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 ignoring the bawlings of perspiring non-coms, clerks and water-carriers and native women forage-cutters, every sort and colour of African and Asiatic, and a positive Noah’s Ark of animals. Next to our berth on the causeway, elephants were being hoisted ashore from a barge, squealing and trumpeting as they swung perilously aloft in their belly-bands, and the crane-tackles groaned and shuddered until the great beasts came to earth with a dangerous thrashing of trunks and limbs; cursing troopers were saddling and loading mules which had one leg strapped up to prevent their lashing out; water-hoys were pumping their streams into huge wheeled tanks on the railway – for every drop of drink in Zoola had to be brought ashore from the condensers of the ships in the bay – and even as I stepped ashore one of the hoses burst asunder, gushing over the pack-mules and swirling round the feet of the elephants which bellowed and reared in panic as their drivers clung to their trunks to quiet them.
Britannia’s bridgehead into Abyssinia was, in fact, a godless mess, made infinitely worse by the dust and the stink. Beyond the harbour and camp lay a wide plain with mountains far off, but you could barely see them through the fawn-coloured cloud that hung over the tents and sheds and rootiesa and even the waters of the bay, covering everything in a fine powder which you had to be constantly brushing off your clothes and skin, and spitting out.
But it was nothing to the stink, a foul carrion-reek that took you by the throat and made breathing a poisonous misery.
“If you think this is bad you should ha’ been here a month ago,” says the transport wallah who supervised the loading of my strong-boxes into a railway bogie; he was a languid, amiable young haw-haw named Twentyman, a Hussar, complete with fly-whisk and followed by a chicob with a bucket of camphorated water whose duty it was to supply his master with wet clouts to sponge away the dust. “What is it? Thousands o’ dead beasts rottin’, that’s what. Cavalry mounts droppin’ like flies, mules too, no one knows why, vets never saw the like.” He dropped his wet rag into the bucket with a weary sigh. “Thank God for the vultures or we’d ha’ had an epidemic.”
I introduced myself, expecting to have to explain my arrival, but no such thing.
“We know all about you, Sir Harry!” says he blithely. “Mail sloop from Jedda brought word of you last week, deputation from H.Q.’s been waitin’ for three days, great excitement, what? And these are the long-awaited spondulikos, are they? Splendid, chuck ’em aboard, sarn’t, and you, dragoman, summon your stout lads to give us a shove, there’s a good chap!”
I bade a hasty farewell to Ballantyne, who was itching to get himself and his ship back into fresh air, and climbed into the bogie with Twentyman, followed by the Marines, who seated themselves on the strong-boxes.
“Sound move, sarn’t, keep their posteriors planted just so,” says Twentyman approvingly. “Can’t be too careful with the 33rd on hand, thievin’ Irish scoundrels to a man, desperate fellows. So keep an eye down on the dollars, or Paddy’ll be over the hedge with his pockets jinglin’, what? …18 I say, dragoman, jildi jao, sub admi push karo!”c
The dragoman bellowed and belaboured the coolies with his staff, and we were propelled towards the head of the causeway. I said it was as well they had a railway, with freight as heavy as mine, and how far did it go.
“Five miles, so far,” says Twentyman cheerfully. “It’s about a hundred and twenty to Attegrat, so it’s mules for you, I’m afraid, sir. They do twelve miles a day, supposin’ you can get ’em, for we’ve fewer than ten thousand pack animals when we’re supposed to have thirty thousand. Well, I ask you! Bombay bandobast,d what?”
I thanked God privately that I wasn’t part of the expedition, and asked how quickly I could get word to Napier of my arrival.
“Oh, couple of hours – telegraph’s only halfway to Attegrat, but we’ve flag signallin’ by day, magnesium flare lamps for night messages, latest thing, bang-up-to-date, what? Ah, there’s one o’ the deputation! Hollo, Henty, he’s here at last!”
As we jumped down, a burly, beef-faced chap in a dust coat and kepi was striding up, grinning hugely, with his hand out.
“Don’t remember me, Sir Harry, I’ll be bound!” cries he. “George Henty19 of the Standard – we shared a billet with Billy Russell and Lew Nolan at Sevastopol, and you went down with dysentery. Before poor old Lew got himself killed, and you and Cardigan charged to glory!”e
He pumped my fin like a long-lost brother, but shot if I could place him.
“D’ye know, you launched my journalistic career?” cries he. “I was in the hospital commissariat, you know, until I offered a piece to the Advertiser describing your part in the Charge, and … well, here I am, eh?” I found myself wondering if he was the idiot who’d written that foul purple tosh which George Paget, curse him, had clipped out and framed and hung in the 4th Lights’ mess, all about “with what nobility and power the gallant Flashman rode, his eye flashing terribly.” And farting like a deflating balloon, had they but known.
