World War II started with a battle at a desert oasis in Abysinnia, or Confusion in a foreign tongue and known as Ethiopia in the west. It it the story of colonial self interest, imperialism and to subjugation. This story is a work of fiction, but the battlefield of Ethiopia and the first battle which is described in this book actually took place, much as it is laid out although historical records differ somewhat and fictional elements are added for effect. For many reasons, some good, some bad, this battlefield is only a footnote in most history books, even though the short war resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, many who died the most horrible deaths imaginable. There were scenes of death and destruction as horrible as any of those in the larger conflict that followed. The Oasis itself is isolated, perhaps the size of a small Bahamian island. It is surrounded by hard baked land which never tastes rain and the types of cacti that survive without water for months as there is no water for months. The animals are insects and those small creatures that can draw moisture and sustenance from these plants and insects or that feed on one another. The oasis is a scattered grove of trees drinking from buried water which provide some protection from the harsh sun and a well from which water may be coaxed. The green of the trees and hardy thorn bearing plants is set off by the dry cadmium and bleached white of the surrounding land. There are no cities close by; the desert towns striving to exist in the hostile environment are distant from the oasis as if even these sparse outposts of humanity are trying to hold themselves aloof from the sun seared, forbidding place. The oasis is set in as isolated a place as exists on dry land, and yet a conflict which was to consume the globe started there. But little of this appears in popular history; a single photograph, perhaps, which shows none of the horrors of the war. There is very little if anything about the effect on World War II except in scholarly texts. The reaction to this battle was the great failure of the League of Nations. So despite the importance of the first battle of World War II on subsequent events, perhaps the most famous reference in western literature to this battle occurs in a Humphrey Bogart movie made during World War II where a minor character in a single sentence tells the lead character that he is suspected of running guns in the country named Confusion in the year that followed the battle that started World War II.