I mostly know of them from Shogun II, what where they actually like in real life? Because that game was rather unsatisfying in its portrayal.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
I mostly know of them from Shogun II, what where they actually like in real life? Because that game was rather unsatisfying in its portrayal.
I don't know about Shogun II, but basically - very basically - they were a coalition of monks and peasants who followed a populist Buddhist theology and who overthrew the samurai caste in a couple of Japanese provinces. The monks were the military backbone of the state, which meant that the abbots were the de facto rulers. Their state, which lasted about 80 years, is the only example I know of where a peasant-based (as opposed to urban) republic survived for a significant time.
The Great Lakes kingdoms, with the possible exception of Buganda, are too premodern and rural to form the sort of semi-industrial urban republic that the Malê founded in Sokoto or Ilorin (the Hausa and Yoruba were already highly urbanized before the Malê got there, with the former having a centuries-long connection to the wider Islamic world and the latter having a pre-existing tradition of council-based government). A peasant-religious state of the type founded by the Ikko-ikki, however, is a possibility in this region. Ankole is already following this model after a decade of rule by the Brotherhood Faith Assembly, and the Rwandans will also do so.
There will be differences between the two states aside from one being Muslim and the other being Christian, with the most important being that Ankole has a formal clergy while Rwanda won't. This will, on the one hand, keep things from getting too rigid in Rwanda, but it will also make the commonwealth harder to organize.
(Notice, BTW, that I'm referring to "Rwandans" and not to Hutu and Tutsi. That's deliberate - that particular caste distinction, which wasn't as rigid in precolonial times as it would become later, is one thing the peasant theocracy will succeed in eliminating.)
The play reference is mainly to the "mysterious lost child" part of Mélisande's background - there are a lot of those in the eastern Congo after a decade of concessionaire misrule and increasingly intensive warfare, and many have grown up to be soldiers in the various armies. That's one reason why apocalyptic religious movements have such appeal in the region - the effect of the Great Lakes Mfecane coming on top of rubber colonialism shouldn't be underestimated.
But yes, I've said that Mélisande and Paulo will meet, so the rest of the plot is also a reference. On the one hand, there won't be any jealous king to get in the way, but on the other hand, Mélisande will no longer be a teenager by then. All things will be made clear in time.
Damn, I'd forgotten about her. Just goes to show that these things can happen, I guess. Lakwena also provides one possible model for what can happen to a Joan of Arc who no longer has a crusade, although not one that anybody would want to follow.
In any event, Islam in this part of Africa in TTL has a heavy folk-religious overlay and a large component of animism (which is one reason why Tippu Tip's prophetic claims, and now Mélisande's, have found such easy acceptance), so the parallels to Lakwena may be closer than one might think. On the other hand, unlike Lakwena or Joan, Mélisande isn't just the messenger - she is the elect of the prophets/ancestors, which will give her a different role in the emerging state.
Well, it's not like the Ikko-ikki were a republic either, in the modern sense of the word. So Iceland is also a potential model, although the millenarian tendencies of the Rwandan rebellion will make the Ikko-ikki a closer one (although neither will actually be that close, due to different social conditions in Rwanda and greater penetration of modern ideas).
Just out of curiosity, does anyone have access to this?
EDIT: A Google search also turned up this (more here in German) about a district in northern Germany that maintained a quasi-republic for about 300 years under the control of the upper peasantry. And now that I think about it, I wonder if some of the Swiss cantons might also count.
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Silly me, I skipped, or anyway barely skimmed, the "Symbolist" play reference and went for reading up on the Queen of Jerusalem.
Obviously Rwandan Melisande is a woman from a very different sort of background in a very different sort of situation than the woman who was born the heiress to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, fought both her husband and her son, sometimes to victory, and in the end to a draw that left her in charge of a substantial town, and triggered the calling of the Second Crusade.
But of all the "models" put forth so far, it's pretty refreshing Jonathan included her as one of the referents to the name.
Because maybe at bottom, she's a Malê sort of woman. Perhaps, like the other ladies who were mother-in-law (or aunt or whatever), wives, or just close female friends of various Abacars (such as the Englishwoman who is now giving the Raj such headaches in India) she combines boldness and purpose with common sense, feet firmly on the ground and a discerning eye on the whole situation. Unlike a voice-hearing Jeanne d'Arc or the unfortunate and less inspiring Alice-Lakwena, she might keep it together.
That's the sort of woman an Abacar pays attention to.
Or I suppose I should go back and look at the play reference; I don't want a sad ending but perhaps the Abacars have been leading lives a bit too charmed; it's not that bad things never happen to them but that they always seem to come out of it as the moral victors, one way or another. I'm perfectly glad not to have yet another grim-dark timeline, but perhaps the karmic wheel must sooner or later turn out an Abacar who blows it bigtime.
Like say, this Melisande is indeed over the rainbow, sack-of-hammers nuts, but she's very good at presenting a passable semblance of sanity, and making the gleams of madness that come through look like there is shrewd method in them. Or she's not nuts but she is sociopathic, quite keen to abuse the power that has come to her and clever at it--and at manipulating a young Abacar who at bottom is raised to believe in the fundamental goodness of human beings--especially African human beings of humble origin and Islamic faith who rise from their pathetic and precarious obscurity to accomplish great and noble things. By now he knows a thing or two about the perversity of things in general and people in particular, but she might still blindside him.
Mind, what I'd like to see is the Abacar legacy score another win--if she's sick, one way or another, he helps her find healing; if she tries to lead him astray he leads her back. Or, there's not much wrong with her in the first place and yet another score for the good guys.
But there's that pesky play...I'll have to read over that reference again.
-----
Nope, I can't say that synopsis inspires much but dread, dread that Paulo might be headed for some kind of fall.
I like the other Melisende rather better.
And I'm marveling I took a whole class on the Crusades and even wrote an assigned essay on the Kingdom of Jerusalem and somehow I completely missed her story.
