Aldershot on a pension

“Theodore’ll have to die, somehow; can’t execute him, but can’t have him hanging around Aldershot on a pension, either. Public wouldn’t stand for it. He’ll just have to be done in on the quiet, accidental-looking.”
      “What hypocrites you are!”
      “No such thing. It’s just the civilised way of doing it, that’s all.”


Flashman on the March, pp.211-12, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, pension.

Holding the sea-lanes

      But I ain’t mocking him, much, and I’ve got a sight more use for him and his like that for the psalm-smiting Holy Joes who pay lip service to delivering the heathen from error’s chain by preaching and giving their ha’pence to the Anti-Slavery Society, but spare never a though for young Ballantyne holding the sea-lanes for civilisation and Jack Legerwood dying the kind of death you wouldn’t wish for your worst enemy. I’ve even heard ‘em maligned like my old shipmate Brooke* for taking a high hand and shooting first and hammering slavers and pirates and brigands like the wrath of God. Censure’s so easy from a distance, but I’ve seen them on the frontiers, schoolboys with the down still on their cheeks doing a man’s work and getting a seedeboy’s pay¹² and damn-all thanks and more often than not a bullet for their twenty-first birthday . . .


12. Seedeboy, sifiboy, Anglo-Indian slang for an African, usually a labourer (see Kipling, The Lost Legion. “We’ve starved on a Seedeboy’s pay”). Eric Partridge points out, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the irony that the word derives from sidi, a lord. 


Flashman on the March, p.20, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, slavery.

Drains and bottled beer

      You see, it’s the great illusion of our civilization that when the poor heathen saw our steamships and elections and drains and bottled beer, he’d realise what a benighted ass he’d been and come into the fold. But he don’t. Oh, he’ll take what he fancies, and can use (cheap booze and rifles), but not on that account will he think we’re better. He knows different.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.170, Pan Books edition, 1983.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, civilization.