The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  APPENDIX II:

  Theodore and Napier

  It is curious that although Flashman’s involvement in the war was peripheral, he probably knew Theodore, the man in the eye of the storm, better than anyone except perhaps Rassam and Speedy. He is also the foremost authority for those remarkable sister-queens, Masteeat and the mysterious Uliba-Wark, and for the conduct of the Galla part of the campaign. No one saw the Abyssinian side of the crisis as closely as Flashman.

  Trying to make sense of the Emperor is really a waste of time. He is beyond the reach of psychiatrists and psychologists, and even if he were not it is doubtful if they could understand let alone explain him. Flashman does not try, and one can say only that his portrait of Theodore, drawn at close range if on brief acquaintance, tallies closely with those which have come to us from Blanc, Rassam, and other contemporary authorities. Almost all the thoughts and ideas, and even the very words, which Flashman attributes to him, are to be found elsewhere, in the reports of other witnesses, and in Theodore’s own letters. His massively split personality, his wild swings of mood, his periods of rational, even light-hearted conversation contrasted with his ungovernable rages, his benevolent impulses, his evident urge to self-destruction, his drunkenness, his restless energy, his undoubted abilities, and his truly devilish wickedness – all these things which Flashman describes are echoes of what others saw in this strange, gifted, proud, and all too horrible man.

  For when all’s said, when his undoubted virtues have been admitted, his courage, his generosity, his patriotism, his educated intelligence, his devotion to his faith, his military prowess and personal attractions (“the best shot, the best spearman, the best runner, the best horseman in Abyssinia”), and when allowance has been made for the difficulties he faced in trying to rule an ungovernable country, the provocations to a haughty spirit inflicted by British bad manners, the crippling loss of his adored wife and best friends, and the intoxicating effect of absolute power – after all this, there is no escape from the conclusion that Theodore of Abyssinia was a monster to rank with the worst in history.

  His atrocities, his slaughters and tortures and mass executions, his deliberate sadistic orgies carried out in cold blood as well as hot, are well attested, and leave one with the same dumfounded horror produced by the first pictures of Belsen, the same disbelief that human beings can do such things, and inevitably one falls back on the word applied to the Hitlers and Stalins and Ivans and Attilas: madness.

  It is a useless term, of course. Whether Theodore was clinically certifiable or not is beside the point; he was mad in any usual sense of the word. The difficulty, for the layman at any rate, is that he was also undoubtedly sane, at least occasionally. His early life, if stained with the ruthlessness and cruelty which later became obsessive, was in other ways a model of enlightened rule. He tried to abolish slavery and reform taxation, but given the anarchy prevailing in the country, and the difficulty of controlling his defeated rivals, his efforts to drag the country out of its medieval state were bound to fail. His ambitions, his vision of himself as a crusader of destiny who would rebuild the Abyssinian empire and extend it to Jerusalem, proved to be his undoing, and he made a mistake which was to prove his ruin by making war on the Wollo Gallas in an attempt to convert them to Christianity. He won Magdala, and by his murderous cruelty created the mortal enemy who would help Napier to bring him down.

  His reputation has been so appalling that it has caused a kind of reaction, and he has had, if not apologists, at least compassionate writers trying to understand him. Alan Moorehead, for example, writes of the accepted view that he was a mad dog let loose, but adds that while this was true in many ways, the appalling reputation does not fit him absolutely. “A touch of nobility intervenes.” Describing Theodore as an elemental figure defying destiny, he goes on to say that “if one can overlook his brutalities for a moment, one can see that he was an utterly displaced person, a Caliban with power but none to guide him; he had no place.” Unfortunately the brutalities cannot be overlooked, and any attempt to make sense of Theodore can only end in the simple banal conclusion that there was real evil in the heart of him, and that the best thing he did in his life was to end it.

  Flashman’s précis of his early years, and of the causes and course of his quarrel with Britain, are accurate so far as they go, and for those who seek more detail, or are interested in Theodore as a case for the consulting room couch, the works cited in the Notes will be of interest.

