When the Going Was Good

by Evelyn Waugh

  There was no possible advantage to be gained by priority, but habitual competition had by now unbalanced many, so that some lorries made a race of it. The adolescent Canadian far outdistanced the rest of the field and arrived in Dessye a day ahead; I believe that on his return he was accorded a civic reception in his home-town for this feat. Others preferred a more leisurely journey; stopped to fish and shoot on the way and compose descriptions of the scenery, which, a few hours after Debra Birhan, became varied and magnificent.

  Early in the afternoon of the second day we came suddenly and without warning – for the road was recent and not yet marked on any published map – upon an enormous escarpment, a rocky precipice open before our wheels; far below lay a broad valley, richly cultivated and studded with small hemispherical hills, each crowned with a church or a cluster of huts. Down this awful cliff the track fell in a multitude of hairpin bends; surveyed from above the gradient seemed, in places, almost perpendicular; there was barely clearance for the wheels; on the off-side the edge crumbled away into space; at the corners the road was sharply inclined in the wrong direction. Our Harari driver gave a sigh of despair. Straight down the face of the cliff transecting the road at each turn led a precipitous footpath. Ostensibly to lighten the truck, actually because we were thoroughly scared, the Radical and I decided to go down on foot. It was a stiff descent; with every step the air became warmer as though we were scrambling across the seasons. When we reached more tolerable ground we waited for the lorry, which presently arrived, the driver speechless but triumphant. All that night, James reported, he was talking in his sleep about braking and reversing.

  We found a warm and sheltered camping place a few miles from the foot of the escarpment, and here, shortly before sundown, we were visited by heralds from the local governor, Dedjasmach Matafara, who was living nearby in temporary quarters, to ask us our business. I sent James to explain. He returned rather drunk to say that the Dedjasmach was ‘very gentleman’. He was accompanied by slaves bearing a present of tedj, native bread, and a young sheep; also an invitation to breakfast the next morning.

  The Dedjasmach was a very old man, a veteran of the first battle of Adowa, corpulent, ponderous in his movements, with unusually dark skin and a fine white beard.

  He occupied a series of huts behind a well-made stockade. There was a circular tukal where he slept and where, on our arrival, he was completing his toilet; there was a larger, square building for eating and the transaction of business, a cook-house, women’s and soldiers’ quarters, and in the centre an open space, part farmyard and part barrack square. Soldiers, slaves, and priests thronged the place, disputing it with cattle and poultry.

  The Dedjasmach greeted us with great politeness and dignity, slipped on a pair of elastic-sided boots and led us across to the dining-room. The preparations were simple. One of the sheets was taken from the Dedjasmach’s bed and stretched across the centre of the hut to shield us from public view; behind it, in almost complete darkness, a low wicker table was laid with piles of native bread. The Radical and I, the Dedjasmach and two priests, sat down at little stools. James stood beside us. Two women slaves stood with horsehair whisks, fanning away the flies. Abyssinian bread is made in thin, spongy discs. It is used very conveniently as both plate and spoon. The curry – a fiery but rather delicious dish which forms the staple food of those who can afford it – is ladled out into the centre of the bread; morsels are then wrapped up in pieces torn from the edge and put into the mouth. The Dedjasmach courteously helped us to tit-bits from his own pile. Other slaves brought us horn mugs of tedj – a heavy drink at eight in the morning. Conversation was intermittent and rather laborious; it consisted chiefly of questions addressed to us by our host and the priests. They asked us our ages, whether we were married, how many children. One of the priests recorded this information in a little exercise book. The Dedjasmach said he loved the English because he knew that they too hated the Italians. The Italians were a poor sort of people, he said; one of his friends had killed forty of them, one after the other, with his sword. He asked us if we knew General Harrington; he had been a good man; was he still alive? Then he returned to the question of the Italians. They did not like the smell of blood, he said; when they smelled blood they were afraid; when an Abyssinian smelled blood he became doubly brave; that was why the sword was better than the gun.

  Besides, he said, the Italians disliked fighting so much they had to be given food free before they would do it; he knew this for a fact; he had seen it himself forty years ago; they had great carts loaded with food and wine to persuade the men to fight; Abyssinians scorned that; each man brought his own rations and, if he had one, his own mule.

