His queen was a moderating influence, and so were two Englishmen, Plowden, our consul, and Bell, a soldier of fortune who became Theodore’s chamberlain. Unfortunately all three died almost simultaneously, the two Britons cut up by rebels and Tewabetch of natural causes. Theodore massacred the rebels in reprisal, but with the three best influences in his life gone, he began to behave like a real absolute monarch at last, taking to drink and concubines and committing even more atrocities than before. He married again, but since his bride was the daughter of a rival claimant to the throne whom Theodore had humiliated and impris oned, the marriage was not a success.
We sent out a new consul, Captain Cameron, who presented Theodore with two pistols from Queen Victoria. This so delighted him that he wrote a letter proposing that he send an envoy to London, and remarking that he’d wiped out Plowden’s murderers “to win the friendship of her majesty'.
You’d have thought he couldn’t say fairer than that, but would you believe that those monumental half-wits at the F.O. didn’t give his letter to the Queen, or even acknowledge it? Why? Oh, other things, like Bertie the Bounder’s wedding to Alexandra of Denmark, [16] were occupying their lordships’ attention, and who was this distant African upstart, anyway? Or quite possibly some chin-less oaf simply mistook it for his wine bill and tossed it into a pigeonhole. God knows how our foreign affairs haven’t been one long catalogue of disaster… stay, though, they have, haven’t they?
What followed was inevitable, with a short-tempered, arrogant barbarian monarch who thought he was God’s anointed. After a year of being ignored he arrested Cameron, who’d visited Egypt, Theodore’s mortal enemy, to investigate cotton supplies which we were liable to need with the American Civil War disrupting our business. Then a missionary called Stern (who was trying to convert Abyssinian Jews to Christianity, if you’ll believe it) published offensive remarks about Theodore. Result: Cameron chained, flogged, and stretched on the rack; Stern brutally beaten and two of his servants lashed to death with hippo-hide whips; other Europeans arrested and bound with cords soaked so that they cut their limbs; missionaries forced to watch the death by torture of malefactors whose blood the executioners smeared on the horrified spectators… and so on, while the letter whose delivery might have prevented these horrors lay unanswered in Whitehall.
Eventually a reply was sent, the messenger being a wily oriental gentleman named Hormuzd Rassam from our Aden office who delayed six months before venturing up-country with conciliatory messages and presents which included a swing for Theodore’s chil dren. (Gad, I’m proud to be British!) Much good it did: Rassam and his party were added to the chain gang, and at long last, after four years in which the public had heard little beyond rumours, Parliament awoke, members began to ask where Abyssinia was, and the Russell government, having stifled debate on the remark able ground that it might irritate Theodore, fell from office, leaving the mess to the Tories who, not without agonised dithering, ordered Napier to take a force from India to Abyssinia, make a final demand for the prisoners’ release, and then “take such measures as he thinks expedient', and good luck to him.
You notice that with typical parliamentary poltroonery the Derby-D’ Israeli gang left it up to the soldier to make the fatal deci sion, but for once I could understand if not sympathise, for if ever a government was caught between Scylla and t’sother thing, they were. On the one hand, they couldn’t leave the prisoners in Theodore’s clutches, for our credit’s sake—what, have a tinpot nigger king showing us his arse? Abandoning Britons, and telling the world we couldn’t defend our own? Letting India, where we’d been given an almighty fright only ten years before, see that we could be defied with impunity? “Never!” cries John Bull, even if it took an army of thousands to free a handful, and cost the three and a half million of Dizzy’s estimate, and lasted months or years, still it must be done, and that was flat.
On the other hand, it was odds on that invasion would fail. Abyssinia was tropical territory incognita, our army would be cut off miles from the sea, without reserves, in country without roads or reliable water supply, where every ounce of food, gear, and ammunition would have to be carried—where? There was no certain information of where the captives were exactly, and what if Theodore cut their throats or carried them into the trackless fast nesses hundreds of miles inland? And what of the hundreds of thou sands of ferocious tribesmen between the coast and Magdala ? if indeed Magdala proved to be the goal? What if, as seemed very likely, Napier’s army vanished into the wilds of Prester John and never came out again?
That, I’m told, was the tenor of the warnings and prophecies that filled the press when the government’s decision became known: the expedition was doomed, but it would have to go anyway. [17]
But none of that was clear to me as we steamed into the dust and stink of Zoola on that fine February morning. I didn’t have the benefit of public opinion from home, and at Jedda they’d been far too taken up with pirates and pilgrims to give thought to the consequences of what was happening in the mysterious south, beyond the far-off peaks dimly seen through the haze that hung over Annesley Bay. But now you know the how and why of Napier’s expedition, and enough of the land and people for the moment. And from what I’ve told you, you may have been struck by a thought which has absolutely occurred to me only now, as I write: for perhaps the first time in her long and turbulent history Britain was going into a war which everyone believed we were going to lose. Everyone, that is, except Bughunter Bob Napier.
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 shud dered 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 rooties (* Indian regiments’ tents.) and even the waters of the bay, covering everything in a fine powder which you had to be con stantly 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
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
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
