Flashman at the Charge
George MacDonald Fraser
Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world.Celebrated Victorian bounder, cad, and lecher, Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., returns to play his (reluctant) part in the charge of the Light Brigade in this of the critically acclaimed Flashman Papers.As the British cavalry prepared to launch themselves against the Russian guns at Balaclava, Harry Flashman was petrified.But the Crimea was only the beginning: beyond lay the snowbound wastes of the great Russian slave empire, torture and death, headlong escapes from relentless enemies, savage tribal hordes to the right of him, passionate females to the left of him…Then, finally, that unknown but desperate war on the roof of the world, when India was the prize, and there was nothing to stop the armed might of Imperial Russia but the wavering sabre and terrified ingenuity of old Flashman himself.
Copyright (#u3ee2c276-65f0-574f-a299-2fb38bfdfd5b)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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First published in Great Britain by Barrie & Jenkins 1973
Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1973 and 1982
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman? © The Beneficiaries of the Literary Estate of George MacDonald Fraser 2015
Map © John Gilkes 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover illustration © Gino D’Achille
George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007217182
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2015 ISBN: 9780007326068
Version: 2016-11-22
The following piece was found in the author’s study in 2013 by the Estate of George MacDonald Fraser.
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman? (#u3ee2c276-65f0-574f-a299-2fb38bfdfd5b)
‘How did you get the idea of Flashman?’ and ‘When are we going to get his U.S. Civil War memoirs?’ are questions which I have ducked more often than I can count. To the second, my invariable response is ‘Oh, one of these days’. Followed, when the inquirer is an impatient American, by the gentle reminder that to an old British soldier like Flashman the unpleasantness between the States is not quite the most important event of the nineteenth century, but rather a sideshow compared to the Mutiny or Crimea. Before they can get indignant I add hastily that his Civil War itinerary is already mapped out; this is the only way of preventing them from telling me what it ought to be.
To the question, how did I get the idea, I simply reply that I don’t know. Who ever knows? Anthony Hope conceived The Prisoner of Zenda on a walk from Westminster to the Temple, but I doubt if he could have said, after the calendar month it took him to write the book, what triggered the idea. In my case, Flashman came thundering out of the mists of forty years living and dreaming, and while I can list the ingredients that went to his making, heaven only knows how and when they combined.
One thing is sure: the Flashman Papers would never have been written if my fellow clansman Hugh Fraser, Lord Allander, had confirmed me as editor of the Glasgow Herald in 1966. But he didn’t, the canny little bandit, and I won’t say he was wrong. I wouldn’t have lasted in the job, for I’d been trained in a journalistic school where editors were gods, and in three months as acting chief my attitude to management, front office, and directors had been that of a seigneur to his serfs – I had even put Fraser’s entry to the House of Lords on an inside page, assuring him that it was not for the Herald, his own paper, to flaunt his elevation, and that a two-column picture of him was quite big enough. How cavalier can you get?
And doubtless I had other editorial shortcomings. In any event, faced with twenty years as deputy editor (which means doing all the work without getting to the big dinners), I promised my wife I would ‘write us out of it’. In a few weeks of thrashing the typewriter at the kitchen table in the small hours, Flashman was half-finished, and likely to stay that way, for I fell down a waterfall, broke my arm, and lost interest – until my wife asked to read what I had written. Her reaction galvanised me into finishing it, one draft, no revisions, and for the next two years it rebounded from publisher after publisher, British and American.
I can’t blame them: the purported memoir of an unregenerate blackguard, bully, and coward resurrected from a Victorian school story is a pretty eccentric subject. By 1968 I was ready to call it a day, but thanks to my wife’s insistence and George Greenfield’s matchless knowledge of the publishing scene, it found a home at last with Herbert Jenkins, the manuscript looking, to quote Christopher MacLehose, as though it had been round the world twice. It dam’ nearly had.
They published it as it stood, with (to me) bewildering results. It wasn’t a bestseller in the blockbuster sense, but the reviewers were enthusiastic, foreign rights (starting with Finland) were sold, and when it appeared in the U.S.A. one-third of forty-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir, to the undisguised glee of the New York Times, which wickedly assembled their reviews. ‘The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers’ is the one that haunts me still, for if I was human enough to feel my lower ribs parting under the strain, I was appalled, sort of.
You see, while I had written a straightforward introduction describing the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Papers’ in a saleroom in Ashby-de-la-Zouche (that ought to have warned them), and larded it with editorial ‘foot-notes’, there had been no intent to deceive; for one thing, while I’d done my best to write, first-person, in Victorian style, I’d never imagined that it would fool anybody. Nor did Herbert Jenkins. And fifty British critics had recognised it as a conceit. (The only one who was half-doubtful was my old chief sub on the Herald; called on to review it for another paper, he demanded of the Herald’s literary editor: ‘This book o’ Geordie’s isnae true, is it?’ and on being assured that it wasn’t, exclaimed: ‘The conniving bastard!’, which I still regard as a high compliment.)
With the exception of one left-wing journal which hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism, the press and public took Flashman, quite rightly, at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad who, despite his cowardice, depravity and deceit, had managed to emerge from fearful ordeals and perils an acclaimed hero, his only redeeming qualities being his humour and shameless honesty as a memorialist. I was gratified, if slightly puzzled to learn that the great American publisher, Alfred Knopf, had said of the book: ‘I haven’t heard this voice in fifty years’, and that the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police was recommending it to his subordinates. My interest increased as I wrote more Flashman books, and noted the reactions.
I was, several critics agreed, a satirist. Taking revenge on the nineteenth century on behalf of the twentieth, said one. Waging war on Victorian hypocrisy, said another. Plainly under the influence of Conrad, said yet another. A full-page review in a German paper took me flat aback when my eye fell on the word ‘Proust’ in the middle of it. I don’t read German, so for all I know the review may have been maintaining that Proust was a better stand-off half than I was, or used more semi-colons. But there it was, and it makes you think. And a few years ago a highly respected religious journal said that the Flashman Papers deserved recognition as the work of a sensitive moralist, and spoke of service not only to literature and history, but to the study of ethics.
My instant reaction to this was to paraphrase Poins: ‘God send me no worse fortune, but I never said so!’ while feeling delighted that someone else had said it, and then reflecting solemnly that this was a far cry from long nights with cold tea and cigarettes, scheming to get Flashman into the passionate embrace of the Empress of China, or out of the toils of a demented dwarf on the edge of a snake-pit. But now, beyond remarking that the anti-imperial left-winger was sadly off the mark, that the Victorians were mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our own brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring and terrified generation, and that I hadn’t read a word of Conrad by 1966 (and my interest in him since has been confined to Under Western Eyes, in the hope that I might persuade Dick Lester to film it as only he could), I have no comments to offer on opinions of my work. I know what I’m doing – at least, I think I do – and the aim is to entertain (myself, for a start) while being true to history, to let Flashman comment on human and inhuman nature, and devil take the romantics and the politically correct revisionists both. But my job is writing, not explaining what I’ve written, and I’m well content and grateful to have others find in Flashy whatever they will (I’ve even had letters psychoanalysing the brute), and return to the question with which I began this article.
A life-long love affair with British imperial adventure, fed on tupenny bloods, the Wolf of Kabul and Lionheart Logan (where are they now?), the Barrack-Room Ballads, films like Lives of aBengal Lancer and The Four Feathers, and the stout-hearted stories for boys which my father won as school prizes in the 1890s; the discovery, through Scott and Sabatini and Macaulay, that history is one tremendous adventure story; soldiering in Burma, and seeing the twilight of the Raj in all its splendour; a newspaper-trained lust for finding the truth behind the received opinion; being a Highlander from a family that would rather spin yarns than eat … I suppose Flashman was born out of all these things, and from reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a child – and having a wayward cast of mind.
Thanks to that contrary streak (I always half-hoped that Rathbone would kill Flynn, confounding convention and turning the story upside down – Basil gets Olivia, Claude Rains triumphs, wow!), I recognised Flashman on sight as the star of Hughes’ book. Fag-roasting rotter and poltroon he might be, he was nevertheless plainly box-office, for he had the looks, swagger and style (‘big and strong’, ‘a bluff, offhand manner’, and ‘considerable powers of being pleasant’, according to his creator) which never fail to cast a glamour on villainy. I suspect Hughes knew it, too, and got rid of him before he could take over the book – which loses all its spirit and zest once Flashy has made his disgraced and drunken exit.
[He was, by the way, a real person; this I learned only recently. A letter exists from one of Hughes’ Rugby contemporaries which is definite on the point, but tactfully does not identify him. I have sometimes speculated about one boy who was at Rugby in Hughes’ day, and who later became a distinguished soldier and something of a ruffian, but since I haven’t a shred of evidence to back up the speculation, I keep it to myself.]
What became of him after Rugby seemed to me an obvious question, which probably first occurred to me when I was about nine, and then waited thirty years for an answer. The Army, inevitably, and since Hughes had given me a starting-point by expelling him in the late 1830s, when Lord Cardigan was in full haw-haw, and the Afghan War was impending … just so. I began with no idea of where the story might take me, but with Victorian history to point the way, and that has been my method ever since: choose an incident or campaign, dig into every contemporary source available, letters, diaries, histories, reports, eye-witness, trivia (and fictions, which like the early Punch are mines of detail), find the milestones for Flashy to follow, more or less, get impatient to be writing, and turn him loose with the research incomplete, digging for it as I go and changing course as history dictates or fancy suggests.
In short, letting history do the work, with an eye open for the unexpected nuggets and coincidences that emerge in the mining process – for example, that the Cabinet were plastered when they took their final resolve on the Crimea, that Pinkerton the detective had been a trade union agitator in the very place where Flashman was stationed in the first book, that Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King had a factual basis, or that Bismarck and Lola Montez were in London in the same week (of 1842, if memory serves, which it often doesn’t: whenever Flashman has been a subject on Mastermind I have invariably scored less than the contestants).
Visiting the scenes helps; I’d not have missed Little Big Horn, the Borneo jungle rivers, Bent’s Fort, or the scruffy, wonderful Gold Road to Samarkand, for anything. Seeking out is half the fun, which is one reason why I decline all offers of help with research (from America, mostly). But the main reason is that I’m a soloist, giving no hints beforehand, even to publishers, and permitting no editorial interference afterwards. It may be tripe, but it’s my tripe – and I do strongly urge authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children, and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.
One of the great rewards of writing about my old ruffian has been getting and answering letters, and marvelling at the kindness of readers who take the trouble to let me know they have enjoyed his adventures, or that he has cheered them up, or turned them to history. Sitting on the stairs at 4 a.m. talking to a group of students who have phoned from the American Midwest is as gratifying as learning from a university lecturer that he is using Flashman as a teaching aid. Even those who want to write the books for you, or complain that he’s a racist (of course he is; why should he be different from the rest of humanity?), or insist that he isn’t a coward at all, but just modest, and they’re in love with him, are compensated for by the stalwarts who’ve named pubs after him (in Monte Carlo, and somewhere in South Africa, I’m told), or have formed societies in his honour. They’re out there, believe me, the Gandamack Delopers of Oklahoma, and Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, and the Royal Society of Upper Canada, with appropriate T-shirts.
I have discovered that when you create – or in my case, adopt and develop – a fictional character, and take him through a series of books, an odd thing happens. He assumes, in a strange way, a life of his own. I don’t mean that he takes you over; far from it, he tends to hive off on his own. At any rate, you find that you’re not just writing about him: you are becoming responsible for him. You’re not just his chronicler: you are also his manager, trainer, and public relations man. It’s your own fault – my own fault – for pretending that he’s real, for presenting his adventures as though they were his memoirs, putting him in historical situations, giving him foot-notes and appendices, and inviting the reader to accept him as a historical character. The result is that about half the letters I get treat him as though he were a person in his own right – of course, people who write to me know that he’s nothing of the sort – well, most of them realise it: I occasionally get indignant letters from people complaining that they can’t find him in the Army List or the D.N.B., but nearly all of them know he’s fiction, and when they pretend that he isn’t, they’re just playing the game. I started it, so I can’t complain.
When Hughes axed Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, brutally and suddenly (on page 170, if I remember rightly), it seemed a pretty callous act to abandon him with all his sins upon him, just at the stage of adolescence when a young fellow needs all the help and understanding he can get. So I adopted him, not from any charitable motives, but because I realised that there was good stuff in the lad, and that with proper care and guidance something could be made out of him.
And I have to say that with all his faults (what am I saying, because of his faults) young Flashy has justified the faith I showed in him. Over the years he and I have gone through several campaigns and assorted adventures, and I can say unhesitatingly that coward, scoundrel, toady, lecher and dissembler though he may be, he is a good man to go into the jungle with.
George MacDonald Fraser
Dedication (#u3ee2c276-65f0-574f-a299-2fb38bfdfd5b)
For ‘Ekaterin’,
rummy champion of Samarkand
Contents
Cover (#ud67f94b3-7a64-5d38-8e3b-ed804b63d407)
Title Page (#ue2a40826-0f1e-5951-9a07-912a06d5f84e)
Copyright
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?
Dedication
Explanatory Note
Map (#u03062da5-9b68-5c6c-9cfc-63c74bcd4144)
Chapter 1 (#ud885fc8d-ef90-50f6-bfe0-0641cdcda3a8)
Chapter 2 (#uc22287f1-1590-5033-aa60-923f58ba0a02)
Chapter 3 (#u3a1c20a3-6779-5dfa-8100-428a265482f4)
Chapter 4 (#ua91057a2-6833-5e5f-a693-7a99f24b4af2)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix I
Appendix II
Footnotes
Notes
About the Author
The FLASHMAN Papers: In chronological order
The FLASHMAN Papers: In order of publication
Also by George MacDonald Fraser
About the Publisher
EXPLANATORY NOTE (#u3ee2c276-65f0-574f-a299-2fb38bfdfd5b)
When the Flashman Papers, that vast personal memoir describing the adult career of the notorious bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, came to light some years ago, it was at once evident that new and remarkable material was going to be added to Victorian history. In the first three packets of the memoirs, already published by permission of their owner, Mr Paget Morrison, Flashman described his early military career, his participation in the ill-fated First Afghan War, his involvement (with Bismarck and Lola Montez) in the Schleswig-Holstein Question, and his fugitive adventures as a slaver in West Africa, an abolitionist agent in the United States, and an erstwhile associate of Congressman Abraham Lincoln, Mr Disraeli, and others.
It will be seen from this that the great soldier’s recollections were not all of a purely military nature, and those who regretted that these earlier papers contained no account of his major campaigns (Indian Mutiny, U.S. Civil War, etc.) will doubtless take satisfaction that in the present volume he deals with his experiences in the Crimea, as well as in other even more colourful – and possibly more important – theatres of conflict. That he adds much to the record of social and military history, illumines many curious byways, and confirms modern opinions of his own deplorable character, goes without saying, but his general accuracy where he deals with well-known events and personages, and his transparent honesty, at least as a memorialist, are evidence that the present volume is as trustworthy as those which preceded it.
As editor, I have only corrected his spelling and added the usual footnotes and appendices. The rest is Flashman.
G.M.F.
The moment after Lew Nolan wheeled his horse away and disappeared over the edge of the escarpment with Raglan’s message tucked in his gauntlet, I knew I was for it. Raglan was still dithering away to himself, as usual, and I heard him cry: ‘No, Airey, stay a moment – send after him!’ and Airey beckoned me from where I was trying to hide myself nonchalantly behind the other gallopers of the staff. I had had my bellyful that day, my luck had been stretched as long as a Jew’s memory, and I knew for certain that another trip across the Balaclava plain would be disaster for old Flashy. I was right, too.
And I remember thinking, as I waited trembling for the order that would launch me after Lew towards the Light Brigade, where they sat at rest on the turf eight hundred feet below – this, I reflected bitterly, is what comes of hanging about pool halls and toad-eating Prince Albert. Both of which, you’ll agree, are perfectly natural things for a fellow to do, if he likes playing billiards and has a knack of grovelling gracefully to royalty. But when you see what came of these apparently harmless diversions, you’ll allow that there’s just no security anywhere, however hard one tries. I should know, with my twenty-odd campaigns and wounds to match – not one of ’em did I go looking for, and the Crimea least of all. Yet there I was again, the reluctant Flashy, sabre on hip, bowels rumbling and whiskers bristling with pure terror, on the brink of the greatest cavalry carnage in the history of war. It’s enough to make you weep.