My immediate thought was to give this familiar brute a set-down, but it’s best to keep in with the press, so I cried, to be sure, I remembered him well, and how had he been all these years? He went rosy with gratitude at being remembered by the famous Flashy.
“But here’s another who’s been counting the hours to see you!” cries he, and there, emerging from a tent, came Giant Despair dressed for a gypsy wedding, and I could only stand and gape.
Bar Mangas Colorado, he was the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life, closer to seven feet than six and built like an overgrown gorilla. His enormous body was wrapped in a robe made of lions’ manes which covered him from the white scarf round his neck to his massive half-boots, he wore a black beard to his chest, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a smoking-cap, and carried a throwing spear in one hand and a straw umbrella in the other. To complete this bespoke costume, he had a sabre on his hip, a revolver in his belt, and a round native shield slung on his back. When he grinned, with a fierce glitter of teeth in the beard, he looked like a Ghazi on hasheesh – and then he spoke, brisk and high-pitched, his huge hand gently enfolding mine, and he might have been a vicar welcoming me to the sale of work.
“Charles Speedy, Sir Harry, used to be adjutant of the Tenth Punjabis, saw you once on the Grand Trunk, near Fatehpur, oh, ever so long ago, but you didn’t see me.”
Then you must have been lying down in cover and wearing mufti, thinks I. My astonishment showed, for he gave a whimsical shrug and spread his arms in display.
“Sir Robert Napier likes me to dress native, thinks it impresses the local sidis, bless ’em! I’m his political adviser, and at present your committee of welcome.” He gave another alarming grin, accompanied by even more alarming words. “Can’t tell you how glad we all are to have you with us.”
Now, that was the very first intimation I had of the possible ghastly sequel to the mission I was carrying out simply to oblige an old school chum. Of course, you could interpret the words two ways, and I lost no time in putting him right.
“I ain’t with you. Delivering the messages, rather.” I nodded at the boxes which the coolies were unloading under the watchful eye of Twentyman and my Bootneck sergeant. “I hear it’ll take ten days to get ’em up to Napier by mule. How short o’ the ready is he?”
“Tight, but one chestful of dollars should cover his immediate needs, and we’ll get those to him inside forty-eight hours. Can’t have his pockets to let when he meets the King of Tigre to arrange our passage through his territory. Napier’s been waiting beyond Attegrat for days, but his majesty’s hanging back, scared to commit himself, likely. Theodore may be a long way off, but these petty rulers go in terror of him still.” He gave his great booming laugh. “As political, ’twill fall to me to persuade King Kussai that we’ll be the winning side, so the sooner we’re southbound the better. You and I and Henty here can split a chest of silver among our saddle-bags, with a couple of led-beasts. Hear that, George? You can stop scribbling and do something useful for a change!”
“Tain’t every day two such lions as Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., and the Basha Fallaka shake hands,” says Henty, pocketing his notebook. “You’re good copy, Charlie, the pair of you. When do we leave, then?”
“After tiffin,” says Speedy. “If that suits, Sir Harry?” Henty laughed and said no wonder the Abs called him Basha Fallaka, which means Quick Chief, and was their pun on Speedy’s name.
I was deciding he was a sight too quick for me. Here I was, hardly ten minutes ashore, and I was being dragooned into the saddle by a crazy Goliath in Hallowe’en rig to go tearing up-country on a forty-eight-hour gallop to Napier’s command post. True, I’d sworn to Speedicutf that I’d see his dollars all the way to Attegrat, but that had been back in Trieste with the hosts of Midian prowling round, and now here was Napier’s own political on hand to collect the dibs – and after that mention of being “with” them I’d no wish to venture nearer the theatre of operations than I must, in case Napier got a notion to drag me into the stew. I know these bloody generals. I’d been there before.
On t’other hand, I was well retired, hadn’t worn the Queen’s coat since China in ’60, and I’d need Napier’s personal kitab g for a paid passage home. He’d expect me to call on him, and offhand I couldn’t think of a good excuse for not doing so, fool that I was. I should have told Speedy I was sickening for mumps, or pleaded my belly, or done any damned thing to stay at a safe distance from a campaign which, to judge from the gloom at tiffin, promised to be the biggest catastrophe since the Kabul retreat.