Of course in that historical story, the husband she takes turns out to be a problem--one she triumphed over to be sure. If Paulo takes a fall, it could be a lesson in the limits of the Abacarist vision when there is an alternate more apt to the local situation; I doubt he'd be as bluntly arrogant as Queen Melisende's husband Fulk, and would doubtless (if this is the role he winds up playing) believe his policies, where they diverged from the African Melisande's, to be more enlightened and for the greater good, which he would assume she would see in time--but nevertheless be wrong for the time and place, which he is a stranger to.
Then again, as the Melisande of the play is guilty of infidelity, there are accusations of the same against the historical Melisende; perhaps Paulo is more Hugh of Jaffa than Fulk. The historical Hugh, if I am to believe the perspective of the Wikipedia article Jonathan referred us to, is said there to have been basically the spokesman and representative of the previous order in the KoJ, before Fulk and his Angevin cronies came to take over the place--the alleged infidelity is argued, by the article, never to have literally happened but to symbolize the conflict between the kingdom and its new king. I don't take the fact that Jerusalem society and the Church did rally to the Melisende-Hugh alliance against Fulk as hard evidence the two of them could never have trysted, but the point is that if they did it wasn't considered that important, and apparently she did reconcile with Fulk, once certain bounds had been placed on his notions of kingship.
So if Paulo is a Hugh figure, he could well be someone who meets Rwandian Melisande after she's committed to a marriage alliance (or even something more symbolic, such as a holy woman position she can't dare compromise by marrying or dallying with any man, a la Elizabeth I) and regrets she isn't free to be with him (and vice versa of course!) But who takes her side against Mr. King Wrong, without the situation being such they can dispose of the mook--or of course, he might have to back her "Virgin Holy Ruler" status while helping her maneuver around some unfortunate logical consequence of the role.
But then, it's more melodrama than drama; again the Abacar is the hero, with his love starcrossed and unrequited but who leaves the field having Done Good, to her gratitude.
I don't know, I'll have to see where Jonathan is going with this. I'm rooting for Melisande here to be as solidly grounded as Baldwin II's daughter was and to come out on top, regardless of how Paulo fits in. (And hoping he does well out of it too, but the references are against it.)
Obviously Rwandan Melisande is a woman from a very different sort of background in a very different sort of situation than the woman who was born the heiress to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, fought both her husband and her son, sometimes to victory, and in the end to a draw that left her in charge of a substantial town, and triggered the calling of the Second Crusade.
But of all the "models" put forth so far, it's pretty refreshing Jonathan included her as one of the referents to the name.
Because maybe at bottom, she's a Malê sort of woman. Perhaps, like the other ladies who were mother-in-law (or aunt or whatever), wives, or just close female friends of various Abacars (such as the Englishwoman who is now giving the Raj such headaches in India) she combines boldness and purpose with common sense, feet firmly on the ground and a discerning eye on the whole situation. Unlike a voice-hearing Jeanne d'Arc or the unfortunate and less inspiring Alice-Lakwena, she might keep it together.
That's the sort of woman an Abacar pays attention to.
Or I suppose I should go back and look at the play reference; I don't want a sad ending but perhaps the Abacars have been leading lives a bit too charmed; it's not that bad things never happen to them but that they always seem to come out of it as the moral victors, one way or another. I'm perfectly glad not to have yet another grim-dark timeline, but perhaps the karmic wheel must sooner or later turn out an Abacar who blows it bigtime.
Like say, this Melisande is indeed over the rainbow, sack-of-hammers nuts, but she's very good at presenting a passable semblance of sanity, and making the gleams of madness that come through look like there is shrewd method in them. Or she's not nuts but she is sociopathic, quite keen to abuse the power that has come to her and clever at it--and at manipulating a young Abacar who at bottom is raised to believe in the fundamental goodness of human beings--especially African human beings of humble origin and Islamic faith who rise from their pathetic and precarious obscurity to accomplish great and noble things. By now he knows a thing or two about the perversity of things in general and people in particular, but she might still blindside him.
Mind, what I'd like to see is the Abacar legacy score another win--if she's sick, one way or another, he helps her find healing; if she tries to lead him astray he leads her back. Or, there's not much wrong with her in the first place and yet another score for the good guys.
But there's that pesky play...I'll have to read over that reference again.
-----
Nope, I can't say that synopsis inspires much but dread, dread that Paulo might be headed for some kind of fall.
I like the other Melisende rather better.
And I'm marveling I took a whole class on the Crusades and even wrote an assigned essay on the Kingdom of Jerusalem and somehow I completely missed her story.
Of course in that historical story, the husband she takes turns out to be a problem--one she triumphed over to be sure. If Paulo takes a fall, it could be a lesson in the limits of the Abacarist vision when there is an alternate more apt to the local situation; I doubt he'd be as bluntly arrogant as Queen Melisende's husband Fulk, and would doubtless (if this is the role he winds up playing) believe his policies, where they diverged from the African Melisande's, to be more enlightened and for the greater good, which he would assume she would see in time--but nevertheless be wrong for the time and place, which he is a stranger to.
Then again, as the Melisande of the play is guilty of infidelity, there are accusations of the same against the historical Melisende; perhaps Paulo is more Hugh of Jaffa than Fulk. The historical Hugh, if I am to believe the perspective of the Wikipedia article Jonathan referred us to, is said there to have been basically the spokesman and representative of the previous order in the KoJ, before Fulk and his Angevin cronies came to take over the place--the alleged infidelity is argued, by the article, never to have literally happened but to symbolize the conflict between the kingdom and its new king. I don't take the fact that Jerusalem society and the Church did rally to the Melisende-Hugh alliance against Fulk as hard evidence the two of them could never have trysted, but the point is that if they did it wasn't considered that important, and apparently she did reconcile with Fulk, once certain bounds had been placed on his notions of kingship.
So if Paulo is a Hugh figure, he could well be someone who meets Rwandian Melisande after she's committed to a marriage alliance (or even something more symbolic, such as a holy woman position she can't dare compromise by marrying or dallying with any man, a la Elizabeth I) and regrets she isn't free to be with him (and vice versa of course!) But who takes her side against Mr. King Wrong, without the situation being such they can dispose of the mook--or of course, he might have to back her "Virgin Holy Ruler" status while helping her maneuver around some unfortunate logical consequence of the role.
