“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 monkeyh 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 saddle-bags 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 dare say I could still dine out on it in the caravanserais along the Jugdulluk road.i
We saddled up, Speedy inspecting the saddle-bags on every “Scindee”, and then we set ahead through the bedlam of the camp; five miles it stretched from the Zoola causeway, on either side of the railway tracks, with the two locomotives puffing and squealing up and down. They weren’t used on the causeway itself, for fear of their weight causing a landslip. What with piled gear, work gangs, Ab vendors who’d set up their stalls as a bazaar in the tent-lines, and no attempt to bring order to the camp, it took us the best part of an hour to reach open country, and Speedy cursed the delay. I didn’t mind, for there was plenty to take the eye, chiefly the Shoho girls with their saucy smiles and hair frizzed into great turbans, bare to their loincloths and well pleased with the catcalls they drew as they sashayed along with their pots balanced on their heads.
“Fine crop of half-caste babes there’ll be by Christmas,” says Speedy. “Can’t blame our fellows either; ’tain’t often they run into beauties like these beyond the borders.”
There was an elephant train loading up on the edge of the camp, half a dozen of the enormous brutes kneeling, each beside a sloping ramp up which the great mortars and Armstrong guns were being hauled to be secured on platforms on the elephants’ backs. Speedy explained that there was no other way the heavy artillery could be carried through the ravines and along the narrow winding paths cut into the cliff-sides in the high country; the lighter mountain guns could be taken apart and carried by led-mules.
“That old Baluch major was right, you see. We stand or fall on animal transport; without it we’re dead in our tracks in the middle of nowhere. And transport depends on forage, and forage depends on money.” He slapped his saddle-bag of coin. “That’s Napier’s life-blood you’ve brought us. This’ll keep him going for a day or so, and God willing the mules’ll bring up the rest within the fortnight.”
“Can we count on the tribes for supplies? So
me of the fellows at tiffin seemed to think they might fight.”
He shook his head. “Not at the moment. They’re too glad to see us – and our dollars. Fact is, the common folk would like nothing better than to have us conquer the country and rule it. We pay, we’d give ’em peace from their endless civil wars, protect ’em from rebels and bandits and locusts and slavers, maybe even relieve their poverty – d’you know that many are so poor they’ll sell their wives and daughters, even? They’re priest-ridden, too; their kangaroo Christian church gets two-thirds of the peasantry’s produce – aye, two-thirds! The king and their chiefs get a cut of what’s left, so there ain’t too much over for the brigands to pinch, is there?”
I wondered if we’d add Abyssinia to our savage possessions, but he said there was no chance of that. “We’re here to free the prisoners – bus!”j says he. “Oh, the chiefs are all for our removing Theodore and installing one of them in his place, but Napier won’t play politics, or take sides, and so he’s told ’em. They can’t believe we ain’t bent on conquest – and I dare say our European pals and the Yankees share their view – but they’re dead wrong. Even the Tories think Britannia’s got quite enough empire, thank’ee very much, and stands in no need of the most advanced barbarians in Africa, whose idea of politics is civil war and massacre. Anyway,” he added, “what profit is there in a country that’s mostly rock and desert? Why, no colonists would look at it!”
I asked what had brought him here, into Theodore’s service, too, and why he’d left it. He rode for a moment in thought, chin down on his chest, and then laughed almost as though he was embarrassed.
“Blowed if I can think of one good reason! They’re a murderous lot of pirates, cruel, untrustworthy, immoral, and bone idle – and I like ’em! Why? ’Cos they’re brave, and clever, and love to laugh, and they’re so dam’ contradictory!” He pointed to a herd of bullocks that were being driven into a corral by Ab cow-whackers. “Those fellows are so sharp they’ll get the better of our commissaries at a bargain, bamboozle ’em with figures – and yet they can’t write, and believe that we’re buying the bullocks as food for the elephants! And that’s the God’s truth.” He paused, and laughed again. “But I guess my best reason for liking Habesh – that’s Arabic for Abyssinia – is that they like us. We treat ’em fair, and unlike the rest of Africa they’re smart enough to admire us, and know they can learn from us, from our engineers and scientists, aye, and our military. You know what they call us? The Sons of Shaitan – and it’s a compliment!”
“And Theodore? You must know him better than anyone else.”
“I don’t know him at all. No one does.” He took off his specs and polished them carefully. “He’s not just one man, he’s many – and they’re all dam’ dangerous. You’re going to ask me what he’s liable to do, will he fight, will he run, will he hold the captives to ransom, will he murder them – and I haven’t the foggiest notion. So I’ll not try to answer. Better to let Napier tell you.”
And that, I may tell you, sent a shiver down my spine for it prompted the question why Napier should want to tell me anything at all. I was pondering this when Speedy added:
“As to why I left Theodore, ’twas because he’d been listening to lies about me, and I’d no wish to wake up some morning face down on a bed of spear-points. So I asked for my back pay and a clear road. ‘Suppose I’ll not let you leave?’ says he.
