie stood alone on the steps, looking out into the rain. A single guard stood at attention behind him. He said softly: "They bring fire." Then added: "Let them burn with it."

Chapter 131:

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