  Water was brought for us to bathe our hands; then little cups of bitter coffee. Finally we made our adieux. He asked us to take two soldiers with us to Dessye. Slightly drunk, we stepped out into the brilliant morning sunshine. One of the soldiers who was accompanying us had to sell his mule before he could start. At last the transaction was complete. He bundled in at the back with the boys; we were saved the embarrassment of the second by the arrival, just as we were starting, of a French journalist. We told him that the Dedjasmach had sent the soldier for him and he accepted the man gratefully.

  Then we resumed the journey.

  It had been more than a pleasant interlude; it had been a glimpse of the age-old, traditional order that still survived, gracious and sturdy, out of sight beyond the brass bands and bunting, the topees and humane humbug of Tafari’s régime; of an order doomed to destruction. Whatever the outcome of the war: mandate or conquest or internationally promoted native reform – whatever resulted at Geneva or Rome or Addis Ababa, Dedjasmach Matafara and all he stood for was bound to disappear. But we were pleased to have seen it and touched hands across the centuries with the court of Prester John.

  On a later day we passed an army – Dedjasmach Bayana’s, which had left Addis fourteen days before; they had found a sugar plantation, and every man was sucking a cane as he shambled along; Bayana himself maintained the same pomp as when he had paraded before the Emperor; he rode under a black umbrella, surrounded by his domestic slaves and led-mules adorned with their ceremonial trappings; a team of women followed him carrying jars of tedj under crimson cotton veils. We passed through belts of forest, full of birds and game and monkeys and brilliant flowers. On the fourth day Dessye lying high up in a cup in the mountains, surrounded on all sides by hills.

  It is a place of recent creation; an Abyssinian military outpost in the Mohammedan Wollo country. In appearance it was very much like a miniature of Addis Ababa – the same eucalyptus trees, the same single shopping street, the same tin roofs, a Gebbi built on an eminence dominating the town. The inhabitants were Abyssinian squatters; the Wollo Gallas came in for the weekly market but lived in the villages.

  The place was full of soldiers; a detachment of the Imperial Guard was quartered in the grounds of the Italian consulate; the irregulars slept in a ring of encampments along the surrounding hillside. They came into town at dawn and remained until sunset, drinking, quarrelling and sauntering about the streets; more were arriving daily and the congestion was becoming perilous. The chiefs were under orders to leave for the front, but they hung on, saying that they would not move until the Emperor led them in person.

  We reported to the mayor, a stocky, bearded figure who had disgraced himself in London and now happily compromised in his costume between the new and old régimes by wearing beard and cloak of a traditional cut and, below them, shorts and red and white ringed football stockings. He passed us on to the chief of police, who, that afternoon, was tipsy. Eventually we found a camping ground for ourselves.

  For so many weeks now Dessye had been our goal – a promised land sometimes glimpsed from afar, sometimes impenetrably obscured, sometimes seen in a mirage a stone’s throw away in crystal detail, always elusive, provocative, desirable – that its pursuit had become an end in itself. Now that, at length, we found ourselves actually th
ere, when the tents were pitched and the stores unpacked and all round us a village of tents had sprung up, we began to wonder what precisely we had gained by the journey. We were two hundred or so miles nearer the Italians, but for any contact we had with the battlefield or information about what was happening, we were worse off than at Addis Ababa. A field wireless had been established on the hill side a mile out of the town. Here we all hurried to enquire about facilities and were told, to our surprise, that messages of any length might be sent. At Addis there had been a limit of two hundred words. All messages from Dessye had to be retransmitted from Addis. It seemed odd, but we were used to unaccountable happenings. That evening all over the camp typewriters were tapping as the journalists spread themselves over five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand word messages describing the perils of the journey. Two days later we were cheerfully informed that none of the messages had been sent, that no more could be accepted until further notice, that when the station reopened there would be a limit of fifty words and a rigid censorship. So there, for the time being, our professional activities ended.

  A week passed in complete idleness. The Emperor’s arrival was daily predicted and daily postponed. Lij Yasu died, and James, who had been dining with Mohammedan friends in the town, and drinking in Christian fashion, returned in a high state of excitement to say that the Emperor would be murdered if he attempted to show himself among the Wollo Gallas.

  The native members of the ‘Ethiopian Red Cross’ had a beano, stripped to the skin and danced round the tent of their American officer, who had only that evening moved his quarters to avoid contamination from his more worldly Irish colleagues.

  The governing Dedjasmach made a strenuous and partly successful attempt to get some of the soldiers to the front. He organized a parade, and, himself at their head, drums beating and bugles playing, led them Pied-Piper fashion up the Makale road, returning by himself after dark to the more agreeable accommodation of his own bedroom.