You will wonder, if you’ve read my earlier memoirs (which I suppose are as fine a record of knavery, cowardice and fleeing for cover as you’ll find outside the covers of Hansard), what fearful run of ill fortune got me to Balaclava at all. So I had better get things in their proper order, like a good memorialist, and before describing the events of that lunatic engagement, tell you of the confoundedly unlucky chain of trivial events that took me there. It should convince you of the necessity of staying out of pool-rooms and shunning the society of royalty.
It was early in ’54, and I had been at home some time, sniffing about, taking things very easy, and considering how I might lie low and enjoy a quiet life in England while my military colleagues braved shot and shell in Russia on behalf of the innocent defenceless Turk – not that there’s any such thing, in my experience, which is limited to my encounter with a big fat Constantinople houri who tried to stab me in bed for my money-belt, and then had the effrontery to call the police when I thrashed her. I’ve never had a high opinion of Turks, and when I saw the war-clouds gathering on my return to England that year, the last thing I was prepared to do was offer my services against the Russian tyrant.
One of the difficulties of being a popular hero, though, is that it’s difficult to wriggle out of sight when the bugle blows. I hadn’t taken the field on England’s behalf for about eight years, but neither had anyone else, much, and when the press starts to beat the drum and the public are clamouring for the foreigners’ blood to be spilled – by someone other than themselves – they have a habit of looking round for their old champions. The laurels I had won so undeservedly in the Afghan business were still bright enough to catch attention, I decided, and it would be damned embarrassing if people in Town started saying: ‘Hollo, here’s old Flash, just the chap to set upon Tsar Nicholas. Going back to the Cherrypickers, Flashy, are you? By Jove, pity the poor Rooskis when the Hero of Gandamack sets about ’em, eh, what?’ As one of the former bright particular stars of the cavalry, who had covered himself with glory from Kabul to the Khyber, and been about the only man to charge in the right direction at Chillianwallah (a mistake, mind you), I wouldn’t be able to say, ‘No, thank’ee, I think I’ll sit out this time.’ Not and keep any credit, anyway. And credit’s the thing, if you’re as big a coward as I am, and want to enjoy life with an easy mind.
So I looked about for a way out, and found a deuced clever one – I rejoined the Army. That is to say, I went round to the Horse Guards, where my Uncle Bindley was still holding on in pursuit of his pension, and took up my colours again, which isn’t difficult when you know the right people. But the smart thing was, I didn’t ask for a cavalry posting, or a staff mount, or anything risky of that nature; instead I applied for the Board of Ordnance, for which I knew I was better qualified than most of its members, inasmuch as I knew which end of a gun the ball came out of. Let me once be installed there, in a comfortable office off Horse Guards, which I might well visit as often as once a fortnight, and Mars could go whistle for me.
And if anyone said, ‘What, Flash, you old blood-drinker, ain’t you off to Turkey to carve up the Cossacks?’, I’d look solemn and talk about the importance of administration and supply, and the need for having at home headquarters some experienced field men – the cleverer ones, of course – who would see what was required for the front. With my record for gallantry (totally false though it was) no one could doubt my sincerity.
Bindley naturally asked me what the deuce I knew about fire-arms, being a cavalryman, and I pointed out that that mattered a good deal less than the fact that I was related, on my mother’s side, to Lord Paget, of the God’s Anointed Pagets, who happened to be a member of the small arms select committee. He’d be ready enough, I thought, to give a billet as personal secretary, confidential civilian aide, and general tale-bearer, to a well-seasoned campaigner who was also a kinsman.
‘Well-seasoned Haymarket Hussar,’ sniffs Bindley, who was from the common or Flashman side of our family, and hated being reminded of my highly placed relatives. ‘I fancy rather more than that will be required.’
‘India and Afghanistan ain’t in the Haymarket, uncle,’ says I, looking humble-offended, ‘and if it comes to fire-arms, well, I’ve handled enough of ’em, Brown Bess, Dreyse needles, Colts, Lancasters, Brunswicks, and so forth’ – I’d handled them with considerable reluctance, but he didn’t know that.
‘H’m,’ says he, pretty sour. ‘This is a curiously humble ambition for one who was once the pride of the plungers. However, since you can hardly be less useful to the ordnance board than you would be if you returned to the wastrel existence you led in the 11th – before they removed you – I shall speak to his lordship.’
I could see he was puzzled, and he sniffed some more about the mighty being fallen, but he didn’t begin to guess at my real motive. For one thing, the war was still some time off, and the official talk was that it would probably be avoided, but I was taking no risks of being caught unprepared. When there’s been a bad harvest, and workers are striking, and young chaps have developed a craze for growing moustaches and whiskers, just watch out.
The country was full of discontent and mischief, largely because England hadn’t had a real war for forty years, and only a few of us knew what fighting was like. The rest were full of rage and stupidity, and all because some Papists and Turkish niggers had quarrelled about the nailing of a star to a door in Palestine. Mind you, nothing surprises me.
When I got home and announced my intention of joining the Board of Ordnance, my darling wife Elspeth was mortified beyond belief.
‘Why, oh why, Harry, could you not have sought an appointment in the Hussars, or some other fashionable regiment? You looked so beautiful and dashing in those wonderful pink pantaloons! Sometimes I think they were what won my heart in the first place, the day you came to father’s house. I suppose that in the Ordnance they wear some horrid drab overalls, and how can you take me riding in the Row dressed like … like a common commissary person, or something?’
‘Shan’t wear uniform,’ says I. ‘Just civilian toggings, my dear. And you’ll own my tailor’s a good one, since you chose him yourself.’
‘That will be quite as bad,’ says she, ‘with all the other husbands in their fine uniforms – and you looked so well and dashing. Could you not be a Hussar again, my love – just for me?’
When Elspeth pouted those red lips, and heaved her remarkable bosom in a sigh, my thoughts always galloped bedwards, and she knew it. But I couldn’t be weakened that way, as I explained.
‘Can’t be done. Cardigan won’t have me back in the 11th, you may be sure; why, he kicked me out in ’40.’
‘Because I was a … a tradesman’s daughter, he said. I know.’ For a moment I thought she would weep. ‘Well, I am not so now. Father …’
‘… bought a peerage just in time before he died, so you are a baron’s daughter. Yes, my love, but that won’t serve for Jim the Bear. I doubt if he fancies bought nobility much above no rank at all.’
‘Oh, how horridly you put it. Anyway, I am sure that is not so, because he danced twice with me last season, while you were away, at Lady Brown’s assembly – yes, and at the cavalry ball. I distinctly remember, because I wore my gold ruffled dress and my hair à l’impératrice, and he said I looked like an Empress indeed. Was that not gallant? And he bows to me in the Park, and we have spoken several times. He seems a very kind old gentleman, and not at all gruff, as they say.’
‘Is he now?’ says I. I didn’t care for the sound of this; I knew Cardigan for as lecherous an old goat as ever tore off breeches. ‘Well, kind or not as he may seem, he’s one to beware of, for your reputation’s sake, and mine. Anyway, he won’t have me back – and I don’t fancy him much either, so that settles it.’
She made a mouth at this. ‘Then I think you are both very stubborn and foolish. Oh, Harry, I am quite miserable about it; and poor little Havvy too, would be so proud to have his father in one of the fine regiments, with a grand uniform. He will be so downcast.’
Poor little Havvy, by the way, was our son and heir, a boisterous malcontent five-year-old who made the house hideous with his noise and was forever hitting his shuttlecocks about the place. I wasn’t by any means sure that I was his father, for as I have explained before, my Elspeth hid a monstrously passionate nature under her beautifully innocent roses-and-cream exterior, and I suspected that she had been bounced about by half London during the fourteen years of our marriage. I’d been away a good deal, of course. But I’d never caught her out – mind you, that meant nothing, for she’d never caught me, and I had had more than would make a hand-rail round Hyde Park. But whatever we both suspected we kept to ourselves, and dealt very well. I loved her, you see, in a way which was not entirely carnal, and I think, I believe, I hope, that she worshipped me, although I’ve never made up my mind about that.
But I had my doubts about the paternity of little Havvy – so called because his names were Harry Albert Victor, and he couldn’t say ‘Harry’ properly, generally because his mouth was full. My chum Speedicut, I remember, who is a coarse brute, claimed to see a conclusive resemblance to me: when Havvy was a few weeks old, and Speed came to the nursery to see him getting his rations, he said the way the infant went after the nurse’s tits proved beyond doubt whose son he was.
‘Little Havvy,’ I told Elspeth, ‘is much too young to care a feather what uniform his father wears. But my present work is important, my love, and you would not have me shirk my duty. Perhaps, later, I may transfer’ – I would, too, as soon as it looked safe – ‘and you will be able to lead your cavalryman to drums and balls and in the Row to your heart’s content.’
It cheered her up, like a sweet to a child; she was an astonishingly shallow creature in that way. More like a lovely flaxen-haired doll come to life than a woman with a human brain, I often thought. Still, that has its conveniences, too.
In any event, Bindley spoke for me to Lord Paget, who took me in tow, and so I joined the Board of Ordnance. And it was the greatest bore, for his lordship proved to be one of those meddling fools who insist on taking an interest in the work of committees to which they are appointed – as if a lord is ever expected to do anything but lend the light of his countenance and his title. He actually put me to work, and not being an engineer, or knowing more of stresses and moments than sufficed to get me in and out of bed, I was assigned to musketry testing at the Woolwich laboratory, which meant standing on firing-points while the marksmen of the Royal Small Arms Factory blazed away at the ‘eunuchs’.
The fellows there were a very common lot, engineers and the like, full of nonsense about the virtues of the Minié as compared with the Long Enfield .577, and the Pritchard bullet, and the Aston backsight – there was tremendous work going on just then, of course, to find a new rifle for the army, and Molesworth’s committee was being set up to make the choice. It was all one to me if they decided on arquebuses; after a month spent listening to them prosing about jamming ramrods, and getting oil on my trousers, I found myself sharing the view of old General Scarlett, who once told me:
‘Splendid chaps the ordnance, but dammem, a powder monkey’s a powder monkey, ain’t he? Let ’em fill the cartridges and bore the guns, but don’t expect me to know a .577 from a mortar! What concern is that of a gentleman – or a soldier, either? Hey? Hey?’
Indeed, I began to wonder how long I could stand it, and settled for spending as little time as I could on my duties, and devoting myself to the social life. Elspeth at thirty seemed to be developing an even greater appetite, if that were possible, for parties and dances and the opera and assemblies, and when I wasn’t squiring her I was busy about the clubs and the Haymarket, getting back into my favourite swing of devilled bones, mulled port and low company, riding round Albert Gate by day and St John’s Wood by night, racing, playing pool, carousing with Speed and the lads, and keeping the Cyprians busy. London is always lively, but there was a wild mood about in those days, and growing wilder as the weeks passed. It was all: when will the war break out? For soon it was seen that it must come, the press and the street-corner orators were baying for Russian blood, the government talked interminably and did nothing, the Russian ambassador was sent packing, the Guards marched away to embark for the Mediterranean at an unconscionably early hour of the morning – Elspeth, full of bogus loyalty and snob curiosity, infuriated me by creeping out of bed at four to go and watch this charade, and came back at eight twittering about how splendid the Queen had looked in a dress of dark green merino as she cried farewell to her gallant fellows – and a few days later Palmerston and Graham got roaring tight at the Reform Club and made furious speeches in which they announced that they were going to set about the villain Nicholas and drum him through Siberia.
I listened to a mob in Piccadilly singing about how British arms would ‘tame the frantic autocrat and smite the Russian slave’, and consoled myself with the thought that I would be snug and safe down at Woolwich, doing less than my share to see that they got the right guns to do it with. And so I might, if I hadn’t loafed out one evening to play pool with Speed in the Haymarket.
As I recall, I only went because Elspeth’s entertainment for the evening was to consist of going to the theatre with a gaggle of her female friends to see some play by a Frenchman – it was patriotic to go to anything French just then, and besides the play was said to be risqué, so my charmer was bound to see it in order to be virtuously shocked.
I doubted whether it would ruffle my tender sensibilities, though – not enough to be interesting, anyway – so I went along with Speed.
We played a few games of sausage in the Piccadilly Rooms, and it was a dead bore, and then a chap named Cutts, a Dragoon whom I knew slightly, came by and offered us a match at billiards for a quid a hundred. I’d played with him before, and beat him, so we agreed, and set to.
I’m no pool-shark, but not a bad player, either, and unless there’s a goodish sum riding, I don’t much care whether I win or lose as a rule. But there are some smart alecs at the table that I can’t abide to be beat by, and Cutts was one of them. You know the sort – they roll their cues on the tables, and tell the bystanders that they play their best game off list cushions instead of rubber, and say ‘Mmph?’ if you miss a shot they couldn’t have got themselves in a hundred years. What made it worse, my eye was out, and Cutts’ luck was dead in – he brought off middle-pocket jennies that Joe Bennet wouldn’t have looked at, missed easy hazards and had his ball roll all round the table for a cannon, and when he tried long pots as often as not he got a pair of breeches. By the time he had taken a fiver apiece from us, I was sick of it.
‘What, had enough?’ cries he, cock-a-hoop. ‘Come on, Flash, where’s your spirit? I’ll play you any cramp game you like – shell-out, skittle pool, pyramids, caroline, doublet or go-back.
What d’ye say? Come on, Speed, you’re game, I see.’
So Speed, the ass, played him again, while I mooched about in no good humour, waiting for them to finish. And it chanced that my eye fell on a game that was going on at a corner table, and I stopped to watch.
It was a flat-catching affair, one of the regular sharks fleecing a novice, and I settled down to see what fun there would be when the sheep realised he was being sheared. I had noticed him while we were playing with Cutts – a proper-looking mamma’s boy with a pale, delicate face and white hands, who looked as though he’d be more at home handing cucumber sandwiches to Aunt Jane than pushing a cue. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, but I’d noticed his clothes were beautifully cut, although hardly what you’d call pool-room fashion; more like Sunday in the country. But there was money about him, and all told he was the living answer to a billiard-rook’s prayer.
They were playing pyramids, and the shark, a grinning specimen with ginger whiskers, was fattening his lamb for the kill. You may not know the game, but there are fifteen colours, and you try to pocket them one after the other, like pool, usually for a stake of a bob a time. The lamb had put down eight of them, and the shark three, exclaiming loudly at his ill luck, and you could see the little chap was pretty pleased with himself.
‘Only four balls left!’ cries the shark. ‘Well, I’m done for; my luck’s dead out, I can see. Tell you what, though; it’s bound to change; I’ll wager a sovereign on each of the last four.’
You or I would know that this was the time to put up your cue and say good evening, before he started making the balls advance in column of route dressed from the front, and even the little greenhorn thought hard about it; but hang it, you could see him thinking, I’ve potted eight out of eleven – surely I’ll get at least two of those remaining.
So he said very well, and I waited to see the shark slam the four balls away in as many shots. But he had weighed up his man’s purse, and decided on a really good plucking, and after pocketing the first ball with a long double that made the greenhorn’s jaw drop, the shark made a miscue on his next stroke. Now when you foul at pyramids, one of the potted balls is put back on the table, so there were four still to go at. So it went on, the shark potting a ball and collecting a quid, and then fouling – damning his own clumsiness, of course – so that the ball was re-spotted again. It could go on all night, and the look of horror on the little greenhorn’s face was a sight to see. He tried desperately to pot the balls himself, but somehow he always found himself making his shots from a stiff position against the cushion, or with the four colours all lying badly; he could make nothing of it. The shark took fifteen pounds off him before dropping the last ball – off three cushions, just for swank – and then dusted his fancy weskit, thanked the flat with a leer, and sauntered off whistling and calling the waiter for champagne.
