HAILE SELASSIE: The Conquering Lion. By Leonard Mosley. Prentice-Hall. 288 pp. $6.95.

No other despot in the world has the romance and regality of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of Judah, Elect of God, King of Kings and Emperor of Ethiopia. This bronzed, slight, 72-year-old man, with curled gray hair and crinkled brow, has survived a lifetime of struggle emerging as Emperor in an era of brutal court intrigue, defending his land against the mustard gas and bombers of the Fascists, trying to modernize his medieval empire without revolution. A legend has been fashioned that describes him as an absolute yet incorruptible monarch, ruling with benevolence, not fear alone. Leonard Mosley’s book adds weight - in many ways, convincing weight - to the legend. Mosley is a British newsman and novelist who has spent much time in the Middle East and East Africa. His tone is respectful, admiring but not fawning. Mosley long ago made a hero of the little man who appealed in vain to the conscience of the League of Nations. But this does not blind him to the blemishes in the portrait.

Ethiopia in the first third of the century was a barbaric land racked by chaos and demented rule. Autocrats ruled by plunder, rape and mutilation. As Mosley details the twists of the intrigues for power, two factors seem to account for Haile Selassie’s triumph over all the other contenders for the crown. First, he had an inner strength, a ruthless drive, an efficiency, a sense of reform that Ethiopia needed at the time - all cloaked in a deceivingly mild manner. The young Haile Selassie was no paragon of reform and resolution. He seemed so only by comparison with those around him. As a young provincial governor, he taxed his peasants 50 per cent of their crop, while other governors took 90 per cent. As Regent to the Empress Zauditu, he seemed paralyzed by patience, ever willing to bide his time and do nothing about the corruption which surrounded him. The British minister wrote of him in 1917 “His apparent inability to take any firm decision in the face of difficulties . . . make[s] one almost despair of any amelioration of the state of the country.”

Second, Haile Selassie fought to power by winning the allegiance of the clergy in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and of the rases (the landowning dukes). Both the clergy and the rases evidently had suspicions about his tendencies toward reform. But he never defied these two privileged classes, and he used them in the coup d’état that deposed Emperor Lij Yasu in 1916, and eventually led to his own coronation as Emperor in 1930, at the age of 37.

Mosley believes that the new Emperor needed ten years to reform his country and prepare it for development. In the first years of the reign, he raised the status of the people from chattels of the rases to subjects of the state, enacted a written though feeble constitution, and weakened the power of the rases by sending administrators into the provinces to advise them and collect taxes. MosIey describes these as first steps from feudalism to paternalism. Haile Selassie took no more steps that decade. Mussolini saw to that.

Mosely is at his best describing the Italian invasion. The account is controlled, though some of his bitterness cuts through, particularly when he discusses the actions of his own government. The British talked loudly about resisting aggression and then instituted an arms embargo that weakened Ethiopia and failed to touch Italy at all. The British did not even support Haile Selassie’s request that the League of Nations send observers to the Ethiopia-Eritrea border to fix responsibility for aggression. Mosley describes the Stanley Baldwin cabinet, cowed by Mussolini, as “a government of craven and rather stupid men of few principles and little vision.”

The invasion began on October 2, 1935: Two months later, Mussolini, displeased with the slow pace of the war, replaced his field commander. The new commander, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, began bombing towns and hospitals, sometimes with explosives, sometimes with mustard gas. “In historical fact,” Mosley writes, “these malevolent tactics had rather less to do with the outcome of the Italo-Ethiopian War than the Ethiopians’ desperate lack of arms with which to fight back, plus sheer ignorance of how to wage a modern war.” Nor were the Ethiopians helped by the tactics of their Emperor as supreme commander. “I am no soldier,” he said. The war proved it.

Early in the war, Haile Selassie replaced an old soldier, Ras Mulugeta, as commander of his northern armies, the force that had to stop the Italians. Mosley says Ras Mulugeta had “prodigious valor and capacity for leadership,” while his successor, Ras Kassa, was “totally ignorant of the arts of war.” Haile Selassie chose Kassa “for dynastic reasons. Kassa was a senior statesman of royal blood, and therefore he must lead.” The Emperor repeated the error late in the war when he ordered a final charge against the Italians and put three inept senior rases at the head of the columns.

