Needlework

Having publicly taken up knitting in Addis Ababa, as a strong hint that they feel themselves barred from all real news sources, correspondents clicked needles last week while the Ethiopian Government made by far the tallest claims they have jabbered since war broke.

Breathless, popeyed, footsore runners from the Northern Front brought Emperor Haile Selassie news that 4,700 Italians have been killed by Ethiopians in savage skirmishes bordering the area nominally conquered by Il Duce's forces. Runners from the Southern Front told of the capture from Italians of 1,000 precious rifles and 20 priceless machine guns, of Italian tanks stranded and abandoned, Italian native troops mutinying.

None of this could correspondents check, as they have been able to check Italian victories by advancing with the troops. Last week Mussolini's flying son-in-law Count Ciano led the "Desperate Squadron" on a strafing expedition possibly meant to avenge Italian reverses which, as nominal Minister for Press-Information, he could not admit. After hurling an avalanche of bombs into the Ethiopian gorges of Buia, Amba Alaji, Lake Ashanghi and Mai Mescic, chubby Count Ciano guessed the squadron had killed 2,000 Ethiopians, counted in his plane holes made by three antiaircraft shells and 36 Ethiopian bullets, some of which struck his oil tank.

From Port Said correspondents cabled that the Italian transport Toscana had just passed homeward-bound "with 76 cases containing the bodies of embalmed Italian officers" and 1,000 sick and wounded.

In an exceedingly fleet "strategic retreat" last week, Ethiopian forces under redoubtable Kassa Sebat executed the "maneuver of luring" Italian General Ruggiero Santini into ordering a whole Army corps to separate from the main Italian advance on the Northern Front and chase Ethiopians headlong, risky in Ethiopia's wilds.

Well satisfied on the whole with Ethiopia's brightest war week thus far, Emperor Haile Selassie, whom the knitting and poker-playing correspondents now call "Little Charlie" among themselves, flew to Harar on the Southern Front.

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