The little gudgeon was standing woebegone, holding his limp purse. I thought of speeding him on his way with a taunt or two, and then I had a sudden bright idea.
‘Cleaned out, Snooks?’ says I. He started, eyed me suspiciously, and then stuck his purse in his pocket and turned to the door.
‘Hold on,’ says I. ‘I’m not a Captain Sharp; you needn’t run away. He rooked you properly, didn’t he?’
He stopped, flushing. ‘I suppose he did. What is it to you?’
‘Oh, nothing at all. I just thought you might care for a drink to drown your sorrows.’
He gave me a wary look; you could see him thinking, here’s another of them.
‘I thank you, no,’ says he, and added: ‘I have no money left whatever.’
‘I’d be surprised if you had,’ says I, ‘but fortunately I have. Hey, waiter.’
The boy was looking nonplussed, as though he wanted to go out into the street and weep over his lost fifteen quid, but at the same time not averse to some manly comfort from this cheery chap. Even Tom Hughes allowed I could charm when I wanted to, and in two minutes I had him looking into a brandy glass, and soon after that we were chatting away like old companions.
He was a foreigner, doing the tour, I gathered, in the care of some tutor from whom he had managed to slip away to have a peep at the flesh-pots of London. The depths of depravity for him, it seemed, was a billiard-room, so he had made for this one and been quickly inveigled and fleeced.
‘At least it has been a lesson to me,’ says he, with that queer formal gravity which a man so often uses in speaking a language not his own. ‘But how am I to explain my empty purse to Dr Winter? What will he think?’
‘Depends how coarse an imagination he’s got,’ says I. ‘You needn’t fret about him; he’ll be so glad to get you back safe and sound, I doubt if he’ll ask too many questions.’
‘That is true,’ says my lad, thoughtfully. ‘He will fear for his own position. Why, he has been a negligent guardian, has he not?’
‘Dam’ slack,’ says I. ‘The devil with him. Drink up, boy, and confusion to Dr Winter.’
You may wonder why I was buying drink and being pleasant to this flat; it was just a whim I had dreamed up to be even with Cutts. I poured a little more into my new acquaintance, and got him quite merry, and then, with an eye on the table where Cutts was trimming up Speed, and gloating over it, I says to the youth:
‘I tell you what, though, my son, it won’t do for the sporting name of Old England if you creep back home without some credit. I can’t put the fifteen sovs back in your pocket, but I’ll tell you what – just do as I tell you, and I’ll see that you win a game before you walk out of this hall.’
‘Ah, no – that, no,’ says he. ‘I have played enough; once is sufficient – besides, I tell you, I have no more money.’
‘Gammon,’ says I. ‘Who’s talking about money? You’d like to win a match, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes, but …’ says he, and the wary look was back in his eye. I slapped him on the knee, jolly old Flash.
‘Leave it to me,’ says I. ‘What, man, it’s just in fun. I’ll get you a game with a pal of mine, and you’ll trim him up, see if you don’t.’
‘But I am the sorriest player,’ cries he. ‘How can I beat your friend?’
‘You ain’t as bad as you think you are,’ says I. ‘Depend on it. Now just sit there a moment.’
I slipped over to one of the markers whom I knew well. ‘Joe,’ says I, ‘give me a shaved ball, will you?’
‘What’s that, cap’n?’ says he. ‘There’s no such thing in this ’ouse.’
‘Don’t fudge me, Joe. I know better. Come on, man, it’s just for a lark, I tell you. No money, no rooking.’
He looked doubtful, but after a moment he went behind his counter and came back with a set of billiard pills. ‘Spot’s the boy,’ says he. ‘But mind, Cap’n Flashman, no nonsense, on your honour.’
‘Trust me,’ says I, and went back to our table. ‘Now, Sam Snooks, just you pop those about for a moment.’ He was looking quite perky, I noticed, what with the booze and, I suspect, a fairly bouncy little spirit under his mamma’s boy exterior. He seemed to have forgotten his fleecing at any rate, and was staring about him at the fellows playing at nearby tables, some in flowery weskits and tall hats and enormous whiskers, others in the new fantastic coloured shirts that were coming in just then, with death’s heads and frogs and serpents all over them; our little novice was drinking it all in, listening to the chatter and laughter, and watching the waiters weave in and out with their trays, and the markers calling off the breaks. I suppose it’s something to see, if you’re a bumpkin.
I went over to where Cutts was just demolishing Speed, and as the pink ball went away, I says:
‘There’s no holding you tonight, Cutts, old fellow. Just my luck, when my eye’s out, to meet first you and then that little terror in the corner yonder.’
‘What, have you been browned again?’ says he, looking round. ‘Oh, my stars, never by that, though, surely? Why, he’s not out of leading-strings, by the looks of him.’
‘Think so?’ says I. ‘He’ll give you twenty in the hundred, any day.’
Well, of course, that settled it, with a conceited pup like Cutts; nothing would do but he must come over, with his toadies in his wake, making great uproar and guffawing, and offer to make a game with my little greenhorn.
‘Just for love, mind,’ says I, in case Joe the marker was watching, but Cutts wouldn’t have it; insisted on a bob a point, and I had to promise to stand good for my man, who shied away as soon as cash was mentioned. He was pretty tipsy by now, or I doubt if I’d have got him to stay at the table, for he was a timid squirt, even in drink, and the bustling and catcalling of the fellows made him nervous. I rolled him the plain ball, and away they went, Cutts chalking his cue with a flourish and winking to his pals.
You’ve probably never seen a shaved ball used – but then, you wouldn’t know it if you had. The trick is simple; your sharp takes an ordinary ball beforehand, and gets a craftsman to peel away just the most delicate shaving of ivory from one side of it; some clumsy cheats try to do it by rubbing it with fine sand-paper, but that shows up like a whore in church. Then, in the game, he makes certain his opponent gets the shaved ball, and plays away. The flat never suspects a thing, for a carefully shaved ball can’t be detected except with the very slowest of slow shots, when it will waver ever so slightly just before it stops. But of course, even with fast shots it goes off the true just a trifle, and in as fine a game as billiards or pool, where precision is everything, a trifle is enough.
It was for Cutts, anyhow. He missed cannons by a whisker, his winning hazards rattled in the jaws of the pocket and stayed out, his losers just wouldn’t drop, and when he tried a jenny he often missed the red altogether. He swore blind and fumed, and I said, ‘My, my, damme, that was close, what?’ and my little greenhorn plugged away – he was a truly shocking player, too – and slowly piled up the score. Cutts couldn’t fathom it, for he knew he was hitting his shots well, but nothing would go right.
I helped him along by suggesting he was watching the wrong ball – a notion which is sure death, once it has been put in a player’s mind – and he got wild and battered away recklessly, and my youngster finally ran out an easy winner, by thirty points.
I was interested to notice he got precious cocky at this. ‘Billiards is not a difficult game, after all,’ says he, and Cutts ground his teeth and began to count out his change. His fine chums, of course, were bantering him unmercifully – which was all I’d wanted in the first place.
‘Better keep your cash to pay for lessons, Cutts, my boy,’ says I. ‘Here, Speed, take our young champion for a drink.’ And when they had gone off to the bar I grinned at Cutts. ‘I’d never have guessed it – with whiskers like yours.’
‘Guessed what, damn you, you funny flash man?’ says he, and I held up the spot ball between finger and thumb.
‘Never have guessed you’d have such a close shave,’ says I. ‘’Pon my soul, you ain’t fit to play with rooks like our little friend. You’d better take up hoppity, with old ladies.’
With a sudden oath he snatched the ball from me, set it on the cloth, and played it away. He leaned over, eyes goggling, as it came to rest, cursed foully, and then dashed it on to the floor.
‘Shaved, by God! Curse you, Flashman – you’ve sharped me, you and that damned little diddler! Where is the little toad – I’ll have him thrashed and flung out for this!’
‘Hold your wind,’ says I, while his pals fell against each other and laughed till they cried. ‘He didn’t know anything about it. And you ain’t sharped – I’ve told you to keep your money, haven’t I?’ I gave him a mocking leer. ‘“Any cramp game you like,” eh? Skittle pool, go-back – but not billiards with little flats from the nursery.’ And I left him thoroughly taken down, and went off to find Speed.
You’ll think this a very trivial revenge, no doubt, but then I’m a trivial chap – and I know the way under the skin of muffins like Cutts, I hope. What was it Hughes said – Flashman had a knack of knowing what hurt, and by a cutting word or look could bring tears to the eyes of people who would have laughed at a blow? Something like that; anyway, I’d taken the starch out of friend Cutts, and spoiled his evening, which was just nuts to me.
I took up with Speed and the greenhorn, who was now waxing voluble in the grip of booze, and off we went. I thought it would be capital sport to take him along to one of the accommodation houses in Haymarket, and get him paired off with a whore in a galloping wheelbarrow race, for it was certain he’d never been astride a female in his life, and it would have been splendid to see them bumping across the floor together on hands and knees towards the winning post. But we stopped off for punch on the way, and the little snirp got so fuddled he couldn’t even walk. We helped him along, but he was maudlin, so we took off his trousers in an alley off Regent Street, painted his arse with blacking which we bought for a penny on the way, and then shouted, ‘Come on, peelers! Here’s the scourge of A Division waiting to set about you! Come on and be damned to you!’ And as soon as the bobbies hove in sight we cut, and left them to find our little friend, nose down in the gutter with his black bum sticking up in the air.
I went home well pleased that night, only wishing I could have been present when Dr Winter came face to face again with his erring pupil.
And that night’s work changed my life, and preserved India for the British Crown – what do you think of that? It’s true enough, though, as you’ll see.
However, the fruits didn’t appear for a few days after that, and in the meantime another thing happened which also has a place in my story. I renewed an old acquaintance, who was to play a considerable part in my affairs over the next few months – and that was full of consequence, too, for him, and me, and history.
I had spent the day keeping out of Paget’s way at the Horse Guards, and chatting part of the time, I remember, with Colonel Colt, the American gun expert, who was there to give evidence before the select committee on fire-arms.
(I ought to remember our conversation, but I don’t, so it was probably damned dull and technical.) Afterwards, however, I went up to Town to meet Elspeth in the Ride, and take her on to tea with one of her Mayfair women.
She was side-saddling it up the Ride, wearing her best mulberry rig and a plumed hat, and looking ten times as fetching as any female in view. But as I trotted up alongside, I near as not fell out of my saddle with surprise, for she had a companion with her, and who should it be but my Lord Haw-Haw himself, the Earl of Cardigan.
I don’t suppose I had exchanged a word with him – indeed, I had hardly seen him, and then only at a distance – since he had packed me off to India fourteen years before. I had loathed the brute then, and time hadn’t softened the sentiment; he was the swine who had kicked me out of the Cherrypickers for (irony of ironies) marrying Elspeth, and committed me to the horrors of the Afghan campaign.
And here he was, getting spoony round my wife, whom he had affected to despise once on a day for her lowly origins. And spooning to some tune, too, by the way he was leaning confidentially across from his saddle, his rangy old boozy face close to her blonde and beautiful one, and the little slut was laughing and looking radiant at his attentions.
She caught my eye and waved, and his lordship looked me over in his high-nosed damn-you way which I remembered so well. He would be in his mid-fifties by now, and it showed; the whiskers were greying, the gooseberry eyes were watery, and the legions of bottles he had consumed had cracked the veins in that fine nose of his. But he still rode straight as a lance, and if his voice was wheezy it had lost nothing of its plunger drawl.
‘Haw, haw,’ says he, ‘it is Fwashman, I see. Where have you been sir? Hiding away these many years, I daresay, with this lovely lady. Haw-haw. How-de-do, Fwashman? Do you know, my dear’ – this to Elspeth, damn his impudence – ‘I decware that this fine fellow, your husband, has put on fwesh alarmingly since last I saw him. Haw-haw. Always was too heavy for a wight dwagoon, but now – pwepostewous! You feed him too well, my dear! Haw-haw!’
It was a damned lie, of course, no doubt designed to draw a comparison with his own fine figure – scrawny, some might have thought it. I could have kicked his lordly backside, and given him a piece of my mind.
‘Good day, milord,’ says I, with my best toady smile. ‘May I say how well your lordship is looking? In good health, I trust.’
‘Thank’ee,’ says he, and turning to Elspeth: ‘As I was saying, we have the vewy finest hunting at Deene. Spwendid sport, don’t ye know, and specially wecommended for young wadies wike yourself. You must come to visit – you too, Fwashman. You wode pwetty well, as I wecollect. Haw-haw.’
‘You honour me with the recollection, milord,’ says I, wondering what would happen if I smashed him between the eyes. ‘But I—’
‘Yaas,’ says he, turning languidly back to Elspeth. ‘No doubt your husband has many duties – in the ordnance, is it not, or some such thing? Haw-haw. But you must come down, my dear, with one of your fwiends, for a good wong stay, what? The faiwest bwossoms bwoom best in countwy air, don’t ye know? Haw-haw.’ And the old scoundrel had the gall to lean over and pat her hand.
She, the little ninny, was all for it, giving him a dazzling smile and protesting he was too, too kind – this aged satyr who was old enough to be her father and had vice leering out of every wrinkle in his face. Of course, where climbing little snobs like Elspeth are concerned, there ain’t such a thing as an ugly peer of the realm, but even she could surely have seen how grotesque his advances were. Of course, women love it.
‘How splendid to see you two old friends together again, after such a long time, is it not, Lord Cardigan? Why, I declare I have never seen you in his lordship’s company, Harry! Such a dreadfully long time it must have been!’ Babbling, you see, like the idiot she was. I’m not sure she didn’t say something about ‘comrades in arms’. ‘You must call upon us, Lord Cardigan, now that you and Harry have met again. It will be so fine, will it not, Harry?’
‘Yaas,’ says he. ‘I may call,’ with a look at me that said he would never dream of setting foot in any hovel of mine. ‘In the meantime, my dear, I shall wook to see you widing hereabouts. Haw-haw. I dewight to see a female who wides so gwacefully. Decidedwy you must come to Deene. Haw-haw.’ He took off his hat to her, bowing from the waist – and a Polish hussar couldn’t have done it better, damn him. ‘Good day to you, Mrs Fwashman.’ He gave me the merest nod, and cantered off up the Ride, cool as you please.
‘Is he not wonderfully condescending, Harry? Such elegant manners – but of course, it is natural in one of such noble breeding. I am sure if you spoke to him, my dear, he would be ready to give the most earnest consideration to finding a place for you – he is so kind, despite his high station. Why, he has promised me almost any favour I care to ask – Harry, whatever is the matter? Why are you swearing – oh, my love, no, people will hear! Oh!’
Of course, swearing and prosing were both lost on Elspeth; when I had vented my bile against Cardigan I tried to point out to her the folly of accepting the attentions of such a notorious roué, but she took this as mere jealousy on my part – not jealousy of a sexual kind, mark you, but supposedly rooted in the fact that here she was climbing in the social world, spooned over by peers, while I was labouring humbly in an office like any Cratchit, and could not abide to see her ascending so far above me. She even reminded me that she was a baron’s daughter, at which I ground my teeth and hurled a boot through our bedroom window, she burst into tears, and ran from the room to take refuge in a broom cupboard, whence she refused to budge while I hammered on the panels. She was terrified of my brutal ways, she said, and feared for her life, so I had to go through the charade of forcing open the door and rogering her in the cupboard before peace was restored. (This was what she had wanted since the quarrel began, you see; very curious and wearing our domestic situation was, but strangely enjoyable, too, as I look back on it. I remember how I carried her to the bedroom afterwards, she nibbling at my ear with her arms round my neck, and at the sight of the broken window we collapsed giggling and kissing on the floor. Aye, married bliss. And like the fool I was I clean forgot to forbid her to talk to Cardigan again.)
But in the next few days I had other things to distract me from Elspeth’s nonsense; my jape in the pool-room with the little greenhorn came home to roost, and in the most unexpected way. I received a summons from my Lord Raglan, of all people.
