Flashman in the Great Game

Personally, I put that down to the fact that in my young days India was a middle-class place for the British, where society people didn’t serve if they could help it. (Cardigan, for example, took one look and fled.) It’s different now, of course; since it became a safe place many of our best and most highly connected people have let the light of their countenances shine on India, with the results you might expect – prices have gone up, service has gone down, and the women have got clap. So they tell me.

Mind you, I could see things were changing even in ’56, when I landed at Bombay. My first voyage to India, sixteen years before, had lasted four months on a creaking East Indiaman; this time, in natty little government steam sloops, it had taken just about half that time, even with a vile journey by camel across the Suez isthmus in between. And even from Bombay you could get the smell of civilisation; they’d started the telegraph, and were pushing ahead with the first railways, there were more white faces and businesses to be seen, and people weren’t talking, as they’d used to, of India as though it were a wild jungle with John Company strongholds here and there. In my early days, a journey from Calcutta to Peshawar had seemed half round the world, but no longer. It was as though the Company was at last seeing India as one vast country – and realising that now the wars with the Sikhs and Maharattas and Afghans were things of the past, it was an empire that had to be ruled and run, quite apart from fighting and showing a nice profit in Leadenhall Street.

It was far busier than I remembered it, and somehow the civilians seemed more to the fore nowadays than the military. Once the gossip on the verandahs had all been about war in the north, or the Thugs, or the bandit chiefs of the Ghats who’d have to be looked up some day; now it was as often as not about new mills or factories, and even schools, and how there would be a railroad clear over to Madras in the next five years, and you’d be able to journey from Mrs Blackwell’s in Bombay to the Auckland in Calcutta without once putting on your boots.

‘All sounds very peaceful and prosperous,’ says I, over a peg and a whore at Mother Sousa’s – like a good little political, you see, I was conducting my first researches in the best gossip-mart I could find (fine mixed clientele, Mother Sousa’s, with nothing blacker than quarter-caste and exhibition dances that would have made a Paris gendarme blench – well, if it’s scuttle-butt you want, you don’t go to a cathedral, do you?). The chap who’d bought me the peg laughed and said:

‘Prosperous? I should just think so – my firm’s divvy is up forty per cent, and we’ll have new factories at Lahore and Allahabad working before Easter. Building churches – and when the universities come there’ll be contracts to last out my service, I can tell you.’

‘Universities?’ says I. ‘Not for the niggers, surely?’

‘The native peoples,’ says he primly – and the little snirp hadn’t been out long enough to get his nose peeled – ‘will soon be advanced beyond those of any country on earth. Heathen countries, that is. Lie still, you black bitch, can’t you see I’m fagged out? Yes, Lord Canning is very strong on education, I believe, and spreading the gospel, too. Well, that’s bricks and mortar, ain’t it? – that’s where to put your money, my boy.’

‘Dear me,’ says I, ‘at this rate I’ll be out of a job, I can see.’

‘Military, are you? Well, don’t fret, old fellow; you can always apply to be sent to the frontiers.’

‘Quiet as that, is it? Even round Jhansi?’

‘Wherever’s that, my dear chap?’

He was just a pipsqueak, of course, and knew nothing; the little yellow piece I was exercising hadn’t heard of Jhansi either, and when I asked her at a venture what chapattis were good for except eating, she didn’t bat an eye, but giggled and said I was a verree fonnee maan, and must buy her meringues, not chapattis, yaas? You may think I was wasting my time, sniffing about in Bombay, but it’s my experience that if there’s anything untoward in a country – even one as big as India – you can sometimes get a scent in the most unexpected places, just from the way the natives look and answer. But it was the same whoever I talked to, merchant or military, whore or missionary; no ripples at all. After a couple of days, when I’d got the old Urdu bat rolling familiarly off my palate again, I even browned up and put on a puggareefn1 and coat and pyjamys, and loafed about the Bund bazaar, letting on I was a Mekran coast trader, and listening to the clack. I came out rotten with fleas, stinking of nautch-oil and cheap perfume and cooking ghee, with my ears full of beggars’ whines and hawkers’ jabbering and the clang of the booths – but that was all. Still, it helped to get India back under my hide again, and that’s important, if you intend to do anything as a political.

