General Graziani looked over one of his militia regiments as they busied themselves preparing for the next Ethiopian attack. He was proud of them, in a way, as they had managed to repel completely another Ethiopian attack a few weeks before. But the Ethiopians were attacking his position in Moyale yet again, and Graziani had to defend again with only lousy militiamen. The battle had already lasted a few days, and this was the skirmish that would determine who would win this struggle. He was on top of a hill, with the militiamen in three defensive lines below. The Ethiopians would come soon, all he had to do was wait.
“General, I-a think that you-a should come and look-a at this,” called the regimental sentry, who was the only other soul sharing this hilltop.
Graziani sauntered over to the sentry, who was using the regiment’s only field glass. In fact, he was the only one in the regiment authorised to use the field glass, due to the fact that he knew that you were supposed to look through the small end. “What is it, sentry?” he asked.
“Mia God...” Graziani could hear the sheer terror in the young sentry’s voice.
“What is it, sentry?” Graziani repeated.
“Mia God...” the sentry repeated, then gulped. “They’re-a....they’re-a Belgians, sir.”
“What?” Graziani took the field glass from the sentry and peered through it. “No... not Belgians. But I’m afraid that they’re just as worse.”
“Dutch?” The sentry visibly paled from the thought.
“No, not Dutch. At least we have been spared that. No... They are Ethiopians, that were trained by Belgians into their ways of war...”
“The-a Belgian ways of war... May-a God help us all...”
The Belgian-trained Ethiopians were indeed fearsome, marching and acting all the while as if they were Belgians. They might have as well have been. For one, they were holding cardboard tubes and strange round containers instead of rifles and grenades. Of course, the Italian militiamen were no better. Due to the rifle shortage, (caused by the recent rifle tree blight that was spreading in northern Italy’s arboretums) the Italian militiamen had been armed with baguettes.
But strangely, for some reason, some of the Ethiopia-Belgians were marching in threes while inside a cardboard box they were holding around their sides. Peering through the field glass, Graziani could read the word ‘Tank’ written prominently onto the side of each of those cardboard boxes. Graziani now understood. They were Belgian tanks.
One of the aforementioned Belgian tanks approached one of the few Italian tanks that had been attached to the regiment on the front line. The Italian tank turned towards it and fired its cannon. Unfortunately, the Italian tank’s turret was backwards, and the cannon shot ended up killing seventeen Italian soldiers. But before the tank crew could turn the turret around, the Belgian ‘tank’’s lead crewman shouted ‘Bang!” at its Italian counterpart, which was destroyed in a huge fireball as its fuel tank and ammunition store ignited.
Graziani smacked his forehead as similar incidents repeated themselves while the Ethiopians reamed through the first line.
But the second line would be more difficult to break, as they were entrenched in, well, trenches. Of course, the Italian militiamen had claimed that they had dug the trench, but Graziani knew that the trench had been there all along. After all, Italian militiamen were too lazy to dig trenches. Anyways, the trench indeed worked, as no matter how many times the Belgian ‘tanks’ shouted “Bang!” at the entrenched Italian soldiers, none of them fell dead. Supposedly, the imaginary shells simply flew over the heads of the Italians in the trench.
Then, the Belgianified Ethiopians opened their round containers, showing that they were not carrying grenades, but something far worse.
“Belgian waffles...” Graziani was now trembling in fear for those poor, doomed Italians soldiers in the second line. Shouting the Belgian warcry, the Belgiano-Ethiopios raised their Belgian waffles and leaped into the trench, using Belgian stabbing techniques to deadify their enemies. The Italians tried to fight back with their baguettes, but it was no use. Soon, every militiaman in the trench was dead.
“The Ethiopian-Belgians are reaching the third line!” Graziani panicked.
“Do-a not worry, General! Do-a you-a remember that moat we were supposed to dig?”
“Yes. Have you idiots actually managed to do something right?”
“Well, not-a really. But we-a have the next best thing.” At this point, the third line of Italian militiamen unfurled the ground, or in other words the giant sand-coloured tarp that concealed a....