You will know all about him, no doubt. He was the ass who presided over the mess we made in the Crimea, and won deathless fame as the man who murdered the Light Brigade. He should have been a parson, or an Oxford don, or a waiter, for he was the kindliest, softest-voiced old stick who ever spared a fellow-creature’s feelings – that was what was wrong with him, that he couldn’t for the life of him say an unkind word, or set anyone down. And this was the man who was the heir to Wellington – as I sat in his office, looking across at his kindly old face, with its rumpled white hair and long nose, and found my eyes straying to the empty right sleeve tucked into his breast, he looked so pathetic and frail, I shuddered inwardly. Thank God, thinks I, that I won’t be in this chap’s campaign.
They had just made him Commander-in-Chief, after years spent bumbling about on the Board of Ordnance, and he was supposed to be taking matters in hand for the coming conflict. So you may guess that the matter on which he had sent for me was one of the gravest national import – Prince Albert, our saintly Bertie the Beauty, wanted a new aide-de-camp, or equerry, or toad-eater-extraordinary, and nothing would do but our new Commander must set all else aside to see the thing was done properly.
Mark you, I’d no time to waste marvelling over the fatuousness of this kind of mismanagement; it was nothing new in our army, anyway, and still isn’t, from all I can see. Ask any commander to choose between toiling over the ammunition returns for a division fighting for its life, and taking the King’s dog for a walk, and he’ll be out there in a trice, bawling ‘Heel, Fido!’ No, I was too much knocked aback to learn that I, Captain Harry Flashman, former Cherrypicker and erstwhile hero of the country, of no great social consequence and no enormous means or influence, should even be considered to breathe the lordly air of the court. Oh, I had my fighting reputation, but what’s that, when London is bursting with pink-cheeked viscounts with cleft palates and long pedigrees? My great-great-great-grandpapa wasn’t even a duke’s bastard, so far as I know.
Raglan approached the thing in his usual roundabout way, by going through a personal history which his minions must have put together for him.
‘I see you are thirty-one years old, Flashman,’ says he. ‘Well, well, I had thought you older – why, you must have been only – yes, nineteen, when you won your spurs at Kabul. Dear me! So young. And since then you have served in India, against the Sikhs, but have been on half pay these six years, more or less. In that time, I believe, you have travelled widely?’
Usually at high speed, thinks I, and not in circumstances I’d care to tell your lordship about. Aloud I confessed to acquaintance with France, Germany, the United States, Madagascar, West Africa, and the East Indies.
‘And I see you have languages – excellent French, German. Hindoostanee, Persian – bless my soul! – and Pushtu. Thanks of Parliament in ’42, Queen’s Medal – well, well, these are quite singular accomplishments, you know.’ And he laughed in his easy way. ‘And apart from Company service, you were formerly, as I apprehend, of the 11th Hussars. Under Lord Cardigan. A-ha. Well, now, Flashman, tell me, what took you to the Board of Ordnance?’
I was ready for that one, and spun him a tale about improving my military education, because no field officer could know too much, and so on, and so on …
‘Yes, that is very true, and I commend it in you. But you know, Flashman, while I never dissuade a young man from studying all aspects of his profession – which indeed, my own mentor, the Great Duke, impressed on us, his young men, as most necessary – still, I wonder if the Ordnance Board is really for you.’ And he looked knowing and quizzical, like someone smiling with a mouthful of salts. His voice took on a deprecatory whisper. ‘Oh, it is very well, but come, my boy, it cannot but seem – well, beneath, a little beneath, I think, a man whose career has been as, yes, brilliant as your own. I say nothing against the Ordnance – why, I was Master-General for many years – but for a young blade, well-connected, highly regarded …?’ He wrinkled his nose at me. ‘Is it not like a charger pulling a cart? Of course it is. Manufacturers and clerks may be admirably suited to deal with barrels and locks and rivets and, oh, dimensions, and what-not, but it is all so mechanical, don’t you agree?’
Why couldn’t the old fool mind his own business? I could see where this was leading – back to active service and being blown to bits in Turkey, devil a doubt. But who contradicts a Commander-in-Chief?
‘I think it a most happy chance,’ he went on, ‘that only yesterday His Royal Highness Prince Albert’ – he said it with reverence – ‘confided to me the task of finding a young officer for a post of considerable delicacy and importance. He must, of course, be well-born – your mother was Lady Alicia Paget, was she not? I remember the great pleasure I had in dancing with her, oh, how many years ago? Well, well, it is no matter. A quadrille, I fancy. However, station alone is not sufficient in this case, or I confess I should have looked to the Guards.’ Well, that was candid, damn him. ‘The officer selected must also have shown himself resourceful, valiant, and experienced in camp and battle. That is essential. He must be young, of equable disposition and good education, unblemished, I need not say, in personal reputation’ – God knows how he’d come to pick on me, thinks I, but he went on: ‘– and yet a man who knows his world. But above all – what our good old Duke would call “a man of his hands”.’ He beamed at me. ‘I believe your name must have occurred to me at once, had His Highness not mentioned it first. It seems our gracious Queen had recollected you to him.’ Well, well, thinks I, little Vicky remembers my whiskers after all these years. I recalled how she had mooned tearfully at me when she pinned my medal on, back in ’42 – they’re all alike you know, can’t resist a dashing boy with big shoulders and a trot-along look in his eye.
‘So I may now confide in you,’ he went on, ‘what this most important duty consists in. You have not heard, I daresay, of Prince William of Celle? He is one of Her Majesty’s European cousins, who has been visiting here some time, incognito, studying our English ways preparatory to pursuing a military career in the British Army. It is his family’s wish that when our forces go overseas – as soon they must, I believe – he shall accompany us, as a member of my staff. But while he will be under my personal eye, as it were, it is most necessary that he should be in the immediate care of the kind of officer I have mentioned – one who will guide his youthful footsteps, guard his person, shield him from temptation, further his military education, and supervise his physical and spiritual welfare in every way.’ Raglan smiled. ‘He is very young, and a most amiable prince in every way; he will require a firm and friendly hand from one who can win the trust and respect of an ardent and developing nature. Well, Flashman, I have no doubt that between us we can make something of him. Do you not agree?’
By God, you’ve come to the right shop, thinks I. Flashy and Co., wholesale moralists, ardent and developing natures supervised, spiritual instruction guaranteed, prayers and laundry two bob extra. How the deuce had they picked on me? The Queen, of course, but did Raglan know what kind of a fellow they had alighted on? Granted I was a hero, but I’d thought my randying about and boozing and general loose living were well known – by George, he must know! Maybe, secretly, he thought that was a qualification – I’m not sure he wasn’t right. But the main point was, all my splendid schemes for avoiding shot and shell were out of court again; it was me for the staff, playing nursemaid to some little German pimp in the wilds of Turkey. Of all the hellish bad luck.
But of course I sat there jerking like a puppet, grinning foolishly – what else was there to do?
‘I think we may congratulate ourselves,’ the old idiot went on, ‘and tomorrow I shall take you to the Palace to meet your new charge. I congratulate you, Captain, and’ – he shook my hand with a noble smile – ‘I know you will be worthy of the trust imposed on you now, as you have been in the past. Good day to you, my dear sir. And now,’ I heard him say to his secretary as I bowed myself out, ‘there is this wretched war business. I suppose there is no word yet whether it has begun? Well, I do wish they would make up their minds.’
You have already guessed, no doubt, the shock that was in store for me at the Palace next day. Raglan took me along, we went through the rigmarole of flunkeys with brushes that I remembered from my previous visit with Wellington, and we were ushered into a study where Prince Albert was waiting for us. There was a reverend creature and a couple of the usual court clowns in morning dress looking austere in the background – and there, at Albert’s right hand, stood my little greenhorn of the billiard hall. The sight hit me like a ball in the leg – for a moment I stood stock-still while I gaped at the lad and he gaped at me, but then he recovered, and so did I, and as I made my deep bow at Raglan’s side I found myself wondering: have they got that blacking off his arse yet?
I was aware that Albert was speaking, in that heavy, German voice; he was still the cold, well-washed exquisite I had first met twelve years ago, with those frightful whiskers that looked as though someone had tried to pluck them and left off half way through. He was addressing me, and indicating a side-table on which a shapeless black object was lying.
‘’hat do you ’hink of the new hett for the Guards, Captain Flash-mann?’ says he.
I knew it, of course; the funny papers had been full of it, and mocking H.R.H., who had invented it. He was always inflicting monstrosities of his own creation on the troops, which Horse Guards had to tell him tactfully were not quite what was needed. I looked at this latest device, a hideous forage cap with long flaps,
and said I was sure it must prove admirably serviceable, and have a very smart appearance, too. Capital, first-rate, couldn’t be better, God knows how someone hadn’t thought of it before.
He nodded smugly, and then says: ‘I un-erstend you were at Rugby School, Captain? Ah, but wait – a captain? That will hardly do, I think. A colonel, no?’ And he looked at Raglan, who said the same notion had occurred to him. Well, thinks I, if that’s how promotion goes, I’m all for it.
‘At Rugby School,’ repeated Albert. ‘That is a great English school, Willy,’ says he to the greenhorn, ‘of the kind which turns younk boys like yourself into menn like Colonel Flash-mann here.’ Well, true enough, I’d found it a fair mixture of jail and knocking-shop; I stood there trying to look like a chap who says his prayers in a cold bath every day.
‘Colonel Flash-mann is a famous soldier in England, Willy; although he is quite younk, he has vun – won – laurelss for brafery in India. You see? Well, he will be your friend and teacher, Willy; you are to mind all that he says, and obey him punctually and willingly, ass a soldier should. O-bedience is the first rule of an army, Willy, you understand?’
The lad spoke for the first time, darting a nervous look at me. ‘Yes, uncle Albert.’
‘Ver-ry good, then. You may shake hands with Colonel Flash-mann.’
The lad came forward hesitantly, and held out his hand. ‘How do you do?’ says he, and you could tell he had only lately learned the phrase.
‘You address Colonel Flash-mann, as “sir”, Willy,’ says Albert. ‘He is your superior officer.’
The kid blushed, and for the life of me I can’t think how I had the nerve to say it, with a stiff-neck like Albert, but the favour I won with this boy was going to be important, after all – you can’t have too many princely friends – and I thought a Flashy touch was in order. So I said:
‘With your highness’s permission, I think “Harry” will do when we’re off parade. Hullo, youngster.’
The boy looked startled, and then smiled, the court clowns started to look outraged, Albert looked puzzled, but then he smiled, too, and Raglan hum-hummed approvingly. Albert said:
‘There, now, Willy, you have an English comrade. You see? Very goot. You will find there are none better. And now, you will go with – with “Harry”’ – he gave a puffy smile, and the court clowns purred toadily, – ‘and he will instruct you in your duties.’
I’ve been about courts a good deal in my misspent career, and by and large I bar royalty pretty strong. They may be harmless enough folk in themselves, but they attract a desperate gang of placemen and hangers-on, and in my experience, the closer you get to the throne, the nearer you may finish up to the firing-line. Why, I’ve been a Prince Consort myself, and had half the cutthroats of Europe trying to assassinate me,
and in my humbler capacities – as chief of staff to a White Rajah, military adviser and chief stud to that black she-devil Ranavalona, and irregular emissary to the court of King Gezo of Dahomey, long may he rot – I’ve usually been lucky to come away with a well-scarred skin. And my occasional attachments to the Court of St James’s have been no exception; nursemaiding little Willy was really the most harrowing job of the lot.
Mind you, the lad was amiable enough in himself, and he took to me from the first.
‘You are a brick,’ he told me as soon as we were alone. ‘Is that not the word? When I saw you today, I was sure you would tell them of the billiard place, and I would be disgraced. But you said nothing – that was to be a true friend.’
‘Least said, soonest mended,’ says I. ‘But whatever did you run away for that night? – why, I’d have seen you home right enough. We couldn’t think what had become of you.’
‘I do not know myself,’ says he. ‘I know that some ruffians set upon me in a dark place, and … stole some of my clothes.’ He blushed crimson, and burst out: ‘I resisted them fiercely, but they were too many for me! And then the police came, and Dr Winter had to be sent for, and – oh! there was such a fuss! But you were right – he was too fearful of his own situation to inform on me to their highnesses. However, I think it is by his insistence that a special guardian has been appointed for me.’ He gave me his shy, happy smile. ‘What luck that it should be you!’
Lucky, is it, thinks I, we’ll see about that. We’d be off to the war, if ever the damned thing got started – but when I thought about it, it stood to reason they wouldn’t risk Little Willy’s precious royal skin very far, and his bear-leader should be safe enough, too. All I said was:
‘Well, I think Dr Winter’s right; you need somebody and a half to look after you, for you ain’t safe on your own hook. So look’ee here – I’m an easy chap, as anyone’ll tell you, but I’ll stand no shines, d’ye see? Do as I tell you, and we’ll do famously, and have good fun, too. But no sliding off on your own again – or you’ll find I’m no Dr Winter. Well?’
‘Very well, sir – Harry,’ says he, prompt enough, but for all his nursery look, I’ll swear he had a glitter in his eye.
We started off on the right foot, with a very pleasant round of tailors and gunsmiths and bootmakers and the rest, for the child hadn’t a stick or stitch for a soldier, and I aimed to see him – and myself – bang up to the nines. The luxury of being toadied through all the best shops, and referring the bills to Her Majesty, was one I wasn’t accustomed to, and you may believe I made the most of it. At my tactful suggestion to Raglan, we were both gazetted in the 17th, who were lancers – no great style as a regiment, perhaps, but I knew it would make Cardigan gnash his elderly teeth when he heard of it, and I’d been a lancer myself in my Indian days. Also, to my eye it was the flashiest rigout in the whole light cavalry, all blue and gold – the darker the better, when you’ve got the figure for it, which of course I had.
Anyway, young Willy clapped his hands when he saw himself in full fig, and ordered another four like it – no one spends like visiting royalty, you know. Then he had to be horsed, and armed, and given lashings of civilian rig, and found servants, and camp gear – and I spent a whole day on that alone. If we were going campaigning, I meant to make certain we did it with every conceivable luxury – wine at a sovereign the dozen, cigars at ten guineas the pound, preserved foods of the best, tip-top linen, quality spirits by the gallon, and all the rest of the stuff that you need if you’re going to fight a war properly. Last of all I insisted on a lead box of biscuits – and Willy cried out with laughter.
‘They are ship’s biscuits – what should we need those for?’
‘Insurance, my lad,’ says I. ‘Take ’em along, and it’s odds you’ll never need them. Leave ’em behind, and as sure as shooting you’ll finish up living off blood-stained snow and dead mules.’ It’s God’s truth, too.
‘It will be exciting!’ cries he, gleefully. ‘I long to be off!’
‘Just let’s hope you don’t find yourself longing to be back,’ says I, and nodded at the mountain of delicacies we had ordered. ‘That’s all the excitement we want.’
His face fell at that, so I cheered him up with a few tales of my own desperate deeds in Afghanistan and elsewhere, just to remind him that a cautious campaigner isn’t necessarily a milksop. Then I took him the rounds, of clubs, and the Horse Guards, and the Park, presented him to anyone of consequence whom I felt it might be useful to toady – and, by George, I had no shortage of friends and fawners when the word got about who he was. I hadn’t seen so many tuft-hunters since I came home from Afghanistan.
You may imagine how Elspeth took the news, when I notified her that Prince Albert had looked me up and given me a Highness to take in tow. She squealed with delight – and then went into a tremendous flurry about how we must give receptions and soirées in his honour, and Hollands would have to provide new curtains and carpet, and extra servants must be hired, and who should she invite, and what new clothes she must have – ‘for we shall be in everyone’s eye now, and I shall be an object of general remark whenever I go out, and everyone will wish to call – oh, it will be famous! – and we shall be receiving all the time, and—’
‘Calm yourself, my love,’ says I. ‘We shan’t be receiving – we shall be being received. Get yourself a few new duds, by all means, if you’ve room for ’em, and then – wait for the pasteboards to land on the mat.’