I’ve told you of the pessimism which, unknown to me, was prevailing at home, but now I was hearing it from the men on the spot, grousing in their shirt-sleeves in the stifling heat of the mess-tent: Native Infantry officers, Punjabi Pioneers, King’s Own, cavalrymen from the Scinde Horse irregulars and Native Cavalry regiments, Baluch, Madras Sappers, even a Dragoon Guardee, and altogether as mixed a collection as you could hope to find, all croaking like the never-wearied rook. In short order I gathered that fat-headed Bombay politicals had hampered Napier at every turn and thrown his plans into disarray; that our transport was in chaos because they’d hired drivers who were the scum of the Levant, Greeks and dagoes and the like, who’d mutinied and had to be replaced by Persians and Hindus; that we were far too soft with the Abs, as witness Pottinger’s giving way to a crowd of Shohos who’d blocked the road, and the armed attack on a sentry which had had to be repulsed by the bayonets of Cooper’s Irishmen; that we were fools to rely on local intelligence which reported Theodore and the captives in half a dozen different places at once; that with the mercury at 116 (and that on a cool day) we’d have an epidemic if the army wasn’t moved up-country to the high ground; that baboons were swinging on the telegraph wires, which would have to be coated in rubber and buried – I’d heard the like from the Khyber to Chattanooga, and if the words were different the tune was the same.
“Oh, for the Army Works Corps that we had in Crimea!”
“As if they’d make a ha’porth o’ difference! God Himself couldn’t lay more than a mile of road a day over solid rock sky-high with boulders.”
“Mile a day should get us to Magdala next year, what?”
“Ah, so we shan’t be in and out by April?” General laughter.
“Dam’ lucky if we get out at all. See here – twelve thousand men, three-quarters of ’em on support, depots, transport, and so on, two thousand to go for Magdala –”
“Flyin’ column, you mean? Napier’s good at those.”
“Flyin’ column be damned! – in country where you’ll make ten miles a day with luck? An’ it’s four hundred miles! So where d’you find mule forage for forty days, to say nothin’ of takin’ elephants and mountain guns and mortars over ground that’d have Hannibal cryin’ for his pension?”
“Talkin’ like a book, ye are. An’ will the tribes let us be? They say Theodore can put a hundred thousand into the field.”
“If the chiefs support him. Merewether reckons they won’t.”
“Does he, now? D’ye know, I don’t reckon Merewether’s optimism counts for much against odds of fifty to one.”20
“Oh, shield-and-spear niggers. Not much firepower.”
“That’s not the point, confound it!” This from a grizzled major of Baluch. “Time and distance are our enemy – not the tribes! We’re not here for conquest or victory, even! Eating, not fighting, is going to be what matters! Aye, survival!” This was greeted by a brief silence, followed by a drawl from a Scinde Horse subaltern.
“Ah, well … any volunteers for the relief expedition in two years’ time?” Some laughter, by no means hearty.
The usual grumble-and-grin of men in the field, if you like, but with a decided note of uncertainty in it – and these weren’t just any soldiers, but the best India could show. Still, I might have dismissed them as croakers if Speedy’s silence during the meal hadn’t convinced me that he shared their misgivings.
You see, we poltroons have a talent for spotting heroes – we have to, in order to steer well clear of them – and from what I learned from Henty, who sat by me at tiffin, Speedy was a prime specimen, and an expert to boot. A gentle giant who looked like the wrath of God but had no side at all, had served in four armies, and probably killed more men than the dysentery. He knew Abyssinia inside out, spoke Amharic, which is the principal lingo of the country, and had been drill instructor in the service of Emperor Theodore, who had particularly admired his party trick of cleaving a sheep in two (lengthwise, God help us) with a single sword-stroke. But they’d fallen out, and Speedy had been farming and fighting Maoris in New Zealand when the present crisis arose; Napier had insisted on having him as his political, and Speedy had rolled up for service with nothing but the clothes he stood in and a couple of blankets.
That tells you the sort of chap he was,21 another of the crazy gentleman-adventurers who infested the frontiers in the earlies, and when a fellow with his authority don’t contradict croaking, you draw your own conclusions – mine being that I must lose no time in tapping Napier for my ticket home.
Just for interest I asked Speedy, when we were making ready for our departure up-country, how he thought Napier might set about the campaign, and was shocked when he said coolly that his only hope was to go hell-for-leather for Magdala with a small force, trust to luck he’d find the prisoners there, and high-tail it back to civilisation double-quick.
“You went with Grant to Pekin, didn’t you, and Gough to the Sutlej – aye, and Sherman to the sea?” He shook his shaggy head. “’Tain’t that kind of trip. They knew where they were going, with proper transport, commissariat, lines of communication, knowing who and where their enemy was, and with force enough to do the trick. Napier’s got none o’ that. As that old Baluch said, it’s time and the country he’s up against, and all he can do is raid and run.”
“Man to man, what are the odds?”
He thought a moment, tugging his beard. “Even chance. Six to four against if ’twas anyone else, but Napier’s the best since old Colin Campbell. Yes, I’d risk a monkeyh on him – if I had one!”
