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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Friday 31 July 2009
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.
Wednesday 29 July 2009
I’m harmless, by comparison
Mind you. I’m harmless, by comparison – I don’t send ’em off, stuffed with lies and rubbish, to get killed or maimed for nothing except a politician’s vanity or a manufacturer’s profit. Oh, I’ll sham it with the best in public, and sport my tinware, but I know what I am, and there’s no room for honest pride in me, you see. But if there was – just a little bit, along with the disgust and hatred and selfishness – I’d keep it for them, those seven hundred British sabres.
Flashman at the Charge, p.123, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Tuesday 28 July 2009
All for a shilling a day
...but it [Garryowen] always sounds bitter on my ears, because I think of those brave, deluded, pathetic bloody fools in that Russian shed, with their mangled bodies and lost limbs, all for a shilling a day, and a pauper’s grave – and yet they thought Cardigan, who’d of flogged ’em for a rusty spur and would have seen them murdered under the Russian guns because he hadn’t wit and manhood enough to tell Lucan to take his order to hell – they thought he was ‘a good old commander’, and they even cheered me, who’d have turned tail on them at a click of a bolt.
Flashman at the Charge, pp.122-3, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Monday 27 July 2009
Garryowen
…the man with the patched eye began to sing, and they all took it up, and as I drove off with Lanskey I heard the words of the Light Brigade canter fading behind me:
In the place of water we’ll drink ale,
An’ pay no reck’ning on the nail,
No man for debt shall go to jail,
While he can Garryowen hail.
I’ve heard it from Afghanistan to Whithall, from the African veldt to drunken hunting parties in Rutland; heard it sounded on penny whistles by children and roared out in full-throated chorus by Custer’s 7th on the day of Greasy Grass…
Flashman at the Charge, p.122, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
Light BrigadeThursday 23 July 2009
Duty and desperate notions
‘Silence, Ryan! says I. ‘I won’t hear of it.’ [an escape attempt] This was one of these dangerous bastards, I could see, full of duty and desperate notions.
Flashman at the Charge, p.121, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Wednesday 22 July 2009
A hellish thing
…it’s this kind of thing, the stale smell of blood, the wasted faces, the hushed voices, the awful hopless tiredness, that makes you understand what a hellish thing war is. Worse than a battle-field, worse than the blood and the mud and the smoke and the steel, is the dank misery of a hospital of wounded men…
Flashman at the Charge, p.120, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Tuesday 21 July 2009
Zzzzz
…I slid away into unconsciousness and slept like a winter hedgehog.
Flashman at the Charge, p.119, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Friday 17 July 2009
We're British Cavalry
What they [the Russian officers] couldn’t fathom was how we’d held together all the way to the guns, and hadn’t broken or turned back, even with four saddles empty out of five, so I told ’em, ‘We’re British cavalry,’ simple as that, and looked them in the eye. It was true, too, even if no one had less right to say it than I.
Flashman at the Charge, p.118, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Thursday 16 July 2009
This Sandhurst-and-Shop crowd
I’m told it’s all changing now, and that war’s no longer a gentleman’s game (as though it ever was), and that among the ‘new professionals’ a prisoner’s a prisoner so damned well cage him up. I don’t know: we treated each other decently and weren’t one jot more incompetent than this Sandhurst-and-Shop crowd. Look at that young pup Kitchener – what that fellow needs is a woman or two.
Flashman at the Charge, p.115, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Wednesday 15 July 2009
Poster boy Flashy
Well, I’ve always said, if you get the Press on your side you’re half way there.
Flashman at the Charge, p.114, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Tuesday 14 July 2009
The most crashing discharge
I moved, gasping gently to myself, stirring on my saddle, and suddenly, without the slightest volition on my part, there was the most crashing discharge of wind, like the report of a mortar. My horse started; Cardigan jumped in his saddle, glaring at me, and from the ranks of the 17th a voice muttered: ‘Christ, as if Russian artillery wasn’t bad enough!’
Flashman at the Charge, p.106, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Monday 13 July 2009
And so have his brains blown out
Several times it had occurred to me on the campaign that it would be a capital thing if he could be induced into action where he might well be hit between the legs and so have his brains blown out, but he’d not looked like taking a scratch so far.
Flashman at the Charge, p.99, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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Thursday 9 July 2009
Hunting in Ireland
‘Tell ye what, Flashman; I don’t know much about fightin’, but it strikes me that this Russian business is like huntin’ in Ireland – confused and primitive, what, but damned interestin’!’
Flashman at the Charge, pp.92-3, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.
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