And they did, of course. There wasn’t a hostess in Town but was suddenly crawling to Mrs Flashman’s pretty feet, and she gloried in it. I’ll say that for her, there wasn’t an ounce of spite in her nature, and while she began to condescend most damnably, she didn’t cut anyone – perhaps she realised, like me, that it never pays in the long run. I was pretty affable myself, just then, and pretended not to hear one or two of the more jealous remarks that were dropped – about how odd it was that Her Majesty hadn’t chosen one of the purple brigade to squire her young cousin, not so much as Guardee even, but a plain Mr – and who the deuce were the Flashmans anyway?
But the press played up all right; The Times was all approval that ‘a soldier, not a courtier, has been entrusted with the grave responsibility entailed in the martial instruction of the young prince. If war should come, as it surely must if Russian imperial despotism and insolence try our patience further, what better guardian and mentor of His Highness could be found than the Hector of Afghanistan? We may assert with confidence – none.’ (I could have asserted with confidence, any number, and good luck to ’em.)
Even Punch, which didn’t have much to say for the Palace, as a rule, and loathed the Queen’s great brood of foreign relations like poison, had a cartoon showing me frowning at little Willy under a signpost of which one arm said ‘Hyde Park’ and the other ‘Honour and Duty’, and saying: ‘What, my boy, do you want to be a stroller or a soldier? You can’t be both if you march in step with me.’ Which delighted me, naturally, although Elspeth thought it didn’t make me look handsome enough.
Little Willy, in the meantime, was taking to all this excitement like a Scotchman to drink. Under a natural shyness, he was a breezy little chap, quick, eager to please, and good-natured; he could be pretty cool with anyone over-familiar, but he could charm marvellously when he wanted – as he did with Elspeth when I took him home to tea. Mind you, the man who doesn’t want to charm Elspeth is either a fool or a eunuch, and little Willy was neither, as I discovered on our second day together, as we were strolling up Haymarket – we’d been shopping for a pair of thunder-and-lightnings
which he admired. It was latish afternoon, and the tarts were beginning to parade; little Willy goggled at a couple of painted princesses swaying by in all their finery, ogling, and then he says to me in a reverent whisper:
‘Harry – I say, Harry – those women – are they—’
‘Whores,’ says I. ‘Never mind ’em. Now, tomorrow, Willy, we must visit the Artillery Mess, I think, and see the guns limbering up in—’
‘Harry,’ says he. ‘I want a whore.’
‘Eh?’ says I. ‘You don’t want anything of the sort, my lad.’ I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘I do, though,’ says he, and damme, he was gaping after them like a satyr, this well-brought-up, Christian little princeling. ‘I have never had a whore.’
‘I should hope not!’ says I, quite scandalised. ‘Now, look here, young Willy, this won’t answer at all. You’re not to think of such things for a moment. I won’t have this … this lewdness. Why, I’m surprised at you! What would – why, what would Her Majesty have to say to such talk? Or Dr Winter, eh?’
‘I want a whore,’ says he, quite fierce. ‘I … I know it is wrong – but I don’t care! Oh, you have no notion what it is like! Since I was quite small, they have never even let me talk to girls – at home I was not even allowed to play with my little cousins at kiss-in-the-ring, or anything! They would not let me go to dancing-classes, in case it should excite me! Dr Winter is always lecturing me about thoughts that pollute, and the fearful punishments awaiting fornicators when they are dead, and accusing me of having carnal thoughts! Of course I have, the old fool! Oh, Harry, I know it is sinful – but I don’t care! I want one,’ says this remarkable youth dreamily, with a blissful look coming over his pure, chaste, boyish visage, ‘with long golden hair, and big, big round—’
‘Stop that this minute!’ says I. ‘I never heard the like!’
‘And she will wear black satin boots buttoning up to her thighs,’ he added, licking his lips.
I’m not often stumped, but this was too much. I know youth has hidden fires, but this fellow was positively ablaze. I tried to cry him down, and then reason with him, for the thought of his cutting a dash through the London bordellos and trotting back to Buckingham Palace with the clap, or some harpy pursuing him for blackmail, made my blood run cold. But it was no good.
‘If you say me nay,’ says he, quite determined, ‘I shall find one myself.’
I couldn’t budge him. So in the end I decided to let him have his way, and make sure there were no snags, and that it was done safe and quiet. I took him off to a very high-priced place I knew in St John’s Wood, swore the old bawd to secrecy, and stated the randy little pig’s requirements. She did him proud, too, with a strapping blonde wench – satin boots and all – and at the sight of her Willy moaned feverishly and pointed, quivering, like a setter. He was trying to clamber all over her almost before the door closed, and of course he made a fearful mess of it, thrashing away like a stoat in a sack, and getting nowhere. It made me quite sentimental to watch him – reminded me of my own ardent youth, when every coupling began with an eager stagger across the floor trying to disentangle one’s breeches from one’s ankles.
I had a brisk, swarthy little gypsy creature on the other couch, and we were finished and toasting each other in iced claret before Willy and his trollop had got properly buckled to. She was a knowing wench, however, and eventually had him galloping away like an archdeacon on holiday, and afterwards we settled down to a jolly supper of salmon and cold curry. But before we had reached the ices Willy was itching to be at grips with his girl again – where these young fellows get the fire from beats me. It was too soon for me, so while he walloped along I and the gypsy passed an improving few moments spying through a peephole into the next chamber, where a pair of elderly naval men were cavorting with three Chinese sluts. They were worse than Willy – it’s those long voyages, I suppose.
When we finally took our leave, Willy was fit to be blown away by the first puff of wind, but pleased as punch with himself.
‘You are a beautiful whore,’ says he to the blonde. ‘I am quite delighted with you, and shall visit you frequently.’ He did, too, and must have spent a fortune on her in tin, of which he had loads, of course. Being of a young and developing nature, as Raglan would have said, he tried as many other strumpets in the establishment as he could manage, but it was the blonde lass as often as not. He got quite spoony over her. Poor Willy.
So his military education progressed, and Raglan chided me for working him too hard. ‘His Highness appears quite pale,’ says he. ‘I fear you have him too much at the grindstone, Flashman. He must have some recreation as well, you know.’ I could have told him that what young Willy needed was a pair of locked iron drawers with the key at the bottom of the Serpentine, but I nodded wisely and said it was sometimes difficult to restrain a young spirit eager for instruction and experience. In fact, when it came to things like learning the rudiments of staff work and army procedure, Willy couldn’t have been sharper; my only fear was that he might become really useful and find himself being actively employed when we went east.
For we were going, there was now no doubt. War was finally declared at the end of March, in spite of Aberdeen’s dithering, and the mob bayed with delight from Shetland to Land’s End. To hear them, all we had to do was march into Moscow when we felt like it, with the Frogs carrying our packs for us and the cowardly Russians skulking away before Britannia’s flashing eyes. And mind you, I don’t say that the British Army and the French together couldn’t have done it – given a Wellington. They were sound at bottom, and the Russians weren’t. I’ll tell you something else, which military historians never realise: they call the Crimea a disaster, which it was, and a hideous botch-up by our staff and supply, which is also true, but what they don’t know is that even with all these things in the balance against you, the difference between hellish catastrophe and brilliant success is sometimes no greater than the width of a sabre blade, but when all is over no one thinks of that. Win gloriously – and the clever dicks forget all about the rickety ambulances that never came, and the rations that were rotten, and the boots that didn’t fit, and the generals who’d have been better employed hawking bedpans round the doors. Lose – and these are the only things they talk about.
But I’ll confess I saw the worst coming before we’d even begun. The very day war was declared Willy and I reported ourselves to Raglan at Horse Guards, and it took me straight back to the Kabul cantonment – all work and fury and chatter, and no proper direction whatever. Old Elphy Bey had sat picking at his nails and saying: ‘We must certainly consider what is best to be done’ while his staff men burst with impatience and spleen. You could see the germ of it here – Raglan’s ante-room was jammed with all sorts of people, Lucan, and Hardinge, and old Scarlett, and Anderson of the Ordnance, and there were staff-scrapers and orderlies running everywhere and saluting and bustling, and mounds of paper growing on the tables, and great consulting of maps (‘Where the devil is Turkey?’ someone was saying. ‘Do they have much rain there, d’ye suppose?’), but in the inner sanctum all was peace and amiability. Raglan was talking about neck-stocks, if I remember rightly, and how they should fasten well up under the chin.
We were kept well up to the collar, though, in the next month before our stout and thick-headed commander finally took his leave for the scene of war – Willy and I were not of his advance party, which pleased me, for there’s no greater fag than breaking in new ground. We were all day staffing at the Horse Guards, and Willy was either killing himself with kindness in St John’s Wood by night, or attending functions about Town, of which there were a feverish number. It’s always the same before the shooting begins – the hostesses go into a frenzy of gaiety, and all the spongers and civilians crawl out of the wainscoting braying with good fellowship because thank God they ain’t going, and the young plungers and green striplings roister it up, and their fiancées let ’em pleasure them red in the face out of pity, because the poor brave boy is off to the cannon’s mouth, and the dance goes on and the eyes grow brighter and the laughter shriller – and the older men in their dress uniforms look tired, and sip their punch by the fireplace and don’t say much at all.
Elspeth, of course, was in her element, dancing all night, laughing with the young blades and flirting with the old ones – Cardigan was still roostering about her, I noticed, with every sign of the little trollop’s encouragement. He’d got himself the Light Cavalry Brigade, which had sent a great groan through every hussar and lancer regiment in the army, and was even fuller of bounce than usual – his ridiculous lisp and growling ‘haw-haw’ seemed to sound everywhere you went, and he was full of brag about how he and his beloved Cherrypickers would be the élite advanced force of the army.
‘I believe they have given Wucan nominal charge of the cavalwy,’ I heard him tell a group of cronies at one party. ‘Well, I suppose they had to find him something, don’t ye know, and he may vewwy well look to wemounts, I daresay. Haw-haw. I hope poor Waglan does not find him too gweat an incubus. Haw-haw.’
This was Lucan, his own brother-in-law; they detested each other, which isn’t to be wondered at, since they were both detestable, Cardigan particularly. But his mighty lordship wasn’t having it all his own way, for the press, who hated him, revived the old jibe about his Cherrypickers’ tight pants, and Punch dedicated a poem to him called ‘Oh Pantaloons of Cherry’, which sent him wild. It was all gammon, really, for the pants were no tighter than anyone else’s – I wore ’em long enough, and should know – but it was good to see Jim the Bear roasting on the spit of popular amusement again. By God, I wish that spit had been a real one, with me to turn it.
It was a night in early May, I think, that Elspeth was bidden to some great drum in Mayfair to celebrate the first absolute fighting of the war, which had been reported a week or so earlier – our ships had bombarded Odessa, and broken half the windows in the place, so of course the fashionable crowd had to rave and riot in honour of the great victory.
I don’t remember seeing Elspeth lovelier than she was that night, in a gown of some shimmering white satin stuff, and no jewels at all, but only flowers coiled in her golden hair. I would have had at her before she even set out, but she was all a-fuss tucking little Havvy into his cot – as though the nurse couldn’t do it ten times better – and was fearful that I would disarrange her appearance. I fondled her, and promised I would put her through the drill when she came home, but she damped this by telling me that Marjorie had bidden her stay the night, although it was only a few streets away, because the dancing would go on until dawn, and she would be too fatigued to return.
So off she fluttered, blowing me a kiss, and I snarled away to the Horse Guards, where I had to burn the midnight oil over sapper transports; Raglan had set out for Turkey leaving most of the work behind him, and those of us who were left were kept at it until three each morning. By the time we had finished, even Willy was too done up to fancy his usual nightly exercise with his Venus, so we sent out for some grub – it was harry and grass,
I remember, which didn’t improve my temper – and then he went home.
I was tired and cranky, but I couldn’t think of sleep, somehow, so I went out and started to get drunk. I was full of apprehension about the coming campaign, and fed up with endless files and reports, and my head ached, and my shoes pinched, so I poured down the whistle-belly with brandy on top, and the inevitable result was that I finished up three parts tight in some cellar near Charing Cross. I thought of a whore, but didn’t want one – and then it struck me: I wanted Elspeth, and nothing else. By God, there was I, on the brink of another war, slaving my innards into knots, while she was tripping about in a Mayfair ballroom, laughing and darting chase-me glances at party-saunterers and young gallants, having a fine time for hours on end, and she hadn’t been able to spare me five minutes for a tumble! She was my wife, dammit, and it was too bad. I put away some more brandy while I considered the iniquity of this, and took a great drunken resolve – I would go round to Marjorie’s at once, surprise my charmer when she came to bed, and make her see what she had been missing all evening. Aye, that was it – and it was romantic, too, the departing warrior tupping up the girl he was going to leave behind, and she full of love and wistful longing and be-damned. (Drink’s a terrible thing.) Anyway, off I set west, with a full bottle in my pocket to see me through the walk, for it was after four, and there wasn’t even a cab to be had.
By the time I got to Marjorie’s place – a huge mansion fronting the Park, with every light ablaze – I was taking the width of the pavement and singing ‘Villikins and his Dinah’.
The flunkeys at the door didn’t mind me a jot, for the house must have been full of foxed chaps and bemused females, to judge by the racket they were making. I found what looked like a butler, inquired the direction of Mrs Flashman’s chamber, and tramped up endless staircases, bouncing off the walls as I went. I found a lady’s maid, too, who put me on the right road, banged on a door, fell inside, and found the place was empty.
It was a lady’s bedroom, no error, but no lady, as yet. All the candles were burning, the bed was turned down, a fluffy little Paris night-rail which I recognised as one I’d bought my darling lay by the pillow, and her scent was in the air. I stood there sighing and lusting boozily; still dancing, hey? We’ll have a pretty little hornpipe together by and by, though – aha, I would surprise her. That was it; I’d hide, and bound out lovingly when she came up. There was a big closet in one wall, full of clothes and linen and what-not, so I toddled in, like the drunken, love-sick ass I was – you’d wonder at it, wouldn’t you, with all my experience? – settled down on something soft, took a last pull at my bottle – and fell fast asleep.
How long I snoozed I don’t know; not long, I think, for I was still well fuddled when I came to. It was a slow business, in which I was conscious of a woman’s voice humming ‘Allan Water’, and then I believe I heard a little laugh. Ah, thinks I, Elspeth; time to get up, Flashy. And as I hauled myself ponderously to my feet, and stood swaying dizzily in the dark of the closet, I was hearing vague confused sounds from the room. A voice? Voices? Someone moving? A door closing? I can’t be sure at all, but just as I blundered tipsily to the closet door, I heard a sharp exclamation which might have been anything from a laugh to a cry of astonishment. I stumbled out of the closet, blinking against the sudden glare of light, and my boisterous view halloo died on my lips.
It was a sight I’ll never forget. Elspeth was standing by the bed, naked except for her long frilled pantaloons; her flowers were still twined in her hair. Her eyes were wide with shock, and her knuckles were against her lips, like a nymph surprised by Pan, or centaurs, or a boozed-up husband emerging from the wardrobe. I goggled at her lecherously for about half a second, and then realised that we were not alone.
Half way between the foot of the bed and the door stood the 7th Earl of Cardigan. His elegant Cherrypicker pants were about his knees, and the front tail of his shirt was clutched up before him in both hands. He was in the act of advancing towards my wife, and from the expression on his face – which was that of a starving, apoplectic glutton faced with a crackling roast – and from other visible signs, his intention was not simply to compare birthmarks. He stopped dead at sight of me, his mottled face paling and his eyes popping, Elspeth squealed in earnest, and for several seconds we all stood stock-still, staring.
Cardigan recovered first, and looking back, I have to admire him. It was not an entirely new situation for me, you understand – I’d been in his shoes, so to speak, many a time, when husbands, traps, or bullies came thundering in unexpectedly. Reviewing Cardigan’s dilemma, I’d have whipped up my britches, feinted towards the window to draw the outraged spouse, doubled back with a spring on to the bed, and then been through the door in a twinkling. But not Lord Haw-Haw; his bearing was magnificent. He dropped his shirt, drew up his pants, threw back his head, looked straight at me, rasped: ‘Good night to you!’, turned about, and marched out, banging the door behind him.
