Before Magdala, April 16th.
My letter describing the fall of Magdala was only written two days ago, and I have but few scraps of intelligence to add. These, however, I shall now send, in hopes that they may arrive by the same mail which conveyed my last. We have had only two excitements here; the one the perquisition—indeed, by the way it was conducted, I may call it inquisition—for loot; the other, the constant plunder by those arrant thieves, the Gallas. The first orders with respect to plunder were reasonable and sensible enough. They were, that all articles of intrinsic value, or which might be nationally interesting, were to be given up. This no one objected to. It was only fair that all booty collected of any value should be fairly divided for the benefit of the force in general. The next order, however, was simply ridiculous, and caused naturally a good deal of grumbling. It was ordered that every article taken, of whatever value or description, should be returned. Now, the men had possessed [pg 409]themselves of all sorts of small mementoes of the capture of Magdala. Spears and glass beads, books and scraps of dresses, empty gourds and powder-horns, all sorts of little objects in fact, the united intrinsic value of which would not be twenty dollars, but which were valuable mementoes to the three or four thousand men who had picked them up—all these were now to be given up; and so strict was the search, that I saw even the men’s havresacks examined to see that they had hidden nothing. The pile of objects collected was of the most miscellaneous description, and looked like the contents of a pawnbroker’s shop in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel. These things were valuable to the men, as having been collected by them in Magdala; but they will fetch nothing whatever when sold. It is a very great pity that the original order was not adhered to, as the men would have all acquiesced cheerfully enough in the summons that articles of intrinsic value should be delivered up. As it is, the whole value of the plunder will not exceed ten thousand dollars in value, and, indeed, I question if it will approach that sum. The principal articles of value, with the exception of some crosses, are of English manufacture, double-barrelled guns, &c.; in fact, the presents which the English Government sent out by Rassam. A medical court have examined Theodore’s body, and have come to the conclusion that he died by his own hand. Mr. Holmes, of the British Museum, has taken an exceedingly good likeness of the dead monarch; indeed, I do not know that I ever saw a more striking resemblance. The Engineers have also taken a photograph of him.
The Gallas have been extremely troublesome for the last three days. The unfortunate fugitives from Magdala are [pg 410]encamped at the foot of the hill, and are gradually moving-off to their respective homes. Round their camp, and round the unfortunates upon their march, the Gallas swarm in great numbers, robbing, driving-off their cattle and donkeys, carrying-off their women and children into captivity, and wounding, and sometimes killing, all who oppose them. Sometimes, too, they attempt to rob our mules and stores. We do all we can to protect the defenceless people, and detachments are constantly going out to drive the robbers off. The infantry, the rocket-train, and the guns have several times had to fire, and several of the plunderers have been killed. Eighteen are at present prisoners in our camp, some of whom were concerned in the murder of one of the Abyssinians. The night before last they made an attack upon some of the mules with the baggage of the 33d, near Magdala, but were beaten off with the loss of several men. Now that we have got Magdala, our difficulty is to dispose of it, and it is this only which is keeping us waiting here. Magdala is, as I have already said, an almost impregnable place, even in the hands of these savages. North and west of them the people are Christians. Whether their Christianity, or the Christianity of any savage people, does them any good whatever, or makes them the least more moral or better than their neighbours, it is needless now to inquire. At any rate they are a settled people, living by the culture of their land. To the east of these agricultural people are the Gallas, nomadic Mussulmans, whose hand is against every man’s, who live by robbery and violence, and who are slavers and man-stealers of the worst kind. Against them Magdala stands as a bulwark. It is on the road between their country and Abyssinia proper, and the garrison can always fall upon their rear in case [pg 411]of an attempted foray. It was therefore desirable that it should be intrusted to some power strong enough to hold in check this nation of robbers. Theodore’s son, who, with his wives, has fallen into our hands, is too young to be thought of, and there remains only Gobayze, and his rival Menilek. Menilek in the early days of the expedition was heard a good deal of. General Merewether was always writing about him and his army of forty thousand men, and his great friendship; but, like most of the gallant general’s promised lands, Menilek’s assistance turned out a myth, and we have never heard of him since we came within a hundred miles of Magdala. Gobayze, on the other hand, has at any rate turned out to be a real personage. He has never, it is true, done the slightest thing to assist us in any way; still his uncle paid us a visit, and nearly got shot, so that we may presume that this uncle really has a nephew called Gobayze. Gobayze has been written to, to come and take possession of Magdala, but he has not arrived; but this morning his uncle has again appeared upon the scene, and, I understand, declines, in the name of his relative, to have anything to say to Magdala. Magdala, in fact, except as a stronghold to retreat to as a last resource, is absolutely valueless. It is too far removed from the main portion of Abyssinia to be of any strategical importance, and it would require a couple of thousand men to garrison it, and who would have to be supplied with provisions from a considerable distance. Gobayze wants all his available force for the struggle he will be engaged in with Menilek as soon as we leave the country, and he does not at all care about detaching two thousand men to an extreme corner of his dominions, where they could in no way affect the issue of the war. He may change his mind; but if [pg 412]he should not do so, we shall in a couple of days start upon our backward course, and abandon Magdala to the first comer. The Abyssinians complain bitterly of our mode of fighting. With them an engagement is a species of duel. Both sides charge simultaneously, discharge their pieces, and retreat to load, repeating the manœuvre until one side or the other has had enough of it. They object, therefore, excessively to our continuous advance and fire, without any pause to reload. It is to this unseemly practice that they attribute their defeat.
