Flashman on the March

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 conver sation 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 wicked ness—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 precis 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 Waterloo Place, London. (H. D. Napier, Field-Marshal Lord Napier of Magdala, 1927; H. M. Vibart, Addiscombe: Its Heroes and Men of Note, 1894.)