Elspeth had sunk to the bed, making little sobbing sounds; I still stood swaying in disbelief, trying to get the booze out of my brain, wondering if this was some drunken nightmare. But it wasn’t, and as I glared at that big-bosomed harlot on the bed, all those ugly suspicions of fourteen years came flooding back, only now they were certainties. And I had caught her in the act at last, all but in the grip of that lustful, evil old villain! I’d just been in the nick of time to thwart him, too, damn him. And whether it was the booze, or my own rotten nature, the emotion I felt was not rage so much as a vicious satisfaction that I had caught her out. Oh, the rage came later, and a black despair that sometimes wounds me like a knife even now, but God help me, I’m an actor, I suppose, and I’d never had a chance to play the outraged husband before.
‘Well?’ It came out of me in a strangled yelp. ‘Well? What? What? Hey?’
I must have looked terrific, I suppose, for she dropped her squeaking and shuddering like a shot, and hopped over t’other side of the bed like a jack rabbit.
‘Harry!’ she squealed. ‘What are you doing here?’
It must have been the booze. I had been on the point of striding – well, staggering – round the bed to seize her and thrash her black and blue, but at her question I stopped, God knows why.
‘I was waiting for you! Curse you, you adulteress!’
‘In that cupboard?’
‘Yes, blast it, in that cupboard. By God, you’ve gone too far, you vile little slut, you! I’ll—’
‘How could you!’ So help me God, it’s what she said. ‘How could you be so inconsiderate and unfeeling as to pry on me in this way? Oh! I was never so mortified! Never!’
‘Mortified?’ cries I. ‘With that randy old rip sporting his beef in your bedroom, and you simpering naked at him? You – you shameless Jezebel! You lewd woman! Caught in the act, by George! I’ll teach you to cuckold me! Where’s a cane? I’ll beat the shame out of that wanton carcase, I’ll—’
‘It is not true!’ she cried. ‘It is not true! Oh, how can you say such a thing!’
I was glaring round for something to thrash her with, but at this I stopped, amazed.
‘Not true? Why, you infernal little liar, d’you think I can’t see? Another second and you’d have been two-backed-beasting all over the place! And you dare—’
‘It is not so!’ She stamped her foot, her fists clenched. ‘You are quite in the wrong – I did not know he was there until an instant before you came out of that cupboard! He must have come in while I was disrobing – Oh!’ And she shuddered. ‘I was taken quite unawares—’
‘By God, you were! By me! D’you think I’m a fool? You’ve been teasing that dirty old bull this month past, and I find him all but mounting you, and you expect me to believe—’ My head was swimming with drink, and I lost the words. ‘You’ve dishonoured me, damn you! You’ve—’
‘Oh, Harry, it is not true! I vow it is not! He must have stolen in, without my hearing, and—’
‘You’re lying!’ I shouted. ‘You were whoring with him!’
‘Oh, that is untrue! It is unjust! How can you think such a thing? How can you say it?’ There were tears in her eyes, as well there might be, and now her mouth trembled and drooped, and she turned her head away. ‘I can see,’ she sobbed, ‘that you merely wish to make this an excuse for a quarrel.’
God knows what I said in reply to that; sounds of rupture, no doubt. I couldn’t believe my ears, and then she was going on, sobbing away:
‘You are wicked to say such a thing! Oh, you have no thought for my feelings! Oh, Harry, to have that evil old creature steal up on me – the shock of it – oh, I thought to have died of fear and shame! And then you – you!’ And she burst into tears in earnest and flung herself down on the bed.
I didn’t know what to say, or do. Her behaviour, the way she had faced me, the fury of her denial – it was all unreal. I couldn’t credit it, after what I’d seen. I was full of rage and hate and disbelief and misery, but in drink and bewilderment I couldn’t reason straight. I tried to remember what I’d heard in the closet – had it been a giggle or a muted shriek? Could she be telling the truth? Was it possible that Cardigan had sneaked in on her, torn down his breeches in an instant, and been sounding the charge when she turned and saw him? Or had she wheedled him in, whispering lewdly, and been stripping for action when I rolled out? All this, in a confused brandy-laden haze, passed through my mind – as you may be sure it has passed since, in sober moments.
I was lost, standing there half-drunk. That queer mixture of shock and rage and exultation, and the vicious desire to punish her brutally, had suddenly passed. With any of my other women, I’d not even have listened, but taken out my spite on them with a whip – except on Ranavalona, who was bigger and stronger than I. But I didn’t care for the other women, you see. Brute and all that I am, I wanted to believe Elspeth.
Mind you, it was still touch and go whether I suddenly went for her or not; but for the booze I probably would have done. There was all the suspicion of the past, and the evidence of my eyes tonight. I stood, panting and glaring, and suddenly she swung up in a sitting position, like Andersen’s mermaid, her eyes full of tears, and threw out her arms. ‘Oh, Harry! Comfort me!’
If you had seen her – aye. It’s so easy, as none knows better than I, to sneer at the Pantaloons of this world, and the cheated wives, too, while the rakes and tarts make fools of them – ‘If only they knew, ho-ho!’ Perhaps they do, or suspect, but would just rather not let on. I don’t know why, but suddenly I was seated on the bed, with my arm round those white shoulders, while she sobbed and clung to me, calling me her ‘jo’ – it was that funny Scotch word, which she hadn’t used for years, since she had grown so grand, that made me believe her – almost.
‘Oh, that you should think ill of me!’ she sniffled. ‘Oh, I could die of shame!’
‘Well,’ says I, breathing brandy everywhere, ‘there he was, wasn’t he? By God! Well, I say!’ I suddenly seized her by the shoulders at arms’ length. ‘Do you—? No, by God! I saw him – and you – and – and—’
‘Oh, you are cruel!’ she cried. ‘Cruel, cruel!’ And then her arms went round my neck, and she kissed me, and I was sure she was lying – almost sure.
She sobbed away a good deal, and protested, and I babbled a great amount, no doubt, and she swore her honesty, and I didn’t know what to make of it. She might be true, but if she was a cheat and a liar and a whore, what then? Murder her? Thrash her? Divorce her? The first was lunatic, the second I couldn’t do, not now, and the third was unthinkable. With the trusts that old swine Morrison had left to tie things up, she controlled all the cash, and the thought of being a known cuckold living on my pay – well, I’m fool enough for a deal, but not for that. Her voice was murmuring in my ear, and all that naked softness was in my arms, and her fondling touch was reminding me of what I’d come here for in the first place, so what the devil, thinks I, first things first, and if you don’t pleasure her now till she faints, you’ll look back from your grey-haired evenings and wish you had. So I did.
I still don’t know – and what’s more I don’t care. But one thing only I was certain of that night – whoever was innocent, it wasn’t James Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan. I swore then inwardly, with Elspeth moaning through her kiss, that I would get even with that one. The thought of that filthy old goat trying to board Elspeth – it brought me out in a sweat of fury and loathing. I’d kill him, somehow. I couldn’t call him out – he’d hide behind the law, and refuse. Even worse, he might accept. And apart from the fact that I daren’t face him, man to man, there would have been scandal for sure. But somehow, some day, I would find a way.
We went to sleep at last, with Elspeth murmuring in my ear about what a mighty lover I was, recalling me in doting detail, and how I was at my finest after a quarrel. She was giggling drowsily about how we had made up our previous tiff, with me tumbling her in the broom closet at home, and what fun it had been, and how I’d said it was the most famous place for rogering, and then suddenly she asked, quite sharp:
‘Harry – tonight – your great rage at my misfortune was not all a pretence, was it? You did not – you are sure? – have some … some female in the cupboard?’
And damn my eyes, she absolutely got out to look. I don’t suppose I’ve cried myself to sleep since I was an infant, but it was touch and go then.
While all these important events in my personal affairs were taking place – Willy and Elspeth and Cardigan and so forth – you may wonder how the war was progressing. The truth is, of course, that it wasn’t, for it’s a singular fact of the Great Conflict against Russia that no one – certainly no one on the Allied side – had any clear notion of how to go about it. You will think that’s one of these smart remarks, but it’s not; I was as close to the conduct of the war in the summer of ’54 as anyone, and I can tell you truthfully that the official view of the whole thing was:
‘Well, here we are, the French and ourselves, at war with Russia, in order to protect Turkey. Ve-ry good. What shall we do, then? Better attack Russia, eh? H’m, yes. (Pause.) Big place, ain’t it?’
So they decided to concentrate our army, and the Froggies, in Bulgaria, where they might help the Turks fight the Ruskis on the Danube. But the Turks flayed the life out of the Russians without anyone’s help, and neither Raglan, who was now out in Varna in command of the allies, nor our chiefs at home, could think what we might usefully do next. I had secret hopes that the whole thing might be called off; Willy and I were still at home, for Raglan had sent word that for safety’s sake his highness should not come out until the fighting started – there was so much fever about in Bulgaria, it would not be healthy for him.
But there was never any hope of a peace being patched up, not with the mood abroad in England that summer. They were savage – they had seen their army and navy sail away with drums beating and fifes tootling, and ‘Rule Britannia’ playing, and the press promising swift and condign punishment for the Muscovite tyrant, and street-corner orators raving about how British steel would strike oppression down, and they were like a crowd come to a prize-fight where the two pugs don’t fight, but spar and weave and never come to grips. They wanted blood, gallons of it, and to read of grapeshot smashing great lanes through Russian ranks, and stern and noble Britons skewering Cossacks, and Russian towns in flames – and they would be able to shake their heads over the losses of our gallant fellows, sacrificed to stern duty, and wolf down their kidneys and muffins in their warm breakfast rooms, saying: ‘Dreadful work this, but by George, England never shirked yet, whatever the price. Pass the marmalade, Amelia; I’m proud to be a Briton this day, let me tell you.’
And all they got that summer, was – nothing. It drove them mad, and they raved at the government, and the army, and each other, lusting for butchery, and suddenly there was a cry on every lip, a word that ran from tongue to tongue and was in every leading article – ‘Sevastopol!’ God knows why, but suddenly that was the place. Why were we not attacking Sevastopol, to show the Russians what was what, eh? It struck me then, and still does, that attacking Sevastopol would be rather like an enemy of England investing Penzance, and then shouting towards London: ‘There, you insolent bastard, that’ll teach you!’ But because it was said to be a great base, and The Times was full of it, an assault on Sevastopol became the talk of the hour.
And the government dithered, the British and Russian armies rotted away in Bulgaria with dysentery and cholera, the public became hysterical, and Willy and I waited, with our traps packed, for word to sail.
It came one warm evening, with a summons to Richmond. Suddenly there was great bustle, and I had to ride post-haste to receive from His Grace the Duke of Newcastle despatches to be carried to Raglan without delay. I remember an English garden, and Gladstone practising croquet shots on the lawn, and dragonflies buzzing among the flowers, and over on the terrace a group of men lounging and yawning – the members of the Cabinet, no less, just finished an arduous meeting at which most of ’em had dozed off – that’s a fact, too, it’s in the books.
And Newcastle’s secretary, a dapper young chap with an ink smudge on the back of his hand, handing me a sealed packet with a ‘secret’ label.
‘The Centaur is waiting at Greenwich,’ says he. ‘You must be aboard tonight, and these are to Lord Raglan, from your hand into his, nothing staying. They contain the government’s latest advices and instructions, and are of the first urgency.’
‘Very good,’ says I. ‘What’s the word of mouth?’ He hesitated, and I went on: ‘I’m on his staff, you know.’
It was the practice of every staff galloper then – and for all I know, may still be – when he was given a written message, to ask if there were any verbal observations to add. (As you’ll see later, it is a very vital practice.) He frowned, and then, bidding me wait, went into the house, and came out with that tall grey figure that everyone in England knew, and the mobs used to cheer and laugh at and say, what a hell of an old fellow he was: Palmerston.
‘Flashman, ain’t it?’ says he, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘Thought you had gone out with Raglan.’ I told him about Willy, and he chuckled. ‘Oh, aye, our aspiring Frederick the Great. Well, you may take him with you, for depend upon it, the war is now under way. You have the despatches? Well, now, I think you may tell his lordship, when he has digested them – I daresay Newcastle has made it plain enough – that the capture of Sevastopol is held by Her Majesty’s Government as being an enterprise that cannot but be seen as signally advancing the success of Allied arms. Hum? But that it will be a damned serious business to undertake. You see?’
I nodded, looking knowing, and he grunted and squinted across the lawn, watching Gladstone trying to knock a ball through a hoop. He missed, and Pam grunted again. ‘Off you go then, Flashman,’ says he. ‘Good luck to you. Come and see me when you return. My respects to his lordship.’ And as I saluted and departed, he hobbled stiffly out on to the lawn, and I watched him say something to Gladstone, and take his mallet from him. And that was all.
We sailed that night, myself after a hasty but passionate farewell with Elspeth, and Willy after a frantic foray to St John’s Wood for a final gallop at his blonde. I was beginning to feel that old queasy rumbling in my belly that comes with any departure, and it wasn’t improved by Willy’s chatter as we stood on deck, watching the forest of shipping slip by in the dusk, and the lights twinkling on the banks.
‘Off to the war!’ exclaimed the little idiot. ‘Isn’t it capital, Harry? Of course, it is nothing new to you, but for me, it is the most exciting thing I have ever known! Did you not feel, setting out on your first campaign, like some knight in the old time, going out to win a great name, oh, for the honour of your house and the love of your fair lady?’
I hadn’t, in fact – and if I had, it wouldn’t have been for a whore in St John’s Wood. So I just grunted, à la Pam, and let him prattle.
It was a voyage, like any other, but faster and pleasanter than most, and I won’t bore you with it. In fact, I won’t deal at any great length at all with those things which other Crimean writers go on about – the fearful state of the army at Varna, the boozing and whoring at Scutari, the way the Varna sickness and the cholera swept through our forces in that long boiling summer, the mismanagement of an untrained commissariat and inexperienced regimental officers, the endless bickering among commanders – like Cardigan for instance. He had left England for Paris within two days of our encounter in Elspeth’s bedroom, and on arrival in Bulgaria had killed a hundred horses with an ill-judged patrol in the direction of the distant Russians. All this – the misery and the sickness and the bad leadership and the rest – you can read if you wish elsewhere; Billy Russell of The Times gives as good a picture as any, although you have to be wary of him. He was a good fellow, Billy, and we got on well, but he always had an eye cocked towards his readers, and the worse he could make out a case, the better they liked it. He set half England in a passion against Raglan, you remember, because Raglan wouldn’t let the army grow beards. ‘I like an Englishman to look like an Englishman,’ says Raglan, ‘and beards are foreign, and breed vermin. Also, depend upon it, they will lead to filthy habits.’ He was dead right about the vermin, but Russell wouldn’t have it; he claimed this was just stiff-necked parade-ground nonsense and red tape on Raglan’s part, and wrote as much. (You may note that Billy Russell himself had a beard like a quickset hedge, and I reckon he took Raglan’s order as a personal insult.)
In any event, this memorial isn’t about the history of the war, but about me, so I’ll confine myself to that all-important subject, and let the war take its chance, just the way the government did.
We got to Varna, and the stink was hellish. The streets were filthy, there were stretcher-parties everywhere, ferrying fever cases from the camps outside town to the sewers they called hospitals, there was no order about anything, and I thought, well, we’ll make our quarters on board until we can find decent lodgings at leisure. So leaving Willy, I went off to report myself to Raglan.
He was full of affability and good nature, as always, shook hands warmly, called for refreshment for me, inquired at great length about Willy’s health and spirits, and then settled down to read the despatches I’d brought. It was close and warm in his office, even with the verandah doors wide and a nigger working a fan; Raglan was sweating in his shirt-sleeves, and as I drank my whistle-belly at a side-table and studied him, I could see that even a couple of months out east had aged him. His hair was snow-white, the lines on his face were deeper than ever, the flesh was all fallen in on his skinny wrist – he was an old man, and he looked and sounded it. And his face grew tireder as he read; when he had done he summoned George Brown, who had the Light Division, and was his bosom pal. Brown read the despatch, and they looked at each other.
