Flashman on the March

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?' (* See Flashman and the Mountain of Light.) 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.

If you’ve read Tom Brown you may remember a worthy called Crab Jones, of whom Hughes said that he was the coolest fish in Rugby, and if he were tumbled into the moon this minute he’d pick himself up without taking his hands out of his pockets. Bob Napier had always reminded me of Crab, in the Sikh War, the Mutiny, China, and along the frontier: the same sure, unhurried style, the quiet voice, the methodical calm that drove his more excitable subordinates wild. He was also the best engi neer in the army, and the most successful commander of troops I ever knew.

He was nearing sixty in Abyssinia, and if he looked worn it was no wonder. We’d shared several campaigns, but he’d had the rougher passage every time, thanks to his talent for getting in harm’s way—and out again, usually leaking blood. God knows how many wounds he’d taken; once, I recall, he’d had his field-glasses shot out of his hand, three bullet-holes in his coat, and a slug through his foot—he probably clicked his tongue and frowned that time. Not surprisingly, he was as often sick as well; he’d been in a shocking state, they say, when he licked Tantia Topi in the Mutiny, and according to Colin Campbell there had been “no twa pun o’ him hingin’ straight” when he’d planned the capture of Lucknow. (That means he wasn’t at all well, by the way.) When he wasn’t being all heroic, chasing Sikhs with elephant guns and hammering Pathans on the border, he’d laid half the canals and most of the roads in northern India, from Lahore to the Khyber, and built Darjeeling. Now, on the brink of retirement and pension, they’d handed him the poisoned chalice of Abyssinia… and here he was, welcoming me with that famous smile which everyone remembered, perhaps because it was so out of keeping with the stern, old-fashioned figurehead, asking about my doings, remarking how well I looked, inquiring after Elspeth (whom he’d never met), drumming up sandwiches and beer for my refreshment, observing again what luck it was my turning up like this, and how glad they were of the Maria Theresas.

Dashed unnerving, so much cordiality from a man who’d never been one of your hearties. In a generation of great captains like Campbell and Rose and Outram, such giants as the Lawrences and Nicholson and Havelock and Harry Smith, to say nothing of fighting madmen like Hope Grant and Rake Hodson, Napier had always been the modest, quiet man on the edge of the party, only occasionally showing a flash of sardonic humour, but always happy to escape to his work and his studies, music and painting and peering at rocks. (* See Appendix II.)

Since he’d mentioned the dollars, I reminded him tactfully that I’d been homeward bound when I’d allowed Speedicut to press me into the service, and hinted politely that I’d be obliged for a warrant and a trifle of journey money to see me on my way again.

“See to that, Moore, if you please,” says he to the Sapper, whom he introduced as his secretary and interpreter. “By the way, how many languages do you have, Moore? A dozen? How does that compare with your store… Sir Harry?” He’d been on the brink of calling me “Flashman', being my senior by ten years, and now a general; mere “Harry” would have been beyond him altogether these days, and I made a note not to address him by the old familiar “Bob'.

I said I might scratch by in a dozen, but wasn’t fluent in more than six.

“One of them being Arabic, I seem to remember,” says Napier, which set me worrying. Why Arabic? He didn’t enlarge, but dis missed Moore and my escort and settled back in his chair, motioning Speedy to take a seat by the table. “Well, this is quite splendid, Sir Harry. I gather from Vienna’s message that you’ve been in Mexico lately. Political indaba (* Affair, business (Swahili).) was it?”

“Not exactly, sir. Foreign enlistment, you might say.” “I see. So you have no official position just now? On the retired list?” He nodded. “Well, Moore will have your warrant ready in the morning… if you want to use it immediately, that is.” He glanced at Speedy, and Speedy, sitting there in his barbarous finery like the King of the Cannibal Islands, smiled ever so roguish, as though he were in on some jolly secret.

“I don’t follow, sir… why shouldn’t I use it?” “No reason at all,” says Napier, “except that, knowing your… your knack for adventurous service, shall I call it?… it had occurred to me that you might care to postpone your departure… in a good cause after your own heart?” He ended on a question, and Speedy chuckled, damn him, watching me with the idiot grin of one waiting to see a glad surprise sprung.

