An older, much wiser soldier

  
That was how I made my strategic retreat, then, from the massacre of Isan’lwana — the greatest debacle of British arms since the Kabul retreat nearly 40 years earlier. Oh, aye, I’d been in that, too, freezing and bleeding on that nightmare march which never reached the Khyber. But I’d been a thoughtless boy then; at Isan’lwana I was an older, much wiser soldier, and I knew I was a long way from safety yet.

Flashman and the Tiger, p.280, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, retreat.

Their terrible bass chorus

. . . Death sweeping towards us at that fearful thunderous jog-trot that made the earth tremble beneath our very feet, while the spears crashed on the ox-hide shields, and the dust rolled up in a bank before them as they chanted out their terrible bass chorus: “Uzitulele, kagali ’muntu!” — which, you’ll be enchanted to know, means roughly: “He is silent, he doesn’t start the attack.”


Flashman and the Tiger, p.275, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, chorus.