Flashman on the March. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ Magdala, the goal of Napier’s expedition, was like that; you don’t need battlements when you have sheer rock walls below you.¹⁴

      So there you have the Abs, a pretty rum lot, first brought to our notice in the 1770s by a Scotch eccentric whom nobody believed – mind you, he was pretty rum himself, fooling about with the Barbary corsairs, seeking the source of the Nile, and finally breaking his neck while helping a lady downstairs, which shows that even the most seasoned mad adventurers can’t be too careful.¹⁵

      Very few Europeans had ventured into Abyssinia before him, for it was a traveller’s nightmare, rugged and desolate beyond description, racked by perpetual civil wars in which the tribal leaders fought for the supreme lordship. One of these, Ras Ali, had made himself king of most of the country by 1840, but made the mistake of giving his daughter, Tewabetch the Beautiful, in marriage to an ambitious young mercenary, Lijkassa, the son of a woman who sold tape-worm medicine, which the Abs take in quantity as a result of their partiality to raw beef, ’nuff said. But he was a first-class soldier, clever, brave, and unscrupulous, and in no time he’d usurped the throne.

      While still a lad, he’d become convinced that he was the Messiah named in an old prophecy and would become the greatest king on earth, master of all Ethiopia and Egypt; he would scourge the infidels out of Palestine, purge Jerusalem of its defilers (the Muslims), and would be called Theodore. So he changed his name accordingly, and proclaimed himself Emperor and King of Kings. He was young, handsome, muscular, literate (unlike most Abs), and full of reforming notions, like abolishing slavery and generally improving the lot of the commonalty. If he had a tendency to berserk rages, butchering his enemies, holding mass executions, flogging people to death or cutting off their limbs and leaving ’em for the wild beasts, well, savage despots can’t afford to behave like Tiny Tim.

      His queen was a moderating influence, and so were two Englishmen, Plowden, our consul, and Bell, a soldier of fortune who became Theodore’s chamberlain. Unfortunately all three died almost simultaneously, the two Britons cut up by rebels and Tewabetch of natural causes. Theodore massacred the rebels in reprisal, but with the three best influences in his life gone, he began to behave like a real absolute monarch at last, taking to drink and concubines and committing even more atrocities than before. He married again, but since his bride was the daughter of a rival claimant to the throne whom Theodore had humiliated and imprisoned, the marriage was not a success.

      We sent out a new consul, Captain Cameron, who presented Theodore with two pistols from Queen Victoria. This so delighted him that he wrote a letter proposing that he send an envoy to London, and remarking that he’d wiped out Plowden’s murderers ‘to win the friendship of her majesty’.

      You’d have thought he couldn’t say fairer than that, but would you believe that those monumental half-wits at the F.O. didn’t give his letter to the Queen, or even acknowledge it? Why? Oh, other things, like Bertie the Bounder’s wedding to Alexandra of Denmark,¹⁶ were occupying their lordships’ attention, and who was this distant African upstart, anyway? Or quite possibly some chinless oaf simply mistook it for his wine bill and tossed it into a pigeonhole. God knows how our foreign affairs haven’t been one long catalogue of disaster … stay, though, they have, haven’t they?

      What followed was inevitable, with a short-tempered, arrogant barbarian monarch who thought he was God’s anointed. After a year of being ignored he arrested Cameron, who’d visited Egypt, Theodore’s mortal enemy, to investigate cotton supplies which we were liable to need with the American Civil War disrupting our business. Then a missionary called Stern (who was trying to convert Abyssinian Jews to Christianity, if you’ll believe it) published offensive remarks about Theodore. Result: Cameron chained, flogged, and stretched on the rack; Stern brutally beaten and two of his servants lashed to death with hippo-hide whips; other Europeans arrested and bound with cords soaked so that they cut their limbs; missionaries forced to watch the death by torture of malefactors whose blood the executioners smeared on the horrified spectators … and so on, while the letter whose delivery might have prevented these horrors lay unanswered in Whitehall.

      Eventually a reply was sent, the messenger being a wily Oriental gentleman named Hormuzd Rassam from our Aden office who delayed six months before venturing up-country with conciliatory messages and presents which included a swing for Theodore’s children. (Gad, I’m proud to be British!) Much good it did: Rassam and his party were added to the chain gang, and at long last, after four years in which the public had heard little beyond rumours, Parliament awoke, members began to ask where Abyssinia was, and the Russell government, having stifled debate on the remarkable ground that it might irritate Theodore, fell from office, leaving the mess to the Tories who, not without agonised dithering, ordered Napier to take a force from India to Abyssinia, make a final demand for the prisoners’ release, and then ‘take such measures as he thinks expedient’, and good luck to him.

      You notice that with typical parliamentary poltroonery the Derby–D’Israeli gang left it up to the soldier to make the fatal decision, but for once I could understand if not sympathise, for if ever a government was caught between Scylla and t’other thing, they were. On the one hand, they couldn’t leave the prisoners in Theodore’s clutches, for our credit’s sake – what, have a tinpot nigger king showing us his arse? Abandoning Britons, and telling the world we couldn’t defend our own? Letting India, where we’d been given an almighty fright only ten years before, see that we could be defied with impunity? ‘Never!’ cries John Bull, even if it took an army of thousands to free a handful, and cost the three and a half million of Dizzy’s estimate, and lasted months or years, still it must be done, and that was flat.

      On the other hand, it was odds on that invasion would fail. Abyssinia was tropical territory incognita, our army would be cut off miles from the sea, without reserves, in country without roads or reliable water supply, where every ounce of food, gear, and ammunition would have to be carried – where? There was no certain information of where the captives were exactly, and what if Theodore cut their throats or carried them into the trackless fastnesses hundreds of miles inland? And what of the hundreds of thousands of ferocious tribesmen between the coast and Magdala – if indeed Magdala proved to be the goal? What if, as seemed very likely, Napier’s army vanished into the wilds of Prester John and never came out again?

      That, I’m told, was the tenor of the warnings and prophecies that filled the press when the government’s decision became known: the expedition was doomed, but it would have to go anyway.¹⁷

      But none of that was clear to me as we steamed into the dust and stink of Zoola on that fine February morning. I didn’t have the benefit of public opinion from home, and at Jedda they’d been far too taken up with pirates and pilgrims to give thought to the consequences of what was happening in the mysterious south, beyond the far-off peaks dimly seen through the haze that hung over Annesley Bay. But now you know the how and why of Napier’s expedition, and enough of the land and people for the moment. And from what I’ve told you, you may have been struck by a thought which has absolutely occurred to me only now, as I write: for perhaps the first time in her long and turbulent history Britain was going into a war which everyone believed we were going to lose. Everyone, that is, except Bughunter Bob Napier.

      The expedition had been ashore for three months, but still supply ships and troopers and men-of-war were arriving daily to swell the fleet of steamships, sailing vessels, and small craft discharging cargo on to the causeway running out into the bay. It had a railway with bogies moving the goods inshore, where they were piled in mountains of bales and boxes among the tent-lines which stretched away into the distance.

      It was a quartermaster’s nightmare, too much gear coming ashore too quickly and nowhere to put it, with confusion worse confounded by the milling mob of what someone called the ‘pierhead democracy’ – staff men and Madras coolies, generals and drummer-boys, dockside gangs both black and white labouring under despairing civilian overseers, work parties of soldiers СКАЧАТЬ