  ROBERT CORNELIS NAPIER (1810–1890) was born in Ceylon into one of the great military families. He entered Addiscombe, the East India Company College, when he was 14, was commissioned into the Royal Engineers, and in half a century of soldiering built a reputation second to none in the Victorian army. He and Flashman had served together in the First Sikh War, the Indian Mutiny, and the China War of 1860, and Flashman is hardly exaggerating when he credits his friend with “half the canals and most of the roads” in Northern India. For Napier’s engineering was quite as distinguished as his fighting record; he was a friend of Brunel and Stephenson, and when he was forced to take three years’ leave after a serious illness when he was only 20, he spent much of it studying railway and canal building. He was a fine landscape and portrait painter, and at the age of 78 was still taking lessons in colour mixing. He was also a geologist and student of fossils, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, which may be why Flashman christened him the Bughunter.

  Napier’s service record is too long and varied to set down in detail, but Flashman has given a succinct and fair sketch of a life which was all the more remarkable for Napier’s struggle with ill-health resulting from wounds and hardship. Few general officers before or since have seen more close-quarter action, which was one reason why he was so well regarded by his soldiers, British and Indian; another was the close interest he took in their welfare out of the line as well as in it; he encouraged physical fitness and recreation, presented prizes for shooting, and as Commander-in-Chief in India instituted a weekly holiday every Thursday, which came to be known as St Napier’s Day.

  Indeed, he seems to have been an unusually nice man, pleasant, courteous, and modest to a fault. Flashman, who seldom has much good to say of his commanders, not only admired him but liked him, too, and remembers, as everyone seems to have done, the gentle voice and sudden brilliant smile.

  He and his army received a hero’s welcome home from Abyssinia, and he was created Baron Napier of Magdala. A more unusual honour, perhaps, was the double eulogy he received from both Disraeli and Gladstone, the latter concluding his tribute by speaking of gratitude, admiration, respect, and regard – “I would almost say with affection for the man.”

  On retirement he became Governor of Gibraltar, a field-marshal, and Constable of the Tower. He received a state funeral, the most impressive since Wellington’s, and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. His statue stands in Kensington Road, opposite Queen’s Gate, London. (H. D. Napier, Field-Marshal Lord Napier of Magdala, 1927; H. M. Vibart, Addiscombe: Its Heroes and Men of Note, 1894.)

  APPENDIX III:

  Abyssinian Names

  In the Explanatory Note mention was made of Flashman’s wild inconsistency in spelling Abyssinian names. He was not alone. When the Abyssinian campaign began, virtually no proper names of places or people were known outside the country, and everyone writing about it seems simply to have pleased himself; thus we hear of Theodore’s Queen as Tooroo-Wark, Teriwark, Teru-Wark, Terunsheh, Terunish, and even Terenachie; his second “queen-concubine”, whom Flashman calls Tamagno, is also Yetemagnu and Itamanya; his valet Wald Gabr is also Welder Gabre. The same is true of place-names, so I have simply chosen the spellings which Flashman uses most often. Rather more serious are the discrepancies in maps of the period, and here again I have used Flashman’s own crude sketch, which differs no more from the rest than they do from each other. It seems right and proper that the word “Abyssinia” means “confusion”, or so I am told.

  Notes

/>   1. It is not entirely clear why the Maria Theresa dollar was so popular. Speedicut suggests that its silver was of unusual purity, but Samuel Baker, the hunter and explorer, noted that the effigy of the Empress “with a very low dress and a profusion of bust, is, I believe, the charm that suits the Arab taste.” (The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, 1867).

  2. “Dickey”, meaning shaky or uncertain, has a currency of centuries, but “in Dickie’s meadow”, meaning in serious trouble is, or was, a North Cumbrian expression, and it has been suggested (fancifully, no doubt) that since Richard III was in his younger days Warden of the West March with his head-quarters in Carlisle, where he is commemorated in one of the city’s principal streets, Rickergate, the proverbial “meadow” may have been Bosworth Field.

  3. The mystery of Flashman’s service in the French Foreign Legion remains unsolved. It may have been after the U.S. Civil War, before his enlistment with Maximilian, or at some earlier date in North Africa, as references elsewhere in the Papers suggest. This is the first time desertion is mentioned, but without time and place. One thing is clear: he must have made his peace with the French authorities before 1877, the year in which he was awarded the Legion of Honour.

