Against the shield wall

It thundered on, the majestic, insistent roar, culminating in another ear-splitting shout at the finish, the crowd chanting out the tremendous triple cheer of the old battle-cry that the Roman legions had heard as the hordes of half-naked, indigo-stained savages had hurled themselves against the shield wall. ‘Hip . . . hip . . . hip . . . hooray! Hip . . . hip . . . hip . . . hooray!’


Mr American, p.524, Pan Books, paperback edition 1982.



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Wings to my wits

      There’s no doubt about it, I’m good at dealing with barmy savages. They scare the bile out of me, and perhaps terror lends wings to my wits, for when i think of the monsters I’ve conversed with and come away with a whole skin, more or less . . . Mangas Colorado, Ranavalona, General Sang-kol-in-sin, Crazy Horse, Dr. Arnold, God knows who else . . . well, it took more than luck, I can tell you. You must know when to grovel and scream for mercy, but also when to take ’em aback with impudence or argument or pure bamboozle.


Flashman on the March, pp.189-90, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



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Contemplating the infinite

Hell of a place the Sudan, all rock and sand and thorn and the most monstorous savages in creation; Charley Gordon, my China acquaintance, had governed it in the 70s, and spent most of his time poring over the scriptures and chasing slavers before retiring to Palestine to watch rocks and contemplate the infinite.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.48, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Prince of Bulgaria

There had even been a move at one stage (this is gospel, though you mayn't credit it) to invite my old comrade William Tecumseh Sherman, the Yankee general, to become Prince of Bulgaria, but nothing came of it. Pity; he was the kind of savage who'd have suited the Bulgars like nuts in May.

Flashman and the Tiger, p.43, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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A savage and a mackerel

      Count Shuvalov, she informed me, was a sacred perverted beast, a savage and a mackerel and a swine of tastes indescribable .... demanding from her an Arabian Nights performance which I doubt even Dick Burton had ever heard of. He had also insisted that they smear each other all over with quince jam, to which he was partial, and while much of it had been removed in the ensuing frolic, I noticed that she still had a tendency to attract fluff and other light debris as she raged to and from the kitchen with hot kettles for her bath.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.35, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Great gift

His great gift, I was told, was that he got on splendidly with savages — even Boers.



Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.30, Harper Collins, 1995.



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It's his rock

That’s worth bearing in mind when you hear some smart alec holding forth about our imperial wars being one-sided massacres of poor club-waving heathen mown down by Gatlings. Oh, it happened, at Ulundi and Washita and Omdurman — but more often than not the Snider and Martini and Brown Bess were facing odds of ten to one against in country where shrapnel and rapid fire doesn’t count for much; your savage with his blowpipe or bow or jezzail* behind a rock has a deuce of an advantage: it’s his rock, you see.


*Afghan musket


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.58, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


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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.



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Savage females of the species

… I say this without conceit, since it ain’t my doing — while civilized women have been more than ordinarily partial to me, my most ardent admirers have been the savage females of the species. Take the captain of Gezo’s Amazons, for example, who’d ogled me so outrageously during the death-house feast; or Sonsee-array the Apache (my fourth wife, in a manner of speaking); or Queen Ranavalona, who’d once confessed shyly that when I died she intended to have part of me pickled in a bottle, and worshipped; or Lady Caroline Lamb — the Dahomey slave, not the other one, who was before my time. Yes, I’ve done well among the barbarian ladies. Elspeth, of course, is Scottish.



Flashman and the Dragon, p.81, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.


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Reservation or the grave

      The Indian’s tragedy was that being a spoiled and arrogant savage who wouldn’t lie down, and a brave and expert fighter who happened to be quite useless at war, he could only be suppressed with a brutality that often matched his own. It was the reservation or the grave, there was no other way.

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.

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A monocle isn't likely to impress

     Possibly because I’ve spent so much time as the unwilling guest of various barbarians around the world, I’ve learned to mistrust romances in which the white hero wins the awestruck regard of the silly savages by sporting a monocle or predicting a convenient eclipse, whereafter they worship him as a god, or make him blood brother, and in no time he’s teaching ‘em close order drill and crop rotation, and generally running the whole show. In my experience, they know all about eclipses, and a monocle isn’t likely to impress an aborigine who wears a bone through his nose.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.161, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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Men in fear and rage

“What bleating breast-beaters like you can’t comprehend,” I went on at the top of my voice, while the toadies pawed at me and yapped for the porters, “is that when selfish frightened men—in other words, any men, red or white, civilized or savage—come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of ‘em want, the Lord alone knows why, then war breaks out, and the weaker go under. Policies don’t matter a spent piss—it’s the men in fear and rage and uncertainty watching the woods and skyline, d’you see, you purblind bookworm, you! And you burble about enlightenment, by God— ”

Flashman and the Redskins, p.20, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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Good men

'Could we not hold Kabul?' I asked. 'Surely with a force of five thousand it should be possible against undisciplined savages.'

'These savages are good men,' says he [Broadfoot]. 'Better shots than we are, for one thing.'



Flashman, p.87, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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