“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
“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
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 arrived 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
