Flashman in the Great Game

And as he hands me down to the platform, you may be sure the local folk are all on hand, bringing their brats to stare and giggle at the big old buffer in his tweed cape and monstrous white whiskers (‘There he is! The V.C. man, Sir Harry Flashman – aye, auld Flashy, him that charged wi’ the Light Brigade and killed a’ the niggers at Kau-bool – Goad, but isnae he the auld yin? – hip, hooray!’). So I acknowledge the cheers with a wave, bluff and hearty, as I step into the dog-cart, stepping briskly to escape the inevitable bemedalled veteran who comes shuffling after me, hoping I’ll slip him sixpence for a dram when he assures me that we once stood together in the Highlanders’ line at Balaclava. Lying old bastard, he was probably skulking in bed.

Not that I’d blame him if he was, mark you; given the chance I’d have skulked in mine – and not just at Balaclava, neither, but at every battle and skirmish I’ve sweated and scampered through during fifty inglorious years of unwilling soldiering. (Leastways, I know they were inglorious, but the country don’t, thank heaven, which is why they’ve rewarded me with general rank and the knighthood and a double row of medals on my left tit. Which shows you what cowardice and roguery can do, given a stalwart appearance, long legs, and a thumping slice of luck. Aye, well whip up, driver, we mustn’t keep royalty waiting.)

But to return to the point, which is the Mutiny, and that terrible, incredible journey that began at Balmoral – well, it was as ghastly a road as any living man travelled in my time. I’ve seen a deal of war, and agree with Sherman that it’s hell, but the Mutiny was the Seventh Circle under the Pit. Of course, it had its compensations: for one, I came through it, pretty whole, which is more than Havelock and Harry East and Johnny Nicholson did, enterprising lads that they were. (What’s the use of a campaign if you don’t survive it?) I did, and it brought me my greatest honour (totally undeserved, I needn’t tell you), and a tidy enough slab of loot which bought and maintains my present place in Leicestershire – I reckon the plunder’s better employed keeping me and my tenants in drink, than it was decorating a nigger temple for the edification of a gang of blood-sucking priests. And along the Mutiny road I met and loved that gorgeous, wicked witch Lakshmibai – there were others, too, naturally, but she was the prime piece.

One other thing about the Mutiny, before I get down to cases – I reckon it must be about the only one of my campaigns that I was pitched into through no fault of mine. On other occasions, I’ll own, I’ve been to blame; for a man with a white liver a yard wide I’ve had a most unhappy knack of landing myself neck-deep in the slaughter through my various follies – to wit, talking too much (that got me into the Afghan débâcle of ’41); playing the fool in pool-rooms (the Crimea); believing everything Abraham Lincoln told me (American Civil War); inviting a half-breed Hunkpapa whore to a regimental ball (the Sioux Rising of ’76), and so on; the list’s as long as my arm. But my involvement in the Mutiny was all Palmerston’s doing (what disaster of the ’fifties wasn’t?).

It came out of as clear and untroubled a sky as you could wish, a few months after my return from the Crimea, where, as you may know, I’d won fresh laurels through my terrified inability to avoid the most gruelling actions. I had stood petrified in the Thin Red Streak, charged with the Heavies and Lights, been taken prisoner by the Russians, and after a most deplorable series of adventures (in which I was employed as chief stud to a nobleman’s daughter, was pursued by hordes of wolves and Cossacks, and finally was caught up in a private war between Asian bandits and a Ruski army bound for India – it’s all in my memoirs somewhere) had emerged breathless and lousy at Peshawar.fn1

There, as if I hadn’t had trouble enough, I was restoring my powers by squandering them on one of those stately, hungry Afghan Amazons, and she must have been a long sight better at coupling than cooking, for something on her menu gave me the cholera. I was on the broad of my back for months, and it took a slow, restful voyage home before I was my own man again, in prime fettle for the reunion with my loving Elspeth and to enjoy the role of a returned hero about town. And, I may add, a retired hero; oxen and wainropes weren’t going to drag Flashy back to the Front again. (I’ve made the same resolve a score of times, and by God I’ve meant it, but you can’t fight fate, especially when he’s called Palmerston.)

