A lucky song

…Custer himself led them off in his cracked baritone until the rafters rang and feet stamped and the glasses swung in rhythm as they roared out in chorus:

              We’ll beat the bailiffs out of fun,
              We’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run,
              We are the boys no man dare dun,
              If he regards a whole skin!
              In place of spa we’ll drink down ale,
              And pay no reckoning on the nail,
              No man for debt shall go to jail,
              While he can Garryowen hail!

They didn’t notice I wasn’t singing; I was remembering the remnants of the Light Brigade in that grisly hospital shed by Yatla, croaking out those self-same words in pathetic pride at having done what no horse-soldiers had ever done before. I thought of the pale fierce faces and the horrid wounds, and the unspeakable hell we’d come through, and the ghastly cost—and I wondered if it was a lucky song to sing, that’s all.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.278, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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Stretched my legs

There are moments in life which defy description…. The last minute at Balaclava, the moment the Welsh broke at Little Hand Rock and the Zulus came bounding over our position, the breaching of Piper’s fort gate, the neck-or-nothing race for Reno’s Bluff with the Sioux braves running among the shattered rabble of Custer’s Seventh – I’ve stretched my legs in all of those, knowing I was going to die, and being damned noisy at the prospect.

Flashman's Lady, p.185, Pan edition, 1979.

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The battery at Balaclava

‘And our moujiks are, well, different from yours’. I wondered, even as I said it, if they were; remembering that hospital at Yalta, I doubted it. But I couldn’t help adding: ‘Would your moujiks have ridden into the battery at Balaclava?’

Flashman at the Charge, p.148, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Charge of the Light Brigade.

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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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Charge of the Light Brigade, pride.

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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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Charge of the Light Brigade, Garryowen.

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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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Crimean War, wounded.

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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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Charge of the Light Brigade, The reason why.