Flashman on the March

While still a lad, he’d become convinced that he was the Messiah named in an old prophecy and would become the greatest king on earth, master of all Ethiopia and Egypt; he would scourge the infidels out of Palestine, purge Jerusalem of its defilers (the Muslims), and would be called Theodore. So he changed his name accordingly, and proclaimed himself Emperor and King of Kings. He was young, handsome, muscular, literate (unlike most Abs), and full of reforming notions, like abolishing slavery and generally improving the lot of the commonalty. If he had a tendency to berserk rages, butchering his enemies, holding mass executions, flogging people to death or cutting off their limbs and leaving ’em for the wild beasts, well, savage despots can’t afford to behave like Tiny Tim.

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 imprisoned, 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 chinless 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 children. (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 remarkable 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 decision, but for once I could understand if not sympathise, for if ever a government was caught between Scylla and t’other 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 fastnesses hundreds of miles inland? And what of the hundreds of thousands 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 shuddered 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 rootiesfn1 and even the waters of the bay, covering everything in a fine powder which you had to be constantly 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 chicofn2 with a bucket of camphorated water whose duty it was to supply his master with wet clouts to sponge away the dust. ‘What is it? Thousands o’ dead beasts rottin’, that’s what. Cavalry mounts droppin’ like flies, mules too, no one knows why, vets never saw the like.’ He dropped his wet rag into the bucket with a weary sigh. ‘Thank God for the vultures or we’d ha’ had an epidemic.’

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 spondulikos, are they? Splendid, chuck ’em aboard, sarn’t, and you, dragoman, summon your stout lads to give us a shove, there’s a good chap!’

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 dollars, or Paddy’ll be over the hedge with his pockets jinglin’, what? …18 I say, dragoman, jildi jao, sub admi push karo!’fn3

The dragoman bellowed and belaboured the coolies with his staff, and we were propelled towards the head of the causeway. I said it was as well they had a railway, with freight as heavy as mine, and how far did it go.

‘Five miles, so far,’ says Twentyman cheerfully. ‘It’s about a hundred and twenty to Attegrat, so it’s mules for you, I’m afraid, sir. They do twelve miles a day, supposin’ you can get ’em, for we’ve fewer than ten thousand pack animals when we’re supposed to have thirty thousand. Well, I ask you! Bombay bandobast,fn4 what?’

I thanked God privately that I wasn’t part of the expedition, and asked how quickly I could get word to Napier of my arrival.

‘Oh, couple of hours – telegraph’s only half way to Attegrat, but we’ve flag signallin’ by day, magnesium flare lamps for night messages, latest thing, bang-up-to-date, what? Ah, there’s one o’ the deputation! Hollo, Henty, he’s here at last!’

As we jumped down, a burly, beef-faced chap in a dust coat and kepi was striding up, grinning hugely, with his hand out.

‘Don’t remember me, Sir Harry, I’ll be bound!’ cries he. ‘George Henty19 of the Standard – we shared a billet with Billy Russell and Lew Nolan at Sevastopol, and you went down with dysentery. Before poor old Lew got himself killed, and you and Cardigan charged to glory!’fn5

He pumped my fin like a long-lost brother, but shot if I could place him.

‘D’ye know, you launched my journalistic career?’ cries he. ‘I was in the hospital commissariat, you know, until I offered a piece to the Advertiser describing your part in the Charge, and … well, here I am, eh?’ I found myself wondering if he was the idiot who’d written that foul purple tosh which George Paget, curse him, had clipped out and framed and hung in the 4th Lights’ mess, all about ‘with what nobility and power the gallant Flashman rode, his eye flashing terribly.’ And farting like a deflating balloon, had they but known.

My immediate thought was to give this familiar brute a set-down, but it’s best to keep in with the press, so I cried, to be sure, I remembered him well, and how had he been all these years? He went rosy with gratitude at being remembered by the famous Flashy.

‘But here’s another who’s been counting the hours to see you!’ cries he, and there, emerging from a tent, came Giant Despair dressed for a gypsy wedding, and I could only stand and gape.

Bar Mangas Colorado, he was the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life, closer to seven feet than six and built like an overgrown gorilla. His enormous body was wrapped in a robe made of lions’ manes which covered him from the white scarf round his neck to his massive half-boots, he wore a black beard to his chest, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a smoking-cap, and carried a throwing spear in one hand and a straw umbrella in the other. To complete this bespoke costume, he had a sabre on his hip, a revolver in his belt, and a round native shield slung on his back. When he grinned, with a fierce glitter of teeth in the beard, he looked like a Ghazi on hasheesh – and then he spoke, brisk and high-pitched, his huge hand gently enfolding mine, and he might have been a vicar welcoming me to the sale of work.

‘Charles Speedy, Sir Harry, used to be adjutant of the Tenth Punjabis, saw you once on the Grand Trunk, near Fatehpur, oh, ever so long ago, but you didn’t see me.’

Then you must have been lying down in cover and wearing mufti, thinks I. My astonishment showed, for he gave a whimsical shrug and spread his arms in display.

