CAESAR IN ABYSSINIA 59

manoeuvres were cleverly executed. They presented no
mass front, they penetrated suddenly, and they concealed
their movements and their numbers from the air.

The second handicap under which they suffered was a
lack of leaders trained in war outside their own frontiers,
or against foreigners. The whole period since the first
battle of Adowa had been one of material modernisation
in the capital, the slight disturbance of the social system
which resulted growing in intensity as the power of the
central authority, personified in Menelik, gradually
decayed : followed by a period of acute civil wars, which
spilled blood over all the mountains of Ethiopia. From
1916 to 1930, undisturbed by any foreign menace, the
struggle between the centre and the Ras, between
modernisation and suspicion of anything foreign continued
to be crowned in the end by the triumph of Power of the
Trinity the First.

During this period the last Emperor of Ethiopia had
been the sole channel of modern influence in his country :
apart from the automatic modernisation caused without
plan by the ordinary commercial contacts. Eventually it
was fatigue with war and disorder that turned the Ethiopian
population at the centre to Haile Selassie. He personified
for them diplomatic wisdom, peacefulness, order and
neatness.

From 1916 to 1930 the vague Ethiopian "feudal"
system, which is really a tough man system, liable at any
moment, as it has been throughout the centuries, to
sudden collapse and regeneration round a dominant type,
was interested only in itself. It was Ethiopia's private
tragedy that this was the period of the World War. Fight-
ing in the far-away clouds of the plateau and the un-
explored provinces, she could learn nothing of the fearful
military progress made in the world outside.

Compare the attitude of Menelik who imported the most
modern rifles of his day and that of Zauditu, the Empress,
his daughter, who refused to allow her heir, Ras Tafari, to
assemble an aeroplane in Addis because it was an accursed
modern invention.

In the event, the Italo-Ethiopian war produced dis-
tinguished soldiers on the Ethiopian side, some of whom,
dead or alive, remained in Ethiopia after the great defeat: