On the face of it, there wasn’t much for the Gazette. No dead on our side, although I believe a couple of our thirty wounded died later, and only seven hundred Abs killed—I say only, you under stand because when you’ve seen Pickett’s charge and the Sutlej awash with thousands of corpses, Arogee’s a fleabite (provided you ain’t one of the seven hundred, that is). For our fellows, it had been a day’s shooting, but for the Abs it was Waterloo. They’d been shot flat, massacred if you like, by Messrs Snider and Enfield, gallant savages decimated by modern weapons… but for once the liberals can’t sniff piously over that, for even at close quarters, steel against steel, Ab swords and spears had been no match for Sikh bayonets. For the Abs, it was shameful disaster, and for Theodore it was finis. [48]
For our side, it was something unheard of, a victory without loss at the end of a campaign that had been supposed to end in catas trophe. But Speedy told me there was no joy in our camp, only pity and admiration for a foe who hadn’t been good enough, and a perverse irritation that it hadn’t been worth all the toil and effort. T. Atkins and J. Sepoy had expected a real battle, an Inkerman or Balaclava, a Mudki or Ferozeshah, against a foe they could touch their hats to. Arogee had been a sell; the Abs had been no opposition at all—oh, they’d tried, and been a mighty disappointment.
That, I can assure you, is what my countrymen felt. Victory had been so easy that they felt cheated. D’you wonder that I shake my head over ’em? [49]
It was well after dark before Theodore could rustle up the will to bestir himself. He sat for a good two hours like a man stunned, not seeming to hear the cries of the wounded below Fala, or that sudden ghastly scream which told us that the jackals and hyenas were at work. At last he summoned Samuel and dictated a letter to Rassam asking him to make his peace with Napier. I can give it exact, for Samuel gave me a copy later, as evidence that he’d done his bit to bring about an armistice. It was a real Theodore effusion:
My dear friend, how have you passed the day? Thank God, I am well. I, being a king, could not allow people to come and fight me without attacking them first. I have done so and my troops have been beaten. I thought your people were women but I find they are men. They fought very bravely. Seeing that I am not able to withstand them, I must ask you to reconcile me to them.
He gave it to a couple of the Germans to take to Magdala, and then we went down to Islamgee, through a torch-lit purgatory of dead who’d been brought up from the battlefield, and wounded being cared for by their comrades. It was raining again, and the guttering flares shone on rows of shrouded corpses, and on lean-tos and tents where the Ab surgeons were at work. Under one long canopy were laid the scarlet-clad bodies of some of the five hundred chiefs who had led the charge and been peppered by the King’s Own and Baluch, who’d supposed that one of ’em must be Theodore.
He stood silent a while, looking at them, and then moved slowly along the line, stopping now and then to touch a hand, or lay his own on a forehead, before turning away. Someone called his attention to another body in a tent nearby, and when they drew back the shroud who should it be but Miriam, looking pale and beautiful and very small. It took me aback; I’d forgotten her in the tumult of the last few days, and seeing her lifeless gave me a shock that I find hard to describe. I mean, I bar vicious bitches who are prepared to burn me to death by inches, but she’d been a lovely peach and I’d have dearly liked to explain the Kama Sutra to her by demonstration. So I can’t say I was grief-stricken, or even moved, much, just sorry as one is to see a beautiful ornament broken, and irritated by the waste.
Some of her mates were around her, keening what I guess was a death-song, and I asked the ugly little trot I’d christened Gorilla Jane how it had happened. Miriam hadn’t been in the battle, but watching with the others from the Fala saddle, and a screaming fire-devil had exploded by her: a rocket. The others had escaped injury, so I guess bonny little Miriam was the only female casu alty of Arogee. Well, at least I gave her a moment’s thought, which was more than Theodore did; he spared her not so much as a glance as he strode on to his tent. Gratitude of princes, what?
You’d ha’ thought, would you not, that it was now all over at last? His army had been thrashed out of sight, he’d confessed with bitter tears that there was no resisting such weapons, and he’d asked Rassam to make peace for him. He changed his mind in the course of the night, which he spent getting raging drunk, and vowing that he’d be damned before he’d sue to Napier, but by dawn he was seeing reason again (for the time being) and I was treated to the sight of Prideaux, in full fig, limping down from Magdala to get his marching orders from the Emperor: he, and one of the German prisoners, a preacher named Flad, were to go with one of Theodore’s sons-in-law, a nervous weed named Alamee, to open negotiations with Napier.
His majesty was in his sunniest mood by now, inquiring after Prideaux’s health, pressing drink on him, and complimenting him on his appearance—at which I couldn’t help smiling approval, for our jaunty subaltern was putting on dog in no uncertain manner. His old red coat was sponged and pressed, his whiskers shone with pomade, his cap was on three hairs, his cane under his arm, and his monocle in his eye. Rule Britannia, thinks I, and stamped my heel in reply to the barra salaam (* Big salute.) he threw me as he and his com panions rode down to Napier’s head-quarters beyond Arogee. Theodore watched their progress through his glass from the summit of Selassie, and was much gratified when one of his scouts panted up to report that the party had been received with cheering and hats in the air.
If he thought that this natural rejoicing at seeing two of the pris oners free at last was a happy omen, he was brought back to earth when they returned in the afternoon with Napier’s reply. By then his mood had changed for the worse, thanks to his chiefs, who came to the Selassie summit en masse to point out that he still had nine-tenths of his army in good fettle, and if they fell on Napier by night, when artillery and rockets would be useless, they could make him sorry he’d ever crossed the Bechelo. Whether Theodore believed this or not, he was looking damned surly by the time Prideaux and Flad and Alamee returned to inform him that Napier’s terms amounted to unconditional surrender, with the prisoners freed and Theodore willing to “submit to the Queen of England", with a promise that he’d be given honourable treatment.
Reasonable enough, considering the trouble and expense we’d been at, and the barbarous way he’d behaved, wouldn’t you say? But you ain’t the descendant of Solomon and Sheba, with notions of imperial grandeur, unable even to contemplate submitting your sacred person to the representative of a mere woman who’d added injury to insult by ignoring your letter and then invading your country. Just to show you how far he was from understanding us, his first question was: did honourable treatment mean we’d assist him against his enemies, and would we look after his family—wives, concubines, numerous offspring, etc?
Flad, who interpreted, put this to Prideaux, who said, being an honest English lad from a good home, that we’d do the decent thing, goodness me. Flad was explaining this in diplomatic terms when Alamee, who’d been hopping nervously as Theodore’s scowl grew blacker, seized his majesty’s arm and drew him out of earshot, chattering twenty to the dozen.
“Talkin’ sense into him, I hope,” says Prideaux to me. “Is the feller changin’ his mind? His army don’t look like surrenderin’, I must say!” Nor did they, ranged in their silent thousands on the lower slopes of Selassie beneath us, and on Fala across the way. “Never saw so many glowerin’ faces! Well, he’d better swallow the terms, ’cos they’re the best he’ll get—what, after the way he’s carried on, keepin’ us chained for two years, torturin’ poor old Cameron, butcherin’ his own folk right and left! The man’s a blasted Attila! And if he expects Napier to just say, ‘So long, old fellow!’ and pack his traps, he’s sadly mistaken!”