He was all action now, breaking the seals on one of the strong-boxes and having the glittering mass of Maria Theresas transferred to saddle-bags by the Marines, with the sergeant watching like a hawk to see that no coins stuck to crafty fingers – he made ’em strip to their drawers and bare feet to make sure no one slipped cash into his clothing, and Twentyman again gave thanks that the 33rd weren’t on hand.
“Aye, a parcel of Fenian thieves,” says Speedy, “but well worth their salt when they form square. Did you hear that they went on an almighty drunk, and when Cooper swore they’d be left down-country their spokesmen asked for fifty lashes a man if only they could join the advance? What could Cooper do but pardon them, the impudent rascals?”
The Provost-Marshal was called to take charge of the remaining boxes, and I commended my Bootnecks to him as the best guard for the dollars he could hope to find. Their sergeant smiled for the first time in our acquaintance, and I supplied a little touch of Flashy by thanking him and his file for their good and trusty work, shaking hands with each man by name, which I knew must go well. Popularity Jack, that’s me.
The weight of the specie was such that we needed half a dozen beasts apart from our own,22 and Speedy decided that so many led-horses must slow us down, so a half-section of the Scinde Horse were whistled up, stalwart frontier riders in the long green coats and trowsers, with red sash and puggaree, that I hadn’t seen since the Mutiny, each man with a twin-barrelled rifle and sword – not the chaps I’d have picked myself, since half of them were Pathans who’d sooner steal than sleep. But Speedy swore by them, and to my gratification their havildar was a leathery veteran from the Mogala country who claimed to remember “Bloody Lance”, as he addressed me, pouring out the old tale of how Ifflass-mann slaughtered the four Gilzais – so much lying tommyrot, you understand, but I dare say I could still dine out on it in the caravanserais along the Jugdulluk road.i
We saddled up, Speedy inspecting the saddle-bags on every “Scindee”, and then we set ahead through the bedlam of the camp; five miles it stretched from the Zoola causeway, on either side of the railway tracks, with the two locomotives puffing and squealing up and down. They weren’t used on the causeway itself, for fear of their weight causing a landslip. What with piled gear, work gangs, Ab vendors who’d set up their stalls as a bazaar in the tent-lines, and no attempt to bring order to the camp, it took us the best part of an hour to reach open country, and Speedy cursed the delay. I didn’t mind, for there was plenty to take the eye, chiefly the Shoho girls with their saucy smiles and hair frizzed into great turbans, bare to their loincloths and well pleased with the catcalls they drew as they sashayed along with their pots balanced on their heads.
“Fine crop of half-caste babes there’ll be by Christmas,” says Speedy. “Can’t blame our fellows either; ’tain’t often they run into beauties like these beyond the borders.”
There was an elephant train loading up on the edge of the camp, half a dozen of the enormous brutes kneeling, each beside a sloping ramp up which the great mortars and Armstrong guns were being hauled to be secured on platforms on the elephants’ backs. Speedy explained that there was no other way the heavy artillery could be carried through the ravines and along the narrow winding paths cut into the cliff-sides in the high country; the lighter mountain guns could be taken apart and carried by led-mules.
“That old Baluch major was right, you see. We stand or fall on animal transport; without it we’re dead in our tracks in the middle of nowhere. And transport depends on forage, and forage depends on money.” He slapped his saddle-bag of coin. “That’s Napier’s life-blood you’ve brought us. This’ll keep him going for a day or so, and God willing the mules’ll bring up the rest within the fortnight.”
“Can we count on the tribes for supplies? Some of the fellows at tiffin seemed to think they might fight.”
He shook his head. “Not at the moment. They’re too glad to see us – and our dollars. Fact is, the common folk would like nothing better than to have us conquer the country and rule it. We pay, we’d give ’em peace from their endless civil wars, protect ’em from rebels and bandits and locusts and slavers, maybe even relieve their poverty – d’you know that many are so poor they’ll sell their wives and daughters, even? They’re priest-ridden, too; their kangaroo Christian church gets two-thirds of the peasantry’s produce – aye, two-thirds! The king and their chiefs get a cut of what’s left, so there ain’t too much over for the brigands to pinch, is there?”
I wondered if we’d add Abyssinia to our savage possessions, but he said there was no chance of that. “We’re here to free the prisoners – bus!”j says he. “Oh, the chiefs are all for our removing Theodore and installing one of them in his place, but Napier won’t play politics, or take sides, and so he’s told ’em. They can’t believe we ain’t bent on conquest – and I dare say our European pals and the Yankees share their view – but they’re dead wrong. Even the Tories think Britannia’s got quite enough empire, thank’ee very much, and stands in no need of the most advanced barbarians in Africa, whose idea of politics is civil war and massacre. Anyway,” he added, “what profit is there in a country that’s mostly rock and desert? Why, no colonists would look at it!”
