Mila 18 - Leon Uris [85]
Chris made peace with himself and played it straight. He could stand nearly everything except when he interviewed the bragging, strutting aviators after they had returned from their missions of bombing and strafing undefended villages of thatched huts.
Ethiopia was not the real battleground.
The British fleet ordered a muscle-flexing maneuver in the Mediterranean. Mussolini called the bluff. There were indignant pickets in Paris and New York and London against Italian legations by people who had learned only in the last month or so that there was actually a country named Ethiopia.
For one fleeting moment the world had a twinge of conscience. An embargo was called against Italy, but it was really not an embargo at all.
Then, for all its inept and ill-fated existence, the League of Nations was honored by one great moment of human dignity. A small black man who was named the Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, made a plea to the souls of men for his people. But Ethiopia was a long way from about everywhere, and who the hell really cared about Addis Ababa?
Apathy of free men. This was the real victory. The scent of blood made the legions of Rome hungry.
On the Yangtze River an American gunboat named the Panay was sunk. Some Americans were able to convince other Americans that the Panay had no right being there in the first place. Yellow men in the Orient were battling yellow men—but that was far away too.
There followed the era of appeasement. The Versailles Treaty was broken by the tramping of German boots into the Rhineland.
The bullies grew brave.
The crucible: Spain.
“Christopher, you did a magnificent job in Ethiopia. Your restraint was remarkable. Now, Christopher! Your Italian passport is really going to come in handy,” Oscar Pecora said. “I’ve gotten you credentials to cover the Insurgent side in Spain.”
Christopher de Monti went to Spain on the Fascist side as a man obsessed with a mission. This was the climax of his life. This was the meaning of every word he had read about freedom and truth. Spain was not Ethiopia. Now the world would listen!
He joined Franco’s forces just after the conquest of Malaga. He became a man with a split personality. On the surface, Christopher de Monti sent out routine dispatches and stories expected of a competent journalist.
All his skill and ingenuity were used in smuggling stories to the free world. Using daring and cunning, he risked his life time and again to get reports over the border to the “neutral” embassies in self-exile in France.
Christopher de Monti secretly reported the arrival of millions of tons of German and Italian war materials—cannons, tanks, airplanes.
Christopher de Monti secretly reported the arrival of the first contingents of German and Italian aviators fighting for Franco.
Christopher de Monti secretly reported that Germany and Italy were using Spain as a testing ground for personnel and equipment.
Christopher de Monti secretly reported the arrival of masses of Italian ground forces.
Christopher de Monti secretly reported the atrocities committed by Franco’s Moroccan hordes and wrote the true reports that the ranks of the Catholic Church were, in actuality, with the Loyalist government.
Christopher de Monti was the first to send through a secret report that the “unidentified” submarines blockading Loyalist ports were Italian.
He was the first to send through documentary evidence that the Italian air force was murdering women and children in undefended open cities.
And he watched his work drown in a cesspool of German propaganda. The rape of Spain, the first of the great sellouts in an age of sellouts, left him a disillusioned man. Fainthearted democracies hid behind shallow words and non-intervention pacts and embargoes which penalized a democracy fighting for its life.
The world did not want to hear what Christopher de Monti risked his life to tell them.
Oscar Pecora kept a close eye on Chris and