Walter Pyecroft is sixteen, an orphan with eleven pounds and a horse-dealer's knowledge of the stable, when he lands at Annesley Bay in January 1868 as a clerk in the transport of the Abyssinian Expedition. He finds the beach crowded with mules nobody owns and nobody tends. With a ledger, a whistle and an old Punjabi muleteer named Futteh Khan, he sets about saving the animals the army cannot march without, and his method reaches the notice of Sir Robert Napier himself. Told in the voice of a kindly uncle who went up to Magdala as a correspondent, this tale by G. A. Henty, Simulacrum, follows the march to the battle of Arogye on Good Friday and argues that character is made in the unregarded work.
by G. A. Henty, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
A Tale of Napier's March to Magdala, 1868
My dear lads, you have read of many charges in my books, and you will read of one more in this tale, though not a large one. But I want you to understand at the outset that the expedition to Abyssinia was won by mules before it was won by bayonets. I went up with it myself, as a correspondent, from the sea to Magdala, and I can tell you that a general who has four hundred miles of mountain between his army and its biscuit thinks about mules a great deal more than he thinks about glory. So did one boy I am going to tell you about, and it made a man of him.
Walter Pyecroft was sixteen when his father died, and his father left him a good seat on a horse, a knowledge of the inside of a stable such as few boys possess, and eleven pounds. Mr. Pyecroft had dealt in horses at Reading for thirty years, and had dealt honestly, which is not a thing that can be said of every man in that trade; but honesty in a horse-dealer is more admired than rewarded, and when the business was sold and the debts paid there was nothing more.
There was, however, an uncle, a brother of Walter's mother, who was in the commissariat at Bombay; and in the autumn of 1867, when all England was talking of King Theodore of Abyssinia and the British subjects whom he held in chains in his fortress of Magdala, a letter came from this uncle. The Bombay Government had been charged with the expedition, it said. Sir Robert Napier was to command. Mules were being bought in Spain, in Italy, in Egypt, in Persia, in every port between Gibraltar and Bushire, and there were not men enough to count them, let alone care for them. If Walter could get himself to Bombay before the end of the year, a place could be found for him as a clerk in the Land Transport Train, at a wage which would keep him; and the uncle added, in a line which Walter read many times, "A lad who knows which end of a mule kicks will be worth more out there than a captain who does not."
Walter got himself to Bombay, and from Bombay, in the first week of January, to Zula.
I do not suppose that any of you have seen Annesley Bay, and I do not recommend it. It is a long arm of the Red Sea lying between bare hills, with a beach of grey sand on which, in that January, there stood the strangest town that ever was built: a town of tents, iron sheds, piled forage, piers running out into the water, and a little railway which the engineers were pushing inland towards Kumayli at the foot of the mountains. The ships in the bay were condensing sea water for the army, for there was none worth drinking on shore. And everywhere, on the beach and up and down the dry watercourses, there were mules.
Walter had expected disorder; he had not expected what he found. The animals had been landed faster than men could be found to take charge of them. Hundreds had come ashore with no attendant at all, or with a muleteer who had been hired at Suez or Smyrna and who spoke no language that any officer understood, and who had in many cases simply walked away. The mules stood in the heat in great loose mobs. Some had been branded, some had not. The water was carried up from the ships and doled out at troughs, and the strong animals fought their way to it while the weak ones stood back and died. Walter counted eleven carcases on the walk from the pier to the transport office, and he was told afterwards that he had not seen the worst.
The officer to whom he reported was a Captain Ormerod of the Bombay Staff Corps, a thin, yellow man who had not slept, and who looked at Walter's letter and then at Walter.
"Can you write a clear hand?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you count?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then God bless you," said Captain Ormerod, without any appearance of piety, "for you are the first person this week who has told me so truthfully. You will take the Fourth Division of mules. It is supposed to be two hundred animals. Find out how many it really is, and write it down."
It took Walter two days to find out, and the finding taught him the first of the lessons which this campaign had to teach.
The Fourth Division existed on paper as two hundred mules, forty muleteers, and a native sergeant. In fact Walter found a hundred and sixty-three mules, of which perhaps a hundred and thirty were fit to carry a load, nineteen muleteers, and no sergeant, the sergeant having gone off on the second day to look for his own brother in some other division and not come back. Of the nineteen men, eleven were Punjabis who had come over with the Indian contingent, five were Persians, and three were men whom nobody could account for.
The Punjabis had a head man among them, a tall, grey-bearded fellow named Futteh Khan, who had served with a mule battery on the Frontier and had a little English. It was Futteh Khan who showed Walter the thing which every one else on that beach had been too hurried to see.
"Sahib," he said, on the first evening, laying his hand flat on the back of a mule that stood with its head down, "this one has not been unsaddled since the ship."
Walter looked, and when the pack-saddle came off he saw what Futteh Khan meant. The back underneath was a raw wound as large as his two hands. The mule had been landed, loaded, sent up the line with forage, sent back, and loaded again, and nobody had once lifted the saddle off it, because nobody had been responsible for it.
