You’ve probably never worn chains, and may be interested to know that they can be a sight easier to put on than to take off. The Ab variety consist of massive links between anklets which are secured with soft iron rivets; once hammered shut, they have to be pried open with a wedge, which likewise has to be hammered with a sledge, and damned unnerving it is to have a grinning blackamoor swinging it down full force, jarring the anklet open, and if he misses his aim you’ll never set that foot on the ground again. Then they slip a leather rope into the anklet, and half a dozen strong men pull it open wide enough to get your foot clear. It takes half an hour and hurts like sin.
I wore my fetters for less than twenty-four hours. What it was like to wear them for months, and even years, I learned next day, when all the prisoners, not only the Europeans but Ab rebels and the like were brought down from Magdala. After I’d been freed and given a breakfast of bread and tej I was seated under guard on a pile of stones near the red royal tent, and watched the captive procession winding its way slowly across the Islamgee plain, through the little hutted villages to the tents of the camp. They were still some way off when there was a commotion behind me, and here comes Theodore down the hill from Selassie, with his astrologers and courtiers and the ferret Samuel. When he saw me his majesty gave a great halloo of greeting and came striding to me with both hands out, clasping mine as though I were a long-lost brother.
“My friend, I see you are well!” cries he. “I too am well, and rejoice to see you at liberty! Did you sleep well? Are you refreshed? Let me tell you what I have seen! Your army is crossing the Bechelo, and we have seen elephants descending into the ravine. What does that mean, Ras Flashman?”
I told him it meant big guns, and he rounded on his followers. “You hear? Did I not tell you, but you doubted me? You know nothing! But the hour is coming when you will learn! Go now, assemble the leaders of the regiments, all officers, and the leaders of sections! I shall address them presently. Now, my friend, let us sit – see, your people are coming from the amba, and will soon be with us. Let us drink to your meeting!”
For a man who’d been ripe to roll in gutters only a few hours earlier, he was uncommon spry, and in full fig: a cloth-of-gold coat adorned with silks of many colours, and the most extraordinary pants of what looked like tinsel. He was in such cheerful fettle I wondered if he’d been using hasheesh, but from what I learned later he had no indulgences of that kind, no doubt because booze and fornication occupied most of his leisure time. You’d not have thought he was about to be deposed and possibly slain by an invading army, for he was all hospitality, pledging me in tej and summoning sundry of his military big-wigs to make them known to me – Hasani, commandant of Magdala, austere and unsmiling; the portly Damash, whom I already knew; Gabrie, the army commander; Engedda, his chief minister, and several others whose names I disremember. Then I must be shown his artillery park below Selassie, and especially his mighty mortar, Sevastopol, an enormous lump of metal weighing seventy tons and mounted on a wagon with drag-chains which it took five hundred men to pull, he told me proudly. Had I ever seen the like? In truth, I hadn’t, and said so, admiringly, but thinking privately that no one in his right mind would have built such a piece, for at that size it couldn’t be accurate, and what’s the use of a gun that takes all day to position? I reckon his German workmen had simply done what he’d bidden them, and kept their thoughts to themselves.
“You cannot conceive the labour of bringing this wonder to my amba!” cries he. “You have seen my road, but oh, my friend, if you had witnessed our toil, through rain and storm and mud, across rivers and plains, over mountain and desert, and my faithful people on the point of exhaustion, and myself straining on the ropes as we dragged our great guns onward and ever onward. Never was such a journey – no, not even Napoleon himself could have accomplished it!”
Oh, sing us a song, do, thinks I – but d’ye know, when I think of that park of artillery, big pieces, and that monstrous beast of a mortar, I have to admit that, mad or not, he was one hell of a sapper and gunner. A hundred miles over hellish country, months on the road with his soldiers marching on their chinstraps and out of food and forage, their strength dwindling by the day, and still he’d kept ’em going by fear and will and example, through hostile country, for with Menelek and Gobayzy in arms, and Masteeat’s Gallas on the lurk, and Napier on his way, Theodore hadn’t a friend to his name on that hellish trek from Debra Tabor.
