Flashman and the Angel of the Lord

‘Miss Prentice, in Sunday School,’ says he, idly striking his cousin, who was trying to detach Alice from me by biting her leg. ‘She says he was the Angel of the Lord who got hung for freeing all the niggers in America.’

‘You oughtn’t to say “niggers”.’ Jemima again, absolutely, removing her teeth from Alice and climbing across to possess my other arm. ‘It’s not nice. You should say “negwoes”, shouldn’t you, Gweat-gwampapa? I always say “negwoes”,’ she added, oozing piety.

‘What should you call them, Great-grandpapa?’ asks John.

‘Call ’em what you like, my son. It’s nothing to what they’ll call you.’

‘I always say “negwoes” –’

‘Great-gran’papa says “niggers”,’ observes confounded Augustus. ‘Lots an’ lots of times.’ He pointed a filthy accusing finger. ‘You said that dam’ nigger, Jonkins, the boxer-man –’

‘Johnson, child, Jack Johnson.’

‘– you said he wanted takin’ down a peg or two.’

‘Did I, though? Yes, Jemima dearest, I know Gus has said another wicked word, but ladies shouldn’t notice, you know –’

‘What’s a peggatoo?’ asks Alice, twining my whiskers.

‘A measure of diminution of self-esteem, precious … yes, Jemima, I’ve no doubt you’re going to peach to Great-grandmama about Gus saying “damn”, but if you do you’ll be saying it yourself, mind … What, Gus? Yes, very well, if I said that about the boxer-man, you may be sure I meant it. But you know, old fellow, when you call people names, it depends who you’re talking about …’ It does, too. Flash coons like Johnson1 and the riff-raff of the levees and most of our Aryan brethren are one thing – but if you’ve seen Ketshwayo’s Nokenke regiment stamping up the dust and the assegais drumming on the ox-hide shields, ‘’Suthu, ’suthu! ’s-jee, ’s-jee!’ as they sweep up the slope to Little Hand … well, that’s black of a different colour, and you find another word for those fellows. And God forbid I should offend Miss Prentice, so …

‘I think it best you should say “negroes”, children. That’s the polite word, you see –’

‘What about nigger minstrels?’ asks Alice, excavating my collar.

‘That’s all right ’cos they’re white underneath,’ says John impatiently. ‘Shut your potato-trap, Alice – I want to hear about John Brown, and how he freed all the … the negro slaves in America, didn’t he, Great-grandpapa?’

‘Well, now, John … no, not exactly …’ And then I stopped, and took a pull at my flask, and thought about it. After all, who am I to say he didn’t? It was coming anyway, but if it hadn’t been for old J.B. and his crack-brained dreams, who can tell how things might have panned out? Little nails hold the hinge of history, as Bismarck remarked (he would!) the night we set out for Tarlenheim … and didn’t Lincoln himself say that Mrs Stowe was the little lady who started the great war, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Well, Ossawatomie Brown, mad and murderous old horse-thief that he was, played just as big a part in setting the darkies free as she did – aye, or Lincoln or Garrison or any of them, I reckon. I did my bit myself – not willingly, you may be sure, and cursing Seward and Pinkerton every step of the way that ghastly night … and as I pondered it, staring across the lake to the big oak casting its first evening shadow, the shrill voices of the grandlings seemed to fade away, and in their place came the harsh yells and crash of gunshots in the dark, and instead of the scent of roses there was the reek of black powder smoke filling the engine-house, the militia’s shots shattering timber and whining about our ears … young Oliver bleeding his life out on the straw … the gaunt scarecrow with his grizzled beard and burning eyes, thumbing back the hammer of his carbine … ‘Stand firm, men! Sell your lives dearly! Don’t give in now!’ … and Jeb Stuart’s eyes on mine, willing me (I’ll swear) to pull the trigger …

‘Wake up, Great-grandpapa – do!’ ‘Tell us about Jombrown!’ ‘Yes, wiv his toes stickin’ out, all stinky!’ ‘Tell us, tell us …!’

I came back from the dark storm of Harper’s Ferry to the peaceful sunshine of Leicestershire, and the four small faces regarding me with that affectionate impatience that is the crowning reward of great-grandfatherhood: John, handsome and grave and listening; Jemima a year younger, prim ivory perfection with her long raven hair and lashes designed for sweeping hearts (Selina’s inevitable daughter); little golden Alice, Elspeth all over again; and the babe Augustus bursting with sin beneath the mud, a Border Ruffian in a sodden sailor suit … and the only pang is that at ninety-one2 you can’t hope to see ’em grown …

‘John Brown, eh? Well, it’s a long story, you know – and Great-grandmama will be calling us for tea presently … no, Alice, he didn’t have wings, although Miss Prentice is quite right, they did call him the Angel of the Lord … and the Avenging Angel, too …’

‘What’s ’venging?’

