Just five words

. . . I begged leave to withdraw and loafed off, leaving the three wise men to blink at each other and resume their chorus of “What is to be done?” — five words which are as sound a motto for disaster as I know. I've heard ’em at Kabul before the Retreat, at Cawnpore, on the heights above the North Valley at Balaclava, and I won't swear someone wasn't croaking them as we laboured up the Greasy Grass slope behind G.A. Custer, God rest his fat-headed soul. No one ever knows the answer, you see, so everyone looks blank until the man in command (in this case Good Prince Edward) makes up his mind in panic, and invariably does the wrong thing.


Flashman and the Tiger, pp.221-2, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.

 
Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, disaster.

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.


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Perform the honours

“You know this man as Jassa,” says he to me. “Well, let me perform the honours by presenting Dr Josiah Harlan of Philadelphia, former packet-rat, imposter, coiner, spy, traitor, revolutionary, and expert in every rascality he can think of — and can’t he think, just? No common blackguard, mind you — Prince of Ghor once, weren’t you, Josiah, and unfrocked governor of Gujerat, to say nothing of being a pretender (it’s the truth Flashman) to the throne of Afghanistan, no less! You know what they call this beauty up in the high hills? The Man Who Would Be King!”


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.108, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


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A promise broken

      I’d vowed never to go near India again after the Afghan fiasco of ’42, and might easily have kept my word but for Elspeth’s loose conduct.


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.21, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


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Don't mend as quickly

           When you’re past the fifty mark, you don’t mend as quickly as you used to. For on thing, you don’t want to; where once on a day you couldn’t wait to be off your sick-bed rampaging about, you’re now content to lie still and let any handy ministering angel do their stuff. When I was a brat of a boy I went through hot hell in Afghanistan, had a fort collapse on me, and broke my thigh—a few weeks later I was fit enough to gallop an Afghan wench with my leg in a splint and old Avitabile egging me on, and get beastly drunk afterwards. Not at fifty-three; if they’d paraded the Folies Bergère past me a month after Little Bighorn I’d have asked for bread and milk instead, and damn little of that in case it over-excited me.

Flashman and the Redskins, pp.330-31, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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The loveliest of all languages

If I hadn’t served long in Afghanistan, and learned the speech and ways of the Central Asian tribes, I suppose I’d have imagined that I was in a cell with a couple of madmen. But I knew this trick that they have of reviling those they respect most, in banter, of their love of irony and formal imagery, which is strong in Pushtu and even stronger in Persian, the loveliest of all languages.

Flashman at the Charge, p.221, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Pushtu, Persian.

A mighty if

It was a mighty ‘if’, of course, but funny things happen north of the Khyber…

Flashman at the Charge, p.209, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Khyber Pass, funny.

Garryowen

…the man with the patched eye began to sing, and they all took it up, and as I drove off with Lanskey I heard the words of the Light Brigade canter fading behind me:

             In the place of water we’ll drink ale,
             An’ pay no reck’ning on the nail,
             No man for debt shall go to jail,
             While he can Garryowen hail.

    I’ve heard it from Afghanistan to Whithall, from the African veldt to drunken hunting parties in Rutland; heard it sounded on penny whistles by children and roared out in full-throated chorus by Custer’s 7th on the day of Greasy Grass…

Flashman at the Charge, p.122, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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A sight of omen

…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 around his belly. I never see those 44th facings but I think of the army of Afghanistan dying in the ice-hills, and shudder.

Flashman at the Charge, p.60, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Afghanistan, Gandamack.

If it comes to firearms

‘India and Afghanistan ain’t in the Haymarket, uncle,’ says I, looking humble-offended, ‘and if it comes to firearms, 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.

Flashman at the Charge, p.13, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Fiery warmth

Then they presented me with a flask of schnapps, and I sent half of it down my throat at once, and felt the fiery warmth running back along my limbs. I poured a little into my palm and rubbed it on my face and neck – a trick Mackenzie taught me in Afghanistan; nothing like it for the cold, if you can spare the liquor.

Royal Flash, p.235, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,schnapps.

Bloody Lance

So we left Mogala, and I had collected a personal following of Afghan tribesman, and a reputation, as a result of the morning’s work. The 12 Gilzais and Ilderim were the best things I found in Afghanistan, and the nickname 'Bloody Lance', which Sher Afzul conferred, did me no harm either.

Flashman, p.105, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,nickname.