Hullo, says you, what’s this? – not Flashy taking his duty seriously for once, surely. Well, I was, and for a good reason. I didn’t take Pam’s forebodings seriously, but I knew I was bound to go to Jhansi and make some sort of showing in the task he’d given me – the thing was to do it quickly. If I could have a couple of official chats with this Rani woman, look into the business of the sepoys’ cakes, and conclude that Skene, the Jhansi political, was a nervous old woman, I could fire off a report to Calcutta and withdraw gracefully. What I must not do was linger – because if there was any bottom to Pam’s anxieties, Jhansi might be full of Ignatieff and his jackals before long, and I wanted to be well away before that happened.

So I didn’t linger in Bombay. On the third day I took the road north-east towards Jhansi, travelling in good style by bullock-hackery, which is just a great wooden room on wheels, in which you have your bed and eat your meals, and your groom and cook and bearer squat on the roof. They’ve gone out now, of course, with the railway, but they were a nice leisurely way of travelling, and I stopped off at messes along the road, and kept my ears open. None of the talk chimed with what I’d heard at Balmoral, and the general feeling was that the country had never been so quiet. Which was heartening, even if it was what you’d expect, down-country.

I purposely kept clear of any politicals, because I wanted to form my own judgements without getting any uncomfortable news that I didn’t want to hear. However, up towards Mhow, who should I run into but Johnny Nicholson, whom I hadn’t seen since Afghanistan, fifteen years before, trotting along on a Persian pony and dressed like a Baluchi robber with a beard down to his belly, and a couple of Sikh lancers in tow. We fell on each other like old chums – he didn’t know me well, you see, but mostly by my fearsome reputation; he was one of your play-up-and-fear-God paladins, full of zeal and athirst for glory, was John, and said his prayers and didn’t drink and thought women were either nuns or mothers. He was very big by now, I discovered, and just coming down for leave before he took up as resident at Peshawar.

By rights I shouldn’t have mentioned my mission to anyone, but this was too good a chance to miss. There wasn’t a downier bird in all India than Nicholson, or one who knew the country better, and you could have trusted him with anything, money even. So I told him I was bound for Jhansi, and why – the chapattis, the Rani, and the Russians. He listened, fingering his beard and squinting into the distance, while we squatted by the road drinking coffee.

‘Jhansi, eh?’ says he. ‘Pindari robber country – Thugs, too. Trust you to pick the toughest nut south of the Khyber. Maharatta chieftains – wouldn’t turn my back on any of ’em, and if you tell me there have been Russian agitators at work, I’m not surprised. Any number of ugly-looking copers and traders have been sliding south with the caravans up our way this year past, but not many guns, you see – that’s what we keep our accounts by. But I don’t like this news about chapattis passing among the sepoys.’

‘You don’t think it amounts to anything, surely?’ I found all his cheerful references to Thugs and Pindaris damned disconcerting; he was making Jhansi sound as bad as Afghanistan.

‘I don’t know,’ says he, very thoughtful. ‘But I do know that this whole country’s getting warm. Don’t ask me how I know – Irish instinct if you like. Oh, I know it looks fine from Bombay or Calcutta, but sometimes I look around and ask myself what we’re sitting on, out here. Look at it – we’re holding a northern frontier against the toughest villains on earth: Pathans, Sikhs, Baluchis, and Afghanistan thrown in, with Russia sitting on the touchline waiting their chance. In addition, down-country, we’re nominal masters of a collection of native states, half of them wild as Barbary, ruled by princes who’d cut our throats for three-pence. Why? Because we’ve tried to civilise ’em – we’ve clipped the tyrants’ wings, abolished abominations like suttee and thugee, cancelled their worst laws and instituted fair ones. We’ve reformed ’em until they’re sick – and started the telegraph, the railroad, schools, hospitals, all the rest of it.’

This sounded to me like a man riding his pet hobby; I couldn’t see why any of this should do anything but please the people.

‘The people don’t count! They never do. It’s the rulers that matter, the rajas and the nabobs – like this rani of yours in Jhansi. They’ve squeezed this country for centuries, and Dalhousie put a stop to it. Of course it’s for the benefit of the poor folk, but they don’t know that – they believe what their princes tell ’em. And what they tell ’em is that the British Sirkar is their enemy, because it stops them burning their widows, and murdering each other in the name of Kali, and will abolish their religion and force Christianity on them if it can.’

‘Oh, come, John,’ says I, ‘they’ve been saying that for years.’