‘Getting your own back … no, John, he was quite an ordinary chap, really, rather thin and bony and shabby, with a straggly beard and very bright grey eyes that lit up when he was angry, ever so fierce and grim! But he was quite a kindly old gentleman, too –’

‘Was he as old as you?’

‘Heavens, child, no one’s that old! He was oldish, but pretty spry and full of beans … let’s see, what else? He was a capital cook, why, he could make ham and eggs, and brown fried potatoes to make your mouth water –’

‘Did he make kedgewee? I hate howwid old kedgewee, ugh!’

‘What about the slaves, and him killing lots of people, and getting hung?’ John shook my knee in his impatience.

‘Well, John, I suppose he did kill quite a few people … How, Gus? Why, with his pistols – he had two, just like the cowboys, and he could pull them in a twinkling, ever so quickly.’ And dam’ near blew your Great-grandpapa’s head off, one second asleep and the next blasting lead all over the shop, curse him. ‘And with his sword … although that was before I knew him. Mind you, he had another sword, in our last fight – and you’ll never guess who it had once belonged to. Frederick the Great! What d’you think of that?’

‘Who’s Frederick the Great?’

‘German king, John. Bit of a tick, I believe; used scent and played the flute.’

‘I think Jombrown was howwid!’ announced Jemima. ‘Killing people is wrong!’

‘Not always, dearest. Sometimes you have to, or they’ll kill you.’

‘Great-gran’papa used to kill people, lots of times,’ protests sturdy Augustus. ‘Great-gran’mama told me, when he was a soldier, weren’t you? Choppin’ ’em up, heaps of –’

‘That’s quite diffewent,’ says Jemima, with an approving smile which may well lead me to revise my will in her favour. ‘It’s pwoper for soldiers to kill people.’ And pat on her words came an echo from half a century ago, the deep level voice of J.B. himself, recalling the slaughter of Pottawatomie … ‘They had a right to be killed.’ It was a warm afternoon, but I found myself shivering.

‘Great-grandpapa’s tired,’ whispers John. ‘Let’s go in for tea.’

‘What – tired? Not a bit of it!’ You can’t have grandlings taking pity on you, even at ninety-one. ‘But tea, what? Capital idea! Who’s for a bellyful of gingerbread, eh? Tell you what, pups – you make yourselves decent, straighten your hair, find Gus’s other shoe, put your socks on, Alice – yes, Jemima, you look positively queenly – and we’ll march up to tea, shall we? At least, you lot will, while I call the step and look after remounts. Won’t that be jolly? And we’ll sing his song as we go –’

‘Jombrown’s body? Gory Halooyah?’

‘The very same, Gus! Now, then, fall in, tallest on the right, shortest on the left – heels together, John, eyes front, Jemima, pull in your guts, Augustus, stop giggling, Alice – and I’ll teach you some capital verses you never heard before! Ready?’

I don’t suppose there’s a soul speaks English in the world who couldn’t sing the chorus today, but of course it hadn’t been written when we went down to Harper’s Ferry – J.B.’s army of ragamuffins, adventurers, escaped slaves, rustlers and lunatics. ‘God’s crusaders’, some enthusiast called us – but then again, I’ve read that we were ‘swaggering, swearing bullies and infidels’ (well, thank’ee, sir). We were twenty-one strong, fifteen white (one with pure terror, I can tell you), six black, and all set to conquer Dixie, if you please! We didn’t make it at the time, quite – but we did in the end, by God, didn’t we just, with Sherman’s bugles blowing thirty miles in latitude three hundred to the main …

Not that I gave a two-cent dam for that, you understand, and still don’t. They could have kept their idiotic Civil War for me, for (my own skin’s safety apart) it was the foulest, most useless conflict in history, the mass suicide of the flower of the British-American race – and for what? Black freedom, which would have come in a few years anyway, as sure as sunrise. And all those boys could have been sitting in the twilight, watching their Johns and Jemimas.

Still, I’ve got a soft spot for the old song – and for J.B., for that matter. Aye, that song which, the historian says, was sung by every Union regiment because ‘it dealt not with John Brown’s feeble sword, but with his soul.’ His soul, my eye – as often as not the poor old maniac wasn’t even mentioned, and it would be:

Wild Bill Sherman’s got a rope around his neck,

An’ we’ll all catch hold an’ give-it-one-hell-of-a-pull!

