Trust to luck

      There's a moment, and I've faced it more often than I care to remember, when you're rat-in-the-corner, all your wriggling and lying and imploring have failed, there's nowhere to run, and your only hope is to do your damnedest and trust to luck and every dirty dodge you know.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.148, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Blind luck

      You’ll have difficulty finding Ferozeshah (or Pheeroo Shah, as we Punjabi purists call it) in the atlas nowadays. It’s a scrubby little hamlet about halfway between Ferozepore and Moodkee, but in its way it’s a greater place than Delhi or Calcutta or Bombay, for it’s where the fate of India was settled — appropriately by treachery, folly, and idiot courage beyond belief. And most of all, by blind luck.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.245, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



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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.

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Suffering ignobly borne

…what I was thinking was, by God, you don’t deserve it [the Victoria
Cross], you know, you shifty old bastard of a Flashy – not if it’s courage they’re after… but if they hand out medals for luck, and survival through sheer funk, and suffering ignobly borne… well grab ’em with both hands, my boy…

Flashman in the Great Game, p.331, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

Long legs and a thumping slice of luck

…I’ve sweated and scampered through during fifty inglorious years of soldiering. Leastways, I know they were inglorious, but the country don’t, thank heaven, which is why they rewarded me with general rank and the knighthood and a double row of medals on my left tit. Which shows you what cowardice and roguery can do, given a stalwart appearance, long legs and a thumping slice of luck…

Flashman in the Great Game, p.13, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,knighthood, soldiering.

The Balaclava plain

…my luck had been stretched as long as a Jew’s memory, and I knew for certain that another trip across the Balaclava plain would be disaster for old Flashy.

Flashman at the Charge, p.11, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,Balaclava, luck.