“We had to plunder as we went,” he told me, slapping his great mortar proudly, for all the world like some motorist showing off his new machine. “We were like to starve, and the peasant jackals of the villages, who had kissed my feet in the days of my power, hung on the flanks of our army, stinging like mosquitoes when they dared, and cutting the throats of stragglers. So, when we took prisoners,” says he with satisfaction, “we burned them alive. Aye, a long march, and slow … Now, tell me, why does your army march so slowly, and why have they come by the salt plain?”
I told him that Napier left nothing to chance, and had calculated time and distance and supply to a nicety, and set his pace accordingly; as to his route, across what Theodore called the salt plain, it was the shortest way to Magdala. I weighed every word, you may be sure, for I knew that however amiable he might be just now, the least little thing could turn him into a murderous maniac. I had to force myself to remember that, in the face of his smiles and cheery chat, but ’twasn’t easy. Here he was, in his harlequin coat and glittering pants, sitting at ease on a gun carriage, laughing and sipping tej, all geniality as he turned the talk to every topic under the sun – the range of our rifles, and our courts martial, and did the Queen ever review her troops, and my opinion of the Prussian needle gun, and the probable cost of his boy’s education at an English school, and what difficulties he might face being black and foreign, and was it likely, did I think, that he’d take up with an English girl … it was all so pleasant and normal, hang it, that I wondered was it possible that this portended a peaceful outcome – in effect, a surrender? I daren’t hope; with this demented bugger, there was no knowing.
And as he talked, his army was falling in on the great plain of Islamgee, rank upon rank, spearmen and swordsmen and riflemen and cavalry by the thousand, white-robed fighters with their banners before them, churning up the dust in rolling clouds, through which appeared presently the Magdala prisoners, plodding wearily to the tent-lines.
The Europeans were in the van, and a sorry lot they were, like tramps on the look-out for a hen-roost; if you’d seen ’em at your gate you’d have set the dog on them. There were a dozen or so of them, all strangers to me, of course, but I guessed that the two in red coats must be Prideaux of the Bombay Army and Cameron, the consul whose imprisonment had started the whole row. Prideaux was your Compleat Subaltern, tall, fairish, with moustache and whiskers; Cameron was burly and black-bearded and had a crutch under one arm. They, and one or two of the others, walked in the oddest way, lifting their feet high at every step, as though treading through mud or heather. That, I discovered, is what wearing heavy irons for months on end does to you; they’d been relieved of them only a few days ago.
Leading the group was a chipper little dago with a bristling head of hair and soup-strainer to match, and at his elbow a hulking fellow who was all beard and pouched eyes; they were Rassam and Blanc, and they were the fellows who, with Prideaux, had carried the first request for Cameron’s release to Theodore two years ago, and been promptly jailed themselves. Who the others in the group were I don’t know, and it don’t matter, for these four were the ones singled out by Theodore for introduction to me. He hailed Rassam effusively, with his usual inquiries about health and happiness and had he slept well, and then took them aback by announcing me with a fine flourish. For of course they all knew me, by name and fame, and shook my hand in turn, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, which I found mighty interesting.
Rassam didn’t like me – or rather, he didn’t like my presence. You see, he’d been the leader of the pack, on account of being in some sort of political job at Aden, and was their spokesman with Theodore, with whom he was very thick. I don’t say he toadied (and I’d not blame him if he had, with a creature like Theodore), but he was at pains to be busy, very much the Emperor’s confidant, and I guess he feared being cut out by the celebrated Flashy. If that seems odd, well, captivity breeds strange germs in people’s minds, rivalries and enmities flourish, and little things wax great. Of course, he was some kind of Levantine Turk or Bedouin chi-chi, so you’d not have expected him to behave like the British prisoners.
