Champion & Challenger

Two scrappy middleweights now in training for the Battle of the Decade are Ethiopia, the Champion who won at Adowa in 1896, and Italy, the Challenger now set for a spectacular comeback. Last week the New York Herald Tribune finally succeeded in placing a word wizard in each training camp and printed their dispatches prizefightwise daily in adjoining columns.

"The Ethiopian Lion is quietly sharpening his claws in preparation for the moment when he will pit his courage, savage skill and crude weapons against the scientifically equipped Italian Jackal," cabled the Herald Tribune's Linton Wells from the Champion's corner in Addis Ababa, taking sides at once as a good fight reporter must. "What impresses one particularly is the amazing morale of these classic-featured, bushy-haired black men. . . . So eager to fight are the Ethiopian lions that the Emperor is able only with difficulty to restrain them from attacking the Italians and precipitating the conflict."

From the new, fast-growing Fascist war base at Asmara (TIME, Aug. 26) in Eritrea, the Herald Tribune's John T. Whitaker reported on the Challenger:

"In mountains as green and cool as those around Geneva, 120,000 bronzed and singing troops of Fascist Italy are marching today along the road of empire to plant their Roman eagles before the Council of the League of Nations ends its deliberations.

"Flying from the cool mountains around Asmara to the steaming caldron of Massaua, Italy's Red Sea port, your correspondent, piloted by Count Galeazzo Ciano, son-in-law of Premier Benito Mussolini, saw something today of the tremendous preparations for Il Duce's drive into Ethiopia and found a new respect for the men working behind the lines. Il Duce's two flying sons, Victor and Bruno, were at the airport here at dawn today when the correspondent, flying from Khartum, in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, landed. Mussolini's kinsmen were screwing fuses into bombs, with comrades of lesser station but no less keen to begin the big show. . . ."

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