‘Sir Robert Napier likes me to dress native, thinks it impresses the local sidis, bless ’em! I’m his political adviser, and at present your committee of welcome.’ He gave another alarming grin, accompanied by even more alarming words. ‘Can’t tell you how glad we all are to have you with us.’

Now, that was the very first intimation I had of the possible ghastly sequel to the mission I was carrying out simply to oblige an old school chum. Of course, you could interpret the words two ways, and I lost no time in putting him right.

‘I ain’t with you. Delivering the messages, rather.’ I nodded at the boxes which the coolies were unloading under the watchful eye of Twentyman and my Bootneck sergeant. ‘I hear it’ll take ten days to get ’em up to Napier by mule. How short o’ the ready is he?’

‘Tight, but one chestful of dollars should cover his immediate needs, and we’ll get those to him inside forty-eight hours. Can’t have his pockets to let when he meets the King of Tigre to arrange our passage through his territory. Napier’s been waiting beyond Attegrat for days, but his majesty’s hanging back, scared to commit himself, likely. Theodore may be a long way off, but these petty rulers go in terror of him still.’ He gave his great booming laugh. ‘As political, ’twill fall to me to persuade King Kussai that we’ll be the winning side, so the sooner we’re southbound the better. You and I and Henty here can split a chest of silver among our saddlebags, with a couple of led-beasts. Hear that, George? You can stop scribbling and do something useful for a change!’

‘Tain’t every day two such lions as Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., and the Basha Fallaka shake hands,’ says Henty, pocketing his notebook. ‘You’re good copy, Charlie, the pair of you. When do we leave, then?’

‘After tiffin,’ says Speedy. ‘If that suits, Sir Harry?’ Henty laughed and said no wonder the Abs called him Basha Fallaka, which means Quick Chief, and was their pun on Speedy’s name.

I was deciding he was a sight too quick for me. Here I was, hardly ten minutes ashore, and I was being dragooned into the saddle by a crazy Goliath in Hallowe’en rig to go tearing up-country on a forty-eight-hour gallop to Napier’s command post. True, I’d sworn to Speedicutfn6 that I’d see his dollars all the way to Attegrat, but that had been back in Trieste with the hosts of Midian prowling round, and now here was Napier’s own political on hand to collect the dibs – and after that mention of being ‘with’ them I’d no wish to venture nearer the theatre of operations than I must, in case Napier got a notion to drag me into the stew. I know these bloody generals. I’d been there before.

On t’other hand, I was well retired, hadn’t worn the Queen’s coat since China in ’60, and I’d need Napier’s personal kitabfn7 for a paid passage home. He’d expect me to call on him, and offhand I couldn’t think of a good excuse for not doing so, fool that I was. I should have told Speedy I was sickening for mumps, or pleaded my belly, or done any damned thing to stay at a safe distance from a campaign which, to judge from the gloom at tiffin, promised to be the biggest catastrophe since the Kabul retreat.

I’ve told you of the pessimism which, unknown to me, was prevailing at home, but now I was hearing it from the men on the spot, grousing in their shirt-sleeves in the stifling heat of the mess-tent: Native Infantry officers, Punjabi Pioneers, King’s Own, cavalrymen from the Scinde Horse irregulars and Native Cavalry regiments, Baluch, Madras Sappers, even a Dragoon Guardee, and altogether as mixed a collection as you could hope to find, all croaking like the never-wearied rook. In short order I gathered that fat-headed Bombay politicals had hampered Napier at every turn and thrown his plans into disarray; that our transport was in chaos because they’d hired drivers who were the scum of the Levant, Greeks and dagoes and the like, who’d mutinied and had to be replaced by Persians and Hindus; that we were far too soft with the Abs, as witness Pottinger’s giving way to a crowd of Shohos who’d blocked the road, and the armed attack on a sentry which had had to be repulsed by the bayonets of Cooper’s Irishmen; that we were fools to rely on local intelligence which reported Theodore and the captives in half a dozen different places at once; that with the mercury at 116 (and that on a cool day) we’d have an epidemic if the army wasn’t moved up-country to the high ground; that baboons were swinging on the telegraph wires, which would have to be coated in rubber and buried – I’d heard the like from the Khyber to Chattanooga, and if the words were different the tune was the same.

‘Oh, for the Army Works Corps that we had in Crimea!’

‘As if they’d make a ha’porth o’ difference! God Himself couldn’t lay more than a mile of road a day over solid rock sky-high with boulders.’

‘Mile a day should get us to Magdala next year, what?’

‘Ah, so we shan’t be in and out by April?’ General laughter.

‘Dam’ lucky if we get out at all. See here – twelve thousand men, three-quarters of ’em on support, depots, transport, and so on, two thousand to go for Magdala—’

‘Flyin’ column, you mean? Napier’s good at those.’