But then, it's more melodrama than drama; again the Abacar is the hero, with his love starcrossed and unrequited but who leaves the field having Done Good, to her gratitude.
I don't know, I'll have to see where Jonathan is going with this. I'm rooting for Melisande here to be as solidly grounded as Baldwin II's daughter was and to come out on top, regardless of how Paulo fits in. (And hoping he does well out of it too, but the references are against it.
)The Sandman
Banned
Well, Usman is going to die knowing that his dream of Imperial Federation has foundered on the rocks of institutional racism and indifference. That should combine justified feelings of bitterness and betrayal in one efficient package.
Which wasn't a bad choice, as she's the primary referent. (And our Mélisande certainly is a woman that Paulo the Younger would notice, with his female relatives being who they are/were.)
Well, let's consider Mélisande's background and current position. Her childhood wasn't as sheltered as that of the historic Joan of Arc, and she's had to be practical from a much earlier age. She's also a merchant's daughter as well as a peasant's, so she has some notion of the wider world and how it works. But still...
A Joan of Arc figure can inspire and lead, but ruling is a task of an entirely different order. Assuming that Mélisande succeeds in overthrowing the Rwandan monarchy (and I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying she will), what then? Many Rwandans may see her as divinely inspired, but at bottom she's still a nineteen-year-old visionary with little idea of macroeconomics or the mechanics of government. Per Murunga Erlander wasn't much older when he took over Ankole, but he at least had an indigenous religious hierarchy to back his play. Mélisande's supporters are fellow-visionaries with no more idea of how to run a country than she does, a Muslim community disorganized by a decade of persecution, and citizens who are glad to see the back of the old boss but who aren't quite sure what happens next.
Under the circumstances, she's quite likely to be co-opted by existing elites who want to maintain their position in the new regime. Or, to avoid co-option, she may need to make a marriage alliance or (as you suggest) take on a "holy queen" role that puts her above the fray. She might also have a hard time keeping her own supporters under control. Any or all of these might lead to her making wrong turns (or having them made in her name), falling into despair, or succumbing to her own visions. They might cause temptations even to someone who isn't psychotic or sociopathic (neither of which Mélisande is), but who might come to believe that the ends justify the means. And these are things that Paulo might want to rectify, even if it means overstepping his role as ambassador - something that could result in triumph, tragedy or a combination of the two.
Paulo won't be a Fulk - all his conditioning runs against that. But he could be a Hugh, a Pelléas, a composite or something of an entirely different order. All things will be made clear in time.
Usman knows what he wants the postwar order to be, and he'll be able to make little of it happen, at least in the short run. And this will certainly affect the outlook of the next generation of Abacars, at least one of whom may become morally compromised trying to vindicate the family legacy. The period from 1915 to 1925, and then from the late 1920s to 1940 for different reasons, will be difficult one for much of British Africa, the Abacar family included.
Next update will hopefully be this weekend, involving southern Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Until then, here's some Rwandan pop music to listen to while reading the last update.
Weren't the original founders (Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden) essentially upper-peasant run states with no towns of any size?
Bruce
F. George MacDonald, Flashman’s Valley (London: John Barrie, 2001)
… I’ll confess that I welcomed the Great War.
No, not the trenches and the machine guns and the death – I’d seen enough of that, and run from it in screaming terror, that I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else. What I welcomed was the chance to sit one out. Surely no one would demand that a retired brigadier in his seventies return to the colors, and it was comforting to know that I could read about the war in the newspapers, in the safety of my home, with nothing worse to worry about than a missed social engagement.
The more fool me, of course.
They came to Gandamack Lodge in late May of ’95, two majors with an urgent summons to Horse Guards. They were very apologetic about it, but they also impressed on me quite firmly that I disobeyed at the risk of my pension. I thought about telling them to bugger off even so, but only for a moment; in the end, I got on the train.
It wasn’t an easy journey for me, as you can imagine. I spent all of it wondering whether I’d soon be facing the machine guns in the German meat-grinder or dispatched to some unhealthy place like West Africa where I might renew awkward acquaintances. [1] So you can understand my relief when I finally sat across the table from the generals, and they said “Switzerland.”
“Switzerland, sir?” I repeated. Not that I was complaining, mind, but I had to make some show of skepticism. “That’s a neutral country, isn’t it?”
“That it is, Flashman. And you’re to make sure it stays that way, or at least that if it comes into the fighting, it does so on our side.”
I nodded sagely, as if that explained everything. “And if I may say so, sir, why me?”
“You may well ask,” the head general said, showing a commendable grasp of the bloody obvious. Sims, I think his name was, but at my age I can’t be bothered to remember, and like most of the generals in that war, he probably isn’t worth the trouble. “We need someone who can blend with the natives, find out what’s going on, but we also need the voice of experience – someone with enough gravitas to take the situation in hand if it’s needed.”
Whatever improvements in military science may have occurred in my absence, I could see that the art of saying nothing in a great many words hadn’t lagged. “But don’t you have a bloody ambassador?” I said. “What makes you think that if I waltzed into Bern and started spouting about how everyone should get along, that anyone would listen?”
“It isn’t Bern where you’re going, General.” That was a new voice, a colonel, obviously the real brains of the outfit. I can’t be arsed to remember his name either. “We’re sending you to Ticino.”
There was a minute or two of where-the-devil-is-that, and then the colonel explained. Ticino was the Italian part of Switzerland, right across the border from Milan. Everyone was Catholic there, but there were liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics, and like everyplace else in the world, it seemed that was a problem.
“The conservatives took over about twenty years ago,” the colonel said, “and they redrew the electoral districts so that they’ve won every election since. There was an election last year, and the liberals got more votes, but the conservatives took two thirds of the seats. The liberals demanded a referendum – apparently they’ve got the right to do that – but the government laughed them off. So the liberals staged a coup.”
“A cantonal coup?”
Yes, it seemed there had been one. And there was more: the federal government in Bern sympathized with the liberals, but couldn’t go allowing one of its cantons to be overthrown, so it had sent in the army and replaced the conservatives in power. Since then, the conservatives had done their best to get even, and the liberals were bushwhacking them every chance they got – nothing like a war the way countries with armies would understand it, but ambushes and assassinations all over the place.