Glory, glory, hallelujah, etc …

Or it might be ‘our sergeant-major’, or Jeff Davis hanging from a sour apple tree, or any of the unprintable choruses that inspired the pious Mrs Howe to write ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory’.3 But all that’s another story, for another day … in the meantime, I taught my small descendants some versions which were entirely to their liking, and we trooped up to the house, the infants in column of twos and the venerable patriarch hobbling painfully behind, flask at the high port, and all waking the echoes with:

John Brown’s donkey’s got an india-rubber tail,

An’ he rubbed it with camphorated oil!

followed by:

Our Great-grandpa saved the Viceroy

In the – good – old – Khyber – Pass!

and concluding with:

Flashy had an army of a hundred Bashi-bazouks

An’ the whole dam’ lot got shot!

Glory, glory, hallelujah …

Spirited stuff, and it was just sheer bad luck that the Bishop and other visiting Pecksniffs should already be taking tea with Elspeth and Miss Prentice when we rolled in through the french windows, the damp and dirty grandlings in full voice and myself measuring my ancient length across the threshold, flask and all. Very well, the grandlings were raucous and dishevelled, and I ain’t at my best sprawled supine on the carpet leaking brandy, but to judge from his lordship’s, disgusted aspect and Miss Prentice’s frozen pince-nez you’d have thought I’d been teaching them to smoke opium and sing ‘One-eyed Riley’.

The upshot was that the infants were packed off in disgrace to a defaulters’ tea of dry bread and milk, Gus was sent to bed early – oh, aye, Jemima ratted on him – and when the guests had departed in an odour of sanctity, withdrawing the hems of their garments from me and making commiserating murmurs to Elspeth, she loosed her wrath on me for an Evil Influence, corrupting young innocence with my barrack-room ribaldry, letting them get their feet wet, and did I know what shoes cost nowadays, and she was Black Affronted, and how was she ever going to look the Bishop in the face again, would I tell her?

Contrition not being my style, and useless anyway, I let the storm blow itself out, and later, having ensured that La Prentice was snug in her lair – polishing her knout and supping gin on the sly, I daresay – I raided the pantry and smuggled gingerbread and lemonade to the grandlings’ bedroom, where at their insistence I regaled them with the story of John Brown (suitably edited for tender ears). They fell asleep in the middle of it, and so did I, among the broken meats on John’s coverlet, and woke at last to the touch of soft lips on my aged brow to find Elspeth shaking her head in fond despair.

Well, the old girl knows I’m past reforming now, and that Jemima’s right: I’ll certainly go to the bad fire. I know one who won’t though, and that’s old Ossawatomie John Brown, ‘that new saint, than whom nothing purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death’, and who made ‘the gallows glorious like the Cross’. That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson on J.B. ‘A saint, noble, brave, trusting in God’, ‘honest, truthful, conscientious’, comparable with William Wallace, Washington, and William Tell – those are the words of Parker and Garrison, who knew him, and they ain’t the half of his worshippers; talk about a mixture of Jesus, Apollo, Goliath and Julius Caesar! On the other hand … ‘a faker, shifty, crafty, vain, selfish, intolerant, brutal’, ‘an unscrupulous soldier of fortune, a horse-thief, a hypocrite’ who didn’t care about freeing slaves and would have been happy to use slave labour himself, a liar, a criminal, and a murderer – that’s his most recent biographer talking. Interesting chap, Brown, wouldn’t you say?

A good deal of it’s true, both sides, and you may take my word for it; scoundrel I may be, but I’ve no axe to grind about J.B.’s reputation. I helped to make it, though, by not shooting him in the back when I had the chance. Didn’t want to, and wouldn’t have had the nerve, anyway.

You might even say that I, all unwitting, launched him on the path to immortal glory. Aye, if there’s a company of saints up yonder, they’ll be dressing by the right on J.B., for when the Recording Angel has racked up all his crimes and lies and thefts and follies and deceits and cold-blooded killings, he’ll still be saved when better men are damned. Why? ’Cos if he wasn’t, there’d be such an almighty roar of indignation from the Heavenly Host it would bust the firmament; God would never live it down. That’s the beauty of a martyr’s crown, you see; it outshines everything, and they don’t come any brighter than old J.B.’s. I’m not saying he deserves it; I only know, perhaps better than anyone, how he came by it.