I asked what had brought him here, into Theodore’s service, too, and why he’d left it. He rode for a moment in thought, chin down on his chest, and then laughed almost as though he was embarrassed.
“Blowed if I can think of one good reason! They’re a murderous lot of pirates, cruel, untrustworthy, immoral, and bone idle – and I like ’em! Why? ’Cos they’re brave, and clever, and love to laugh, and they’re so dam’ contradictory!” He pointed to a herd of bullocks that were being driven into a corral by Ab cow-whackers. “Those fellows are so sharp they’ll get the better of our commissaries at a bargain, bamboozle ’em with figures – and yet they can’t write, and believe that we’re buying the bullocks as food for the elephants! And that’s the God’s truth.” He paused, and laughed again. “But I guess my best reason for liking Habesh – that’s Arabic for Abyssinia – is that they like us. We treat ’em fair, and unlike the rest of Africa they’re smart enough to admire us, and know they can learn from us, from our engineers and scientists, aye, and our military. You know what they call us? The Sons of Shaitan – and it’s a compliment!”
“And Theodore? You must know him better than anyone else.”
“I don’t know him at all. No one does.” He took off his specs and polished them carefully. “He’s not just one man, he’s many – and they’re all dam’ dangerous. You’re going to ask me what he’s liable to do, will he fight, will he run, will he hold the captives to ransom, will he murder them – and I haven’t the foggiest notion. So I’ll not try to answer. Better to let Napier tell you.”
And that, I may tell you, sent a shiver down my spine for it prompted the question why Napier should want to tell me anything at all. I was pondering this when Speedy added:
“As to why I left Theodore, ’twas because he’d been listening to lies about me, and I’d no wish to wake up some morning face down on a bed of spear-points. So I asked for my back pay and a clear road. ‘Suppose I’ll not let you leave?’ says he.
“‘Then I’ll fight,’ says I, ‘and you know I’m not an infant.’
“‘I can have you killed,’ says he.
“‘Ah, but how quickly?’ says I, and laid my hand on my hilt. He had no fear, but he paused, and then smiled and embraced me and said I should have my money, a horse, and a spear, and God be with me.” He chucked his reins. “Let’s raise the pace, shall we?”
From Zoola the barren scrub-land rises slowly to the base of the hills, and it took us five hours’ uncomfortable riding across stone-choked dry river beds and little slithering screes before we came to the plateau from which you could look back at the huge panorama of the distant camp like a sand-table model, and Annesley Bay with its forest of shipping, and the Red Sea beyond. Ahead of us lay the way station of Koomaylee, in a broad basin with sheer cliffs towering on either hand and a massive rampart of stone before us, crimson in the sunset save for the gloomy mouth of the Great Pass which splits it in two as though some god had gashed it with a cleaver. That’s the real gateway to Abyssinia, and at dusk it looks like the road to the Underworld. Beyond it lay range upon range of mighty peaks, rising ever higher as far as you could see.
The Himalays and the Rockies, magnificent as they are, never made me feel as small and helpless as those hellish Abyssinian highlands; they had a power to overwhelm, to make you feel you were in an alien, dreadful world, a desert of peaks that someone likened to the legs of an overturned table, thrusting into a sky of burnished steel. I was seeing them for the first time that night at Koomaylee, and I remember thinking that while the Hindu Kush and the Sangre de Cristo may convince you that they’re the roof of the world, they don’t frighten. Abyssinia did.
My only other memory of Koomaylee, where we bedded down with the Madras Sappers, is of the Norton pumps, like a row of gigantic hallstands, spouting a never-ending stream of wonderful ice-cold water, utterly unlike the stale condensed sludge of Zoola, into the hundred-foot wooden reservoirs. We sank it by the quart. “God bless America,” says Henty, “for if they can work as well up-country we shan’t go thirsty at any rate.”
Next day we traversed the Great Pass, mile after mile through that astonishing defile which narrows to as little as five yards in places, with eight hundred feet of solid granite either side and only a strip of sky far overhead to remind you that with luck you won’t meet Charon this trip. We rode single file, the Scindees full of oaths and wonder as we passed through pretty groves of mimosa and laurel, with brilliantly coloured birds fluttering overhead, and when the pass widened at last there were little meadows of wild flowers, splendid woodland of pine and fir on the lower slopes, stands of the magnificent candelabra cactus, pink and white and crimson, and the surrounding peaks changed in the sunlight from orange to silver that looked like snow but was in fact white lichen – and all this in a country which would presently turn from fairyland into a burning desert of barren mountain and bottomless ravine where your way might lie through boulder-filled gullies or along winding cliff paths, or across a plateau as level as a billiard table with a drop of a thousand feet to left and right, and similar flat-topped bluffs rising like islands all the way to the horizon.