I took stock. “Very well, it sounds bad,” I said. “But it seems like a local matter. What has any of it to do with Switzerland joining the war?”
“The liberals are asking the Italians to help them. And the conservatives – they’re the type that go off and join the Papal Legion, and they want the Pope to help them.”
So now they got to the point. This would be no easy duty on neutral ground; instead, I’d have to umpire four different armies and make sure they didn’t get into a war on Swiss soil, or at least not one that would damage us. And how was I to know what that might be?
I wondered about that all the way to Genoa. I only stopped wondering when I got there and found that the French had broken through to Turin…
… My attempts to bow out gracefully having all been thwarted, here was nothing for it but to go on. It was no trick at all to kit myself out as an Italian peasant, and I spoke enough of the local jabber to pass for one at a distance. With hell breaking loose all over northern Italy, it seemed like everyone was on the move – armies advancing or retreating, peasants fleeing one way from the French and the other from the Austrians, the usual chancers and looters that followed in war’s path – so no one was like to notice one more.
How I was supposed to get to Switzerland in a peasant’s rigout and retain, what was it, the gravitas to stop a war, was a problem I left for later.
In retrospect, I was lucky I got to Italy when I did. If I’d got there a few weeks later, the front would have settled down again and siege lines would have been established. But at that moment in time, things were fluid enough for me to get through. My gut was churning the whole way, and I expected any moment to be denounced and shot as a spy, but I made it to Milan in one piece. [2]
And found the border closed…
… I was sitting outside a Milan pub in the August heat, enjoying – if that’s the word – a mug of the local wine. That had become my habit, and no one questioned it; one of the advantages of being here rather than in Horse Guards was that nobody expected someone of my age to actually do anything. The pubs were a perfect place to imbibe, listen and learn.
What I was trying to learn about, at the moment, was smugglers. I’d been told that the Ticino government, which sympathized with the Frogs, had been the one to close the border, hoping to do its part starving out the Italians pocketed in Milan. But it’s hard to really close a hill-country frontier, and all the canton had succeeded in doing was making the smugglers rich, Ticinese and Italian both. Everything was more expensive than it had been before the invasion, and store shelves were half-full, but they weren’t empty. [3]
The problem was bulk items, especially the ones the army needed – guns, bullets, powder, spare parts. Those were harder to smuggle, as I knew well from experience, and I doubted the Italian generals in Milan would let themselves run dry without taking action. Once they crossed the border, Switzerland would be at war, and not in a way that would gratify my lords and masters in Whitehall.
So I had to smuggle myself across to Ticino and find some way to open the frontier before everything went to hell.
“Ah, Signor,” I heard, and saw that I now had a companion at table. He was a man a few years short of my own age, speaking the barbarous Lombard dialect that passed for current in Milan, and with the look of a smuggler about him. Smugglers might be rife here, but they also couldn’t let themselves be known to just anyone, and I’d had to become a known quantity before I could meet them.
“Astolfi?” I asked, more for form’s sake than anything else; who else would have sought me out here?
“The same.” He waved his hand to a waiter and ordered a cup of wine. “I’m told you wanted to see me.”
“Yes. I have an engagement in Lugano, and I find I’m in need of an expert guide.”
Astolfi sized me up, and evidently decided that I might be a man of substance despite the peasant rig. “You can pay?”
In answer, I reached into my pocket and passed a lump of gold across the table. “My stock in trade,” I said. “I have some to spare, to ease the journey.”
“Ah.” He didn’t take my word for it; he examined the gold as thoroughly as if he’d been a jeweler. “Yes,” he said finally, “I think we can do business.”
“You can get me across the border, then?”
“No, not me. You may want to cross the frontier at your age, but I prefer to stay home and drink wine. My daughter.”
I had a sudden feeling that my luck had turned…
… “You must understand what the reactionaries have been doing to this country,” Letizia Astolfi said earnestly. “They want to return us to the middle ages, to choke off all progress. Art, theater, poetry – they’d smother everything that makes life worth living, and say it was ordained by God.”
I made a good show of listening, although I was far more interested in how Letizia looked when she was backlit by the campfire. Most women in peasant countries aren’t much to look at after thirty, but she was a fortunate exception, for all she’d had three children. She was a war widow, her husband killed fighting the Austrians in the winter of ’94, and she’d gone over to the radicals’ side since. Most Italians hated priests these days, but for Letizia, it had become a passion.
I wondered if her father knew.
She wasn’t the only one in the camp for whom smuggling was more than a business. There was an older Ticinese man here in the upper valley who’d been a mayor before his wife and child were killed in an ambush meant for him. There were others who’d been driven out of the towns in various ways after speaking up for the liberal party. And – worst of all, from my admittedly-narrow viewpoint – there were Italian soldiers who were determined to help reopen the border and who’d joined the Ticinese liberals’ counter-patrols. They were out of uniform, but if they were caught by the cantonal police, that would hardly matter. It seemed that Ticino, and with it Switzerland, was one wrong move away from war.
“… know that you’re a good man, a man who understands freedom,” Letizia was saying. “Surely, then, you’ll help us?”
She suddenly had my full attention for reasons that had nothing to do with the fairness of her form. “I’m sorry, signora – help you with what?”
“The canton is sending a commission to Lugano to hold trials. There are some of us in jail there, and we’re afraid they’ll be condemned. We must attack the commissioners before they can render a verdict. The police know us; none of us can watch the commission or give the signal. But you could do it – no one would suspect you…”
“Now, now,” I temporized. “Surely if you attacked them, the canton would just send a new commission, and the verdict would be even harsher…”
“What kind of coward are you?” Letizia demanded. I could give her all kinds of answers to that, but the question was rhetorical. “Letting them be won’t help us. No, the day we stop fighting is the day they can do anything, because they’ll know nobody dares oppose them. That should be something even you can understand… Englishman.”
I don’t know how she knew, but she did, and the stricken look on my face only confirmed it. All she had to do was denounce me as a spy, and the smugglers would tear me to pieces.
But as the message went home, her voice softened. “I know it can’t be easy for a person of your age, and I’m sorry I called you a coward. This isn’t your fight, but if you help us in it, I’d be very grateful...”