However, there I was in the summer of ’56, safely content on half pay as a staff colonel, with not so much as a sniff of war in sight, except the Persian farce, and that didn’t matter. I was comfortably settled with Elspeth and little Havvy (the first fruit of our union, a guzzling lout of seven) in a fine house off Berkeley Square which Elspeth’s inheritance maintained in lavish style, dropping by occasionally at Horse Guards, leading the social life, clubbing and turfing, whoring here and there as an occasional change from my lawful brainless beauty, and being lionised by all London – well, I’d stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord (ostensibly) hadn’t I, and enough had leaked out about my subsequent secret exploits in Central Asia (though government was damned cagey about them, on account of our delicate peace negotiations with Russia) to suggest that Flashy had surpassed all his former heroics. So with the country in a patriotic fever about its returning braves, I was ace-high in popular esteem – there was even talk that I’d get one of the new Victoria Crosses (for what that was worth) but it’s my belief that Airey and Cardigan scotched it between them. Jealous bastards.

I suspect that Airey, who’d been chief of staff to Raglan in Crimea, hadn’t forgotten my minor dereliction of duty at the Alma, when the Queen’s randy little cousin Willy got his fool head blown off while under my care. And Cardigan loathed me, not least because I’d once emerged drunk, in the nick of time, from a wardrobe to prevent him cocking his lustful leg over my loving Elspeth. (She was no better than I was, you know.) And since coming home, I hadn’t given him cause to love me any better.

You see, there was a deal of fine malicious tittle-tattle going about that summer, over Cardigan’s part in the Light Brigade fiasco – not so much about his responsibility for the disaster, which was debatable, if you ask me, but for his personal behaviour at the guns. He’d been at the head of the charge, right enough, with me alongside on a bolting horse, farting my fearful soul out, but after we’d reached the battery he’d barely paused to exchange a cut or two with the Ruski gunners before heading for home and safety again. Shocking bad form in a commander, says I, who was trying to hide under a gun limber at the time – not that I think for a moment that he was funking it; he hadn’t the brains to be frightened, our Lord Haw-Haw. But he had retreated without undue delay, and since he was never short of enemies eager to believe the worst, the gossips were having a field day now. There were angry letters in the press, and even a law-suit,1 and since I’d been in the thick of the action, it was natural that I should be asked about it.

In fact, it was George Paget, who’d commanded the 4th Lights in the charge, who put the thing to me point-blank in the card-room at White’s (can’t imagine what I was doing there; must have been somebody’s guest) in front of a number of people, civilians mostly, but I know Spottswood was there, and old Scarlett of the Heavies, I think.

‘You were neck and neck with Cardigan,’ says Paget, ‘and in the battery before anyone else. Now, God knows he’s not my soul-mate, but all this talk’s getting a shade raw. Did you see him in the battery or not?’

Well, I had, but I wasn’t saying so – far be it from me to clear his lordship’s reputation when there was a chance of damaging it. So I said offhand:

‘Don’t ask me, George; I was too busy hunting for your cigars,’ which caused a guffaw.

‘No gammon, Flash,’ says he, looking grim, and asked again, in his tactful way: ‘Did Cardigan cut out, or not?’

There were one or two shocked murmurs, and I shuffled a pack, frowning, before I answered. There are more ways than one of damning a man’s credit, and I wanted to give Cardigan of my best. So I looked uncomfortable, and then growled, slapped the pack down as I rose, looked Paget in the eye, and said:

‘It’s all by and done with now, ain’t it? Let’s drop it, George, shall we?’ And I went out then and there, leaving behind the impression that bluff, gallant Flashy didn’t want to talk about it – which convinced them all that Cardigan had shirked, better than if I’d said so straight out, or called him a coward to his face. I had a chance to do that, too, a bare two hours later, when the man himself came raging up to me with a couple of his toadies in tow, just as Spottswood and I were coming out of the Guards Club. The hall was full of fellows, goggling at the sensation.

‘Fwashman! You there, sir!’ he croaked – they were absolutely the first words between us since the Charge, nearly two years before. He was breathing frantically, like a man who has been running, his beaky face all mottled and his grey whiskers quaking with fury. ‘Fwashman – this is intolewable! My honour is impugned – scandalous lies, sir! And they tell me that you don’t deny them! Well, sir? Well? Haw-haw?’

I tilted back my tile with a forefinger and looked him up and down, from his bald head and pop eyes to his stamping foot. He looked on the edge of apoplexy; a delightful sight.

‘What lies are these, my lord?’ says I, very steady.