  4. Flashman is recalling another service to the Austrian royal family, when he foiled a plot by Hungarian nationalists to assassinate the Emperor Franz-Josef at his hunting lodge in Bad Ischl in 1883. He was rewarded with the Order of Maria Theresa and a waltz with the Empress Elisabeth. (See Flashman and the Tiger.)

  5. No doubt Flashman’s Mexican papers will have more to say of this remarkable and rather mysterious adventuress. All that we know of her origins is that she was probably American and had been a circus bareback rider before she met and married Prince Felix Salm-Salm, a German soldier of fortune, when he was serving in the U.S. Civil War. After the war the Salms’ taste for excitement took them to Mexico, where Felix became Maximilian’s chief a.d.c. and Flashman’s colleague. The three were involved in efforts to rescue the Emperor before his execution, and Princess Agnes has left some account of these in her Ten Years of my Life (1868), the frontispiece of which shows a handsome, striking lady of obvious intelligence and determination. Aside from these facts, and what Flashman writes of her, the only other detail that we have is that she owned a pet dog, Jimmy, who was her constant companion. (See Flashman and the Tiger, and Maximilian’s Lieutenant, A Personal History of the Mexican Campaign, 1864–7 by Ernst Pitner, tr. and edited by Gordon Etherington-Smith, 1993.)

  6. Details of the Emperor Maximilian’s last voyage may be found in newspapers of the day, and there is an excellent account in the Illustrated London News. Needless to say, Flashman has the ceremonial off pat, even to the curious triple coffin and the waterfront procession.

  7. There must have been 250 of these boxes, each containing 2000 dollars, according to the cash account of the Treasury Officer to the expedition.

  8. A Bootneck or Leatherneck is a Royal Marine, supposedly so-called from the leather tab securing the uniform collar in the nineteenth century, or possibly from the leather neck-stock. Leatherneck was adopted as a nickname for the U.S. Marines early in the twentieth century. Royal Marines were also known as Jollies, which according to Eric Partridge was once the nickname of the London Trained Bands.

  9. Work on the Suez Canal, the brainchild of the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, began in 1859, and the waterway was opened to navigation in 1869. It had cost almost £30 million, and in 1875 Disraeli acquired 176,602 shares for £4 million, giving Britain a 44% holding. The canal was indeed built by what amounted to slavery, the forced labour (corvee) of the Egyptian peasants being enforced by the rawhide whip of the overseers (courbash). (John Marlowe, The Making of the Suez Canal, 1964.)

  10. In fact, Flashman’s consignment of dollars was a modest part of Napier’s “war-chest”, about one-ninth. The financial accounts of the expedition show a total of 4,530,000 dollars paid in numerous instalments up to May 14, 1868, which the accountants estimated as equivalent to £969,343.15.0, but these were only the shipments of silver; the total cost of the expedition was far higher. Disraeli, the Chancellor, originally asked the House of Commons for £2 million, with a further £1.5 million in the following year if the campaign was protracted; eventually the total cost was close to £9 million, a vast sum which appalled Parliament. In fairness to Disraeli, it was impossible to tell what such an expedition into unknown territory would cost; on the other hand, there was tremendous waste, partly because Napier was given carte blanche and gave no thought to economy. (See “Supply of Treasure and Financial Arrangements” in volume 1 of the official history, Record of the Expedition to Abyssinia by Major T. J. Holland and Captain H. M. Hozier, 1870; Prelude to Magdala by Percy Arnold, 1991.)

  11. This version of the Red Sea crossing by the Children of Israel is also to be found in Harper’s Hand-book for Travellers in Europe and the East, 1871 edition, a guide for American tourists compiled by W. Pembroke Fetridge.

  12. Seedeboy, sidiboy, Anglo-Indian slang for an African, usually a labourer (see Kipling, The Lost Legion, “We’ve starved on a Seedeboy’s pay”). Eric Partridge points out, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the irony that the word derives from sidi, a lord.

  13. Flashman’s memory is playing him false. He may well have seen, in late January, 1868, the cartoon of Theodore, as well as Punch’s complaint about the cost of the expedition, since these appeared in early December, 1867, but the suggestion of exhibiting the Emperor in a cage is from Punch of May, 1868, when the campaign was over.