It wasn’t subtle at all, but when it’s bowled to a man of seventy-three, it doesn’t have to be. I had no choice, I was damned regardless, so I might as well enjoy my remaining time on earth…
… Lugano is a pleasant town of about ten thousand on the shores of a mountain lake. By Ticinese standards, it’s a city; in fact, the biggest one in the canton. It was a stronghold of the liberals before the coup, and one of the few places where they were still strong enough to have an open presence. And for this very reason, it looked like a city at war – public buildings barricaded, shops and homes bearing the scars of unnatural incidents, and people carefully avoiding each other’s glances as they walked down the street.
The courthouse where the trials would be held faced a public square, and it was as much a fortress as any building here: regular patrols around the outside, and if the signs were anything to go by, gun positions commanding the doors. I sat across the square at a coffee-house, trying my best to look old and invisible; I was to watch for the commissoners’ entrance, and to give the signal as soon as the patrol was past.
The cup of coffee in front of me stood untouched; you can guess the state of my digestion. I tried to calm myself with memories of Letizia, and succeeded only in working myself into a panic. At least, thanks to her, I was fluent enough in Lombard that no one would think me a stranger.
A procession of men suddenly came into view: the commissioners, guarded by a squad of militiamen. Next to British soldiers, they’d be of no account, but poorly-armed Ticinese fighters wouldn’t find them an easy mark. I watched them enter the courthouse, and then I marked the patrol as it passed around the corner of the building. The signal was four taps on the table with the coffee mug, and I reached across the table…
I felt hands pull me back, and someone put a sack over my head. I screamed and flailed like one possessed, but then I felt a blow to the back of my skull, and I knew no more.
When I came to, I found myself surrounded by decidedly unsavory characters. I had vague memories of a journey by water, and then being bundled into a cart; I’d gathered that I was back on the Italian side, but I wasn’t sure where. I tried to take in my surroundings; my mind was still foggy, but it was acute enough to tell that I was in a basement and tied to a chair. And from the medals and crosses that my captors wore, it was plain that I was in the hands of the Papal Legion.
“Good afternoon,” said the biggest of the men in front of me.
“It’ll be a bloody bad one for you if you don’t let me go,” I said, deciding to put it all on the table. “I’m a British officer taken on neutral territory, and when my government finds out what you’ve done…”
“You’re a spy, signor – a spy for the atheists and liberals who want to damn the world to Hell – and we’ll treat you as one. And you’re in a town we hold. No one knows you’re here, and if you don’t cooperate, no one will know you’re buried here.” He looked behind me, and someone slapped me hard across the back of the head to punctuate the message.
“Very well, then,” I said. When my bluff is called, there’s no point wasting time. “What do you want?”
“Where is the nest of atheists who sent you to Lugano?”
“Got away from you, did they?” I began, but winced as I received another blow.
“They won’t get away from us. Because you will tell us where they are.”
I thought of Letizia again, and had a moment’s regret for what might happen to her, but as you know by now, the body I look out for first is the one I live in. “I don’t know the place by name,” I said. “But I can lead you there.”
“You will do so, then. And you won’t like what will happen to you if you lie…”
… A week later, I stood at the top of the valley again. I was sure it was the right one; along with language and horsemanship, direction has always been one of my talents. I was sorry to be there – not least because there would be shooting, and I didn’t want to be a part of it – but the Legionnaires had given me no opportunity to even think of escape. There were two hundred of them, more than enough to keep me guarded night and day.
“The huts over there,” I whispered. The Legionnaires’ commander – the same one who had interrogated me in the basement – looked where I was pointing, and saw campfires and moving figures. He called his sergeants over – I don’t know what ranks the Legion uses, but they could be nothing else – and gave rapid-fire orders. He meant to surround the camp and move in for the kill, and with his numbers against the smugglers’, it would be over with quickly.
It seemed like forever, but it must have been only a few minutes before a runner returned to tell him everything was ready. He fired a shot in the air, and from all around the camp, the Legionnaires began shooting. I saw a figure fall by the campfire, and another pitched forward as he came out of a hut; even as they did so, the Legionnaires were charging.
But what happened next wasn’t aimless milling-around of smugglers as they were slaughtered. The men in the camp started shooting back, and I heard the sound of military rifles – and then, all at once, the moonlight glinted off a uniform.
“They’re federals!” someone said, and I realized what must have happened: the Swiss regulars had come to clear out the camp at the same time the Legionnaires had, and instead of smugglers and guerrillas, the Legion had just attacked the Swiss army.
Whatever doubt may have remained was dispelled by what happened next: the chatter of Maxims. The charging Legionnaires went down as if scythed, and those who hadn’t rushed toward the camp suddenly started charging in the opposite direction. Somehow, in all the commotion, no one noticed me, and I took the opportunity to hit the ground and play dead.
It was all over in minutes, just like the Legion had thought it would be. When I judged it safe, I tore off my shirt and walked toward the Swiss officers, waving it overhead. “Friend! British!” I called, hoping that they’d ask questions before shooting, and they did.
I was treated to coffee by a Swiss major, who’d just got the butcher’s bill from his adjutant and vowed that the Legion would pay. I took that in, and I took in the answering nods of the officers and sergeants, and I realized that I might just have maneuvered Switzerland into the war on our side. “Mission accomplished,” I said to myself, and started planning my journey home and my triumphal report to Horse Guards.
If I’d only known… [4]
_______
[1] See Flashman on the Niger.
[2] Although Flashman doesn’t say, we can deduce from this that he landed in Genoa sometime in early June 1895, and that he arrived at Milan sometime before the French and Austrian armies completed their investment of the pocket on June 27.
[3] Flashman paints a fairly accurate picture of the Milan pocket during the early days of the siege. The government of Ticino, which was sympathetic to the Franco-Austrian side, had declared the border closed, but the cantonal police and militia were stretched thin, and the pro-Italian sympathies of the majority of Ticinese citizens rendered the border very porous. Supplies in Milan were strained by the siege and by the influx of refugees, but there were no critical shortages of food or household items, and (in contrast to the strains that would appear later) civilian morale was high.