Pair of lines drawn in the sand twenty yards apart, labelled prominently with the word ‘Moat’.
“What!?” yell/asked a furious Graziani. “What is
that going to do!?”
“But-a remember, General. These-a Ethiopians are-a trained in the Belgian ways of-a war. The
Belgian ways of-a war.”
Graziani suddenly understood. “I see, the
Belgian ways of war!” They both laughed, as they watched as the Ethiopio-Belgianic infantry approached the drawn lines, read what it was supposed to be, and came to a complete halt.
Graziani grinned from ear to ear. Perhaps they would win after all. Soon the entire Ethiopia-Belgian army was on the other side of the ‘moat’, staring at the Italian defenders on the other side, who were making funny faces in return.
But what happened next shocked them all, as the Belgio-Ethiopic soldiers began to cross out the ‘Tank’ on the side of their ‘tanks’, and write in ‘Battleship’. Then the infantrymen piled in the ‘Battleships‘, and together they proceeded to cross the ‘Moat’. The Belgian tanks had turned into a Belgian Armada...
Just then, a messenger ran up to General Graziani, saluted, then proceeded to read, very very loudly, his message.
“Sir! Belgian Nucelar and Biological weapons have been launched from Brussels!”
“What!?”
“Sorry.” He turned the paper upside-down. “Sir! Mussolini demands to know why you have not given his alarm clock its celery bath!”
“WHAT!?”
“Sorry again, sir.” The messenger sheepishly turned the paper ninety degrees to the right. “Your wife is hot!”
“Sorry, General Graziani,” the sentry intervened before the situation grew worse, “this-a here-a is Dyslexic Dan. Si, his-a eyes are-a always crossed like that.” Graziani could now see that the messenger’s eyes were indeed very crossed. The sentry took the message from the cross-eyed messenger and proceeded to read it. “Sorry for-a leaving you-a in-a your time-a of need, but we’re-a all cowardly militiamen with-a low org. Sincerely, the-a rest of your-a two divisions.” The sentry looked up. “Sorry, mia General.”
“It is all right, sentry. It is not your fault.“ He turned to Dyslexic Dan. “Messenger, you are dismissed.” The messenger saluted and promptly ran headlong into a wall. Which was quite amazing, because the nearest wall was at least thirty miles away from the sun-blasted desert in which they were standing.
Graziani sighed again. “Is all of the Italian Army made up of incompetents such as these?” he lamented. When he looked down at the battle still going on below, he received his answer. The Ethiopic-Belgian ‘Armada’ had reached the other side of the ‘moat’ and were in the process of crossing out the ‘Battleship’ painted on their sides and writing in ‘Tank’ again. Then they proceeded to move forward, yelling “Bang!” at the defending Italian soldiers, who promptly began falling over dead. The ones who weren’t dead kept trying to fire their baguettes at the ‘Tanks’, with no avail. With the last line of defence clearly broken, the Belgianised Ethiopians would reach Graziani and the hill-top soon.
“Sentry,” Graziani began speaking to the sentry, “As the only competent soldier in the Italian Army, it is imperative that you escape from this battle alive. I will hold those Ethiopia-Belgics off by myself.”
“Truly-a, sir? Thank-a you.” Then the sentry ran off to the south, towards which the rest of Graziani’s low-org militiamen had fled.
Thus Graziani faced the Belgian-Ethiopics that were advancing up the hillside alone. Summoning all of his reserve energy, he released the infamous Italian Battle Cry. While the rest of the Italian Army at this point could have been defeated by an army of angry toddlers, the one thing that the Italians had going for them was their awesome battle cry. Combining the emotions of passion, anger, revenge, and avoiding latrine duty whenever possible, the mighty Italian Battle Cry encompassed all of the emotions needed for a soldier to do his duty. Unfortunately, to encompass all of these emotions, the Italian Battle Cry had to be a little over three hours in length. By the time ten minutes of the famous Italian Battle Cry had passed, the Belgio-Ethiopian soldiers had surrounded Graziani and the hilltop. Then they waited for the next two hours and fifty-seven minutes, until Graziani finally finished the cry, realised that he was surrounded, and surrendered.