  14. Flashman’s experience of Abyssinia was brief, barely more than two months in which he saw comparatively little of the country and its people. What he did see he reported with his usual accuracy, and his descriptions of costume and racial characteristics are borne out by contemporary artists. His enthusiasm for the beauty of the people, especially the women of Galla, is shared by other travellers. Most early descriptions of the country dwell at length on its churches, and religious customs and artefacts, some of which are strange to European Christians, but while Flashman has little interest in these, his notice of curiosities is reliable. The Illustrated London News drawings are invaluable, as is J. C. Hotten’s Abyssinia and Its People, 1868, an anthology drawn from every traveller of note up to that time, including the first British Consul, Plowden, King Theodore’s friend and adviser.

  15. James Bruce (1730–94) was indeed something of an eccentric, a scholar, traveller, businessman, linguist, antiquary, and the first of a distinguished line of Scottish explorers in Africa. Born in Stirlingshire and educated at Harrow, he was a splendid athlete and horseman, six feet four inches tall, red-haired, reckless, combative, and “swayed to an undue degree by self-esteem and the thirst for fame”. In the course of an adventurous life Bruce was British Consul at Algiers, a perilous post when the Barbary pirates were still active, survived shipwreck by swimming ashore at Benghazi, explored Abyssinia and reached the source of the Blue Nile, won the confidence of the royal family (and the admiration of a beautiful princess) by using his amateur medical skill to treat smallpox and the plague, and astonished the warriors by showing them how to break wild horses and by his marksmanship. “His intrepid bearing and his great physical strength and agility fitted him,” says his biographer, “to overawe a barbarous people.”

  His own countrymen were less easily impressed, and his account of his adventures was disbelieved by the educated (and caused some scandal) although it sold well in book form. Bruce’s overbearing style and touchiness were no help, and Fanny Burney noted that “his grand air, gigantic height, and forbidding brow awed everybody into silence.” He retired to Scotland in dudgeon, and died when, hurrying to show a lady to her carriage, he tripped and fell downstairs, landing head first, and never regained consciousness. Since his death virtually everything that he related about Abyssinia has been proved to be true. (James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768–73; Dictionary of National Biograph
y; Margery Perham and J. Simmons, African Discovery, 1942)

  16. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, married Princess Alexandra of Denmark on March 10, 1863. Other matters which may have commanded the Foreign Office’s attention about this time were the Greek Assembly’s election of Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, as King of Greece (an honour which was declined); the division of Poland into provinces by Russia; Maori risings in New Zealand, and the advance of French troops on Mexico City which led to the installation of Maximilian as emperor.

  17. Public pessimism was such that Holland and Hozier devoted space to it in their official report. Letters to editors “drew ghastly pictures of the malaria of the coast and the insalubrity of the country. At one time the expedition was to die of thirst, at one time to be destroyed by hippopotami. Every beast antagonistic to the life of man was … to be found in the jungles or the swamps. Animals were to perish by flies, men by worms. The return of the expedition was regarded as chimerical, the massacre of the prisoners as certain.” The report also noted the “merciless” rise in insurance companies’ rates for officers volunteering, “who were regarded as rushing blindfold into suicide.” But competition for places was fierce, and newspapers were besieged by would-be special correspondents.

  18. The 33rd Foot were the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, also known as the West Yorkshires, but consisting largely of Irishmen, and notoriously ill-disciplined. But they were to be, with the 4th Foot (King’s Own), and the 45th (Sherwood Foresters), the vanguard of Napier’s force.

  19. George Alfred (“G.A.”) Henty (1832–1902) shares with R. M. Ballantyne the leading place among writers for boys. He was born in Trumpington, educated at Westminster and Cambridge, and volunteered for hospital service in the Crimean War. This led to his appointment as organiser of the Italian hospitals in the 1859 war with Austria, but after a brief interval in which he worked as a mine manager in Wales and Sardinia, he returned to his first love, military journalism, and for ten years followed the drum with Garibaldi in the Tyrol, Napier in Abyssinia, Wolseley in Ashanti, the Russians at Khiva, and the Turks in the Serbian war of 1876. He covered the winter campaign in the Franco-Prussian war, was in Paris during the Commune, and in Spain with the guerrillas in the Carlist rebellion. Most of his work was for the Standard, but eventually the strain of campaigning told on his health and he devoted himself to more sedentary writing.