‘Well, there’s something in it.’ He looked troubled, in a stuffy religious way. ‘I’m a Christian, I hope, or try to be, and I pray I shall see the day when the Gospel is the daily bread of every poor benighted soul on this continent, and His praise is sung in a thousand churches. But I could wish our people went more carefully about it. These are a devout people, Flashman, and their beliefs, misguided though they are, must not be taken lightly. What do they think, when they hear Christianity taught in the schools – in the jails, even – and when colonels preach to their regiments?5 Let the prince, or the agitator, whisper in their ears “See how the British will trample on thy holy things, which they respect not. See how they will make Christians of you.” They will believe him. And they are such simple folk, and their eyes are closed. D’you know,’ he went on, ‘there’s a sect in Kashmir that even worships me?’

‘Good for you,’ says I. ‘D’ye take up a collection?’

‘I try to reason with them – but it does no good. I tell you, India won’t be converted in a day, or in years. It must come slowly, if surely. But our missionaries – good, worthy men – press on apace, and cannot see the harm they may do.’ He sighed. ‘Yet can one find it in one’s heart to blame them, old fellow, when one considers the blessings that God’s grace would bring to this darkened continent? It is very hard.’ And he looked stern and nobly anguished; Arnold would have loved him. Then he frowned and growled, and suddenly burst out:

‘It wouldn’t be so bad, if we weren’t so confounded soft! If we would only carry things with a high hand – the reforms, and the missionary work, even. Either let well alone, or do the thing properly. But we don’t, you see; we take half-measures, and are too gentle by a mile. If we are going to pull down their false gods, and reform their old and corrupt states and amend their laws, and make ’em worthy men and women – then let us do it with strength! Dalhousie was strong, but I don’t know about Canning. I know if I were he, I’d bring these oily, smirking, treacherous princes under my heel—’ his eyes flashed as he ground his boot in the dust. ‘I’d give ’em government, firm and fair. I’d be less soft with the sepoys, too – and with some of our own people. That’s half the trouble – you haven’t been back long enough, but depend upon it, we send some poor specimens out to the army nowadays, and to the Company offices. “Broken-down tapsters and serving men’s sons”, eh? Well, you’ll see ’em – ignorant, slothful fellows of poor class, and we put ’em to officer high-caste Hindoos of ten years’ service. They don’t know their men, and treat ’em like children or animals, and think of nothing but drinking and hunting, and – and …’ he reddened to the roots of his enormous beard and looked aside. ‘Some of them consort with … with the worst type of native women.’ He cleared his throat and patted my arm. ‘There, I’m sorry, old fellow; I know it’s distasteful to talk of such things, but it’s true, alas.’

I shook my head and said it was heart-breaking.

‘Now you see why your news concerns me so? These omens at Jhansi – they may be the spark to the tinder, and I’ve shown you, I hope, that the tinder exists in India, because of our own blindness and softness. If we were stronger, and dealt firmly with the princes, and accompanied our enlightenment of the people with proper discipline – why, the spark would be stamped out easily enough. As it is—’ he shook his head again. ‘I don’t like it. Thank God they had the wit to send someone like you to Jhansi – I only wish I could come with you, to share whatever perils may lie ahead. It’s a strange, wild place, from all I’ve heard,’ says this confounded croaker with pious satisfaction, as he shook my hand. ‘Come, old fellow, shall we pray together – for your safety and guidance in whatever dangers you may find yourself?’

And he plumped down there and then on his knees, with me alongside, and gave God his marching orders in no uncertain fashion, telling him to keep a sharp eye on his servant. I don’t know what it was about me, but holy fellows like Nicholson were forever addressing heaven on my behalf – even those who didn’t know me well seemed to sense that there was a lot of hard graft to be done if Flashy was ever to smell salvation. I can see him yet – his great dark head and long nose against the sunset, his beard quivering with exhortation, and even the freckles on the back of his clasped hands. Poor wild John – he should have canvassed the Lord on his own behalf, perhaps, for while I’m still here after half a century, he was stiff inside the year, shot in the midriff by a pandy sniper in the attack on Delhi, and left to die by inches at the roadside. That’s what his duty earned for him; if he’d taken proper precautions he’d have made viceroy. And Delhi would have fallen just the same.6

Whatever his prayers accomplished for my solid flesh, his talk about Jhansi had done nothing for my spirits. ‘A strange wild place,’ he’d said, and talked of the Pindari bandits and Thugs and Maharatta scoundrels – well, I knew it had been hell’s punch-bowl in the old days, but I’d thought since we’d annexed it that it must be quieter now. Mangles, at the Board of Control in London, had described it as ‘tranquil beneath the Company’s benevolent rule’, but he was a pompous ass with a talent for talking complete bosh about subjects on which he was an authority.