You will wonder, if you’re familiar with my inglorious record, how I came to take part with John Brown at all. Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady – bearing Freedom’s banner aloft in the noblest cause of all, the liberation of the enslaved and downtrodden? Striking off the shackles at the risk of death and dishonour? Gad, I wish Arnold could have seen me. That’s the irony of it – if I’d bitten the dust at the Ferry, I’d have had a martyr’s crown, too, on top of all the honours and glory I’d already won in Her Majesty’s service (by turning tail and lying and posturing and pinching other chaps’ credit, but nobody knew that, not even wily old Colin Campbell who’d pinned the V.C. on my coat only a few months before). Oh, the Ferry fiasco could have been my finest hour, with the Queen in mourning, Yankee politicos declaiming three-hour tributes full of ten-dollar words and Latin misquotations (not Lincoln, though; he knew me too well), a memorial service in the Rugby chapel, the Haymarket brothels closed in respect, old comrades looking stern and noble … ‘Can’t believe he’s gone … dear old Flash … height of his fame … glorious career before him … goes off to free the niggers … not for gold or guerdon … aye, so like him … quixotic, chivalrous, helpin’ lame dogs … ah, one in ten thousand … I say, seen his widow, have you? Gad, look at ’em bounce! Rich as Croesus, too, they tell me …’

There’d have been no talk of roasted fags or expulsion for sottish behaviour, either. Die in a good cause and they’ll forgive you anything.

But I didn’t, thank God, and as any of you who have read my other memoirs will have guessed, I’d not have been within three thousand miles of Harper’s Ferry, or blasted Brown, but for the ghastliest series of mischances: three hellish coincidences – three, mark you! – that even Dickens wouldn’t have used for fear of being hooted at in the street. But they happened, with that damned Nemesis logic that has haunted me all my life, and landed me in more horrors than I can count. Mustn’t complain, though; I’m still here, cash in hand, the grandlings upstairs asleep, and Elspeth in her boudoir reading the Countess of Cardigan’s Recollections (in which, little does my dear one suspect, I appear under the name of ‘Baldwin’, and a wild night that was, but no mention, thank heaven, of the time I was locked in the frenzied embrace of Fanny Paget, Cardigan himself knocked on the door, I dived trouserless beneath the sofa, found a private detective already in situ, and had to lie beside the brute while Cardigan and Fanny galloped the night away two feet above our heads. Dammit, we were still there when her husband came home and blacked her eye. Serve her right; Cardigan, I ask you! Some women have no taste).

However, that’s a far cry from the Shenandoah, but before I tell you about J.B. I must make one thing clear, for my own credit and good name’s sake, and it’s this: I care not one tuppenny hoot about slavery, and never did. I can’t say it’s none of my biznai, because it was once: in my time, I’ve raided blacks from the Dahomey Coast, shipped ’em across the Middle Passage, driven them on a plantation – and run them to freedom on the Underground Railroad and across the Ohio ice-floes with a bullet in my rump, to say nothing of abetting J.B.’s lunatic scheme of establishing a black republic – in Virginia, of all places. Set up an Orange Lodge in the Vatican, why don’t you?

The point is that I was forced into all these things against my will – by gad, you could say I was ‘enslaved’ into them. For that matter, I’ve been a slave in earnest – at least, they put me up for sale in Madagascar, and ’twasn’t my fault nobody bid; Queen Ranavalona got me without paying a penny, and piling into that lust-maddened monster was slavery, if you like, with the prospect of being flayed alive if I failed to give satisfaction.fn1 I’ve been a fag at Rugby, too.

So when I say I don’t mind about slavery, I mean I’m easy about the institution, so long as it don’t affect me; whenever it did, I was agin it. Selfish, callous, and immoral, says you, and I agree; unprincipled, too – unlike the Holy Joe abolitionist who used to beat his breast about his black brother while drawing his dividend from the mill that was killing his white sister – aye, and in such squalor as no Dixie planter would have tolerated for his slaves. (Don’t mistake me; I hold no rank in the Salvation Army, and I’ve never lifted a finger for our working poor except to flip ’em a tip, and employ them as necessary. I just know there’s more than one kind of slavery.)

Anyway, if life has taught me anything, it’s that the wealth and comfort of the fortunate few (who include our contented middle classes as well as the nobility) will always depend on the sweat and poverty of the unfortunate many, whether they’re toiling on plantations or licking labels in sweatshops at a penny a thousand. It’s the way of the world, and until Utopia comes, which it shows no sign of doing, thank God, I’ll just rub along with the few, minding my own business.