  Relieved of the itch to cable, the journalists displayed amiable characteristics which they had hitherto concealed. We became house proud; the Radical and I set a popular vogue by erecting the first latrine. Mr Prospero contrived an arc-light. We began to entertain and competed mildly in kitchen and service. Except for a Finnish misanthrope who maintained a front of unbroken hostility – and later on his return to Addis indulged in litigation at the American consular court against a colleague who punched him – the grimmest characters seemed to grow soft in idleness. On 28th November there was a Thanksgiving Dinner, attended by all except the Finn, and after it a drinking competition won – dishonestly we discovered later – by one of the Irishmen.

  Next day it was announced officially that the Emperor was on the road, and on the 30th he arrived. The soldiers waited for him all day, squatting along the route, reeling and jostling about the streets. They had been surly and hostile for some days; now, exhilarated at the prospect of the Emperor’s arrival, they became menacing, held up the cars of the cinema men, scowled and jeered through the heat of the day; then, towards evening, as it became cold, crowded shivering and morose. The royal mules in brilliant saddle cloths waited to take the Emperor on the last stage of his journey, up the hill to the Crown Prince’s Gebbi, but the sun went down, the crowds began to melt away and the photographers were again deprived of a picturesque shot. At length he arrived, unobtrusively, in the darkness. From now on Dessye became his headquarters; in the new year he moved north; he was not to see Addis again until he arrived in the spring, in flight to the coast.

  There was no mistaking the sincerity of the Court’s optimism; three weeks before they had professed the same confidence but in a strained and anxious fashion; now, reverting to the simpler habits of their upbringing, they were openly jubilant.

  The Emperor came to visit the American hospital. The wards were fairly full, but not with war wounded; there were several venereal cases and some of influenza contracted on the journey up (the Imperial Guard seemed to be of lower stamina than the irregular troops); there were a few soldiers who had deserted from Eritrea and got badly cut up by a company of Abyssinian troops deserting in the opposite direction; but there were no heroes upon whom the Emperor could suitably manifest his sympathy. In order to show the equipment of the hospital at its best advantage the doctors staged an operation – the amputation of a gangrened stump of arm. Emperor, Court, and journalists crowded into the theatre; the photographers and cinema men took their shots. The Emperor asked, ‘And where did this gallant man lose his hand?’

  ‘Here in Dessye. The Dedjasmach had it cut off for stealing two besas worth of corn.’

  Meanwhile in Europe and America the editors and film magnates had begun to lose patience. They had spent large sums of money on the Abyssinian war and were getting very little in return; several journalists had already been recalled; the largest cinema company was beginning to pack up; now a general retreat began. I received my dismissal by cable on the day after the Emperor’s arrival. For a few hours I considered staying on independently. That had been my original intention, but now the prospect seemed unendurably dismal. I had long wanted to spend Christmas at Bethlehem. This was the opportunity.

  There was a car travelling to Addis Ababa on Red Cross business in which I was able, illegally, to purchase a seat. We had to start before dawn in order to avoid notice from the Red Cross authorities. James cried. It was an uneventful journey. The German driver – an adventurous young airman who had come to look for good fortune after serving in the Paraguayan war – kept a rifle across the wheel and inflicted slight wounds on the passing fauna at point-blank range.

  Addis was dead. With the Emperor’s departure the public services had settled into the accustomed coma. The bars were open but empty. A handful of journalists from the south were packing up to return to England. The mystery men had faded away.

  After a few days I got down to Djibouti. At Dirre-Dowa the French garrison were firmly entrenched; half the town was a French fort. Djibouti was still crowded, still panicky. There were a number of journalists there reporting the war at leisure from their imaginations. Soon after I left, some bombs had been dropped on Dessye and the chief excitement of Djibouti centred on a race to get the films of them back to Europe. Weeks later in Devon I saw them on the news reel. It was difficult to recapture the excitement, secrecy, and competition that had attended their despatch.

  News of the Hoare-Laval proposals reached us in the Red Sea; at Port Said we heard of their reception. Next day I was in Jerusalem and visited the Abyssinian monks, perched in their little African village on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre; Christmas morning in Bethlehem; desert and ruined castles in Transjordan; like the rest of the world I began to forget about Abyssinia.

  He just wanted a decent book to read …

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  First published by Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd 1946

  Published in Penguin Books 1951