Serf watch

I’ve seen a lot of human sorrow and misery in my time, but the lot of the Russian serf was the most appalling I’ve ever struck.

Flashman at the Charge, p.125, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,misery, serfs.

A miserable anthem

     It’s not that I’m an abolitionist by any means, but by the end of the day I’d had my bellyful of slaving. The reek of those musky bodies was abominable; the heat and stench grew by the hour, until you’d have wondered that anything could survive down there. They howled and blubbered, and we were fagged out with grabbing brown limbs and tugging and shoving and nudging them up with our feet to get the brutes to lie close. They fouled themselves where they lay, and before the job was half done the filth was indescribable….
     I looked down at it just before the hatch gratings went on, it was an indescribable sight. Row upon row of black bodies, packed like cigars in a box, naked and gleaming, the dark mass striped with glittering dots of light where the eyes rolled in sooty faces. The crying and moaning and whimpering blended into a miserable anthem that I’ll never forget, with the clanking of chains and the rustle of hundreds of incessantly stirring bodies, and the horrible smell of musk and foulness and burned flesh.

Flash For Freedom!, p.89, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.