Aosta on Alag?

The only sound near the top of 10,000-ft. Mount Alagi one morning last week was the chink of a chisel on stone--two workmen were carving a name into a crude headstone. Most of the graves were marked only by rough wooden crosses, hacked from ammunition boxes; beside each cross was a half-buried wine bottle, with the deceased's identification papers crammed in. The workmen, glad to be alive, chipped somberly among the graves of men who had done their brave best.

A tall young man stepped into the sunlight from the cavernous door of Fort Toselli above the unfinished cemetery. He was Prince Amadeo di Savoia, Duke of Aosta, Governor General of Italian East Africa, Viceroy of Ethiopia, and he had spent the night all alone in this echoing fort deep in the mountains of the Empire Rome had sent him to rule.

His 7,000 Italian troops, harried from position to position by the British all spring, were a mixed lot to look at. There were aviators who had not felt a joy stick for months, sailors who had swum ashore from battered battlecraft, Alpini swinging their mountain picks, Bersaglieri with un-cocky cock feathers on their steel helmets.

They had all marched down the mountain the day before to surrender to the British.

The British had let them march down carrying their weapons: a tribute to the stout hearts which even the enemy knew they had shown.

The Duke walked slowly down to the patch of graves. He looked at the letters the soldiers were chiseling: Volpini, a friend. The Duke took off his hat and bowed his head.

He had spent so many years hoping and groping for a world of reason and self-respect. As a boy he had made many friends on the playing fields of Eton. As a 17-year-old soldier he was decorated for valor in World War I. Then he had worked hard as an agent in the expansion of the Empire, in the Congo and in Libya, where he sadly disapproved of General Rodolfo Graziani's ruthlessness. At home in Italy he was the most popular member of the royal family. In Ethiopia he wanted to simplify the Italianate bureaucracy along British colonial lines, and just before assuming his duties in 1937 he visited his old friends in England.

Then war came. When the British drive began last winter he saw the hopelessness of the situation; his heart was not in fighting his friends. Month ago he asked his boss Benito ("War is the Normal State of the People") Mussolini whether he might make peace. He was ordered to continue. And so for a futile month he did his best and his men fought and died. This was the end of Aosta's young hopes.

Amadeo of Aosta stooped, laid the bare palm of his hand flat on the soil of the Empire which was no longer his to rule, stood again, and walked quickly down to the British staff car waiting for him.

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