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.

 
Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, disaster.

Elphy Bey stood alone

Let me say that when I talk of disasters I speak with authority. I have served at Balaclava, Cawnpore, and Little Big Horn. Name the biggest born fools who wore uniform in the nineteenth-century – Cardigan, Sale, Custer, Raglan, Lucan – I knew them all. Think of all the conceivable misfortunes that can arise from combinations of folly, cowardice and sheer bad luck, and I’ll give you chapter and verse. But I still state unhesitatingly that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignarance combined with bad judgement – in short, for the true talent for catastrophe – Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day.

Flashman, pp.106-107, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes,William Elphinstone, Elphy Bey.