As I pushed on into Bandelkand it began to look as though he was wrong and Nicholson was right – it was broken, hilly country, with jungle on the slopes and in the valleys, never a white face to be seen, and the black ones getting uglier by the mile. The roads were so atrocious, and the hackery jolted and rolled so sickeningly, that I was forced to take to my Pegu pony; there was devil a sign of civilisation, but only walled villages and every so often a sinister Maharatta fort squatting on a hilltop to remind you who really held the power in this land. ‘The toughest nut south of the Khyber’ – I was ready to believe it, as I surveyed those unfriendly jungly hills, seeing nothing cheerier than a distant tiger skulking among the waitabit thorn. And this was the country that we were ‘ruling’ – with one battalion of suspect sepoy infantry and a handful of British civilians to collect the taxes.

My first sight of Jhansi city wasn’t uplifting either. We rounded a bend on the hill road, and there it was under a dull evening sky – a massive fort, embattled and towered, on a great steep rock, and the walled city clustered at its foot. It was far bigger than I’d imagined; the walls must have been four miles round at least, and the air over the city was thick with the smoke of a thousand cooking fires. On this side of the city lay the orderly white lines of the British camp and cantonment – God, it looked tiny and feeble, beneath that looming vastness of Jhansi fort. My mind went back to Kabul, and how our camp had seemed dwarfed by the Bala Hissar – and even at Kabul, with an army of ten thousand, only a handful of us had escaped. I told myself that here it was different – that less than a hundred miles ahead of me there were our great garrisons along the Grand Trunk, and that however forbidding Jhansi might look, it was a British state nowadays, and under the Sirkar’s protection. Only there wasn’t much sign of that protection – just our pathetic little village like a flea on the lion’s lip, and somewhere in that great citadel, where our troops never went, that brooding old bitch of a Rani scheming against us, with her thousands of savage subjects waiting for her word. Thus my imagination – as if it hadn’t been full enough already, what with Ignatieff and Thugs and wild Pindaris and dissident sepoys and Nicholson’s forebodings.

My first task was to look up Skene, the political whose reports had started the whole business, so I headed down to the cantonment, which was a neat little compound of perhaps forty bungalows, with decent gardens, and the usual groups already meeting on the verandahs for sundown pegs and cordials; there were a few carriages waiting with their grooms and drivers to take people out for dinner, and one or two officers riding home, but I drove straight through, and got a chowkidar’s direction to the little Star Fort, where Skene had his office – he’d still be there, the chowkidar said, which argued a very conscientious political indeed.

Frankly, I hoped to find him scared or stupid; he wasn’t either. He was one of these fair, intent young fellows who fall over themselves to help, and will work all the hours God sends. He hopped from one leg to another when I presented myself, and seemed fairly overwhelmed to meet the great Flashy, but the steady grey eye told you at once that here was a boy who didn’t take alarm at trifles. He had clerks and bearers running in all directions to take my gear to quarters, saw to it that I was given a bath, and then bore me off for dinner at his own bungalow, where he lost no time in getting down to business.

‘No one knows why you’re here, sir, except me,’ says he. ‘I believe Carshore, the Collector, suspects, but he’s a sound man, and will say nothing. Of course, Erskine, the Commissioner at Saugor, knows all about it, but no one else.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m not quite clear myself, sir, why they sent you out, and not someone from Calcutta.’

‘Well, they wanted an assassin, you see,’ says I, easily, just for bounce. ‘It so happens I’m acquainted with the Russian gentleman who’s been active in these parts – and dealing with him ain’t a job for an ordinary political, what?’ It was true, after all; Pam himself had said it. ‘Also, it seems Calcutta and yourself and Commissioner Erskine – with all respect – haven’t been too successful with this titled lady up in the city palace. Then there are these cakes; all told, it seemed better to Lord Palmerston to send me.’

‘Lord Palmerston?’ says he, his eyes wide open. ‘I didn’t know it had gone that far.’

I assured him he’d been the cause of the Prime Minister’s losing a night’s sleep, and he whistled and reached for the decanter.

