Flashman

by George MacDonald Fraser

I’ve raked and ridden harder than most, no doubt, and there are probably a number of middle-aged men and women who could answer to the name of Flashman if only they knew it.

She got up and took it, smiling still, but there was none of the old wanton glint about her eye. She was being stately and forgiving, like an aunt to a naughty nephew. The nephew, had she known it, was intent on incest.

It is the look that your parvenu would give half his fortune for, that unrufflable gaze of the spoiled child of fortune who knows with unshakeable certainty that he is right and that the world is exactly ordered for his satisfaction and pleasure. It is the look that makes underlings writhe and causes revolutions.

When I am frightened, I go red in the face, not pale, as most men do, so that in me fear can pass for anger, which has been convenient more than once.

But he was greedy, and I’ve lived long enough to discover that there isn’t any folly a man won’t contemplate if there’s money or a woman at stake.

His lovely new regiment, he found, contained officers who consorted with French whores and even fought duels over them.

If you were country-bred or lived in London these things were nothing to you, and all I gathered was that the poor folk were mutinous and wanted to do less work for more money, and the factory owners were damned if they’d let them. There may have been more to it than this, but I doubt it,

Elspeth was like none of the others. She was beautiful, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and pink-cheeked, and she alone smiled at me with the open, simple smile of the truly stupid.

You may wonder why I took pains to ingratiate myself with these puritan boors, and the answer is that I have always made a point of being civil to anyone who might ever be of use to me.

And among these riotous pleasures of a soldier’s life I talked occasionally with Miss Elspeth, and found her brainless beyond description. But she was undeniably desirable, and for all the piety and fear of hell-fire that had been drummed into her, I thought there was sometimes a wanton look about her eye and lower lip, and after a week I had her as infatuated with me as any young woman could be.

rissalder,

Risaldar (often called ressaidar in the British Indian Army), meaning the commander of a risala (mounted troop) in Persian, is a mid-level rank in cavalry and armoured units of the Indian Army.

But at last we came to Kabul, and I saw the great fortress of Bala Hissar lowering over the city, and beyond it to the right the neat lines of the cantonment beside the water’s edge, where the red tunics showed like tiny dolls in the distance and the sound of a bugle came faintly over the river.

gommeril.’

A fool, a stupid person.http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gomerel Drauntin' gomrals — in a swarm, Oure the hip o' Whigray's hill.

It was at one of these matches that I first saw Shah Sujah, the king, who had come down as the guest of McNaghten. He was a portly, brown-bearded man who stood gravely contemplating the game, and when McNaghten asked him how he liked it, said: ‘Strange and manifold are the ways of God.’

jezzails

The jezail (sometimes Jezzail from the Pashto language) was a simple, cost-efficient and often hand made muzzle-loading long arm commonly used in British India,Central Asia and parts of the Middle East in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jezail

Let me say that when I talk of disasters I speak with authority. I have served at Balaclava, Cawnpore, and Little Big Horn. Name the biggest born fools who wore uniform in the nineteenth century – Cardigan, Sale, Custer, Raglan, Lucan – I knew them all.

I have observed, in the course of a dishonest life, that when a rogue is outlining a treacherous plan, he works harder to convince himself than to move his hearers. Akbar wanted to cook his Afghan enemies’ goose, that was all, and perfectly understandable, but he wanted to look like a gentleman still – to himself.

was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whoremongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not so far off the mark.

There is a painting of the scene at Gandamack,20 which I saw a few years ago, and it is like enough the real thing as I remember it. No doubt it is very fine and stirs martial thoughts in the glory-blown asses who look at it; my only thought when I saw it was, ‘You poor bloody fools!’ and I said so, to the disgust of other viewers. But I was there, you see, shivering with horror as I watched, unlike the good Londoners, who let the roughnecks and jailbirds keep their empire for them; they are good enough for getting cut up at the Gandamacks which fools like Elphy and McNaghten bring ’em to, and no great loss to anybody.

There is great pleasure in catastrophe that doesn’t touch you, and anyone who says there isn’t is a liar. Haven’t you seen it in the face of a bearer of bad news, and heard it in the unctuous phrases at the church gate after a funeral?

thought of hooded black figures, and the Inquisition, and torture chambers that I had gloated over in forbidden books at school. It’s very different when you are actually in one.

I knew quite clearly what I wanted to do; I would gather up the flag and surrender it to the Afghans, and then they would let us alone; Hudson, even in that hellish din and horror, must have guessed somehow what was in my mind, for I saw him crawling towards the colours, too.

There was a thunder like a waterfall, and things were falling on me; a horrible pain went through my right leg, and I heard the shriek of a Ghazi almost in my ear. I was lying face down, clutching at the flag, mumbling, ‘Here, take the bloody thing; I don’t want it. Please take it; I give in.’

he was Major Havelock, by the way, a Bible-moth of the deepest dye, and a great name now.22

Major General Sir Henry Havelock KCB (5 April 1795 – 24 November 1857) was a British general who is particularly associated with India and his recapture of Cawnpore during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Havelock

I can say that I told it well – offhand, but not over-modest; just a blunt soldier reporting to his seniors. It calls for nice judgement, this art of bragging; you must be plain, but not too plain, and you must smile only rarely. Letting them guess more than you say is the kernel of it, and looking uncomfortable when they compliment you.

At Ludhiana a clergyman preached a tremendous sermon on the text, ‘Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends’ – he admitted, in a roundabout way, that I hadn’t actually laid down mine, but it hadn’t been for want of trying, and had been a damned near thing altogether. Better luck next time was about his view of it,

I told him I had passed for one, and he opened his eyes and said did I speak the language, and would I say something in it. So without thinking I said the first words that came into my head: ‘Hamare ghali ana, achha din,’ which is what the harlots chant at passers-by, and means ‘Good day, come into our street’. He seemed very interested, but the man beside him stiffened and stared hard at me. ‘What does it mean, Mr Flashman?’ says the Queen. ‘It is a Hindu greeting, marm,’ says the Duke, and my guts turned over as I recalled that he had served in India.

but all the time he would know in his hypocrite heart that I was a rotter still.30 But neither he nor anyone else would have dared to say so. This myth called bravery, which is half-panic, half-lunacy (in my case, all panic), pays for all; in England you can’t be a hero and bad. There’s practically a law against it.

We shook hands, and he drove off. I never spoke to him again. Years later, though, I told the American general, Robert Lee, of the incident, and he said Wellington was right – I had received the highest honour any soldier could hope for. But it wasn’t the medal; for Lee’s money it was Wellington’s hand. Neither, I may point out, had any intrinsic value.