The whole army are looking forward with the greatest eagerness for the order to retire. Existence here is not a pleasant one. The weather in the day is dry, hot, but not unpleasant; in the afternoon we have always heavy rains, and cold at night. Our variety of provisions is not great. We have plenty of meat, and little flour; no rum, no tea, no sugar, no vegetables. By the way, the commissariat actually managed to supply the extraordinarily liberal allowance of one dram of rum per man to the force on the day after the capture of Magdala. But our great want is water. We are literally without water. A mile and a half off is a limited quantity, but it is very limited indeed, and stinks abominably; so bad is it, that it is difficult to distinguish what one is drinking, even if one is fortunate enough to procure tea or coffee; and even of this there is not sufficient for drinking purposes alone, and a man enters another tent and asks as eagerly for a cup of water as if it were the choicest of drinks. Washing is altogether out of the question; and the animals have to be taken down to the muddy Bachelo, fifteen hundred feet below us, and six miles distant, for their daily draught. Decidedly the sooner we are out of this the better. At present the 18th is the happy day decided upon; and I earnestly [pg 413]hope that nothing will occur to postpone our departure. Some of the troops will certainly start to-day or to-morrow.
Antalo, May 1st.
There are few things of less interest than the closing chapter of a campaign. The excitement and anxiety, the success and triumph, are over; the curtain has fallen upon the play, and we have only to put on our wraps and go home. Even by the present date the telegraph has told England of the success with which the expedition has been crowned. When he has once read the details, the English reader will, after the first little burst of natural pride and satisfaction, sit himself down with a slight sigh to count the cost, and then endeavour, as far as possible, to forget the unpleasant subject. I feel that the heading of my letter, “The Abyssinian Expedition,” will no longer be an attractive one. Epilogues are gone out of fashion, and are only retained as a relic of the past at the annual play of the Westminster boys. I should imagine that at the end of a modern play very few people would sit-out an epilogue; and in the same way, I anticipate that very few readers will care for hearing any more about the barren and mountainous country in which it has been our lot to sojourn for the last six months. I should imagine that they must be nearly as weary of the subject as we are ourselves. Never certainly in my experience have special correspondents had so hard or so ungrateful a task as that which has devolved upon us here. The country through which the army has marched has been barren and mountainous in the extreme. The actual events have been few and far between. [pg 414]There has been no opportunity for generalship or strategical movement. It has been one long, slow, monotonous march, accompanied with more or less hardship to all concerned. It has presented no points of comparison with the shifting scenes and exciting phases of a European campaign. It is only by its results, and by the remembrance of the hostile criticisms and lugubrious prophecies with which it was assailed in its early days, that we ourselves can judge of the difficulty of the task accomplished, and of the way in which the world will view it. It has to us been simply a monotony of hard work and hard living. Until the last week of our march we had no excitement whatever to enliven it; and, as far as the incidents of the campaign have been concerned, there has been but little to recompense the British taxpayer for his outlay. In other respects there is no doubt that, worthless as were the set of people as a whole in whose favour this costly expedition has been undertaken, the money has been well spent. In no other way, with so comparatively small an outlay, could Great Britain have recovered the prestige which years of peace had undoubtedly much impaired both in Europe and the East. England has shown that she can go to war really for an idea; that she can embark in a war so difficult, hazardous, and costly, that no other European Power would have undertaken it under similar circumstances, and this, without the smallest idea of material advantage to herself. England had, pace our French critics, no possible benefit to derive from the conquest or occupation of Abyssinia. With Aden and Perim in our power, the Red Sea is virtually an English lake, and the possession of Abyssinia, hundreds of miles from the port of Annesley Bay, which in itself is quite out of the track of vessels between Suez and [pg 415]Aden, would be a source of weakness rather than of additional strength. The war was undertaken purely from a generous national impulse, aggravated by the feeling that the captivity of our unfortunate countrymen was due to no fault of their own, but attributable to the gross blundering of the men to whom the foreign affairs of the nation were unfortunately intrusted. Our success has been astonishing even to ourselves, and has been providentially accomplished in the face of blunders and mistakes which would have ruined any other expedition.
