Free The Bedbug by Peter Day Page B

But when the British Foreign Office failed to reply to his overtures with sufficient alacrity or respect he took their representative hostage. Charles Cameron spent more than four years in captivity. He was joined by the emissary sent to negotiate his release, Hormuz Rassam, and by missionaries, European artisans and adventurers, and various princelings of rival tribes. The princes were hostages against the continued subservience of their tribes. Their lives depended on Theodore’s murderous black moods, often occasioned by strong drink. Among the European hostages was Moritz Hall, a former Polish soldier, a Jew who hadconverted to Christianity and an opportunist who had agreed, under duress, to build Theodore’s great cannon.
Legend has it that Moritz was chained to the gun to prevent him escaping. 3 If so, he was lucky to survive: its barrel was flawed and eventually burst upon firing. Theodore took it as an ill-omen that his stronghold would fall to the mighty force of redcoats assembled by General Napier. And Magdala did fall. But only after Theodore, in a quite unexpected act of clemency, released all his European hostages; he had previously propelled his native captives to their deaths over a sheer cliff. He had already seen some of his best troops cut to pieces by rocket fire and new Snider-Enfield rifles, which were capable of firing ten rounds per minute. They were slaughtered as they hurtled down from their fortress in a hopeless spear charge on the British positions. Imperial pride would not countenance surrender. Theodore hoped that freedom for his prisoners and a peace offering of 1,000 cattle would suffice.
Down the mountain on the Easter Saturday of the year 1868 came sixty-one hostages, with 187 servants and 323 animals. Among them was the hapless royal armourer Moritz Hall with his wife Wayzaru Walatta Iyassus, otherwise known as Katarina, the daughter of a German artist and an Ethiopian princess. By Easter Sunday there was an addition to their ranks – Mrs Hall gave birth to a baby girl.
In the midst of such momentous events her birth might have passed unnoticed, but the celebrated American war correspondent Henry Morton Stanley recorded the new arrival for his readers. He had the child’s name as Theodora, in tribute to the emperor. Maybe Morton was mistaken, maybe her parents pragmatically changed their minds, but eventually the child was christened Magdalena. At the age of twenty Magdalena would marry an aristocratic Russian-born Protestant, of German nationality, who was well over twice her age. Their eldest son was Jona Ustinov, otherwise known as Klop,
Stanley’s attention was quickly diverted to the storming of the fortress, on Easter Monday. Drummer Michael Magnerand Private James Bergin won the Victoria Cross for leading a heroic assault, cutting through the brushwood defences with their bayonets and leading the charge on the dispirited defenders. Theodore committed suicide, with one of Queen Victoria’s pistols, rather than endure the humiliation of capture; the victorious troops discovered his liquor store and pretty soon ran riot, looting and pillaging until Napier eventually restored some sort of order. 4
Theodore’s fortress contained many religious and imperial treasures, some of which he himself had looted during his conquests. These were auctioned and carried back to Britain. A good few of them ended up in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Collection – the tangible legacy of a military adventure in which no territory was captured, no other tribute exacted and no trade links established. Theodore’s son and heir, Prince Alemayehu, accompanied the retreating British army, as did his mother until she succumbed to illness and died. Alemayehu was introduced to Queen Victoria at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, tutored by his guardian Captain Tristram Speedy and then given a traditional education for an English gentleman, Rugby public school and Sandhurst