Their terrible bass chorus

. . . Death sweeping towards us at that fearful thunderous jog-trot that made the earth tremble beneath our very feet, while the spears crashed on the ox-hide shields, and the dust rolled up in a bank before them as they chanted out their terrible bass chorus: “Uzitulele, kagali ’muntu!” — which, you’ll be enchanted to know, means roughly: “He is silent, he doesn’t start the attack.”


Flashman and the Tiger, p.275, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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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.

 
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A much better motto

So I told him I had ambitions, too – to live as I please, love as I please and never grow old. He didn’t think much of that , I fancy; he told me I was frivolous, and would be disappointed. Only the strong, he said, could afford ambitions. So I told him I had a much better motto than that…
“Courage – and shuffle the cards”...

Royal Flash, p.25, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,motto.