‘Flyin’ column be damned! – in country where you’ll make ten miles a day with luck? An’ it’s four hundred miles! So where d’you find mule forage for forty days, to say nothin’ of takin’ elephants and mountain guns and mortars over ground that’d have Hannibal cryin’ for his pension?’

‘Talkin’ like a book, ye are. An’ will the tribes let us be? They say Theodore can put a hundred thousand into the field.’

‘If the chiefs support him. Merewether reckons they won’t.’

‘Does he, now? D’ye know, I don’t reckon Merewether’s optimism counts for much against odds of fifty to one.’20

‘Oh, shield-and-spear niggers. Not much firepower.’

‘That’s not the point, confound it!’ This from a grizzled major of Baluch. ‘Time and distance are our enemy – not the tribes! We’re not here for conquest or victory, even! Eating, not fighting, is going to be what matters! Aye, survival!’ This was greeted by a brief silence, followed by a drawl from a Scinde Horse subaltern.

‘Ah, well … any volunteers for the relief expedition in two years’ time?’ Some laughter, by no means hearty.

The usual grumble-and-grin of men in the field, if you like, but with a decided note of uncertainty in it – and these weren’t just any soldiers, but the best India could show. Still, I might have dismissed them as croakers if Speedy’s silence during the meal hadn’t convinced me that he shared their misgivings.

You see, we poltroons have a talent for spotting heroes – we have to, in order to steer well clear of them – and from what I learned from Henty, who sat by me at tiffin, Speedy was a prime specimen, and an expert to boot. A gentle giant who looked like the wrath of God but had no side at all, had served in four armies, and probably killed more men than the dysentery. He knew Abyssinia inside out, spoke Amharic, which is the principal lingo of the country, and had been drill instructor in the service of Emperor Theodore, who had particularly admired his party trick of cleaving a sheep in two (lengthwise, God help us) with a single sword-stroke. But they’d fallen out, and Speedy had been farming and fighting Maoris in New Zealand when the present crisis arose; Napier had insisted on having him as his political, and Speedy had rolled up for service with nothing but the clothes he stood in and a couple of blankets.

That tells you the sort of chap he was,21 another of the crazy gentleman-adventurers who infested the frontiers in the earlies, and when a fellow with his authority don’t contradict croaking, you draw your own conclusions – mine being that I must lose no time in tapping Napier for my ticket home.

Just for interest I asked Speedy, when we were making ready for our departure up-country, how he thought Napier might set about the campaign, and was shocked when he said coolly that his only hope was to go hell-for-leather for Magdala with a small force, trust to luck he’d find the prisoners there, and high-tail it back to civilisation double-quick.

‘You went with Grant to Pekin, didn’t you, and Gough to the Sutlej – aye, and Sherman to the sea?’ He shook his shaggy head. ‘’Tain’t that kind of trip. They knew where they were going, with proper transport, commissariat, lines of communication, knowing who and where their enemy was, and with force enough to do the trick. Napier’s got none o’ that. As that old Baluch said, it’s time and the country he’s up against, and all he can do is raid and run.’

‘Man to man, what are the odds?’

He thought a moment, tugging his beard. ‘Even chance. Six to four against if ’twas anyone else, but Napier’s the best since old Colin Campbell. Yes, I’d risk a monkeyfn8 on him – if I had one!’

He was all action now, breaking the seals on one of the strong-boxes and having the glittering mass of Maria Theresas transferred to saddlebags by the Marines, with the sergeant watching like a hawk to see that no coins stuck to crafty fingers – he made ’em strip to their drawers and bare feet to make sure no one slipped cash into his clothing, and Twentyman again gave thanks that the 33rd weren’t on hand.

‘Aye, a parcel of Fenian thieves,’ says Speedy, ‘but well worth their salt when they form square. Did you hear that they went on an almighty drunk, and when Cooper swore they’d be left down-country their spokesmen asked for fifty lashes a man if only they could join the advance? What could Cooper do but pardon them, the impudent rascals?’

The Provost-Marshal was called to take charge of the remaining boxes, and I commended my Bootnecks to him as the best guard for the dollars he could hope to find. Their sergeant smiled for the first time in our acquaintance, and I supplied a little touch of Flashy by thanking him and his file for their good and trusty work, shaking hands with each man by name, which I knew must go well. Popularity Jack, that’s me.

The weight of the specie was such that we needed half a dozen beasts apart from our own,22 and Speedy decided that so many led-horses must slow us down, so a half-section of the Scinde Horse were whistled up, stalwart frontier riders in the long green coats and trowsers, with red sash and puggaree, that I hadn’t seen since the Mutiny, each man with a twin-barrelled rifle and sword – not the chaps I’d have picked myself, since half of them were Pathans who’d sooner steal than sleep. But Speedy swore by them, and to my gratification their havildar was a leathery veteran from the Mogala country who claimed to remember ‘Bloody Lance’, as he addressed me, pouring out the old tale of how Ifflass-mann slaughtered the four Gilzais – so much lying tommyrot, you understand, but I daresay I could still dine out on it in the caravanserais along the Jugdulluk road.fn9