Salaam friend or foe

“Salaam, Shadman Khan!” and he shouted with delight and yelled in English: “Stand fast, foortee-foorth! — and in an instant I was looking down on the bloody snow over Gandamack, with the remnants of the 44th being cut down by tribesman swarming over their position . . . and I wondered which side he’d been on then. (I’ve since remembered there was a Shadman Khan among those ruffians who held me in Gul Shah’s dungeon, and yet another among the band who saved me from the Thugs at Jhansi in ’57 and stole out horses on the way to Cawnpore. I wonder if they were the same man. It has no bearing on my present tale, anyway; it was just an incident at the Bright Gate. But I think it was the same man; everybody changed sides in the old days.)


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.119, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, comrade.