Walter had seen a sore back on a horse at Reading, and he knew what his father had done for it; and that night, with Futteh Khan holding a lantern, he went through all the animals of the Fourth Division one by one. Thirty-one of them had galls. Four were past saving. The rest he took off the work altogether, which drew upon him a very sharp note from the Commissariat in the morning, demanding to know by what authority a clerk withdrew thirty mules from the service of the army.
Walter, who had sat up half the night over it, wrote back that by his reckoning a mule with a raw back would carry for five more days and then be dead, whereas a mule rested and dressed for a fortnight would carry to Magdala; and that he would rather have twenty-seven mules in a fortnight than thirty for five days and none afterwards. He signed it in his clear hand, and then, being sixteen, he was frightened of what he had done.
Nothing came of it for three weeks. Then something did.
He had a system by that time, which was simply his father's stable-book over again. Every mule in the Fourth Division had its number burned on the near hoof as well as branded on the shoulder, because a brand on a moulting mule is not always to be read; every man had his own string of eight or nine animals and no others, and was answerable for them; and every evening, before the men ate, the saddles came off, and the backs were looked at, and the result went into a ledger with a column for each animal. Futteh Khan, who had seen this kind of thing done in a good battery, made the men keep it, at first with abuse and afterwards because they saw that their own mules were living while other men's were dying.
It was at the evening inspection, a little way up the line beyond Kumayli, where the road began to climb through the pass towards Senafe, that a party of officers rode by. Walter did not look up, because he had his arm across the back of a grey Spanish mule and was feeling along the line of the spine with the flat of his fingers. When he did look up, an officer with a heavy grey moustache had reined in and was watching him; an officer who sat his horse a little stiffly, with a plain undress jacket, and with a staff behind him who were all watching too.
"What are you feeling for?" the officer asked.
"Heat, sir," said Walter. "You feel the heat before you see the sore. If you catch it then, a night with the saddle off and a wet cloth will save it."
"Whose method is that?"
"My father's, sir. He was a horse-dealer at Reading."
The officer looked along the line of mules, unsaddled, picketed in a straight row, each with its number on its hoof, and at the nineteen muleteers squatting each beside his own string, and at Futteh Khan, who had drawn himself up as straight as a ramrod.
"How many have you lost since Zula?"
"Two, sir, and both of them were bad when I took them over."
"You are the clerk who wrote that he would rather have twenty-seven mules in a fortnight than thirty for five days."
Walter's face went hot. "Yes, sir."
"You were quite right," said Sir Robert Napier; for of course it was he. "A sore back is a lost mule, and a lost mule is a lost load, and enough lost loads are a lost army. There are colonels in this force who have not learned it yet." He turned to one of his staff. "Make a note. I want the Fourth Division's returns sent to me weekly, and I want them read to the other divisions." Then he nodded to Walter, and rode on up the pass.
That was all. I tell you of it at length because I want you to notice something. The great commander did not make Walter a hero. He made him a pattern; which is a much better thing, and much rarer.
I shall not describe the march; you may read of it in the histories, and I have described it elsewhere myself. It was three months of climbing on to one great plateau after another, through Senafe and Antalo and past the lake of Ashangi; three months of thin air and cold nights, of roads made by the Sappers and the Pioneers yard by yard across ground where no wheel had ever gone, of elephants from India carrying the guns, of rations cut down and baggage cut down again, until officers who had come out with a camp-bed and a bath carried what they could tie to their own saddles. Through it all the Fourth Division went up with the stores, and its returns went weekly to the General. Walter lost eight more mules between the sea and the Bashilo, and every one of them was entered in the ledger with the cause.
He grew in those three months. His face burned and then hardened, he could march twenty miles behind his animals without much thinking about it, and he learned enough Hindustani to quarrel with Futteh Khan, which was the beginning of their being friends. The old man never called him anything but Sahib. But one night, high up on the Dalanta plateau, when the frost was white on the picket-ropes and the boy was sitting up with a mule that had the colic, Futteh Khan came and sat by him without being asked, and stayed until it was over.
On the ninth of April the army came down into the valley of the Bashilo, and from the river the soldiers could see, across a tumble of ridges, the heights of Fala and Selassie and, beyond them, the great flat-topped rock of Magdala, on which King Theodore sat with his guns and his prisoners.
The next day was Good Friday. The leading brigade crossed the river in the morning and began to climb the ravine towards the plateau of Arogye. The Fourth Division, carrying, among other things, a good part of the reserve ammunition for the rocket-tubes of the Naval Brigade, was ordered to follow the baggage up the road behind the infantry.
I was on the field that afternoon, and I can tell you exactly how it fell out, for nobody on our side had expected it. Theodore's gunners opened from Fala; and then, out of the heights, his army came down. I suppose there were some thousands of them, in their white robes with the red stripe, with their spears and shields and matchlocks, led by chiefs on horseback; and they came down with a splendid courage, straight at the column, and a part of them swung round towards the road on which the baggage and the mules were toiling up.
Walter heard the guns, and then the shouting, and then saw the slope above him on the right turn white with men running. The baggage in front of him broke into confusion: mules plunging, loads coming off, drivers running back down the road. A Persian muleteer of another division went past him at a run with no mule at all.