‘You know vewy well!’ he cried. ‘Bawacwava, sir – the storming of the battewy! Word George Paget has asked you, in pubwic, whether you saw me at the guns – and you have the effwontewy to tell him you don’t know! Damnation, sir! And one of my own officers, too—’

‘A former member of your regiment, my lord – I admit the fact.’

‘Blast your impudence!’ he roared, frothing at me. ‘Will you give me the lie? Will you say I was not at the guns?’

I settled my hat and pulled on my gloves while he mouthed.

‘My lord,’ says I, speaking deliberately clear, ‘I saw you in the advance. In the battery itself – I was otherwise engaged, and had no leisure nor inclination to look about me to see who was where. For that matter, I did not see Lord George himself until he pulled me to my feet. I assumed –’ and I bore on the word ever so slightly ‘– that you were on hand, at the head of your command. But I do not know, and frankly I do not care. Good day to you, my lord.’ And with a little nod I turned to the door.

His voice pursued me, cracking with rage.

‘Colonel Fwashman!’ he cried. ‘You are a viper!’

I turned at that, making myself go red in the face in righteous wrath, but I knew what I was about; he was getting no blow or challenge from me – he shot too damned straight for that.

‘Indeed, my lord,’ says I. ‘Yet I don’t wriggle and turn.’ And I left him gargling, well pleased with myself. But, as I say, it probably cost me the V.C. at the time; for all the rumours, he was still a power at Horse Guards, and well insinuated at Court, too.

However, our little exchange did nothing to diminish my popularity at large; a few nights later I got a tremendous cheer at the Guards Dinner at Surrey Gardens, with chaps standing on the table shouting ‘Huzza for Flash Harry!’ and singing ‘Garryowen’ and tumbling down drunk – how they did it on a third of a bottle of bubbly beat me.2 Cardigan wasn’t there, sensible fellow; they’d have hooted him out of the kingdom. As it was, Punch carried a nasty little dig about his absence, and wondered that he hadn’t sent along his spurs, since he’d made such good use of them in retiring from the battery.

Of course, Lord Haw-Haw wasn’t the only general to come under the public lash that summer; the rest of ’em, like Lucan and Airey, got it too for the way they’d botched the campaign. So while we gallant underlings enjoyed roses and laurels all the way, our idiot commanders were gainfully employed exchanging recriminations, writing furious letters to the papers saying ’twasn’t their fault, but some other fellow’s, and there had even been a commission set up to investigate their misconduct of the war.

Unfortunately, government picked the wrong men to do the investigating – MacNeill and Tulloch – for they turned out to be honest, and reported that indeed our high command hadn’t been fit to dig latrines, or words to that effect. Well, that plainly wouldn’t do, so another commission had to be hurriedly formed to investigate afresh, and this time get the right answer, and no nonsense about it. Well, they did, and exonerated everybody, hip-hip-hurrah and Rule, Britannia. Which was what you’d have expected any half-competent government to stage-manage in the first place, but Palmerston was in the saddle by then, and he wasn’t really good at politics, you know.

To crown it all, in the middle of the scandal the Queen herself had words about it with Hardinge, the Commander-in-Chief, at the Aldershot Review, and poor old Hardinge fell down paralysed and never smiled again. It’s true; I was there myself, getting soaked through, and Hardinge went down like a shanghaied sailor, with all his faculties gone, not that he had many to start with. Some said it was a judgement on the Army and government corruption, so there.

All of which mattered rather less to me than the width of Elspeth’s crinolines, but if I’ve digressed it is merely to show you how things were in England then, and also because I can never resist the temptation to blackguard Cardigan as he deserves. Meanwhile, I was going happily about my business, helping my dear wife spend her cash – which she did like a clipper-hand in port, I’m bound to say – and you would have said we were a blissful young couple, turning a blind eye to each other’s infidelities and galloping in harness when we felt like it, which was frequent, for if anything she got more beddable with the passing years.

And then came the invitation to Balmoral, which reduced Elspeth to a state of nervous exultation close to hysterics, and took me clean aback. I’d have imagined that if the Royal family ever thought of me at all, it was as the chap who’d been remiss enough to lose one of the Queen’s cousins – but mind you, she had so many of ’em she probably didn’t notice, or if she did, hadn’t heard that I was to blame for it. No, I’ve puzzled over it sometimes, and can only conclude that the reason we were bidden to Balmoral that September was that Russia was still very much the topic of the day, what with the new Tsar’s coronation and the recent peace, and I was one of the most senior men to have been a prisoner in Russia’s hands.