[4] Flashman is clearly describing the “Ticino Incident” of November 2, 1895, in which two companies of the Papal Legion crossed into Switzerland to attack what they believed to be a smugglers’ encampment, and instead encountered a battalion of Swiss regulars. The Swiss federal government, alarmed at the incursion but anxious to stay out of a war that might split its Catholic population, responded by issuing an ultimatum demanding that the French and Austrian governments restrain the Legion from any further border crossings. The allies initially appeared open to the idea, and a high-level Franco-Austrian negotiating team was dispatched to Bern, but when news of the talks leaked, the Catholic parties in France threatened to defect from the government and file a motion of no confidence in the prosecution of the war. Unable to survive without the support of the Catholic factions, the French government broke off negotiations and declared its support for the Legion. On November 21, Switzerland declared war on France, and on November 25, after last-minute talks with Austrian representatives failed, it also declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As will be seen later in this memoir, Flashman takes credit for sabotaging the negotiations, but the historical record does not reflect his presence…
… I’ll confess that I welcomed the Great War.
No, not the trenches and the machine guns and the death – I’d seen enough of that, and run from it in screaming terror, that I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else. What I welcomed was the chance to sit one out. Surely no one would demand that a retired brigadier in his seventies return to the colors, and it was comforting to know that I could read about the war in the newspapers, in the safety of my home, with nothing worse to worry about than a missed social engagement.
The more fool me, of course.
They came to Gandamack Lodge in late May of ’95, two majors with an urgent summons to Horse Guards. They were very apologetic about it, but they also impressed on me quite firmly that I disobeyed at the risk of my pension. I thought about telling them to bugger off even so, but only for a moment; in the end, I got on the train.
It wasn’t an easy journey for me, as you can imagine. I spent all of it wondering whether I’d soon be facing the machine guns in the German meat-grinder or dispatched to some unhealthy place like West Africa where I might renew awkward acquaintances. [1] So you can understand my relief when I finally sat across the table from the generals, and they said “Switzerland.”
“Switzerland, sir?” I repeated. Not that I was complaining, mind, but I had to make some show of skepticism. “That’s a neutral country, isn’t it?”
“That it is, Flashman. And you’re to make sure it stays that way, or at least that if it comes into the fighting, it does so on our side.”
I nodded sagely, as if that explained everything. “And if I may say so, sir, why me?”
“You may well ask,” the head general said, showing a commendable grasp of the bloody obvious. Sims, I think his name was, but at my age I can’t be bothered to remember, and like most of the generals in that war, he probably isn’t worth the trouble. “We need someone who can blend with the natives, find out what’s going on, but we also need the voice of experience – someone with enough gravitas to take the situation in hand if it’s needed.”
Whatever improvements in military science may have occurred in my absence, I could see that the art of saying nothing in a great many words hadn’t lagged. “But don’t you have a bloody ambassador?” I said. “What makes you think that if I waltzed into Bern and started spouting about how everyone should get along, that anyone would listen?”
“It isn’t Bern where you’re going, General.” That was a new voice, a colonel, obviously the real brains of the outfit. I can’t be arsed to remember his name either. “We’re sending you to Ticino.”
There was a minute or two of where-the-devil-is-that, and then the colonel explained. Ticino was the Italian part of Switzerland, right across the border from Milan. Everyone was Catholic there, but there were liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics, and like everyplace else in the world, it seemed that was a problem.
“The conservatives took over about twenty years ago,” the colonel said, “and they redrew the electoral districts so that they’ve won every election since. There was an election last year, and the liberals got more votes, but the conservatives took two thirds of the seats. The liberals demanded a referendum – apparently they’ve got the right to do that – but the government laughed them off. So the liberals staged a coup.”
“A cantonal coup?”
Yes, it seemed there had been one. And there was more: the federal government in Bern sympathized with the liberals, but couldn’t go allowing one of its cantons to be overthrown, so it had sent in the army and replaced the conservatives in power. Since then, the conservatives had done their best to get even, and the liberals were bushwhacking them every chance they got – nothing like a war the way countries with armies would understand it, but ambushes and assassinations all over the place.
I took stock. “Very well, it sounds bad,” I said. “But it seems like a local matter. What has any of it to do with Switzerland joining the war?”
“The liberals are asking the Italians to help them. And the conservatives – they’re the type that go off and join the Papal Legion, and they want the Pope to help them.”
So now they got to the point. This would be no easy duty on neutral ground; instead, I’d have to umpire four different armies and make sure they didn’t get into a war on Swiss soil, or at least not one that would damage us. And how was I to know what that might be?
I wondered about that all the way to Genoa. I only stopped wondering when I got there and found that the French had broken through to Turin…
… My attempts to bow out gracefully having all been thwarted, here was nothing for it but to go on. It was no trick at all to kit myself out as an Italian peasant, and I spoke enough of the local jabber to pass for one at a distance. With hell breaking loose all over northern Italy, it seemed like everyone was on the move – armies advancing or retreating, peasants fleeing one way from the French and the other from the Austrians, the usual chancers and looters that followed in war’s path – so no one was like to notice one more.
How I was supposed to get to Switzerland in a peasant’s rigout and retain, what was it, the gravitas to stop a war, was a problem I left for later.
In retrospect, I was lucky I got to Italy when I did. If I’d got there a few weeks later, the front would have settled down again and siege lines would have been established. But at that moment in time, things were fluid enough for me to get through. My gut was churning the whole way, and I expected any moment to be denounced and shot as a spy, but I made it to Milan in one piece. [2]
And found the border closed…
… I was sitting outside a Milan pub in the August heat, enjoying – if that’s the word – a mug of the local wine. That had become my habit, and no one questioned it; one of the advantages of being here rather than in Horse Guards was that nobody expected someone of my age to actually do anything. The pubs were a perfect place to imbibe, listen and learn.