What he did next he did not think about, and I believe that is generally true of the things a boy is afterwards praised for. He had his whistle in his teeth, the one he blew for the evening inspection, and he blew it, long and hard, as he blew it every night; and the nineteen men of the Fourth Division, who had heard that whistle every night for three months, did what they did every night. They went each to his own string. Futteh Khan bellowed at them in Punjabi. The mules, which had been trained to stand at the whistle and be looked at, stood. And in less time than it takes me to write it the Fourth Division was a column again, closed up, on the road, while the loose baggage streamed down past it.
There was a company of the Punjab Pioneers on the road ahead, which had been told off to guard the baggage, and they had faced about and were firing. Walter ran forward to the officer in command, a young lieutenant with his helmet gone.
"I have the rocket ammunition for the Naval Brigade, sir," he said. "Where do they want it?"
The lieutenant stared at him and then pointed up the hill to the left, where, on a little spur commanding the plain, the sailors had got their tubes into action. "Up there. Can you get there?"
"There is a track, sir."
"Then for God's sake go, and be quick. They will be out in a quarter of an hour."
Walter went back down his column, and picked out the mules with the rocket boxes, fourteen of them, and their drivers; and Futteh Khan, without a word said, took the leading rein of the first himself. The track went up the side of the spur over loose stones, at an angle a man would think twice about with an empty mule, and a little party of the Abyssinians who had been driven off the road by the Pioneers' fire were among the rocks to their right. A ball struck the ground in front of Walter's feet and threw up the dust; another went through the load on the third mule, and the mule, to Walter's lasting astonishment, did not so much as stop. I have always said that a well-handled mule has more nerve than most men, and I will say it again.
Two-thirds of the way up, the grey Spanish mule, the same animal whose back Walter had been feeling when the General rode by, put her foot through the crust of a rotten rock and went down on her knees with two boxes of rockets on her and slid sideways towards the drop. Walter threw himself on the down-hill side and got his shoulder under the load, which was the most foolish thing he ever did in his life, and it held for perhaps two seconds, which was long enough for Futteh Khan to get her head up and her feet under her. Then they went on.
They came out on the spur behind the guns with the sailors firing their last rockets. A lieutenant of the Navy, black with powder, saw the boxes and gave a shout which the whole battery took up, and the bluejackets ran to unload them without waiting for an order. And for the next hour, while the Abyssinian charge broke and came on again and broke once more, and while the men of the King's Own, on the plain below, poured into it the fire of their new Snider rifles, the rockets went screaming over the plateau from the Fourth Division's boxes.
I saw that battle end. I shall not dwell on it. The Abyssinians had fought as bravely as any men I ever saw, and they had fought against breech-loaders, and the slope where they had charged was a sad sight in the evening. Our own loss was very small. Theodore's was very great, and among his dead was Fitaurari Gabri, the chief who had led them. You will not find me making light of a brave enemy. The lesson is not that they were cowards, for they were not. It is that courage without discipline and modern arms is no longer enough; and that the discipline of an army, my lads, begins a long way behind the firing line, with a ledger, and a whistle, and a hand laid flat on a mule's back.
The rest you know from the histories. The captives were sent down into our lines on the two days that followed, Mr. Rassam and Consul Cameron and the missionaries, thin and grey but alive. On Easter Monday the 33rd Regiment stormed the gate of Magdala, and when our men came through it they found King Theodore lying dead within, by his own hand. Walter did not see the storming. He was at the foot of the hill with the Fourth Division, carrying up water.
A month later, when the army was going down again towards the sea, he was sent for to the General's tent. Sir Robert Napier asked him a number of questions about the ledger, and then a number about Reading, and then said that he had mentioned him in his despatch, and that there would be a place for him, if he wished it, in the buying of horses for the Army at home, where a young man who understood the care of animals might do very well. Walter thanked him, and said that he wished it very much.
"And the Punjabi," said the General. "Futteh Khan. Lieutenant Hartley of the Naval Brigade tells me he led your first mule up that spur."
"He did, sir. He did more than I did."
"Then he shall have something too." And Futteh Khan had his reward, and a letter in English which he could not read and kept in a little leather case on a cord round his neck.
I saw them part at Zula in June. The old man went down the pier to the transport for Bombay, and the boy went to the ship for Suez and home, and they shook hands like two Englishmen. I never saw the old man again.
Walter Pyecroft did very well in the buying of the Army's horses, as the General had said he would, and I believe that at the time I write there is hardly a mule in the British service which is not saddled and inspected after the fashion which he had worked out on that beach at Annesley Bay. He never made a great name. He never wished to. He married a farmer's daughter from Berkshire, and he kept, on the wall of his office, the order which the General's staff had sent round the transport divisions in the spring of 1868, with his own returns attached.
And in the drawer of his desk, where his grandchildren were not allowed to look, he kept a tin whistle with the nickel worn off where his teeth had held it.
THE END
✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Georgiō Alfrēdō Hentiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
G. A. Henty, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
If you would like to talk to this simulacrum, please sign in at the Universitas Scholarium.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Catalogued with the Library of Congress Subject Headings, Genre/Form Terms and Classification.
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.