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.

 
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Flashman on pain and Cawnpore

I’ll tell you a strange thing about pain – and Cawnpore. That ankle of mine, which I’d thought was broken, but which in fact was badly sprained, would have kept me flat on my back for days anywhere else, bleating for sympathy; in Cawnpore I was walking on it within a few hours, suffering damnably, but with no coice but to endure it. That was the sort of place it was; if you’d had both legs blown off you were rated fit for only light duties.

Flashman in the Great Game, p.195, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes, Cawnpore.

I don't bilk at much

I don’t bilk at much: I watched them blowing sepoys from the ends of guns at Cawnpore, and I ate my dinner at Peking an hour after the massacre, but I confess Spring’s method of disposing of incriminating evidence made me gulp.

Flash For Freedom!, p.113, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.