What I was trying to learn about, at the moment, was smugglers. I’d been told that the Ticino government, which sympathized with the Frogs, had been the one to close the border, hoping to do its part starving out the Italians pocketed in Milan. But it’s hard to really close a hill-country frontier, and all the canton had succeeded in doing was making the smugglers rich, Ticinese and Italian both. Everything was more expensive than it had been before the invasion, and store shelves were half-full, but they weren’t empty. [3]
The problem was bulk items, especially the ones the army needed – guns, bullets, powder, spare parts. Those were harder to smuggle, as I knew well from experience, and I doubted the Italian generals in Milan would let themselves run dry without taking action. Once they crossed the border, Switzerland would be at war, and not in a way that would gratify my lords and masters in Whitehall.
So I had to smuggle myself across to Ticino and find some way to open the frontier before everything went to hell.
“Ah, Signor,” I heard, and saw that I now had a companion at table. He was a man a few years short of my own age, speaking the barbarous Lombard dialect that passed for current in Milan, and with the look of a smuggler about him. Smugglers might be rife here, but they also couldn’t let themselves be known to just anyone, and I’d had to become a known quantity before I could meet them.
“Astolfi?” I asked, more for form’s sake than anything else; who else would have sought me out here?
“The same.” He waved his hand to a waiter and ordered a cup of wine. “I’m told you wanted to see me.”
“Yes. I have an engagement in Lugano, and I find I’m in need of an expert guide.”
Astolfi sized me up, and evidently decided that I might be a man of substance despite the peasant rig. “You can pay?”
In answer, I reached into my pocket and passed a lump of gold across the table. “My stock in trade,” I said. “I have some to spare, to ease the journey.”
“Ah.” He didn’t take my word for it; he examined the gold as thoroughly as if he’d been a jeweler. “Yes,” he said finally, “I think we can do business.”
“You can get me across the border, then?”
“No, not me. You may want to cross the frontier at your age, but I prefer to stay home and drink wine. My daughter.”
I had a sudden feeling that my luck had turned…
… “You must understand what the reactionaries have been doing to this country,” Letizia Astolfi said earnestly. “They want to return us to the middle ages, to choke off all progress. Art, theater, poetry – they’d smother everything that makes life worth living, and say it was ordained by God.”
I made a good show of listening, although I was far more interested in how Letizia looked when she was backlit by the campfire. Most women in peasant countries aren’t much to look at after thirty, but she was a fortunate exception, for all she’d had three children. She was a war widow, her husband killed fighting the Austrians in the winter of ’94, and she’d gone over to the radicals’ side since. Most Italians hated priests these days, but for Letizia, it had become a passion.
I wondered if her father knew.
She wasn’t the only one in the camp for whom smuggling was more than a business. There was an older Ticinese man here in the upper valley who’d been a mayor before his wife and child were killed in an ambush meant for him. There were others who’d been driven out of the towns in various ways after speaking up for the liberal party. And – worst of all, from my admittedly-narrow viewpoint – there were Italian soldiers who were determined to help reopen the border and who’d joined the Ticinese liberals’ counter-patrols. They were out of uniform, but if they were caught by the cantonal police, that would hardly matter. It seemed that Ticino, and with it Switzerland, was one wrong move away from war.
“… know that you’re a good man, a man who understands freedom,” Letizia was saying. “Surely, then, you’ll help us?”
She suddenly had my full attention for reasons that had nothing to do with the fairness of her form. “I’m sorry, signora – help you with what?”
“The canton is sending a commission to Lugano to hold trials. There are some of us in jail there, and we’re afraid they’ll be condemned. We must attack the commissioners before they can render a verdict. The police know us; none of us can watch the commission or give the signal. But you could do it – no one would suspect you…”
“Now, now,” I temporized. “Surely if you attacked them, the canton would just send a new commission, and the verdict would be even harsher…”
“What kind of coward are you?” Letizia demanded. I could give her all kinds of answers to that, but the question was rhetorical. “Letting them be won’t help us. No, the day we stop fighting is the day they can do anything, because they’ll know nobody dares oppose them. That should be something even you can understand… Englishman.”
I don’t know how she knew, but she did, and the stricken look on my face only confirmed it. All she had to do was denounce me as a spy, and the smugglers would tear me to pieces.
But as the message went home, her voice softened. “I know it can’t be easy for a person of your age, and I’m sorry I called you a coward. This isn’t your fight, but if you help us in it, I’d be very grateful...”
It wasn’t subtle at all, but when it’s bowled to a man of seventy-three, it doesn’t have to be. I had no choice, I was damned regardless, so I might as well enjoy my remaining time on earth…
… Lugano is a pleasant town of about ten thousand on the shores of a mountain lake. By Ticinese standards, it’s a city; in fact, the biggest one in the canton. It was a stronghold of the liberals before the coup, and one of the few places where they were still strong enough to have an open presence. And for this very reason, it looked like a city at war – public buildings barricaded, shops and homes bearing the scars of unnatural incidents, and people carefully avoiding each other’s glances as they walked down the street.
The courthouse where the trials would be held faced a public square, and it was as much a fortress as any building here: regular patrols around the outside, and if the signs were anything to go by, gun positions commanding the doors. I sat across the square at a coffee-house, trying my best to look old and invisible; I was to watch for the commissoners’ entrance, and to give the signal as soon as the patrol was past.
The cup of coffee in front of me stood untouched; you can guess the state of my digestion. I tried to calm myself with memories of Letizia, and succeeded only in working myself into a panic. At least, thanks to her, I was fluent enough in Lombard that no one would think me a stranger.
A procession of men suddenly came into view: the commissioners, guarded by a squad of militiamen. Next to British soldiers, they’d be of no account, but poorly-armed Ticinese fighters wouldn’t find them an easy mark. I watched them enter the courthouse, and then I marked the patrol as it passed around the corner of the building. The signal was four taps on the table with the coffee mug, and I reached across the table…
I felt hands pull me back, and someone put a sack over my head. I screamed and flailed like one possessed, but then I felt a blow to the back of my skull, and I knew no more.
When I came to, I found myself surrounded by decidedly unsavory characters. I had vague memories of a journey by water, and then being bundled into a cart; I’d gathered that I was back on the Italian side, but I wasn’t sure where. I tried to take in my surroundings; my mind was still foggy, but it was acute enough to tell that I was in a basement and tied to a chair. And from the medals and crosses that my captors wore, it was plain that I was in the hands of the Papal Legion.
“Good afternoon,” said the biggest of the men in front of me.