So you understand, I hope, that they could have kept every nigger in Dixie in bondage for all I cared – or freed them. I was indifferent, spiritually, and only wish I could have been so, corporally. And before you start thundering at me from your pulpit, just remember the chap who said that if the union of the United States could only be preserved by maintaining slavery, that was all right with him. What’s his name again? Ah, yes – Abraham Lincoln.

And now for old John Brown and the Path to Glory, not the worst of my many adventures, but just about the unlikeliest. It had no right to happen, truly, or so it strikes me when I look back. God knows I haven’t led a tranquil life, but in review there seems to have been some form and order to it – Afghanistan, Borneo, Madagascar, Punjab, Germany, Slave Coast and Mississippi, Russia and the back o’ beyond, India in the Mutiny, China, American war, Mexico … and there, you see, I’ve missed out J.B. altogether, because he don’t fit the pattern, somehow. He’s there, though, whiskers, six-guns, texts, and all, between India and China – and nought to do with either, right out o’ the mainstream, as though some malevolent djinn had plucked me from my course, dipped me into Harper’s Ferry, and then whisked me back to the Army again.

It began (it usually does) with a wanton nymph in Calcutta at the back-end of ’58. But for her, it would never have happened. Plunkett, her name was, the sporty young wife of an elderly pantaloon who was a High Court judge or something of that order. I was homeward bound from the Mutiny, into which I’d been thrust by the evil offices of my Lord Palmerston, who’d despatched me to India on secret work two years before;fn2 thanks to dear old Pam, I’d been through the thick of that hellish rebellion, from the Meerut massacre to the battle of Gwalior, fleeing for my life from Thugs and pandies, spending months as a sowar of native cavalry, blazing away at the Cawnpore barricade, sneaking disguised out of Lucknow with a demented Irishman in tow, and coming within an ace of being eaten by crocodiles, torn asunder on the rack, and blown from a gun as a condemned mutineer – oh, aye, the diplomatic’s the life for a lad of metal, I can tell you. True, there had been compensations in the delectable shape of Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, and a Victoria Cross and knighthood at the end of the day, and the only fly in the ointment as I rolled down to Calcutta had been the discovery that during my absence from England some scribbling swine had published his reminiscences of Rugby School, with me as the villain of the piece. A vile volume entitled Tom Brown’s Schooldays, on every page of which the disgusting Flashy was to be found torturing fags, shirking, toadying, lying, whining for mercy, and boozing himself to disgraceful expulsion – every word of it true, and all the worse for that.

It was with relief that I learned, by eavesdropping in Calcutta’s messes and hotels, that no one seemed to have heard of the damned book, or weren’t letting on if they had. It’s been the same ever since, I’m happy to say; not a word of reproach or a covert snigger, even, although the thing must have been read in every corner of the civilised world by now. Why, when President Grant discovered that I was the Flashman of Tom Brown he just looked baffled and had another drink.

The fact is, some truths don’t matter. I’ve been seventy years an admired hero, the Hector of Afghanistan, the chap who led the Light Brigade, daredevil survivor of countless stricken fields, honoured by Queen and Country, V.C. and Medal of Honour – folk simply don’t want to know that such a paladin was a rotter and bully in childhood, and if he was, they don’t care. They put it from their minds, never suspecting that boy and man are one, and that all my fame and glory has been earned by accident, false pretence, cowardice, doing the dirty, and blind luck. Only I know that. So my shining reputation’s safe, which is how the public want it, bless ’em.

It’s always been the same. Suppose some learned scholar were to discover a Fifth Gospel which proved beyond doubt that Our Lord survived the Cross and became a bandit or a slave-trader, or a politician, even – d’you think it would disturb the Christian faith one little bit? Of course not; ’twouldn’t even be denied, likely, just ignored. Hang it, I’ve seen the evidence, in black and white in our secret files, that Benjamin Franklin was a British spy right through the American Revolution, selling out the patriots for all he was worth – but would any Yankee believe that, if ’twas published? Never, because it’s not what they want to believe.4

I reached Calcutta, then, to find myself feted on all sides – and there was no shortage of heroes to be worshipped after the Mutiny, you may be sure. But no other had the V.C. and a knighthood (for word of the latter had leaked out, thanks to Billy Russell, I daresay), or stood six feet two with black whiskers and Handsome Harry’s style. I’d had my fill of fame in the past, of course, and was all for it, but I knew how to carry it off, modest and manly, not too bluff, and with a pinch of salt.