But I don’t purpose to write a tourist guide, and if you want a vade mecum from Zoola to Magdala you must turn to Henty or that Yankee blowhard Henry Stanley. They’ll tell you all about the scenery, and describe the army’s labours in making their slow way from the coast up-country, building every yard of their road as they went, blasting away rocks and pounding ’em flat to make a highway for the columns of bullock-carts and mule trains and elephants and camels who hindered us as we pushed on through Senafe, a great supply station which had been Napier’s head-quarters before he’d advanced to Attegrat a couple of weeks before our arrival – Speedicut’s judgment of his whereabouts had not been far out. There were troops on the move all the way: I recognised the blue and silver of the 3rd Native Cavalry, the brown puggarees and cotton robes of the Punjabi Pioneers with their picks and shovels at the slope, and the celebrated coats of many colours of the motley crowd of border ruffians, Sikhs, Pathans, Punjabis, and the like, who composed the famous 10th Native Infantry. They looked as always like revellers at a fancy-dress ball, in red puggarees, green puggarees, violet caps, jackets and pantaloons of every shape and hue. A detachment of King’s Own, swinging along in sober khaki, showed altogether drab by comparison, and as Speedy observed, the Baluch in their green coats and black pants, with their band playing “Highland Laddie”, looked a sight more like British soldiers than our fellows did.
Well, God help you, Theodore, if this lot catches up with you, thinks I, reflecting that Napier must have had the time of his life choosing such a fine variety. There were Dragoon Guards swapping rum and baccy for chapattis with Bengal Lancers, pigtailed Chinese railway gangers in plate hats giggling and waving to blackavised Cameronian sharpshooters who glowered in response as they filed grimly by, pieces at the trail, long lines of mules bearing the wheels and barrels of the 2000-yard mountain artillery and the tubes and rockets of the Naval Brigade, escorted by bluejackets with their cutlasses slung – twelve thousand horse, foot, and guns bound for the heart of darkness at a cost of £333 a man (each of whom had recently received a rise in pay of tuppence per diem). And all to rescue a handful of Britons from a savage prison at the back of beyond. Aye, those were the days.
We’d been three nights on the road and two days in the saddle when we reached Attegrat and learned that Napier was still up ahead awaiting the King of Tigre, who was said to have overcome his fears and was expected any day. This news had Speedy and Henty off at the gallop, one to do his diplomatic duty, t’other athirst for “copy”. I was left to see the silver delivered to the paymaster, and to follow at my leisure. Another day a-horseback in the heat, but since no one knew if or when Napier would return to Attegrat, there was nothing else for it.
Attegrat’s a shallow valley two miles across, and the tents of our main force, four to five thousand British and Indian troops, were strung out along the valley side, all mighty klim-blim and orderly compared to the Frog’s knapsack of Zoola. Trust Napier; he’d always had an eye like a gimlet and a knack of being into everything. Not that he was a martinet, but it all had to be just so for him.
Being off station, he could hardly be blamed for the piece of disciplinary folly I saw on my way to the paymaster’s tent. A native driver, bare to the waist and tied to a gun-wheel, was being flogged in a half-hearted way, and for once the off-duty loafers who’d assembled to watch the sport were encouraging the flogger to go easy and voicing sympathy for the floggee. It transpired that the unfortunate nigger had dared to shoot and wound an Ab robber who’d been trying to despoil him at pistol-point – and for this he’d been awarded a dozen lashes! Well, I’m all for a hearty flogging myself, but this seemed to be a poor excuse, and I learned from a disgusted paymaster that it had been ordered only because Krapf, an idiot clergyman who’d attached himself to the expedition as an expert,23 had convinced the Provost-Marshal, another idiot, that there would be a native uprising if the Abs weren’t placated by having the driver whipped.
“Wait until the chief hears about this!” fumes my informant. “We’re far too soft with these blasted savages, givin’ in to the bastards every time, and a wretched sidi is thrashed for nothing! Well, I just hope that next time he lets himself be robbed, and bills that clown Krapf for the loss! Depend upon it, these damned people despise us as weaklings, and they’ll become insolent to the point of fightin’ us if we don’t show who’s master!”
I was glad to be shot of the silver, an uncomfortable responsibility when it was being carried by that troop of thieving blackguards; their reluctance to part with their saddle-bags was pitiful to see. In all modesty, I believe that their respect for “Bloody Lance” was what had stopped the villains from trying to filch the odd dollar. It was all tallied out on the paymaster’s table, and since he’d been informed by signal that the rest was coming up, he made out a receipt to be handed over on its arrival. I haven’t had it yet.