“It’ll be a bloody bad one for you if you don’t let me go,” I said, deciding to put it all on the table. “I’m a British officer taken on neutral territory, and when my government finds out what you’ve done…”
“You’re a spy, signor – a spy for the atheists and liberals who want to damn the world to Hell – and we’ll treat you as one. And you’re in a town we hold. No one knows you’re here, and if you don’t cooperate, no one will know you’re buried here.” He looked behind me, and someone slapped me hard across the back of the head to punctuate the message.
“Very well, then,” I said. When my bluff is called, there’s no point wasting time. “What do you want?”
“Where is the nest of atheists who sent you to Lugano?”
“Got away from you, did they?” I began, but winced as I received another blow.
“They won’t get away from us. Because you will tell us where they are.”
I thought of Letizia again, and had a moment’s regret for what might happen to her, but as you know by now, the body I look out for first is the one I live in. “I don’t know the place by name,” I said. “But I can lead you there.”
“You will do so, then. And you won’t like what will happen to you if you lie…”
… A week later, I stood at the top of the valley again. I was sure it was the right one; along with language and horsemanship, direction has always been one of my talents. I was sorry to be there – not least because there would be shooting, and I didn’t want to be a part of it – but the Legionnaires had given me no opportunity to even think of escape. There were two hundred of them, more than enough to keep me guarded night and day.
“The huts over there,” I whispered. The Legionnaires’ commander – the same one who had interrogated me in the basement – looked where I was pointing, and saw campfires and moving figures. He called his sergeants over – I don’t know what ranks the Legion uses, but they could be nothing else – and gave rapid-fire orders. He meant to surround the camp and move in for the kill, and with his numbers against the smugglers’, it would be over with quickly.
It seemed like forever, but it must have been only a few minutes before a runner returned to tell him everything was ready. He fired a shot in the air, and from all around the camp, the Legionnaires began shooting. I saw a figure fall by the campfire, and another pitched forward as he came out of a hut; even as they did so, the Legionnaires were charging.
But what happened next wasn’t aimless milling-around of smugglers as they were slaughtered. The men in the camp started shooting back, and I heard the sound of military rifles – and then, all at once, the moonlight glinted off a uniform.
“They’re federals!” someone said, and I realized what must have happened: the Swiss regulars had come to clear out the camp at the same time the Legionnaires had, and instead of smugglers and guerrillas, the Legion had just attacked the Swiss army.
Whatever doubt may have remained was dispelled by what happened next: the chatter of Maxims. The charging Legionnaires went down as if scythed, and those who hadn’t rushed toward the camp suddenly started charging in the opposite direction. Somehow, in all the commotion, no one noticed me, and I took the opportunity to hit the ground and play dead.
It was all over in minutes, just like the Legion had thought it would be. When I judged it safe, I tore off my shirt and walked toward the Swiss officers, waving it overhead. “Friend! British!” I called, hoping that they’d ask questions before shooting, and they did.
I was treated to coffee by a Swiss major, who’d just got the butcher’s bill from his adjutant and vowed that the Legion would pay. I took that in, and I took in the answering nods of the officers and sergeants, and I realized that I might just have maneuvered Switzerland into the war on our side. “Mission accomplished,” I said to myself, and started planning my journey home and my triumphal report to Horse Guards.
If I’d only known… [4]
_______
[1] See Flashman on the Niger.
[2] Although Flashman doesn’t say, we can deduce from this that he landed in Genoa sometime in early June 1895, and that he arrived at Milan sometime before the French and Austrian armies completed their investment of the pocket on June 27.
[3] Flashman paints a fairly accurate picture of the Milan pocket during the early days of the siege. The government of Ticino, which was sympathetic to the Franco-Austrian side, had declared the border closed, but the cantonal police and militia were stretched thin, and the pro-Italian sympathies of the majority of Ticinese citizens rendered the border very porous. Supplies in Milan were strained by the siege and by the influx of refugees, but there were no critical shortages of food or household items, and (in contrast to the strains that would appear later) civilian morale was high.
[4] Flashman is clearly describing the “Ticino Incident” of November 2, 1895, in which two companies of the Papal Legion crossed into Switzerland to attack what they believed to be a smugglers’ encampment, and instead encountered a battalion of Swiss regulars. The Swiss federal government, alarmed at the incursion but anxious to stay out of a war that might split its Catholic population, responded by issuing an ultimatum demanding that the French and Austrian governments restrain the Legion from any further border crossings. The allies initially appeared open to the idea, and a high-level Franco-Austrian negotiating team was dispatched to Bern, but when news of the talks leaked, the Catholic parties in France threatened to defect from the government and file a motion of no confidence in the prosecution of the war. Unable to survive without the support of the Catholic factions, the French government broke off negotiations and declared its support for the Legion. On November 21, Switzerland declared war on France, and on November 25, after last-minute talks with Austrian representatives failed, it also declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As will be seen later in this memoir, Flashman takes credit for sabotaging the negotiations, but the historical record does not reflect his presence…
Well, there goes southern Germany. Switzerland is going to tie up resources that the FARs cannot afford.
There goes the entire campaign in Germany and Italy for France.
Yup, this sucks for the FAR. Switzerland won't be able to do much offensively at first - mobilization will take time, and it will have to deal with a great deal of internal dissent - but guarding the Swiss border will still tie up French and Austrian troops. And if the North German autumn offensive into the southern German states does well enough, then the BOGs might cut off the land route from France to Austria-Hungary.
Leclair is very much regretting his bargain with the Pope right now, but he doesn't have a great deal of choice in the matter.
(The offensive in southern Germany will be the topic of the next update, BTW; it was going to be part of this update, but the Flashman story was too long and I was having too much fun writing it.)
If Wikipedia is anything to go by, they were run by the upper peasantry and the heads of livestock collectives, with the monasteries competing for power. That's actually a fair breakdown of how power might be divided in post-revolutionary Rwanda, as the new commonwealth will retain the tripartite administrative structure of land, herds and armies, and much of the military will consist of religious brotherhoods.
What a mess...
And by the way, you bastard. You just violated Swiss neutrality.
Technically the Papal Legion did that.