'Memoirs and Recollections of An Officer of the Indian Political Service' [‎10r] (19/156)

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advice, but the fact was that he had no military attache on his staff and no-one else
with military experience to whom he could turn. Presumably had he asked the Foreign
Office for a more senior officer this might have caused alarm amongst a jittery
British community, and might also have met with the disapproval of the Emperor him
self, who was quite convinced that, even without allies, he was capable of defeating
the Italians as one of his predecessors had done at the disastrous battle of Adowa
many years earlier.
As far as the existing defence measures were concerned, the military resources at •
our disposal in the Legation were primarily the Da^dar and l-*£kt troopers of the
Cavalry Escort. Their arms consisted of their rifles, their swords and their lances
only. In the cellars of the Legation there were stored about one hundred .303 SMLE
rifles and several thousand rounds of ammunitions. The Legation building was to some
extent defensible as it had been furnished with loop-holes in useful places when it
was built many years earlier. The spare rifles were designed to be issued to
volunteer British subjects in the event of trouble but few, if any, had been trained
in their use.
I duly inspected the Legation compound with much care, and climbed the steep hill
overlooking the position. I found it to be even more disquieting than I had feared.
From its slopes, all parts of the compound were clearly visible including the large
paddock or open space where, of necessity, the refugee camp would have to be estab
lished. Mutinous soldiery armed with rifles, with which the Army and many of the
r*a/Ll>Urv Cwrryid
tribesmen, who had been mobilised in their thousands^ could create havoc down below
unless access to the summit were to be denied to them. I informed the Minister that,
in my opinion, the existing resources at our disposal were totally inadequate to
defend the Legation and the compound as well as the assembled refugees in the event
of the breakdown of law and order. If, it was his intention to maintain the Legation
intact throughout the forthcoming hostilities and afford the British communities the
protection to which they were entitled, then the only solution was to provide a
contingent of well armed regular troops to defend it, as had been done at the turn of
the century when the foreign Legations in Peking had come under seige at the time
of the Boxer Rebellion. Sir Sidney Barton was well aware of this analogy. Until he
came to Ethiopia in 1930, he had passed the whole of his career in the China Consular
Service. He had been Consul General at Shanghai in 1929 when British troops and
Marines had been landed to protect British lives and property when the city port was
invaded by the Japanese Army fighting the Chinese.