In my last letter I stated that Gobayze had declined to accept the charge of Magdala. It was consequently determined to burn it; and on the 18th ultimo fire was applied, and in a very short time the whole of the thatched tents were in a blaze. The wind was blowing freshly at the time, and in a few minutes the whole of the plateau of Magdala was covered with a fierce blaze, which told to the surrounding country for miles that the last act of atonement was being inflicted. Had the scene taken place at night, it would have been grand in the extreme; but even in broad day the effect of the sheet of flame, unclouded as it was by smoke—for the dry roofs burned like tinder—was very fine. Imagine a gigantic farmyard of three-quarters of a mile long by nearly half a mile wide, and containing above 300 hayricks, in a blaze; and the effect of burning Magdala may be readily conceived. Simultaneously with the conflagration the gates were blown up and the pieces of ordnance burst; and then the troops who had been told-off for the task retired from the scene of their signal success to join their comrades, and march the next day for the sea-shore. I started for Dalanta the day before the departure of the troops, and was very glad [pg 416]that I did so, as I thereby avoided the tremendous confusion of the baggage, part of which was nearly thirty hours upon the road, and witnessed one of the most extraordinary scenes I ever beheld. At the Bachelo river I came upon the van of the principal column of the fugitives from Magdala, who had encamped upon the previous night by the stream. Here the number of empty gourds, cooking-vessels, and rubbish of all kinds, showed that, scanty as their baggage was, it was already too great for their means of transport. A mile farther I came upon their rear. As far as the eye could reach up the winding path to the summit of the gorge, they swarmed in a thick gray multitude. Thirty thousand human beings, men, women, and children, besides innumerable animals of all kinds. Never, probably, since the great Exodus from Egypt, was so strange a sight witnessed. All were laden; for once, the men had to share the labours of their wives and families; and indeed I may say that the males of this portion of Abyssinia are less lazy, and more willing to bear their share of the family-labours, than were the men of Tigre, who, as I before mentioned, never condescend to assist their wives in any way. The men carried bags of grain—which, by the way, the men always carry on one shoulder, and not upon their backs as the women do; the women were similarly burdened, and in addition had gourds of water and ghee, with a child or two clinging round their necks. The children, too, carried their share of the household goods, all but the very little ones; and these, little, naked, pot-bellied things, trotted along holding by their mothers’ skirts. A few, who in the crowd and confusion had lost their friends, sat down and cried pitifully; but as a general thing they kept steadily up the steep ascent, which was trying enough [pg 417]to men, to say nothing of these poor little mites. Although an involuntary exodus, it did not appear to me to cause any pain or regret to anyone. Neither upon this occasion nor upon the day when they quitted Magdala did I see a tear shed, or witness any demonstrations of grief. Now, the Abyssinians are an extremely demonstrative people, and weep and wail copiously and obstreperously over the smallest fancied grievance; consequently, I cannot but think that the great proportion of the people were glad to leave Magdala, and to return to their respective countries. All pressed steadily forward; there was no halting, no delay, scarce a pause to take breath; for on their rear and flank, and sometimes in their very midst, were the robber Gallas plundering all whom they came across. I spoke of the Gallas in my last. Since that time they have become even more bold and troublesome, and not a few have fallen in skirmishes with our troops. Soon after we had joined the body of fugitives, I heard screams and cries in front, and riding-in at a gallop with my friend, we came upon a number of natives in a state of great excitement, the women crying and wringing their hands. They pointed to a ravine, and made us understand that the Gallas were there. Riding up to it, we came upon a party of eight or ten men with spears and shields driving off a couple of dozen oxen they had just stolen. Before they could recover from their surprise we were in their midst, and our revolvers soon sent them flying up the hill with two or three of their number wounded. We drove back the cattle, and were received with acclamations by the unfortunate but miserably cowardly natives, who could only with stones have kept their assailants at a distance, had they had the pluck of so many sheep. A few hundred yards further on we came upon [pg 418]another party of Gallas actively engaged in looting; and at the sight of us with our rifles and revolvers in hand, most of them fled; but we captured two of the robbers, who saw that throwing themselves upon their faces was the only chance of escape from being shot. We tied their hands behind them, and handed them over to our syces, who drove them before them until the end of the day, when we delivered them over to Colonel Graves of the 3d Cavalry, who was in command at Dalanta, and had the satisfaction of seeing them get two dozen lashes each, well laid on. After this skirmish, seeing numbers of Gallas hanging about, we constituted ourselves a sort of rearguard to the native column, and my double-barrelled rifle soon drove them to a distance, the long range at which it sent balls into groups waiting for an opportunity of attack evidently astonishing them greatly, and causing them to scatter in the greatest haste. I think it a question whether the Gallas or the Abyssinians are the greatest cowards. Two or three officers coming up later upon the same day had skirmishes with them, and three or four of the Gallas were killed. The natives encamped upon the plains of Dalanta, their black blanket-tents extending over a great extent of ground. The next day they crossed the Djedda, and after mounting to the table-land beyond, were safe from the attacks of the Gallas, and were able to pursue their way to Gondar, and the other places to which they belonged, in quiet.