“It is an altogether unofficial thing, and indeed must be strictly secret.” Napier sat forward, instinctively lowering his voice. “You are entirely strange in the country, Sir Harry, and care has been taken that no highland Abyssinian should lay eyes on you, and that your presence here is unknown to all but a few of our own people who can be relied upon. You see, there is a part to be played—a secret and, it may well be, a perilous part, and one that no other man in the Army could even attempt to play.” He paused, his hooded eyes on mine. “A part on which the success or failure of the ex pedition may well depend.” He paused again. “Shall I continue?” At this point, when it was plain that some beastly folly was about to be unveiled, Inner Flashman would gladly have cried: “Not unless you wish to risk seeing a grown man burst into tears and run wailing into the Abyssinian night!” Outer Flashman, poor devil, could only sit sweating nonchalantly, going red in the face with funk and hoping that Napier might construe it as apoplectic rage at the prospect of having my travel arrangements upset. He took stricken silence for assent, and rose, beckoning me to an easel on which was a map of the country—a most odd map in that it had length but little breadth, like the one which I attach to this memoir, and was made up of several photographs glued together, something I had never seen before.

“You know what’s to do—find Theodore and secure the release of the captives by whatever means. Here are we at Attegrat, and there is Theodore, with his army, on the road from Debra Tabor to Magdala. Between us lie three hundred miles of country which, as I’ve no doubt our croakers will have told you—” he gave an amused snort “—is an impassable wilderness of unclimbable peaks and bot tomless chasms in which certain disaster awaits if our supply should fail, or hostile tribes bar our way or lay waste the country, or Theodore himself engages us with overwhelming force, or any one of a hundred difficulties arises to bring us to a standstill.”

He paused to see how I was taking this, and gave one of his little tired sighs.

“Well, Sir Harry, I can tell you that with your silver to pay our way, we’ll not fail of supply, if we move swiftly. The tribes…” he shrugged “are unpredictable and untrustworthy. Kussai of Tigre has thirty thousand warriors, and Menelek of Shoa and Gobayzy of Lasta each as many, but they will not trouble us unless we show signs of faltering or failure. Kussai offers us passage and assis tance, and all three hope we shall depose Theodore. Then they will scramble for his throne.”

“They’re mortal scared of him,” put in Speedy. “Menelek besieged Magdala last year, but thought better of it. He and Gobayzy are still in the field with their armies, willing to wound but afraid to strike.” He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “Can’t say I blame Gobayzy. He sent a message of defiance to Theodore last month, and Theodore gave his messenger the slow death—that’s half-cutting off the limbs at knees and elbows, twisting ’em to seal the arteries, and leaving the victim for the wild beasts. I’ve seen it done,” he added, no doubt seeking to cheer me up.

“Quite so,” says Napier briskly. “It is of a piece with the atrocities he has been inflicting for years past on his southern provinces.” He touched a spot on the map west of Magdala. “Gondar, where he has been repressing rebellion by wholesale slaughter, torturing tens of thousands to death, laying waste the countryside. Debra Tabor, which he has burned and whose inhabitants have suffered indescribable cruelties, crucifixions, mass burnings alive, and the like. He seems to have gone completely mad, for all Abyssinia is in a ferment against him, except for his army, and that is dwindling, we’re told, through constant desertions. At the moment he is leading it back to Magdala, but slowly, because he is carrying his heavy guns and like us is having to build his road as he goes, no doubt with the labour of rebels enslaved in Gondar.”

“He always likes to have a few political enemies to slaughter from time to time,” says Speedy. “He’ll execute ’em in hundreds along the way. Thank God our folk are in Magdala and spared that march! When I think of the torture and abuse they’ve suffered…” His huge hands clenched on the spear lying across his knees, and he growled deep in his throat. “One o’ these days I’ll have a word with his majesty on the treatment of white prisoners!”

Napier received this with polite interest before resuming. “In any event, he will reach Magdala before we do. He may make his stand there. I hope and believe he will. But if he doubts his ability to withstand a siege, he may