A lucky song

…Custer himself led them off in his cracked baritone until the rafters rang and feet stamped and the glasses swung in rhythm as they roared out in chorus:

              We’ll beat the bailiffs out of fun,
              We’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run,
              We are the boys no man dare dun,
              If he regards a whole skin!
              In place of spa we’ll drink down ale,
              And pay no reckoning on the nail,
              No man for debt shall go to jail,
              While he can Garryowen hail!

They didn’t notice I wasn’t singing; I was remembering the remnants of the Light Brigade in that grisly hospital shed by Yatla, croaking out those self-same words in pathetic pride at having done what no horse-soldiers had ever done before. I thought of the pale fierce faces and the horrid wounds, and the unspeakable hell we’d come through, and the ghastly cost—and I wondered if it was a lucky song to sing, that’s all.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.278, Pan Books edition, 1983.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, song.

All for a shilling a day

...but it [Garryowen] always sounds bitter on my ears, because I think of those brave, deluded, pathetic bloody fools in that Russian shed, with their mangled bodies and lost limbs, all for a shilling a day, and a pauper’s grave – and yet they thought Cardigan, who’d of flogged ’em for a rusty spur and would have seen them murdered under the Russian guns because he hadn’t wit and manhood enough to tell Lucan to take his order to hell – they thought he was ‘a good old commander’, and they even cheered me, who’d have turned tail on them at a click of a bolt.

Flashman at the Charge, pp.122-3, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,Charge of the Light Brigade, Garryowen.

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.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,Light Brigade, Garryowen.

We're British Cavalry

What they [the Russian officers] couldn’t fathom was how we’d held together all the way to the guns, and hadn’t broken or turned back, even with four saddles empty out of five, so I told ’em, ‘We’re British cavalry,’ simple as that, and looked them in the eye. It was true, too, even if no one had less right to say it than I.

Flashman at the Charge, p.118, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,Charge of the Light Brigade, The reason why.

The heir to Wellington

You will know all about him, no doubt. He was the ass who presided over the mess we made in the Crimea, and won deathless fame as the man who murdered the Light Brigade. He should have been a parson, or an Oxford don, or a waiter, for he was the kindliest, softest-voiced old stick who ever spared a fellow-creature’s feeling… And this was the man who was the heir to Wellington…

Flashman at the Charge, p.29, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,FitzRoy Somerset, Lord Raglan.