I didn’t have leisure to speculate at the time, though, for Elspeth’s frenzy at the thought of being ‘in attendance’, as she chose to call it, claimed everyone’s attention within a mile of Berkeley Square. Being a Scotch tradesman’s daughter, my darling was one degree more snobbish than a penniless Spanish duke, and in the days before we went north her condescension to her middle-class friends would have turned your stomach. Between gloating, and babbling about how she and the Queen would discuss dressmaking while Albert and I boozed in the gunroom (she had a marvellous notion of court life, you see), she went into declines at the thought that she would come out in spots, or have her drawers fall down when being presented. You must have endured the sort of thing yourself.

‘Oh, Harry, Jane Speedicut will be green! You and I – guests of Her Majesty! It will be the finest thing – and I have my new French dresses – the ivory, the beige silk, the lilac satin, and the lovely, lovely green which old Admiral Lawson so admired – if you think it is not a leetle low for the Queen? And my barrege for Sunday – will there be members of the nobility staying also? – will there be ladies whose husbands are of lower rank than you? Ellen Parkin – Lady Parkin, indeed! – was consumed with spite when I told her – oh, and I must have another maid who can manage my hair, for Sarah is too maladroit for words, although she is very passable with dresses – what shall I wear to picnics? – for we shall be bound to walk in the lovely Highland countryside – oh, Harry, what do you suppose the Queen reads? – and shall I call the Prince “highness” or “sir”?’

I was glad, I can tell you, when we finally reached Abergeldie, where we had rooms in the castle where guests were put up – for Balmoral was very new then, and Albert was still busy having the finishing touches put to it. Elspeth by this time was too nervous even to talk, but her first glimpse of our royal hosts reduced her awe a trifle, I think. We took a stroll the first afternoon, in the direction of Balmoral, and on the road encountered what seemed to be a family of tinkers led by a small washerwoman and an usher who had evidently pinched his headmaster’s clothes. Fortunately, I recognised them as Victoria and Albert out with their brood, and knew enough simply to raise my hat as we passed, for they loathed to be treated as royalty when they were playing at being commoners. Elspeth didn’t even suspect who it was until we were past, and when I told her she swooned by the roadside. I revived her by threatening to carry her into the bushes and molest her, and on the way back she observed that really Her Majesty had looked quite royal, but in a common sort of way.

By the time we were presented at Balmoral, though, the next day, she was high up the scale again, and the fact that we shared the waiting-room beforehand with some lord or other and his beak-nosed lady, who looked at us as though we were riff-raff, reduced my poor little scatterbrain to quaking terror. I’d met the royals before, of course, and tried to reassure her, whispering that she looked a stunner (which was true) and not to be put out by Lord and Lady Puffbuttock, who were now ignoring us with that icy incivility which is the stamp of our lower-class aristocracy. (I know; I’m one myself nowadays.)

It was quite handy that our companions kept their noses in the air, though, for it gave me the chance to loop a ribbon from the lady’s enormous crinoline on to an occasional table without her knowing, and when the doors to the royal drawing-room were opened she set off and brought the whole thing crashing down, crockery and all, in full view of the little court circle. I kept Elspeth in an iron grip, and steered her round the wreckage, and so Colonel and Mrs Flashman made their bows while the doors were hurriedly closed behind us, and the muffled sounds of the Puffbuttocks being extricated by flunkeys was music to my ears, even if it did make the Queen look more pop-eyed than usual. The moral is: don’t put on airs with Flashy, and if you do, keep your crinolines out of harm’s way.

And, as it turned out, to Elspeth’s lifelong delight and my immense satisfaction, she and the Queen got on like port and nuts from the first. Elspeth, you see, was one of those females who are so beautiful that even other women can’t help liking ’em, and in her idiot way she was a lively and engaging soul. The fact that she was Scotch helped, too, for the Queen was in one of her Jacobite moods just then, and by the grace of God someone had read Waverley to Elspeth when she was a child, and taught her to recite ‘The Lady of the Lake’.

I had been dreading meeting Albert again, in case he mentioned his whoremongering Nephew Willy, now deceased, but all he did was say:

‘Ah, Colonel Flash-mann – haff you read Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime?’