‘That’s neither here nor there, anyway,’ says I. ‘You cost me a night’s sleep, too, for that matter. The first thing is: have any of these Russian fellows been back this way?’

To my surprise, he looked confused. ‘Truth is, sir – I never knew they’d been near. That came to me from Calcutta – our frontier people traced them down this way, three times, I believe, and I was kept informed. But if they hadn’t told me, I’d never have known.’

That rattled me, if you like. ‘You mean, if they do come back – or if they’re loose in your bailiwick now – you won’t know of it until Calcutta sees fit to tell you?’

‘Oh, our frontier politicals will send me word as soon as any suspected person crosses over,’ says he. ‘And I have my own native agents on the look-out now – some pretty sharp men, sir.’

‘They know especially to look out for a one-eyed man?’

‘Yes, sir – he has a curious deformity which he hides with a patch, you know – one of his eyes is half-blue, half-brown.’

‘You don’t say,’ says I. By George, I hadn’t realised our political arrangements were as ramshackle as this. ‘That, Captain Skene, is the man I’m here to kill – so if any of your … sharp men have the chance to save me the trouble, they may do it with my blessing.’

‘Oh, of course, sir. Oh, they will, you know. Some of them,’ says he, impressively, ‘are Pindari bandits – or used to be, that is. But we’ll know in good time, sir, before any of these Ruski fellows get within distance.’

I wished I could share his confidence. ‘Calcutta has no notion what the Russian spies were up to down here?’ I asked him, but he shook his head.

‘Nothing definite at all – only that they’d been here. We were sure it must be connected with the chapattis going round, but those have dried up lately. None have passed since October, and the sepoys of the 12th N.I. – that’s the regiment here, you know – seem perfectly quiet. Their colonel swears they’re loyal – has done from the first, and was quite offended that I reported the cakes to Calcutta. Perhaps he’s right; I’ve had some of my men scouting the sepoy lines, and they haven’t heard so much as a murmur. And Calcutta was to inform me if cakes passed at any other place, but none have, apparently.’

Come, thinks I, this is decidedly better; Pam’s been up a gum-tree for nothing. All I had to do was make a show of brief activity here, and then loaf over to Calcutta after a few weeks and report nothing doing. Give ’em a piece of my mind, too, for causing me so much inconvenience.

‘Well, Skene,’ says I, ‘this is how I see it. There’s nothing to be done about what the Prime Minister calls “those blasted buns” – unless they make a reappearance, what? As to the Russians – well, when we get word of them, I’ll probably drop out of sight, d’you see?’ I would, too – to some convenient haven which the Lord would provide, and emerge when the coast was clear. But I doubted it would even come to that. ‘Yes, you won’t see me – but I’ll be about, never fear, and if our one-eyed friend, or any of his creatures, shows face … well …’

He looked suitably impressed, with a hint of that awe which my fearsome reputation inspires. ‘I understand, sir. You’ll wish to … er, work in your own way, of course.’ He blinked at me, and then exclaimed reverently: ‘By Jove, I don’t envy those Ruski fellows above half – if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.’

‘Skene, old chap,’ says I, and winked at him. ‘Neither do I.’ And believe me, he was my slave for life, from that moment.

‘There’s the other thing,’ I went on. ‘The Rani. I have to try to talk some sense into her. Now, I daresay there isn’t much I can do, since I gather she’s shown you and Erskine that she’s not disposed to be friendly, but I’m bound to try, you see. So I’ll be obliged to you if you’ll arrange an audience for me the day after tomorrow – I’d like to rest and perhaps look around the city first. For the present, you can tell me your own opinion of her.’

He frowned, and filled my glass. ‘You’ll think it’s odd, sir, I daresay, but in all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never even seen her. I’ve met her, frequently, at the palace, but she speaks from behind a purdah, you know – and as often as not her chamberlain does the talking for her. She’s a stickler for form, and since government granted her diplomatic immunity after her husband died – as a sop, really, when we assumed suzerainty – well, it makes it difficult to deal with her satisfactorily. She was friendly enough with Erskine at one time – but I’ve had no change out of her at all. She’s damned bitter, you see – when her husband died, old Raja Gangadar, he left no children of his own – well, he was an odd bird, really,’ and Skene blushed furiously and avoided my eye. ‘Used to go about in female dress most of the time, and wore bangles and … and perfume, you see—’