Rolling up the Peiho

Fifteen thousand horse, foot and guns rolling up the Peiho, not to fight or hold or to conquer, but just so that the Big Barbarian could stand before the Son of Heaven and watch him put his mark on paper. “And when he does,” says Elgin, “the ends of the earth will have met at last, and there will be no more savage kings for our people to subdue. We’ve come a long way from our northern forests; I wonder if we were wise.”


Flashman and the Dragon, p.168, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, sign.

Elgin's fads

      “Synonymous be damned!” snaps Elgin. “H.M.G will not be drawn into war against the Taipings. We’d find ourselves with a new empire in China before we knew it.” He heaved up from the table and poured coffee from a spirit kettle. “And I have no intention, Parkes, of presiding over any extension of the area in which we exhibit the hollowness of our Christianity and our civilization. Coffee, Flashman? Yes, you can light one of your damned cheroots if you want to—but blow the smoke the other way. Poisoning mankind!”
      There you have three of Elgin’s fads all together — he hated tobacco, was soft on Asiatics, and didn’t care for empire-building. I recall him on this very campaign saying he’d do anything “to prevent England calling down God’s curse on herself for brutalities committed on yet another feeble Oriental race.” Yet he did more to fix and maintain the course of the British empire than any man of his day, and is remembered for the supreme atrocity. Ironic, ain’t it?


Flashman and the Dragon, pp.163-4, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, Elgin.

Damned crowded place

My little anthropologist would say it was all the white man’s fault for intruding; no doubt, but by that logic Ur of the Chaldees would be a damned crowded place by now.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.171, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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Not the best position

      You begin to understand, perhaps, the impossibility of red man and white man ever understanding each other—not that it would have made a damned bit of difference if they had, or altered the Yankees’ Indian policy, except perhaps in the direction of wiping up such intractable bastards even faster that they did. They knew they were going to have to dispossess the redskins, but being good Christian humbugs they kept trying to bully and cajole them into accepting the theft gracefully—which ain’t quite the best position from which to make treaties with unreliable savages who are accustomed to rob rather than be robbed, and who don’t understand what government and authority mean, anyway.

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

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, dispossess.

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.

A different mystery on the bestial floor

This twisted morality is almost impossible for white folk to understand; they look for excuses, and say the poor savage don’t know right from wrong. Jack Cremony had the best answer to that: if you think an Apache can’t tell right from wrong—wrong him and see what happens.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.169, Pan Books edition, 1983.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, wrong.

An Apache ponders

Why should the Americanos try to force their law on us? . . . It is because their spirit tells them to spread their law to all people, and they believe their spirit is better than ours.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.167, Pan Books edition, 1983.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, law.