I said I hadn’t, yet, but I’d be at the railway library first thing in the morning, and he looked doleful and went on:

‘It warns us that bureaucratic central government, far from curing the ills of revolution, can actually arouse them.’

I said I’d often thought that, now that he mentioned it, and he nodded and said: ‘Italy is very unsatisfactory,’ which brought our conversation to a close. Fortunately old Ellenborough, who’d been chief in India at the time of my Kabul heroics, was among those present, and he buttonholed me, which was a profound relief. And then the Queen addressed me, in that high sing-song of hers:

‘Your dear wife, Colonel Flashman, tells me that you are quite recovered from the rigours of your Russian adventures, which you shall tell us of presently. They seem to be a quite extraordinary people; Lord Granville writes from Petersburg that Lady Wodehouse’s Russian maid was found eating the contents of one of her ladyship’s dressing-table pots – it was castor oil pomatum for the hair! What a remarkable extravagance, was it not?’

That was my cue, of course, to regale them with a few domestic anecdotes of Russia, and its primitive ways, which went down well, with the Queen nodding approval and saying: ‘How barbarous! How strange!’ while Elspeth glowed to see her hero holding the floor. Albert joined in in his rib-tickling way to observe that no European state offered such fertile soil for the seeds of socialism as Russia did, and that he feared that the new Tsar had little intellect or character.

‘So Lord Granville says,’ was the Queen’s prim rejoinder, ‘but I do not think it is quite his place to make such observations on a royal personage. Do you not agree, Mrs Flashman?’

Old Ellenborough, who was a cheery, boozy buffer, said to me that he hoped I had tried to civilise the Russians a little by teaching them cricket, and Albert, who had no more humour than the parish trough, looked stuffy and says:

‘I am sure Colonel Flash-mann would do no such thing. I cannot unner-stend this passion for cricket; it seems to me a great waste of time. What is the proff-it to a younk boy in crouching motionless in a field for hours on end? Em I nott right, Colonel?’

‘Well, sir,’ says I, ‘I’ve looked out in the deep field myself long enough to sympathise with you; it’s a great fag, to be sure. But perhaps, when the boy’s a man, his life may depend on crouching motionless, behind a Khyber rock or a Burmese bush – so a bit of practice may not come amiss, when he’s young.’

Which was sauce, if you like, but I could never resist the temptation, in grovelling to Albert, to put a pinch of pepper down his shirt. It was in my character of bluff, no-nonsense Harry, too, and a nice reminder of the daring deeds I’d done. Ellenborough said ‘Hear, hear’, and even Albert looked only half-sulky, and said all diss-cipline was admirable, but there must be better ways of instilling it; the Prince of Wales, he said, should nott play cricket, but some more constructiff game.

After that we had tea, very informal, and Elspeth distinguished herself by actually prevailing on Albert to eat a cucumber sandwich; she’ll have him in the bushes in a minute, thinks I, and on that happy note our first visit concluded, with Elspeth going home on a cloud to Abergeldie.

But if it was socially useful, it wasn’t much of a holiday, although Elspeth revelled in it. She went for walks with the Queen, twice (calling themselves Mrs Fitzjames and Mrs Marmion, if you please), and even made Albert laugh when charades were played in the evening, by impersonating Helen of Troy with a Scotch accent. I couldn’t even get a grin out of him; we went shooting with the other gentlemen, and it was purgatory having to stalk at his pace. He was keen as mustard, though, and slaughtered stags like a Ghazi on hashish – you’ll hardly credit it, but his notion of sport was that a huge long trench should be dug so that we could sneak up on the deer unobserved; he’d have done it, too, but the local ghillies showed so much disgust at the idea that he dropped it. He couldn’t understand their objections, though; to him all that mattered was killing the beasts.

For the rest, he prosed interminably and played German music on the piano, with me applauding like hell. Things weren’t made easier by the fact that he and Victoria weren’t getting on too well just then; she had just discovered (and confided to Elspeth) that she was in foal for the ninth time, and she took her temper out on dear Albert – the trouble was, he was so bloody patient with her, which can drive a woman to fury faster than anything I know. And he was always right, which was worse. So they weren’t dealing at all well, and he spent most of the daylight hours tramping up Glen Bollocks, or whatever they call it, roaring ‘Ze gunn!’ and butchering every animal in view.