An older, much wiser soldier

  
That was how I made my strategic retreat, then, from the massacre of Isan’lwana — the greatest debacle of British arms since the Kabul retreat nearly 40 years earlier. Oh, aye, I’d been in that, too, freezing and bleeding on that nightmare march which never reached the Khyber. But I’d been a thoughtless boy then; at Isan’lwana I was an older, much wiser soldier, and I knew I was a long way from safety yet.

Flashman and the Tiger, p.280, 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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Squinted wisely

…he fixed his thumbs in his belt and squinted wisely at me, like an owl in labour…

Flashman's Lady, p.18, Pan edition, 1979.

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Even slimy little snakes

Now, if I’d been as wise then as I am now, I’d have remembered that even as slimy a snake as Bryant still has fangs…

Flash For Freedom!, pp.28-29, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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The wise son

‘The wise son,’ croaked Khan Hamet, opening his mouth for the first time, ‘mistrusts his mother.’ Doubtless he knew his own family best.

Flashman, p.148, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,son, wise.