Prideaux was the youngest, thirty-ish or thereabouts, cool as a trout with an affected lazy look which I guessed concealed a sharp mind and a deal of hard bark; from the way he glanced towards Theodore I knew that captivity hadn’t cracked him. Nor had it done anything to Cameron’s spirit, although it had played havoc with his body; he’d been racked and flogged even worse than the rest, and was a sick man, but he had that dogged, quiet manner which is generally admired, especially by devout Christians. Not my style, but useful in companions in misfortune. Blanc was a sawbones in the Bombay medical service, grave and tough, and respected by the chief men on the amba for his skill in doctoring them and their families.
Rassam, as I say, wasn’t glad to see me; Prideaux was, and showed it; Blanc was, but didn’t, for demonstration wasn’t his style. Cameron was too used up to do more than acknowledge me, and of course all four wondered what my arrival portended, what news did I have of Napier’s progress, and what, above all, was Theodore about to do.
That last remained a mystery. He sat the five of us down before his tent, and started gassing about everything under the sun – how his fancy dress was made of French silk, how he had had to rebuke Damash for belittling our army, and then a great harangue about a rifle that someone had stolen from the King’s tent several months before and poor Damash had led an expedition to recover it and been cut up by the Gallas. From that he passed on to the Crimea, and the American war, and I noticed that Cameron, Blanc and Prideaux had nothing to say, but Rassam was in like quicksilver, always echoing Theodore, and evidently afraid that I’d put him in the shade, having been in both campaigns. I took no part, until Theodore summoned his little son Alamayo, a bright nipper of six, and I chaffed him about going to Rugby, while Rassam listened with a stuffed smile. But not a word was said about Napier, or Theodore’s intentions, and I could feel Prideaux fairly bursting with impatience beside me.
At last Theodore said we might retire to rest in a tent that had been set aside for us, and we withdrew, except for Rassam, who stayed, hinting that he’d be glad of a private word in the King’s ear.
“No doubt to pay him a few well-chosen compliments,” says Prideaux. “Would you believe he wrote Theodore a letter congratulating him on getting all his artillery to Magdala? He’ll be offering to taste his food next.”44
“Policy,” says Blanc, shrugging. “Theodore likes him, and if he takes advantage of it, do we not all benefit?”
“I just wish he didn’t seem to like Theodore quite so much,” says Prideaux. “I like to be sure our spokesman is on our side. But that’s no matter,” he added, turning eagerly on me. “However did they come to take you, sir, and what can you tell us? Is Napier about to attack?”
I’d made up my mind to tell them nothing of my mission to Masteeat, on the principle of least said, soonest mended, and also I was leery of Rassam. So I said I’d been on a long scout and run into an ambush. Napier I believed to be no more than a day’s march away, but did Theodore mean to fight him, that was the point? I asked if they had any notion.
“All we know is that he is insane,” says Blanc, “and altogether unpredictable. He has received a letter of ultimatum from Sir Robert Napier, and Rassam urges him to write in reply, but it is dangerous even to hint that he would be well advised to sue for peace.”
“Theodore’ll fight,” says Cameron, sounding dog-tired. “He cannot back down now.”
“Then God help us all,” says Blanc. “But I believe you are right, Consul. Even if he faces certain defeat, he will give battle, out of pride and superstition. Oh, he is ruled by his astrologers, and his lunatic fatalism! You heard him just now, lamenting his lost rifle? He regarded it as a talisman, and is sure that catastrophe will follow if it is not recovered! That is why he is here, at Magdala – nothing but superstition.” Seeing my expression, he laughed, and explained.
“Magdala is another talisman; he believes that while he holds it, he cannot fail. Only last week he cried aloud that while he had lost all Abyssinia, Magdala remained, and he would hold it and emerge again as a conqueror. He truly believes it, too.”