The final charge itself may have been a strategic error. Some military writers say it lost the war. In their view, the Emperor should have moved back and allowed the mud of the rainy season to bog down the Italian troops so far from their supply depots. But Mosley writes that the Emperor knew he had no chance of winning the war. “All he knew,” Mosley says, “was that as an Emperor he must do what was expected of an Emperor by the Ethiopian people. . . . There must be one last full-scale attack upon the enemy.” The attack began at dawn. By nightfall the Ethiopian army rushed back in panic. No soldier knew his place. No one would obey an order. A nightmarish retreat began, the soldiers pillaging and murdering their own people in the rush south to Addis Ababa. “The men were either mad or drunk and fired their rifles repeatedly into the air,” Mosley writes. “The wounded and the gassed suppurated and coughed; the Azebu Gallas [enemy tribesmen] stalked them like jackals.”

The defeated Emperor and his family took a special train on the French railroad that runs from Addis Ababa to Djibouti in French Somalia. Weary and pathetic, he boarded a British cruiser in Djibouti and sailed into exile. After he left, the Ethiopian soldiers in Addis Ababa panicked into fury, stormed and plundered the palace, killed the royal lions, looted European shops, murdered Europeans. On May 5, 1936, the Italian troops entered Addis Ababa. “We come to restore order,” said Marshal Badoglio.

On June 30, the Emperor, a little stooped and tired, contemptuous of the curses from hysterical Italian journalists in the hall, addressed the League of Nations in Geneva. In Amharic, he told the delegates, “it is international morality that is at stake.” The drama touched all those struggling against fascism. But it did not matter much to Ethiopia. The war was over. The League lifted its sanctions against Italy. One by one, every nation except the United States, Russia, Mexico and New Zealand recognized the Italian regime in Ethiopia.

Mosley tends to lose interest in events after he describes the British defeat of the Italians in East Africa, Haile Selassie’s return to Ethiopia and the end of World War II. All the excitement of the last two decades, including the abortive coup d’état of 1960, are treated in an epilogue of 8 pages. Perhaps Mosley shows discretion in skimming through these years. Addis Ababa still is a city of intrigues and rumors - people whisper tales of new attempted coups and military shakeups every day - and Mosley may have decided that he could not sift fact from fantasy without the perspective of time or the help of still-secret documentary evidence. Nevertheless, this is unfortunate. Selassie’s attempt at modernization without provoking revolution is the touchstone of his rule. It may determine whether a future Ethiopia will revere him as its redeemer or curse him as a reactionary tyrant.

Selassie has expanded the Ethiopian educational system to produce the intellectual manpower that a modern society demands. He has invited the Organization of African Unity to make its headquarters in Addis Ababa, drawing in all the more radical thought of those who govern the rest of the continent. He has accepted huge grants of assistance from the United States and other countries to train and equip his armed forces with modern materiel and modern thought. At the same time, he has only toyed with the power of the rases and the clergy. His modernization has given the young elite hope, but not power. Many find their way blocked in the ministries by traditionalists with ties to the feudal lords. In addition, education has driven home to the young the fact that Ethiopia can never emerge into the modern world until it breaks the shackles of feudalism. That is why the university students marched through Addis Ababa recently demanding reform of the feudal land system. “Land to the tiller,” they cried. Yet the Emperor, while sympathetic to these demands, so far has failed to smash the feudal powers of the rases and the clergy.

Mosley understands Haile Selassie’s dilemma. “He has lost the admiration of the young elite by the sluggishness of his reforms and his insistence on feudal privileges,” he writes, “but he stands to lose his throne the moment he improves conditions too radically.” Perhaps no modernization, no break with feudalism can ever come to Ethiopia with a man so beholden to feudalism at the helm. Haile Selassie may be esteemed not as the Emperor who led Ethiopia out of the Dark Ages but as the enlightened monarch who paved the way for revolution. If Mosley doesn’t explore this enough, he does give us the history we need in order to understand the tensions which characterize Ethiopia today.

Stanley Meisler is a frequent Nation contributor.