Napier was to meet his princely savage at a place called Mai Dehar, a short day’s ride ahead, so with the Scindees as escort I set off after tiffin across the valley and past the collection of huts that makes up Attegrat village. There’s a church and a ruined palace, but what takes the eye is the veritable Bluebeard’s castle perched on an eminence high above the valley, a massive keep with four great turrets at each corner. A sinister sight even in broad day, grim and forbidding behind its curtain wall.
Our way wound through the hills into a desolation where we began to see all the signs of civil war and spoiling, with villages ruined and abandoned, burned huts, fallow fields, and hardly a living creature except at a distance. The villages still inhabited were all on rising ground, stoutly walled, and on every peak there was a stark adobe tower after the style of the one at Attegrat; some were a good fifty feet high and of five or six storey, built on the lips of precipices, crouched like vultures over the valleys below. A proper simile, for my havildar explained that these were the holds of robber barons who preyed on the countryside, and between them and the slave-raiding Gallas from the south the peasantry had a deuced thin time – it reminded him, he said cheerfully, of home, that blessed frontier where honest chaps lived by pillage and extortion, with only the interfering British Sirkar to mar the idyll. I pointed out that the Sirkar also paid the wages of him and his fellow-thieves when they took a holiday from crime, and he admitted that we had our uses.
We covered about twenty miles through that waste land, and lay overnight by the well serving the nearby village of Ad Abaga; the wells, being low-lying, are necessarily outside the walls of all the hill communities. I was thankful for my escort of bearded evil faces as we sat round our fire listening to the jackals and the occasional horrid heh-heh of a hyena while we watched the moon rise to silhouette another of those nightmare cliff-castles. I remarked on its ghastly look, and the Scindee havildar chuckled.
“The husoor has heard the story of that castle? No? Of the strange Lady of the Fortress who is seen by no one? The tale runs that she is the wife of a robber chief who is a prisoner of the King of Lasta –” he pointed to the distant mountains “– and that she has vowed that the sun shall not shine or the rain fall on her head until he is home again. Others believe she is under a spell, an enchantress bound by some great magician to dwell forever confined and solitary.”
“A regular Lady of Shalott, eh? And what do the Scindees think?”
“Why, that she bribed the King of Lasta to kidnap her man so that she might beguile herself with lusty servitors!” cries he, and his ruffians chortled approval. I quoted Ilderim Khan’s adage: “A Gilzai and a grandmother for scandal!” and they fairly hooted.
Our way next day lay through more broken country and tumble-down remains of raided villages, across a plateau so rough that it was late afternoon before we came up with Napier’s pickets on the crest that overlooks Mai Dehar, a shallow valley cut across by a stream, where John Bull first came face to face with Prester John.
A momentous meeting and a splendid spectacle, by all accounts, with our stalwart ranks of King’s Own, native cavalry and infantry, and artillery firing salutes from the near side of the stream, while the Tigre army, four thousand strong, suddenly came into view on the far crest, drums thundering as they formed a vast half-moon formation with their monarch in its midst. I say “by all accounts” because I arrived too late to see it, and if you want the colourful details you must refer again to Henty and Stanley or any of the great rabble of correspondents who were on hand.k
They’ll tell you how Napier rode to the meeting on an elephant, but had to get off because it scared the Tigre horses, and finally arrived in the royal presence on a charger, which he presented as a gift to King Kussai, along with a rifle, receiving in return a shield, spear, lion tippet, and a white mule. They spent the day in the King’s tent confabbing, and when Kussai remarked that he didn’t care for invaders, much, but would stretch a point if they were Christians, Napier replied diplomatically that he liked all Abs except those who imprisoned our people. Ah, says Kussai, you mean Theodore, an evil son-of-a-bitch who’ll stand deposing, and I’m just the lad to replace him. Alas, says Napier, we ain’t concerned with Ab politics, just our captives, which of course means we shan’t help your competitors either. Can’t say fairer than that, concedes Kussai, carry on through my dominions, give Theodore his gruel and leave the rival claimants to me.
That was the gist of it, but Henty and Co. will also hold you spellbound with descriptions of the barbaric splendour of the Tigre warriors in their velvet mantles, lion-mane robes, shirts all colours of the rainbow, bearing sickle-bladed swords, shields, lances, and a few muskets, their officers in flowing silk head-dresses, Bedouin style, with silver fillets round the forehead, and braided hair and beards. They’ll comment on the noble bearing of young King Kussai in his red-fringed toga and gold gauntlets, mild in speech and manner and not the smartest despot between Cairo and the Cape, perhaps, but amiable to a degree, being in no doubt which side his bread was buttered.
The proceedings concluded with ceremonial inspections, Napier running the rule over the Tigre army, strapping fellows if primitively armed, and Kussai being treated to a display of foot drill and manoeuvres by our gallant lads; there were those who thought we’d have done better to show the Abs our Armstrong guns and rockets in action, by way of warning, for they seem to have come away from that first encounter convinced that while we’d be invincible on the plain, we’d be no match for their irregulars in the high country.