“He can’t believe it!” Automatically I added: “He must be –”
“Mad?” says Prideaux. “You’ve noticed, sir? Yes, his majesty is a trifle erratic.”
“We can thank God for it,” says Cameron. “If he didn’t think of that rock as a symbol of victory, he would not have determined to hold it … and God knows where we would have been taken to by now. At least we’re here, where Napier can find us.”
They were silent, and I knew they were thinking: “If we survive.” At least they were sane enough to do nothing but wait; no wild talk of trying to break out, or blow up the powder magazine which was only a few yards from our tent, by the artillery park. Captivity had taught them patience; that was evident from what they told me of schemes for escape that had been considered and rejected, of plots with the rebels to storm the amba in Theodore’s absence, and of the hideous consequences of conspiracies gone amiss, with the guilty being mutilated and flung over cliffs, and one girl of sixteen being flogged to death with girafs. Small wonder that attempts to suborn their jailers hadn’t got far, although in some respects even leading men on the amba had been helpful and friendly, despite the risk of arousing Theodore’s displeasure.
Thus there had been a continuous correspondence carried on with our politicals in Egypt and Aden, with letters sewn into the clothes of Ab couriers, and supplies of money and comforts coming in for the prisoners. You may read about it at length in the memoirs of Blanc and Rassam, if you’ve a mind to, and it’s the strangest tale – in a way, my own experience of Theodore mirrors it in miniature. For sometimes they’d been treated as honoured guests, sometimes beaten and tortured; splendidly fed with luxurious dinners of seven courses, and loaded with chains; well housed and allowed the freedom to wander, tend their gardens, and promised early release, then dragged away from one prison to another. There had simply been no pattern to their strange existence. No wonder, when Samuel the ferret came to summon us back to the royal presence, my companions exchanged anxious looks. “Now what?” wonders Prideaux. “Chains or candy?”
In fact it was to be given an alarming reassurance – reassuring because it was a promise from Theodore, speaking at his sanest, that in the event of danger we’d be put in a safe place, along with his family; alarming because it suggested that battle was imminent.
That was not my only anxiety. Among the great concourse of priests, generals, courtiers, astrologers, and servants assembled before the red pavilion to hear his majesty’s pronouncements were a number of his women, with the bloated “Queen” Tamagno to the fore. She was seated with her attendants close to the King, being fanned with great ostrich plumes, and once again I was conscious of being appraised like a prize bullock in the ring. Prideaux muttered beside me.
“Careful o’ that one, sir. She’s a Haymarket Hussar,a and quite desperate altogether.” From which I gathered that he, too, had taken the lady’s fancy, and avoided her for his own good.
“Haymarket or Grant Road?” says I, and he said ’twas no joke, Theodore being a real mad miser with his women. “A fellow on sentry-go at the hareem cadged a cup of tej from one of the concubines, and was lashed to a pulp. Best to keep together when the likes of Madam Tamagno’s on the prowl; safety in numbers, what?”
“Unless she likes to drill by platoons,” says I, and he exclaimed “I say!”, at which point Theodore announced that it was time for him to address the troops, who’d been waiting patiently in the sun for an hour or more. So we were marshalled by Damash, and trooped obediently in the King’s wake through the camp to the plain where the flower of the Habesh military stood at attention in orderly silence, and gazing at the huge array under the silken banners, I found myself praying that Napier would keep to the open ground.
The speech was pure Theodore, a rousing address contradicted at the end. He began by trotting before them on a stallion and then dismounted to climb on a rock, displaying himself in his rainbow attire and delivering a great harangue against the invaders of the country. “Understand,” bellows he, “that in a day or two you will be obliged to confront the finest army in the world outside Africa, men far superior to you in strength and in arms, whose very uniforms are bedecked with gold, to say nothing of their treasures, which can only be borne by elephants!” That’ll cheer them up, thinks I, but then he went on, flourishing his arms on high.