‘It is to be Sevastopol,’ says Raglan. ‘The government’s direction seems quite clear to me.’
‘Provided,’ says Brown, ‘both you and the French commander believe the matter can be carried through successfully. In effect, they leave the decision to you, and to St Arnaud.’
‘Hardly,’ says Raglan, and picked up a paper. ‘Newcastle includes a personal aide memoire in which he emphasises the wishes of the Ministers – it is all Sevastopol, you see.’
‘What do we know about Sevastopol – its defences, its garrison? How many men can the Russians oppose to us if we invade Crimea?’
‘Well, my dear Sir George,’ says Raglan, ‘we know very little, you see. There are no reconnaissance reports, but we believe the defences to be strong. On the other hand, I know St Arnaud thinks it unlikely there can be more than 70,000 Russians mustered in the Crimean peninsula.’
‘About our own numbers,’ says Brown.
‘Precisely, but that is only conjecture. There may be fewer, there may well be more. It is all so uncertain.’ He sighed, and kneaded his brow with his left hand, rather abstracted. ‘I cannot say for sure that they might not field 100,000 men, you know. There has been no blockade, and nothing to prevent their troop movements.’
‘And we would have to invade across the Black Sea, make a foothold, perhaps face odds of four to three, invest Sevastopol, reduce it speedily – or else carry on a siege through a Russian winter – and all this while relying solely on our fleet for supply, while the Russians may send into the Crimea what strength they choose.’
‘Exactly, Sir George. Meanwhile, only one fourth of our siege equipment has arrived. Nor is the army in the best of health, and I believe the French to be rather worse.’
I listened to this with mounting horror – not so much at what they were saying, but how they said it. Perfectly calmly, reasonably, and without visible emotion, they were rehearsing a formula which even I, ignorant staff-walloper that I was, could see was one for disaster. But I could only keep mum, clutching my pot of beer and listening.
‘I should welcome your observations, my dear Sir George,’ says Raglan.
Brown’s face was a study. He was an old Scotch war horse this, and nobody’s fool, but he knew Raglan, and he knew something of the politics of power and warfare. He put the despatch back on the table.
‘As to the enterprise of Sevastopol which the Ministers appear to be suggesting,’ says he, ‘I ask myself how our old master the Duke would have seen it. I believe he would have turned it down flat – there is not enough information about the Crimea and the Russians, and our armies are reduced to the point where we have no leeway to work on. He would not have taken the terrible responsibility of launching such a campaign.’
You could see the relief spreading over Raglan’s old face like water.
‘I concur exactly in what you say, Sir George,’ says he, ‘in which case—’
‘On the other hand,’ says Brown, ‘I judge from this despatch that the government are determined on Sevastopol. They have made up their minds at home. Now, if you decline to accept the responsibility, what will they do? In my opinion, they will recall you; in fine, if you will not do the job, they’ll send out someone who will.’
Raglan’s face lengthened, and I saw an almost pettish set to his mouth as he said:
‘Dear me, that is to be very precise, Sir George. Do you really think so?’
‘I do, sir. As I see it, things have reached a pass where they will have action, whatever it may be.’ He was breathing heavy, I noticed. ‘And I believe that with them, one place is as good as another.’
Raglan sighed. ‘It may be as you say; it may be. Sevastopol. Sevastopol. I wonder why? Why that, rather than the Danube or the Caucasus?’ He glanced round, as though he expected to see the answer on the wall, and noticed me. ‘Ah, Colonel Flashman, perhaps you can enlighten us a little in this. Are you aware of any factor in affairs at home that may have determined the government on this especial venture?’
I told him what I knew – that the press was yelping Sevastopol right and left, and that everyone had it on the brain.
‘Do they know where it is?’ says Brown.
I wasn’t too sure myself where it was, but I said I supposed they did. Raglan tapped his lip, looking at the despatch as though he hoped it would go away.
‘Did you see anyone when the despatch was delivered to you – Newcastle, or Argyll, perhaps?’
‘I saw Lord Palmerston, sir. He remarked that the government were confident that the occupation of Sevastopol would be an excellent thing, but that it would be a damned serious business. Those were his words, sir.’
Brown gave a bark of disgust, and Raglan laughed. ‘We may agree with him, I think. Well, we must see what our Gallic allies think, I suppose, before we can reach a fruitful conclusion.’
So they did – all the chattering Frogs of the day, with St Arnaud, the little mountebank from the Foreign Legion, who had once earned his living on the stage and looked like an ice-cream vendor, with his perky moustache, at their head. He had the feverish look of a dying man – which he was – and Canrobert, with his long hair and ridiculous curling moustaches, wasn’t one to inspire confidence either. Not that they were worse than our own crew – the ass Cambridge, and Evans snorting and growling, and old England burbling, and Raglan sitting at the table head, like a vicar at a prize-giving, being polite and expressing gratified pleasure at every opinion, no matter what it was.
And there was no lack of opinions. Raglan thought an invasion might well come off – given luck – Brown was dead against it, but at first the Frogs were all for it, and St Arnaud said we should be in Sevastopol by Christmas, death of his life and sacred blue. Our navy people opposed the thing, and Raglan got peevish, and then the Frogs began to have their doubts, and everything fell into confusion. They had another meeting, at which I wasn’t present, and then the word came out: the Frogs and Raglan were in agreement again, Brown was over-ruled and the navy with him, we were to go to the Crimea.
‘I daresay the sea air will do us good and raise everyone’s spirits,’ says Raglan, and by God, he didn’t raise mine. I’ve wondered since, if I could have done anything about it, and decided I could. But what? If Otto Bismarck had been in my boots and uniform, I daresay he could have steered them away, as even a junior man can, if he goes about it right. But I’ve never meddled if I could avoid it, where great affairs are concerned; it’s too chancy. Mind you, if I could have seen ahead I’d have sneaked into Raglan’s tent one night and brained the old fool, but I didn’t know, you see.
So there was tremendous sound and fury for the next month, with everyone preparing for the great invasion. Willy and I had established ourselves snugly in a cottage outside the town, and with all our provisions and gear we did comfortably enough, but being staff men we couldn’t shirk too much, although Raglan worked Willy lightly, and was forever encouraging him to go riding and shooting and taking it easy. For the rest, it was touch and go, so far as I could see, whether the army, which was still full of fever and confusion, would ever be well enough to crawl on the transports, but as you know, the thing was done in the end. I’ve written about it at length elsewhere – the fearful havoc of embarking, with ships full of spewing soldiers rocking at anchor for days on end, the weeping women who were ordered to stay behind (although my little pal, Fan Duberly,
sneaked aboard disguised as a washerwoman), the horses fighting and smashing in their cramped stalls, the hideous stink, the cholera corpses floating in the bay, Billy Russell standing on the quay with his note-book damning Lord Lucan’s eyes – ‘I have my duty, too, my lord, which is to inform my readers, and if you don’t like what you’re doing being reported, why then, don’t do it! And that’s my advice to you!’ Of course he was daft and Irish, was Billy, but so was Lucan, and they stood and cussed each other like Mississippi pilots.
I had my work cut out latterly in bagging a berth on the Caradoc, which was Raglan’s flagship, and managed to get not a bad billet for Willy and myself and Lew Nolan, who was galloper to Airey, the new chief of staff. He was another Irish, with a touch of dago or something, this Nolan, a cavalry maniac who held everybody in contempt, and let ’em feel it, too, although he was a long way junior. Mind you, he came no snuff with me, because I was a better horseman, and he knew it. We three bunked in together, while major-generals and the like had to make do with hammocks – I played Willy’s royalty for all it was worth, you may be sure. And then, heigh-ho, we were off on our balmy cruise across the Black Sea, a huge fleet of sixty thousand soldiers, only half of ’em rotten with sickness, British, Frogs, Turks, a few Bashi-bazooks, not enough heavy guns to fire more than a salute or two, and old General Scarlett sitting on top of a crate of hens learning the words of command for manoeuvring a cavalry brigade, closing his book on his finger, shutting his boozy old eyes, and shouting, ‘Walk, march, trot. Damme, what comes next?’
The only thing was – no one knew where we were going. We ploughed about the Black Sea, while Raglan and the Frogs wondered where we should land, and sailed up and down the Russian coast looking for a likely spot. We found one, and Raglan stood there smiling and saying what a capital beach it was. ‘Do you smell the lavender?’ says he. ‘Ah, Prince William, you may think you are back in Kew Gardens.’
Well, it may have smelled like it at first, but by the time we had spent five days crawling ashore, with everyone spewing and soiling themselves in the pouring rain, and great piles of stores and guns and rubbish growing on the beach, and the sea getting fouler and fouler with the dirt of sixty thousand men – well, you may imagine what it was like. The army’s health was perhaps a little better than it had been on the voyage, but not much, and when we finally set off down the coast, and I watched the heavy, plodding tread of the infantry, and saw the stretched look of the cavalry mounts – I thought, how far will this crowd go, on a few handfuls of pork and biscuit, no tents, devil a bottle of jallop, and the cholera, the invisible dragon, humming in the air as they marched?
Mind you, from a distance it looked well. When that whole army was formed up, it stretched four miles by four, a great glittering host from the Zouaves on the beach, in their red caps and blue coats, to the shakos of the 44th on the far horizon of the plain – and they were a sight of omen to me, for the last time I’d seen them they’d been standing back to back in the bloodied snow of Gandamack, with the Ghazi knives whittling ’em down, and Souter with the flag wrapped round his belly. I never see those 44th facings but I think of the army of Afghanistan dying in the ice-hills, and shudder.
I was privileged, if that is the word, to give the word that started the whole march, for Raglan sent me and Willy to gallop first to the rear guard and then to the advance guard with the order to march. In fact, I let Willy deliver the second message, for the advance guard was led by none other than Cardigan, and it was more than I could bear to look at the swine. We cantered through the army, and the fleeting pictures are in my mind still – the little French canteen tarts sitting laughing on the gun limbers, the scarlet stillness of the Guards, rank on rank, the bearded French faces with their kepis, and Bosquet balancing his belly above a horse too small for him, the sing-song chatter of the Highlanders in their dark green tartans, the sombre jackets of the Light Division, the red yokel faces burning in the heat, the smell of sweat and oil and hot serge, the creak of leather and the jingle of bits, the glittering points of the lances where the 17th sat waiting – and Willy burst out in excitement: ‘Our regiment, Harry! See how grand they look! What noble fellows they are!’ – Billy Russell sitting athwart his mule and shouting ‘What is it, Flash? Are we off at last?’, and I turned away to talk to him while Willy galloped ahead to where the long pink and blue line of the 11th marked the van of the army.
‘I haven’t seen our friends so close before,’ says Billy. ‘Look yonder.’ And following his pointing finger, far out to the left flank, with the sun behind them, I saw the long silent line of horsemen on the crest, the lances like twigs in the hands of pygmies.
‘Cossacks,’ says Billy. We’d seen ’em before, of course, the first night, scouting our landing, and I’d thought then, it’s well seen you ain’t Ghazis, my lads, or you’d pitch our whole force back into the sea before we’re right ashore. And as the advance was sounded, and the whole great army lumbered forward into the heat haze, with a band lilting ‘Garryowen’, and the chargers of the 17th snorting and fidgeting at the sound, I saw to my horror that Willy, having delivered his message, was not riding back towards me, but was moving off at a smart gallop towards the left flank.
I cut out at once, to head him off, but he was light and his horse was fast, and he was a good three hundred yards clear of the left flank before I came up with him. He was cantering on, his eyes fixed on the distant ridge – and it was none so distant now; as I came up roaring at him, he turned and pointed: ‘Look, Harry – the enemy!’
‘You little duffer, what are you about?’ cries I. ‘D’you want to get your head blown off?’
‘They are some way off,’ says he, laughing, and indeed they were – but close enough to be able to see the blue and white stripes of the lance, and make out the shaggy fur caps. They sat immovable while we stared at them, and I felt the sweat turn icy on my spine in spite of the heat. These were the famous savages of Tartary, watching, waiting – and God knew how many of them there might be, in great hordes advancing on our pathetic little army, as it tootled along with its gay colours by the sea. I pulled Willy’s bridle round.
‘Out of this, my lad,’ says I, ‘and don’t stray again without my leave, d’ye hear?’
‘Why, it is safe enough. None of them is advancing, or even looking like it. What a bore it is! If this were – oh, the Middle Ages, one of them would ride out and challenge us, and we could have a set-to while the army watched!’ He was actually sitting there, with his eyes shining, and his hand twitching at his sabre-hilt, wanting a fight! A fine credit to me he was, you’ll agree. And before I could rebuke him, there was the boom of gunfire, beyond the ridge, and boom-boom-boom, and the whistle of shot ahead, and a little cloud of pink-panted Hussars broke away and went dashing over towards the ridge, sabres out. There were cries and orders, and a troop of horse artillery came thundering out towards us, and I had to shout at Willy to get him trotting back towards the army, while the horse artillery unlimbered, and wheeled their pieces, and crashed their reply to the Russian guns.
He wanted to stay, but I wouldn’t have it. ‘Gallopers can get killed,’ says I, ‘but not sitting with their mouths open staring at a peep-show.’ To tell truth, the sound of those bloody guns had set my innards quaking again, in the old style. ‘Now – gallop!’ says I.
‘Oh, very well,’ says he. ‘But you need not be so careful of me, you know – I don’t mean to go astray just yet.’ And seeing my expression, he burst out laughing: ‘My word, what a cautious old stick you are, Harry – you are getting as bad as Dr Winter!’
And I wish I were with Dr Winter this minute, thinks I, whatever the old whoreson’s doing. But I was to remember what Willy had said – and in the next day or so, too, when the army had rolled on down the coast, choking with heat by day and shivering by the fires at night, and we had come at last to the long slope that runs down to a red-banked river with great bluffs and gullies beyond. Just a little Russian creek, and today in any English parish church you may see its name on stone memorials, on old tattered flags in cathedrals, in the metalwork of badges, and on the nameplates of grimy back streets beside the factories. Alma.
You have seen the fine oil-paintings, I daresay – the perfect lines of guardsmen and Highlanders fronting up the hill towards the Russian batteries, with here and there a chap lying looking thoughtful with his hat on the ground beside him, and in the distance fine silvery clouds of cannon smoke, and the colours to the fore, and fellows in cocked hats waving their swords. I daresay some people saw and remember the Battle of the Alma like that, but Flashy is not among them. And I was in the middle of it, too, all on account of a commander who hadn’t the sense to realise that generals ought to stay in the rear, directing matters.
It was bloody lunacy, from the start, and bloody carnage, too. You may know what the position was – the Russians, forty thousand strong, on the bluffs south of the Alma, with artillery positions dug on the forward slopes above the river, and our chaps, with the Frogs on the right, advancing over the river and up the slopes to drive the Ruskis out. If Menschikoff had known his work, or our troops had had less blind courage, they’d have massacred the whole Allied army there and then. But the Russians fought as badly and stupidly as they nearly always do, and by sheer blind luck on Raglan’s part, and idiot bravery among our fellows, the thing went otherwise.
You may read detailed accounts of the slaughter, if you wish, in any military history, but you may take my word for it that the battle was for all practical purposes divided into four parts, as follows. One, Flashy observes preliminary bombardment from his post in the middle of Raglan’s staff, consoling himself that there are about twenty thousand other fellows between him and the enemy. Two, Flashy is engaged in what seem like hours of frantic galloping behind the lines of the Frog battalions on the right, keeping as far from the firing as he decently can, and inquiring on Lord Raglan’s behalf why the hell the Frogs are not driving the seaward flank of the Russian position before them? Three, Flashy is involved in the battle with Lord Raglan. Four, Flashy reaps the fruits of Allied victory, and bitter they were.
