The Sun. — 1868-05-18 (London, England)

THE SCENE WITHIN THE FORTRESS. Only a small number of Theodore's troops stood by him to the last, It is said that eighty dead bodies have been  jlli4i  111:n3c-if.  At I  fcarad within Alagdala. If so, I fear that many of the slain were not fighting men, for I myself counted the bodies near the gateway, at which nearly all the fighting occurred, and I could not find more than ten, and at least half of these were Theodore's chiefs, distinguished from the common soldiers by their shirts of coloured silk. These few men stood by him to the last with desperate devotion, but the rest must have made a very poor stand, or our troops would have suffered far more. As it is, it is little short of miraculous that even six men, bent on selling their lives dearly, and with good arms in their hands (nearly a dozen English breech-loaders have been found in Magdala) should have failed to kill one man out of a dense column advancing up such an ascent as that to Magdala—it would have been less surprising if they had between them killed a hundred men than that they should have failed to kill one. Theodore's body was found, not near those of his chiefs in the gateway, but alone on the hill above. I happened to be near Dr. Lumsdaine when he examined the body, then still warm, and was told by him that he believed Theodore to have committed suicide. This theory is so exactly in accordance with what is known of the man's character and his conduct up to the last moment that lam inclined still to think it the right one. His face seemed to me rather a disappointing one after all that has been said about it, but then it was impossible to judge properly after death, especially as the eye was said to be, from its fire and expression, the most remarkable feature. There was a look of bloated, sensual indulgence about the cheeks by no means heroic or kingly, but the forehead was intellectual, and the mouth singularly determined and cruel. A very strange smile still lingered about the lips, as if even in the death-throe his last thought had been one of triumph at having baulked his conquerors by dying a king. His death is universally regarded with unmixed satisfaction. It would be affectation to pity a tyrant who himself knew no pity, who was as unscrupulous, and crafty as he was cruel, and who had indeed every reason to style himself the Scourge of God sent to punish the people. He has met with a death far more merciful than he dealt out to better men, and far more honourable than any trait in his character, except, perhaps, his dauntless bravery and invincible determination, deserved. Those few to whom these qualities recommended him to some sort of mercy had only to look for a moment into the fearful charnel-house, the loathsome human shambles which was exposed to our horrified gaze as we neared Magdala, and every lingering trace of compassion at once disappeared. We had been told by his prisoners, our fellow-countrymen, that the day before the arrival of the British army Theodore had summoned all the prisoners to his presence, and had in cold blood butchered over 300 of them, some with his own hand, almost within sight and hearing of the rest, who momentarily expected the same fate. But though details of this kind make one shudder, the mind of a civilised man, whose whole experience runs counter to a vivid faith in the actual existence of such atrocities, somehow cannot fully realise them, or take in their whole terrible import. On Easter Monday, however, nothing was left to the imagination, the tragedy was forced in all its naked horror upon our revolted senses. A strange smell, for which there was no apparent cause, made some of our party look over the edge of a steep cliff, almost within a few yards of the spot from which the guns were beginning to play upon Magdala, and there, on a ledge about fifty feet below them, lay two large heaps of mangled human bodies, closely piled upon each other in ghastly confusion, their limbs protruding from the mass in all sorts of repulsive attitudes and contortions, and presenting altogether a scene of horror such as no pen could adequately describe, could any pen be found to undertake the task. Here was the latest, though not by any means the worst, specimen of the pious handiwork of the self-elected Scourge of God. More commonly he mutilated and disabled his victims, leaving them to die of their wounds, or to the more tender mercy of the hyena. On Dalanta one of the force picked up two human hands, evidently not long cut off. The only exceptionally cruel feature in this last massacre was its unusual wantonness. The victims were, many of them, prisoners for very slight offences, and men of no importance, who might with perfect safety have been set free. Theodore feared the expense of keeping them during a siege, and considered it perhaps derogatory to his dignity to let them go ;so he massacred them. It is impossible to feel pity for such a man.