Robert Napier(1810–1890)

Robert Cornelis Napier was born at Colombo in Ceylon on 6 December 1810, the son of Major Charles Frederick Napier of the Scottish Napier family and his wife Catherine. His father died of wounds before the boy was a year old. He was educated in England and at the East India Company's military seminary at Addiscombe, was commissioned into the Bengal Engineers in 1826, and went out to India at eighteen. The engineers were the thinking arm of the Company's army, and Napier spent his early career on the works that held British India together: irrigation canals on the Ganges and the Jumna, the roads and cantonments of the new hill stations, the bridges and siege-works of a service that built as readily as it fought.

He saw hard fighting across the middle of the century. In the Sikh wars he was present at Mudki and Ferozeshah in 1845 and was severely wounded at Ferozeshah; he directed the siege-works at Mooltan and fought at Gujrat in 1849, the battle that ended Sikh power in the Punjab. In the rising of 1857 he served as chief engineer in the relief of Lucknow under Outram and Sir Colin Campbell and was wounded again in the final capture of the city. He commanded a division in the China war of 1860 and was present at the taking of the Taku forts and the advance on Peking. By the middle of the 1860s he was a lieutenant-general with a reputation as the most careful and complete soldier in India, a man who counted his transport and his water before he counted his guns.

In 1867 the Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia, in a quarrel with the British government, imprisoned the British consul and a number of European missionaries and officials in his mountain fortress of Magdala, high in the Ethiopian highlands. Napier was given the command of the expedition to free them. The problem was not the fighting but the four hundred miles of mountain country between the captives and the sea, and Napier solved it as an engineer. He landed at Zula on the Red Sea coast in late 1867 and built there a harbour with piers, a condensing plant for fresh water, and a railway running inland from the beach, then pushed a supply road up through the passes with his army of some thirteen thousand troops and a vast train of baggage animals, including elephants to carry the guns.

He reached Magdala in April 1868. On 10 April he broke Tewodros's army on the plateau of Aroge below the fortress, his rockets and breech-loading rifles scattering the assault for the loss of barely twenty British wounded and not a man killed. The captives were released. On 13 April his troops stormed the gates of Magdala itself; Tewodros, refusing to surrender, took his own life as the assault came in. Napier freed the prisoners, destroyed the fortress and its guns, and then, having come only to recover the captives, turned his whole army round and marched it back the four hundred miles to the sea, re-embarking it without leaving a garrison or claiming a yard of territory. It was held up at once, and has been held up since, as a model of a limited expedition exactly executed: a rescue, not a conquest.

He was created Baron Napier of Magdala, granted the thanks of both Houses of Parliament and a pension, and went on to be Commander-in-Chief in India and then Governor of Gibraltar. He was made a field marshal in 1883 and Constable of the Tower of London in 1887. He died in London on 14 January 1890 and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral. The Napier name carries his memory as the engineer-general who turned the longest and least promising line of march in Victorian soldiering into a clean rescue, brought every captive out of the Abyssinian highlands, and then declined to stay.