Due Considerations by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Tags: #genre
ISBN: 9780345499004
Google: esJnZhK9qrUC
Amazon: 034549900X
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Fraser returns in his endnotes to worry at the issues: “Should Britain have stayed, and pacified the country, assuming the white man's burden? There are those who think so…. Of one thing we can be sure: if Britainhad stayed, revisionist historians would certainly have condemned it as another act of selfish imperialism.” In the relaxed aftermath of victory, General Napier applies to imperialism the old Scots adage “Ye canna dae right for daein’ wrang!”

Advantageously, the Abyssinian campaign had a precisely defined objective, the rescue of the British prisoners, who included Her Majesty's envoy to the court of the Emperor Theodore, Captain Douglas Cameron. The indignant British public was for action, though it disliked the cost of “a penny or more on the income tax.” The Empire was global, and it drew upon loyal Sikh and Indian armies for this African intervention. Western technology still had the edge: the Abyssinians, Flashman reports, were “shot flat, massacred if you like, by Messrs Snider and Enfield, gallant savages decimated by modern weapons.” In the siege of his stronghold of Magdala, Theodore (who admired the British and wanted his son to go to school in England) committed suicide, relieving the Crown of the embarrassment of what to do with him. Napier exercised a conqueror's prerogatives by burning down Magdala and giving the territory to the Galla Queen Masteeat—a historical figure, unlike Flashman's slimmer bints. The British, though the Foreign Office helped precipitate the war by ignoring the Abyssinian monarch's letter to the Queen proposing a friendlier relationship, made shrewd use, once embarked upon their face-saving invasion, of local politics; Flashman's secret mission is to persuade, with a bribe of fifty thousand Maria Theresa dollars, the Galla Queen to encircle Magdala with her army and prevent Theodore's escape. Know your ground, spend what's needed for thorough preparation, quit while you’re ahead, and leave nation-building to the natives, at each other's throats though they be: these would seem to be the lessons, possibly but not necessarily applicable to our second invasion of Iraq. History repeats, but always with differences. Abyssinia had no oil reserves worth securing, and its Coptic-flavored brand of Christianity wasn't inspiring terrorists in London.

Flashman's own conclusion proposes “suggesting to Her Majesty's ministers that next time they get a letter from a touchy barbarian despot, it might save ’em a great deal of trouble and expense if they sent him a civil reply by return of post.” But, if they had placated Emperor Theodore, George MacDonald Fraser would have had one less historical imbroglio to convert into a postmodern penny dreadful, which treats us to, along with its hero's hairbreadth escapes and blithe lechery, a near-forgotten piece of history that once made headlines as gripping and as agitating as today's from the Middle East.

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