All this was over by the time we breasted the slope to the crest where the pickets were stationed, with the sun setting behind them, and here came a young subaltern of the 3rd Native Cavalry, mighty trim in his blue and silver, cantering downhill to meet us. He greeted me by name, explaining that he’d been on the q.v. all day, with instructions to bring me to Napier’s tent as soon as I was sighted – which would have been flattering if I hadn’t, as you know, been leery of generals who can’t wait to see me. With good cause, for …
“I wonder, Sir Harry, if you’d be good enough to wear this?” says he, holding out a long hooded cloak of the kind the Heavies wore in those days. “And my rissaldar will look after your Scindees.”
I looked from the cloak to him and his rissaldar, who was throwing me a salaam and calling my escort to attention, and the tiny doubt that had been stirring at the back of my mind since Speedy had rejoiced at my being “with” the expedition grew suddenly into a dreadful foreboding as he put the cloak into my reluctant hand.
“What the devil’s this?” I demanded.
“If you would please keep it close about you,” says he. “Sir Robert wishes your presence to be known to as few people as possible, especially the enem—that is, our Abyssinian friends. There are a number of them moving about our lines, you see … oh, perfectly cordial, merely curious –”
“And why the hell shouldn’t they see me? I ain’t in purdah!”
“Sir Robert thinks it best, sir.” He was pink but firm, all of twenty but not to be over-awed even by the famous Flashy. “Indeed, he insists. So, if you wouldn’t mind, sir … the hood will conceal your features, you see.”
It was ridiculous – alarmingly so, but there was no use to protest. I threw the cloak round my shoulders, drew the hood forward, and followed over the crest and down the slope to our lines already lit by storm lanterns against the gathering dusk. Sure enough, there were tall Ab warriors, and womenfolk and children, moving among the tents, staring at our fellows and the jawansl who’d plainly been put on their best behaviour, for they were calling greetings to the Abs, offering them seats by their fires, glad-eyeing the Shoho girls, and letting the chicos play with their equipment. My conductor led the way to a big marquee set apart, with a couple of Dragoons with drawn sabres at the fly, and the gigantic figure of Speedy between them, handing me down and ushering me inside.
“None o’ the press gang saw him?” My escort assured him they hadn’t. This was too much, and I said so.
“Of all the dam’ nonsense! Henty’s seen me, hasn’t he? Why shouldn’t the rest of ’em?”
“Henty’s safe,” says Speedy. “The rest ain’t, least of all the confounded nosey-parker Stanley – you know him, the Chicago wallah.24 He’d trumpet your arrival to the four winds!”
“And who’d give a mad clergyman’s fart if he did? Why shouldn’t he? Oh, the blazes with this! Where’s Bob Napier, then? Or has he gone off the deep end too?” I flung off the cloak, and was about to give my disquiet full flow when I realised that my auditors – the escort, Speedy, and a bookish-looking Sapper captain – were glancing apprehensively at the far end of the tent – and there he was, the Bughunter in person, and even in my agitation my first thought was that if ever a played-out veteran needed a long furlough, he did. He’d always looked middling tired, with his down-turned brows and pouchy eyes and drowsy moustache, but now he was old, too, regarding me with a tolerant but weary smile as he rose from behind his table and came forward under the lamp.
“You must not mind Sir Harry’s John Company manners, gentlemen,” says he. “The first time I heard his voice he was addressing a governor-general of India in the most cavalier terms. You remember the great diamond, twenty years ago, at Kussoor?”m And blessed if he wasn’t bright-eyed with memory. “Give me your hand, old comrade, and welcome indeed, for I never was so pleased to see anyone, I can tell you!”
That was the moment when I knew, beyond all doubt, that the doom had come upon me yet again.
a Indian regiments’ tents.
b Native child.
c “Hurry up, everybody push!”
d Organisation.
e See Flashman at the Charge.
f It obviously did not occur to Flashman that the similarity of the names Speedicut and Speedy might be confusing. Had this been pointed out to him he would no doubt have retorted that they were, in fact, the respective surnames of his Rugby schoolfellow and the political officer of Abyssinia, that this was not his fault, and that he had no intention of offending truth by calling one of them Smith or Snodgrass.
g Literally, book (Hind.) but in this sense, official warrant.
h £500.
i For the story of how Flashman earned the nickname “Bloody Lance” in Afghanistan, see the first volume of his memoirs, Flashman.
j That’s all, finished, stop (Hind.).
k This meeting took place on February 25.
l Indian soldiers.
m See Flashman and the Mountain of Light.