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 mut tered beside me.
“Careful o’ that one, sir. She’s a Haymarket Hussar, (* Haymarket Hussar: a courtesan of the better class. Grant Road was the prostitutes’ quarter in Bombay.) 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 your selves 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 direc tion 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 store keeper’s wife and infant, who had been in prison since the deser tion. 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 fin ishing 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.’”
I’m not good on dates as a rule, but I know the next day was April the ninth, because Rassam said it aloud as he made an entry in his journal, and it stays fixed in my memory [45] as the day on which I was forced to witness one of the foulest crimes I’ve ever seen. As you know, I’m no stranger to human wickedness and cruelty and death; slaughter in battle aside, I’ve watched mass scalpings and blowing from guns and the knouting of a Russian peasant, and I’ve seen the torture pits of Madagascar and what was left of the occupants of a New Mexican hacienda after the Mimbreno Apaches had come to call. But what happened on the eve of Good Friday at Islamgee was an atrocity apart—I can’t tell why, unless it’s because ’twas so unexpected and unreal and without sense or reason, committed not by a prim itive savage but by a man who only moments before had been earnestly considering Christian ethics and the problems of Church and State. Blind passion I can understand, and cruelty for its own sake, but I guess madness is a law unto itself. And yet none of these, not anger or sadistic bloodlust or lunacy, even, has ever seemed to me sufficient explanation for what happened on that day at Islamgee.
Yet it began tamely enough, after a peaceful night in which the five of us slept undisturbed in our fine silk tent, with the other European prisoners and the German workmen in lesser tents close by. No one spoke of last night’s murders, and we were at break fast when a messenger arriv
ed bearing compliments to Rassam from the King, which delighted him, and an order for me to present myself to the royal presence instanter, which didn’t. I wasn’t specially happy myself to be singled out, but there was nothing for it, so off I went.
There was great action afoot in the camp, and on the north end of Islamgee where the ground rose to the Fala saddle. A mighty crowd of prisoners had been herded together by the troops; there must have been several hundred, chained and foully dirty, squat ting in the dust, and recalling the mob of them I’d seen yesterday I found myself wondering how Magdala had contained them all, for that’s where they’d come from; it struck me Theodore must have had half the local population in close tack—rebels, criminals, folk whose faces didn’t fit, but now it seemed there was to be a great jail clearance, for the armourers were passing among them with hammers and leather straps, setting them free, and great rusty piles of fetters were in evidence, while their late wearers wandered about looking dazed and lost. Still, I took it as a good sign; perhaps his mad majesty was seeing sense at last.
My hopes were soon shot; he might be wearing his humane socks, but he was pulling on his jackboots over them. Beyond the assembled prisoners the slopes up to the Fala shoulder were crawling with troops, and they were dragging his artillery pieces along a newly made road to the summit on which the morning mist was just beginning to blow away. My heart sank, for I knew the Fala height commanded the Arogee plain which Napier’s force was bound to cross, and a well-placed park of artillery could play havoc with our advance if the Ab gunners knew their business.
My messenger and I were mounted, but we had the deuce of a job forcing our way up the crowded slope and along the narrow roadway. It was churned to mud by recent rains, and the carts carry ing the guns were up to the axles in the red glue. The great mortar Sevastopol was chained in place on its enormous cart, with hun dreds of hauliers straining on its huge hawsers, slithering and ploughing through the muck, and Theodore himself on the cart yelling orders and encouragement. It began to rain, coming down in stair-rods that pitted the mud like buckshot, and the steam came off the sweating gangs in clouds; we were sodden in no time, and our beasts were fairly streaming down their flanks.
Theodore waved and roared to me to come on the wagon with him, which I was glad to do, for he had Samuel and a couple of servants holding great brollies overhead. Even so, he was soaked, and presently tore off his shirt and stood bare to the waist, laughing and rubbing the water over his chest and arms as though he were in a bath. He seemed in capital spirits, exulting over the damage that his mortar would do, “for there has never been such a weapon in the world, and how will your soldiers be able to endure it? Even its thunder will terrify the bravest; they will scatter like frightened sheep!”
I said he’d never seen British and Indian soldiers, and they’d not scatter, because they knew that noise never killed anyone. He looked a bit downcast at this, so I asked him, greatly daring, if he’d decided to fight.
“If I must!” cries he. “I do not want war, but who is this woman who sends her soldiers against a king? By what right does she come to steal my country?”
I wasn’t going to argue, and he ran on about how he had been insulted, and it was not to be borne; he had written in good will and friendship, as one monarch to another, and had been ignored (which I knew was true), and he’d never have laid a finger on any of our people if Cameron hadn’t conspired with his enemies the Egyptians, and he’d have let that pass, even, if only he’d been shown the courtesy due to his rank, but it was plain that the British Government looked down on African kings as petty rulers of no account. So what else could he do, by the power of God, but defy those who had despised and affronted him, even if he died for it?