“‘Then I’ll fight,’ says I, ‘and you know I’m not an infant.’
“‘I can have you killed,’ says he.
“‘Ah, but how quickly?’ says I, and laid my hand on my hilt. He had no fear, but he paused, and then smiled and embraced me and said I should have my money, a horse, and a spear, and God be with me.” He chucked his reins. “Let’s raise the pace, shall we?”
From Zoola the barren scrub-land rises slowly to the base of the hills, and it took us five hours’ uncomfortable riding across stone-choked dry river beds and little slithering screes before we came to the plateau from which you could look back at the huge panorama of the distant camp like a sand-table model, and Annesley Bay with its forest of shipping, and the Red Sea beyond. Ahead of us lay the way station of Koomaylee, in a broad basin with sheer cliffs towering on either hand and a massive rampart of stone before us, crimson in the sunset save for the gloomy mouth of the Great Pass which splits it in two as though some god had gashed it with a cleaver. That’s the real gateway to Abyssinia, and at dusk it looks like the road to the Underworld. Beyond it lay range upon range of mighty peaks, rising ever higher as far as you could see.
The Himalays and the Rockies, magnificent as they are, never made me feel as small and helpless as those hellish Abyssinian highlands; they had a power to overwhelm, to make you feel you were in an alien, dreadful world, a desert of peaks that someone likened to the legs of an overturned table, thrusting into a sky of burnished steel. I was seeing them for the first time that night at Koomaylee, and I remember thinking that while the Hindu Kush and the Sangre de Cristo may convince you that they’re the roof of the world, they don’t frighten. Abyssinia did.
My only other memory of Koomaylee, where we bedded down with the Madras Sappers, is of the Norton pumps, like a row of gigantic hallstands, spouting a never-ending stream of wonderful ice-cold water, utterly unlike the stale condensed sludge of Zoola, into the hundred-foot wooden reservoirs. We sank it by the quart. “God bless America,” says Henty, “for if they can work as well up-country we shan’t go thirsty at any rate.”
Next day we traversed the Great Pass, mile after mile through that astonishing defile which narrows to as little as five yards in places, with eight hundred feet of solid granite either side and only a strip of sky far overhead to remind you that with luck you won’t meet Charon this trip. We rode single file, the Scindees full of oaths and wonder as we passed through pretty groves of mimosa and laurel, with brilliantly coloured birds fluttering overhead, and when the pass widened at last there were little meadows of wild flowers, splendid woodland of pine and fir on the lower slopes, stands of the magnificent candelabra cactus, pink and white and crimson, and the surrounding peaks changed in the sunlight from orange to silver that looked like snow but was in fact white lichen – and all this in a country which would presently turn from fairyland into a burning desert of barren mountain and bottomless ravine where your way might lie through boulder-filled gullies or along winding cliff paths, or across a plateau as level as a billiard table with a drop of a thousand feet to left and right, and similar flat-topped bluffs rising like islands all the way to the horizon.
But I don’t purpose to write a tourist guide, and if you want a vade mecum from Zoola to Magdala you must turn to Henty or that Yankee blowhard Henry Stanley. They’ll tell you all about the scenery, and describe the army’s labours in making their slow way from the coast up-country, building every yard of their road as they went, blasting away rocks and pounding ’em flat to make a highway for the columns of bullock-carts and mule trains and elephants and camels who hindered us as we pushed on through Senafe, a great supply station which had been Napier’s head-quarters before he’d advanced to Attegrat a couple of weeks before our arrival – Speedicut’s judgment of his whereabouts had not been far out. There were troops on the move all the way: I recognised the blue and silver of the 3rd Native Cavalry, the brown puggarees and cotton robes of the Punjabi Pioneers with their picks and shovels at the slope, and the celebrated coats of many colours of the motley crowd of border ruffians, Sikhs, Pathans, Punjabis, and the like, who composed the famous 10th Native Infantry. They looked as always like revellers at a fancy-dress ball, in red puggarees, green puggarees, violet caps, jackets and pantaloons of every shape and hue. A detachment of King’s Own, swinging along in sober khaki, showed altogether drab by comparison, and as Speedy observed, the Baluch in their green coats and black pants, with their band playing “Highland Laddie”, looked a sight more like British soldiers than our fellows did.
Well, God help you, Theodore, if th
is lot catches up with you, thinks I, reflecting that Napier must have had the time of his life choosing such a fine variety. There were Dragoon Guards swapping rum and baccy for chapattis with Bengal Lancers, pigtailed Chinese railway gangers in plate hats giggling and waving to blackavised Cameronian sharpshooters who glowered in response as they filed grimly by, pieces at the trail, long lines of mules bearing the wheels and barrels of the 2000-yard mountain artillery and the tubes and rockets of the Naval Brigade, escorted by bluejackets with their cutlasses slung – twelve thousand horse, foot, and guns bound for the heart of darkness at a cost of £333 a man (each of whom had recently received a rise in pay of tuppence per diem). And all to rescue a handful of Britons from a savage prison at the back of beyond. Aye, those were the days.
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 376