It was supposed to begin, you see, with the Frogs turning the Ruskis’ flank, and then our chaps would roll over the river and finish the job. So for hours we sat there, sweating in the heat, and watching the powder-puff clouds of smoke popping out of the Russian batteries, and peppering our men in the left and centre. But the Frogs made nothing of their part of the business, and Nolan and I were to and fro like shuttlecocks to St Arnaud; he was looking like death, and jabbering like fury, while a bare half-mile away his little blue-coats were swarming up the ridges, and being battered, and the smoke was rolling back over the river in long grey wreaths.
‘Tell milord it will take a little longer,’ he kept saying, and back we would gallop to Raglan. ‘We shall never beat the French at this rate,’ says he, and when he was reminded that the enemy were the Russians, not the French, he would correct himself hurriedly, and glance round to see that no Frog gallopers were near to overhear. And at last, seeing our silent columns being pounded by the Russian shot as they lay waiting for the advance, he gave the word, and the long red lines began rolling down the slope to the river.
There was a great reek of black smoke drifting along the banks from a burning hamlet right before us, and the white discharge of the Russian batteries rolled down in great clouds to meet it. The huge wavering lines of infantry vanished into it, and through gaps we could see them plunging into the river, their pieces above their heads, while the crash-crash-crash of the Russian guns reverberated down from the bluffs, and the tiny white spots of musket-fire began to snap like fire-crackers along the lips of the Russian trenches. And then the ragged lines of our infantry appeared beyond the smoke, clambering up the foot of the bluffs, and we could see the shot ploughing through them, tearing up the ground, and our guns were thundering in reply, throwing great fountains of earth up round the Russian batteries. Willy beside me was squirming in his saddle, yelling his head off with excitement, the little fool; it made no odds, for the din was deafening.
And Raglan looked round, and seeing the boy, smiled, and beckoned to me. He had to shout. ‘Keep him close, Flashman!’ cries he. ‘We are going across the river presently,’ which was the worst news I had heard in weeks. Our attack was coming to a standstill; as the Russian firing redoubled, you could see our men milling anywhere at the foot of the bluffs, and the ground already thick with still bodies, in little heaps where the cannon had caught them, or singly where they had gone down before the muskets.
Then Nolan comes galloping up, full of zeal and gallantry, damn him, and shouted a message from the Frogs, and I saw Raglan shake his head, and then he trotted off towards the river, with the rest of us dutifully tailing on behind. Willy had his sabre out, God knows why, for all we had to worry about just then was the Russian shot, which was bad enough. We spurred down to the river, myself keeping Willy at the tail of the group, and I saw Airey throw aside his plumed hat just as we took the water. There were bodies floating in the stream, which was churned up with mud, and the smoke was billowing down and catching at our throats, making the horses rear and plunge – I had to grip Willy’s bridle to prevent his being thrown. On our left men of the 2nd Division were crowded on the bank, waiting to go forward; they were retching and coughing in the smoke, and the small shot and balls were whizzing and whining by in a hideously frightening way. I just kept my head down, praying feverishly, as is my wont, and then I saw one of the other gallopers, just ahead of me, go reeling out of his saddle with the blood spouting from his sleeve. He staggered up, clutching at my stirrup, and bawling, ‘I am perfectly well, my lord, I assure you!’ and then he rolled away, and someone else jumped down to see to him.
Raglan halted, cool as you like, glancing right and left, and then summoned two of the gallopers and sent them pounding away along the bank to find Evans and Brown, whose divisions were being smashed to pieces at the foot of the bluffs. Then he says, ‘Come along, gentlemen. We shall find a vantage point,’ and cantered up the gully that opened up before us just there in the bluff-face. For a wonder it seemed empty, all the Ruskis being on the heights to either side, and the smoke was hanging above our heads in such clouds you couldn’t see more than twenty yards up the hill. A hell of a fine position for a general to be in, you may think, and Raglan must have thought so, too, for suddenly he spurred his horse at the hill to the left, and we all ploughed up behind him, scrambling on the shale and rough tufts, through the reeking smoke, until suddenly we were through it, and on the top of a little knoll at the bluff foot.
I’ll never forget that sight. Ahead and to our left rose the bluffs, bare steep hillside for five hundred feet. We could see the Russian positions clear as day, the plumes of musket smoke spouting down from the trenches, and the bearded faces behind them. Directly to our left was a huge redoubt, packed with enemy guns and infantry; there were other great batteries above and beyond. In front of the big redoubt the ground was thick with the bodies of our men, but they were still swarming up from the river, under a hail of firing. And beyond, along the bluffs, they were still advancing, a great sprawling mass of scarlet coats and white cross belts, clawing their way up, falling, scattering, re-forming and pressing on. For a mile, as far as one could see, they were surging up, over that hellish slope with the dead scattered before them, towards the smoking positions of the enemy.
Better here than there, thinks I, until I realised that we were sitting up in full view, unprotected, with the Ruski infantry not a hundred yards away. We were absolutely ahead of our own infantry, thanks to that fool Raglan – and he was sitting there, with his blue coat flapping round him, and his plumed hat on his head, as calm as if it were a review, clinging to his saddle with his knees alone, while he steadied his glass with his single arm. There was so much shot whistling overhead, you couldn’t be sure whether they were firing on us with intent or not.
And then right up on the crest, above the batteries, we saw the Russian infantry coming down the slope – a great brown mass, packed like sardines, rank after rank of them. They came clumping slowly, inexorably down towards the batteries, obviously intent on rolling into our infantry below. They looked unstoppable, and Raglan whistled through his teeth as he watched them.
‘Too good to miss, by George!’ cries he, and turning, caught my eye. ‘Down with you, Flashman! Guns, at once!’ and you may understand that I didn’t need telling twice. ‘Stay there!’ shouts I to Willy, and then had my charger down that slope like a jack rabbit. There were gun-teams labouring and splashing up the bank, and I bawled to them to make haste to the ridge. The horses were lashed up the muddy slope, the guns swinging wildly behind them; one of our gallopers got them positioned, with the gunners hauling them round by main force, and as I came back up the hill – none too swiftly – the first salvoes were screaming away to crash into the flank of the Russian columns.
It was havoc all along the bluffs, and smoking hell on that little hill. There were infantry pouring past us now, sweating, panting, smoke-blackened faces, and bayonets thrust out ahead as they surged by and upwards towards the Russian positions. They were shrieking and bawling like madmen, heedless apparently of the bloody holes torn in their ranks by the Russian firing; I saw two of them suddenly turn into pulp as a fusillade struck them, and another lying screaming with a thigh shot away. I looked for Raglan, and saw him with a couple of gallopers preparing to descend the hill; I looked for Willy, and there he was, his hat gone, shouting like a madman at the passing infantry.
And then, by God, he whirled up his sabre, and went flying along with them, across the face of the slope towards the nearest battery. His horse stumbled and recovered, and he waved his sword and huzza’d. ‘Come back, you German lunatic!’ I yelled, and Raglan must have heard me, for he checked his horse and turned. Even with the shot flying and the screaming and the thunder of the guns, with the fate of the battle in his hands, those ears which were normally deaf to sense caught my words. He saw me, he saw Willy, careering away along the bluffs among the infantry, and he sang out: ‘After him, Flashman!’
Probably, addressed to any other man in the army, that order would have evoked an immediate response. The Eye of the Chief, and all that. But I took one look along that shell-swept slope, with the bodies thick on it, and that young idiot riding through the blood and bullets, and I thought, by God, let him go for me. I hesitated, and Raglan shouted again, angrily, so I set my charger towards him, cupping a hand behind my ear, and yelling: ‘What’s that, my lord?’ He shouted and pointed again, stabbing with his finger, and then a shot mercifully ploughed up the ground between us, and as the dirt showered over me I took the opportunity to roll nimbly out of the saddle.
I clambered up again, like a man dazed, and rot him, he was still there, and looking thoroughly agitated. ‘The Prince, Flashman!’ he bawls, and then one of the gallopers plucked at his coat, and pointed to the right, and off they went, leaving me clutching at my horse’s head, and Willy a hundred yards away, in the thick of the advancing infantry, setting his horse to the breastwork of the battery. It baulked, and he reeled in the saddle, his sabre falling, and then he pitched straight back, losing his grip, and went down before the feet of the infantry. I saw him roll a yard or two, and then he lay still, as the advance passed over him.
Christ, I thought, he’s done for, and as our fellows surged into the battery, and the firing from above slackened, I picked my way cautiously along, through those dreadful heaps of dead and dying and wounded, with the stink of blood and powder everywhere, and the chorus of shrieks and moans of agony in my ears. I dropped on one knee beside the little blue-clad figure among the crimson; he was lying face down. I turned him over, and vomited. He had half a face – one glazed eye, and brow, and cheek, and on the other side, just a gory mash, with his brains running out of it.
I don’t know how long I crouched there, staring at him, horror-struck. Above me, I could hear all hell of firing and shouting still going on as the battle surged up the slope, and I shook with fear at it. I wasn’t going near that again, not for a pension, but as I forced myself to look at what was left of Willy, I found myself babbling aloud: ‘Jesus, what’ll Raglan say? I’ve lost Willy – my God, what will they say?’ And I began cursing and sobbing – not for Willy, but out of shock and for the folly and ill-luck that had brought me to this slaughterhouse and had killed this brainless brat, this pathetic princeling who thought war was great sport, and had been entrusted to my safe-keeping. By God, his death could be the ruin of me! So I swore and wept, crouched beside his corpse.
‘Of all the fearful sights I have seen on this day, none has so wrung my heart as this.’ That’s what Airey told Raglan, when he described how he had found me with Willy’s body above the Alma. ‘Poor Flashman, I believe his heart is broken. But to see the bravest blade on your staff, an officer whose courage is a byword in the army, weeping like a child beside his fallen comrade – it is a terrible thing. He would have given his own life a hundred times, I know, to preserve that boy.’
I was listening outside the tent-flap, you see, stricken dumb with manly grief. Well, I thought, that’s none so bad; crying with funk and shock has its uses, provided it’s mistaken for noble tears. Raglan couldn’t blame me, after all; I hadn’t shot the poor little fool, or been able to stop him throwing his life away. Anyway, Raglan had a victory to satisfy him, and even the loss of a royal galloper couldn’t sour that, you’d think. Aye, but it could.
He was all stern reproach when finally I stood in front of him, covered in dust, played out with fear, and doing my damnedest to look contrite – which wasn’t difficult.
‘What,’ says he, in a voice like a church bell, ‘will you tell Her Majesty?’
‘My lord,’ says I. ‘I am sorry, but it was no fault—’
He held up his one fine hand. ‘Here is no question of fault, Flashman. You had a sacred duty – a trust, given into your hands by your own sovereign, to preserve that precious life. You have failed, utterly. I ask again, what will you tell the Queen?’
Only a bloody fool like Raglan would ask a question like that, but I did my best to wriggle clear.
‘What could I have done, my lord? You sent me for the guns, and—’
‘And you had returned. Your first thought thereafter should have been for your sacred charge. Well, sir, what have you to say? Myself, in the midst of battle, had to point to where honour should have taken you at once. And yet you paused; I saw you, and—’
‘My lord!’ cries I, full of indignation. ‘That is unjust! I did not fully understand, in the confusion, what your order was, I—’
‘Did you need to understand?’ says he, all quivering sorrow. ‘I do not question your courage, Flashman; it is not in doubt.’ Not with me, either, I thought. ‘But I cannot but charge you, heavily though it weighs on my heart to do so, with failing in that … that instinct for your first duty, which should have been not to me, or to the army even, but to that poor boy whose shattered body lies in the ambulance. His soul, we may be confident, is with God.’ He came up to me, and his eyes were full of tears, the maudlin old hypocrite. ‘I can guess at your own grief; it has moved not only Airey, but myself. And I can well believe that you wish that you, too, could have found an honourable grave on the field, as William of Celle has done. Better, perhaps, had you done so.’ He sighed, thinking about it, and no doubt deciding that he’d be a deal happier, when he saw the Queen again, to be able to say: ‘Oh, Flashy’s kicked the bucket, by the way, but your precious Willy is all right.’ Well, fearful and miserable as I was, I wasn’t that far gone, myself.
He prosed on a bit, about duty and honour and my own failure, and what a hell of a blot I’d put on my copybook. No thought, you’ll notice, for the blot he’d earned, with those thousands of dead piled up above the Alma, the incompetent buffoon.
‘I doubt not you will carry this burden all your life,’ says he, with gloomy satisfaction. ‘How it will be received at home – I cannot say. For the moment, we must all look to our duty in the campaign ahead. There, it may be, reparation lies.’ He was still thinking about Flashy filling a pit, I could see. ‘I pity you, Flashman, and because I pity you, I shall not send you home. You may continue on my staff, and I trust that your future conduct will enable me to think that this lapse – irreparable though its consequences are – was but one terrible error of judgment, one sudden dereliction of duty, which will never – nay, can never – be repeated. But for the moment, I cannot admit you again to that full fellowship of the spirit in which members of my staff are wont to be embraced.’
Well, I could stand that. He rummaged on his table, and picked up some things. ‘These are the personal effects of your … your dead comrade. Take them, and let them be an awful reminder to you of duty undone, of trust neglected, and of honour – no, I will not say aught of honour to one whose courage, at least, I believe to be beyond reproach.’ He looked at the things; one of them was a locket which Willy had worn round his neck. Raglan snapped it open, and gave a little gulp. He held it out to me, his face all noble and working. ‘Look on that fair, pure face,’ cries he, ‘and feel the remorse you deserve. More than anything I can say, it will strike to your soul – the face of a boy’s sweetheart, chaste, trusting, and innocent. Think of that poor, sweet creature who, thanks to your neglect, will soon be draining the bitterest cup of sorrow.’
I doubted it myself, as I looked at the locket. Last time I’d seen her, the poor sweet creature had been wearing nothing but black satin boots. Only Willy in this wide world would have thought of wearing the picture of a St John’s Wood whore round his neck; he had been truly wild about her, the randy little rascal. Well, if I’d had my way, he’d still have been thumping her every night, instead of lying on a stretcher with only half his head. But I wonder if the preaching Raglan, or any of the pious hypocrites who were his relatives, would have called him back to life on those terms? Poor little Willy.
Well, if I was in disgrace, I was also in good health, and that’s what matters. I might have been one of the three thousand dead, or of the shattered wounded lying shrieking through the dusk along that awful line of bluffs. There seemed to be no medical provision – among the British, anyway – and scores of our folk just lay writhing where they fell, or died in the arms of mates hauling and carrying them down to the beach hospitals. The Russian wounded lay in piles by the hundred round our bivouacs, crying and moaning all through the night – I can hear their sobbing ‘Pajalsta! pajalsta!’ still. The camp ground was littered with spent shot and rubbish and broken gear among the pools of congealed blood – my stars, wouldn’t I just like to take one of our Ministers, or street-corner orators, or blood-lusting, breakfast-scoffing papas, over such a place as the Alma hills – not to let him see, because he’d just tut-tut and look anguished and have a good pray and not care a damn – but to shoot him in the belly with a soft-nosed bullet and let him die screaming where he belonged. That’s all they deserve.
Not that I cared a fig for dead or wounded that night. I had worries enough on my own account, for in brooding about the injustice of Raglan’s reproaches, I convinced myself that I’d be broke in the end. The loss of that mealy little German pimp swelled out of all proportion in my imagination, with the Queen calling me a murderer and Albert accusing me of high treason, and The Times trumpeting for my impeachment. It was only when I realised that the army might have other things to think about that I cheered up.
I was feeling as lonely as the policeman at Herne Bay
when I loafed into Billy Russell’s tent, and found him scribbling away by a storm lantern, with Lew Nolan perched on an ammunition box, holding forth as usual.
‘Two brigades of cavalry!’ Nolan was saying. ‘Two brigades, enough to have pursued and routed the whole pack of ’em! And what do they do? Sit on their backsides, because Lucan’s too damned scared to order a bag of oats without a written order from Raglan. Lord Lucan? Bah! Lord bloody Look-on, more like.’
‘Hm’m,’ says Billy, writing away, and glanced up. ‘Here, Flash – you’ll know. Were the Highlanders first into the redoubt? I say yes, but Lew says not.
Stevens ain’t sure, and I can’t find Campbell anywhere. What d’ye say?’
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