With him shouting at me through the downpour, getting angrier by the minute, and poor Samuel struggling with his brolly in the wind and beseeching me with his eyes to say something to turn away wrath, I cried that Theodore was absolutely right, he’d been disgracefully put upon, no question, and it was just a shame that so many fine men, Ab and British, should have to die because our Foreign Office had no bloody manners. Even as I said it, I realised that I’d struck a good line, so I expanded on the arrogance, stu pidity, and downright laziness of our civil servants, but what could you expect from folk who’d gone to disgusting dens of vice and ignorance like Harrow and Eton, and had he given any further thought to the idea of sending that splendid little lad to Rugby, capital school, been there myself…
It may be that the best way to talk to a maniac is to drivel as much as he does, especially if you don’t let him get a word in. My balderdash quite disconcerted him, and by good luck the great wagon suddenly lost a wheel, we had to leap clear for our lives, and Sevastopol finished up to its trunnions in mud. It took a couple of hours to right it, and another hour to reach the top of Fala, by which time the rain had cleared, and the sun broke through the sullen clouds—and there, far across the plain of Arogee, was the Dalanta plateau above the Bechelo, black with the tiny figures of men and animals. Hurry, hurry, old Bob, thinks I, you’re almost there.
Gabrie, the Ab field-marshal, was in charge of emplacing the guns, and making by far too good a job of it for my liking, while Theodore stood Napoleon-like on the edge of the bluff, arms folded, sombrely regarding the distant deployment of the army that was coming to destroy him. He seemed not at all alarmed, remarking that it would be most gratifying to see how a European general disposed his troops, and was it true that Napier was the best commander of his day? I said he was the best we had, careful and steady but sure, perhaps not as inspired as Wolseley or the American Lee, but safer than either, and less prodigal of his soldiers’ lives than Grant.
He nodded. “You think he will destroy me?” says he, and I saw what I hoped was a chance.
“Not if you meet him in love and friendship, getow. Those were the words you used to me, if you remember.”
“I said if he came in love and friendship!” He pointed towards the Bechelo. “Do you see them there? He is the invader, I am the besieged! Would you have me submit to the thieves who come to rob me of my throne, of my country?” He was starting to shout now, striding to and fro, waving his arms and shooting angry glares at me. “That is the counsel of cowards like Damash and Dasta and the fool Samuel! Where is he? Where is Samuel?” He looked around, stamping, but Samuel, luckily for him, wasn’t on hand. Theodore stood snarling for a moment, snapped at one of his attendants to give him a shama, and once he’d wrapped it round his shoulders he came muttering to me.
“They would surrender, Damash and the others. They hate me, all of them, and would run away if they had the courage. Why do they not kill me, eh? Because they fear me, by death, and dare not strike!” He was starting to froth again, and the mad stare was in his eyes. “Well, they had better kill me, because if they do not I shall kill them all, by the power of God, one at a time!” Suddenly he seized me by the shirt, thrusting his face into mine, raving in a whisper.
“You know I must sleep with loaded pistols under my pillow? They know it, too, and fear to murder me in my bed! They would poison me, but my food and drink are tasted! But I do not fear!” He released his grip, closed his eyes, and began to mumble to himself as though in prayer. Then he looked up at the darkening sky, and his voice was shaking. “If He who is above does not kill me, no one will. If He says I must die, no one can save me!”
It came out in a yell, and I looked round to see what Gabrie and his staff were making of it—but they weren’t even looking at him, but busied themselves even more with the teams slewing the cannon into place. They knew he was stark mad, but they were too fearful to do anything about it. And it wasn’t just fear; they were in thrall to him, to the sheer power of his will and spirit. I felt it too, as well as my terror of him; he had that force that I’d seen in others, like Brooke of Sarawak and old John Brown; they weren’t to be resisted, or reasoned with, just avoided if possible—but I couldn’t avoid Theodore.
And then in a mome
nt the morbid fury that had possessed him so suddenly was gone, and he was striding about the gun positions, commending and criticising and even laughing; I saw him slap an Ab gunner on the shoulder and say something that set them in a roar; then he was deep in consultation with one of his Germans, climbing up on to Sevastopol to examine the firing mechanism. He was still chuckling as he came back to me, putting a hand on my shoulder confidential-like.
“They are easy to amuse, are they not? Do you not find it so, with your soldiers? Come, we shall go down and drink a little tej together.” He seemed content to walk, nodding to the gunners and assuring them that when they were called on to load up and fire, he would be on hand to direct them. They cheered and hammered their hilts on the guns as we went down the hill.
“You heard me speak to them yesterday, my friend, did you not? Did I rouse them on to battle? Did I inspire them? Oh, my good friend, I was fakering, (* Bragging. Not in OED, but apparently a favourite word of Theodore’s.) no more than that. But they believe, because they are simpletons and love me.” It didn’t seem to occur to him that they might just as easily believe what he’d shouted at the old general, that they were doomed to defeat. “If I say, ‘Fight, my chil dren!’ they will fight, even if it means death. But are your soldiers any different, Ras Flashman? Why do they do it, my friend?”