Crimson with booze

Even in the South they respected him for his courage; I remember the verdict, delivered to me by a grizzled Alabama veteran, crimson with booze and chewing on his Wheeling tobey:* “Ole Ossawatomie? Well, now, suh, Ah reckon he lived like a skunk — an’ died like a lion.”

* A particularly pungent cigar.

 
Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.348, Harper Collins, 1995.


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Sincerely mourned

…I doubt if any man in the history of the United States was more deeply or sincerely mourned — and I ain’t forgetting friend Abraham, either. He was even more detested in Dixie than J.B., and he was just a politician, while J.B. was a fighting man and a rebel, a combination which no American could resist.


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.348, Harper Collins, 1995.


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One crazy farmer

I thought he was talking through his hat — one crazy farmer being topped for murder and treason didn’t strike me as a reasonable casus belli. Which shows how much I knew.


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, pp.342-3, Harper Collins, 1995.



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The English view

“What did you think of him . . . from an English point of view, I mean?”
… “From an English point of view? Well, they’d not take him in Whites . . . not sure about Reform, though.”


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.342, Harper Collins, 1995.



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His matchless mixture

Ironic, ain’t it? He’d failed . . . and found his triumph. Wounded and doomed he was a man uplifted, and he laid it off to them with his matchless mixture of deep sincerity and sheer damned humbug.



Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.340, Harper Collins, 1995.


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You bloody vandals

      My first thought was, why, you bloody vandals, I don’t shock easy, and have no more of the milk of human kindness than you’d put in a cup of tea; I’ll taunt and gloat over a fallen foe any day, and out a boot in his ribs if he sasses back — but I’m a brute and a bully. These were your upstanding pillars of society, bursting with Christian piety and love thy neighbour, and here they were, shaking their sanctimonious heads as they harassed and goaded a seemingly dying man… They even had the effrontery to argue and hector him, now that he was beat and helpless — I’d have liked to see ’em argue with him eight hours back, when he was standing up with his guns on.


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.339, Harper Collins, 1995.


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Time for a little something

       I suppose Cardigan’s “Walk—march—trot!” at Balaclava is the most memorable battlefield command I’ve ever heard, but J.B.'s order for breakfast at Harper’s Ferry runs it close.


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.283, Harper Collins, 1995.


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An imposing old file

 From all I’d heard in the past three days, I’d formed a picture of John Brown as a towering figure with flowing white locks, glaring like a fakir and brandishing an Excelsior banner in one fist and a smoking Colt in t’other; what I saw was an elderly man, spare and bony in an old black suit, like a rather seedy farmer come to town for market. He had a long aquiline nose, large ears, and deep-set eyes under heavy brows. An imposing old file, you’d have said, but nothing out of the ordinary — until you met the gaze of those eyes, clear bright grey and steady as a rock. Gunfighter’s eyes, was my first thought, but they weren’t cold; you knew they could twinkle or blaze (and I was to see ’em do both), but what I remember most was their level certainty. No one was ever going to make this man drop his gaze, or talk him out of anything.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, pp.206-07, Harper Collins, 1995.


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My immediate thought

      “What do you know of John Brown?”
     That he’s a hairy lout who can hold more hard liquor than a distillery, was my immediate thought, for the only John Brown I knew was a young ghillie…


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.89, Harper Collins, 1995.


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