“Are you ready to fight?” bawls he. “To fight, and enrich yourselves with the spoil of these white slaves! Will you conquer, or will you leave me in the lurch? Think of my great deeds in the past, of my conquests, of great battles in which you have triumphed over my enemies! You have adorned your weapons with their weapons, ha-ha! [Prolonged cheering.] When these white kaffirs approach you, what will you do? You will wait until they fire on you, and before they can reload, you will fall upon them with your spears! [Less enthusiastic cheers.] Your valour will meet with its reward, and you will enrich yourselves with spoils beside which this rich dress that I am wearing will seem but a shabby trifle.” [Sensation, and clashing of spears and swords.]
Stirring stuff, and I was remarking to Prideaux on the neat way he’d cried up our army and then changed tack by depicting us as lambs to the slaughter, when a beaming old codger at the head of one of the foot regiments stepped forward, brandishing his spear and shouting:
“Oh, only wait, great king, until these foreign asses make their appearance! We’ll tear them to pieces, and those who are lucky enough to escape will have a sorry tale to tell in England!”
To which any intelligent leader would have responded with a hearty grin and a flourished fist. So what does Theodore do, eh? Waits for the cheering to die down, and then cries:
“What are you talking about, you old fool? Have you ever seen a British soldier? Do you know what weapons he carries? Why, before you know where you are he’ll have given you a bellyful of bullets! These people have cannon, elephants, guns without number! We can’t fight them! You think our muskets are any good? If they were, they wouldn’t have sold them to us!” And while his army stared in amazed silence, he turned to the priests and generals and courtiers. “It’s your fault, you people of Magdala! You should have advised me better!”
D’you know, for a second I thought he was trying a dam’ silly joke? But he wasn’t. All in a moment his black mood had come on him, and he was telling the truth. Why, heaven only knows. He’d given his troops jingo and ginger, and now he was striding off to his tent with a face like a wet week, leaving ’em stunned and silent with the fight knocked clean out of them. By the way, if you doubt my story, look at Blanc and Rassam.
After his parade, he flung himself aboard a mule and rode up Selassie to spy out Napier’s movements. He can’t have liked what he saw, for he came down in the foulest of tempers; we were dining in our tent, but we heard him screaming curses, and soon after there was a volley of musketry which seemed to come from the direction of the Fala saddle. A few single shots sounded a moment later, and Rassam told one of the servants to find out what was afoot, but the guards on our tent wouldn’t let him pass.
So we waited, wondering, and then word came. Theodore had remembered that a few months before one of his storekeepers had deserted and taken refuge among the Gallas; the recollection had sent him into a frenzy and he had ordered up the storekeeper’s wife and infant, who had been in prison since the desertion. They and five other of his Ab prisoners had been taken to the nearest precipice, shot by a firing squad, and their bodies thrown down the cliff. The later single shots had been the finishing off of those who were still alive after the fall.
“Including the child?” says Cameron, and Samuel, who had brought the news, said yes, including the child. He begged that we should not remonstrate with Theodore, who had embarked on another drinking spree, and was still undetermined what to do about Napier, whose troops were believed to be preparing to cross the Bechelo river next morning.
When Samuel had gone there was a long silence, broken by Prideaux.
“Napier will be here the day after tomorrow.”
More silence and then Rassam says: “We must do nothing to excite the King’s … passions. In the morning I think I shall ask him to communicate with Sir Robert.”
Nobody said aye or no to that. Nobody wanted to utter a word that might influence Rassam, who might in turn influence Theodore, perhaps with terrible consequences. It all hung in the balance – Napier’s progress, Theodore’s madness, sheer blind chance. Blanc muttered something in Latin, and I asked what it was.
“A quotation I recollected from somewhere,” says he. “‘At the mercy of Tiberius.’”
a Haymarket Hussar: a courtesan of the better class. Grant Road was the prostitutes’ quarter in Bombay.