Elephant guns and theodolites

When he wasn’t being all heroic, chasing Sikhs with elephant guns and hammering Pathans on the border, he’d laid half the canals and most of the roads in northern India, from Lahore to the Khyber, and built Darjeeling.


Flashman on the March, p.49, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Red tartan

He was a real Pathan mercenary, with iron moustaches and a nose like a hatchet — but he was dressed from top to toe, puggaree,* robe and pyjamas, in the red tartan of the 79th Highlanders!


*Turban.


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, pp.63-4, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


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Knew how to fight

      They [the Apache] knew how to fight, too, after their fashion, far better than the Plains Tribes; given numbers, they might be holding out in Arizona yet, for bar the Pathans they were the best guerrillas ever I saw.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.177, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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Nothing as gleeful

There’s nothing as gleeful as a Pathan when he’s doing the dirty…

Flashman in the Great Game, p.176, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes, geeful, Pathan.

Alas, I cannot swim

…in my panic all I could think to do was start singing – that old Pathan song that goes:

There’s a girl across the river
With a bottom like a peach –
And alas, I cannot swim.*

[*Flashman misquotes the song, see this link]

Flashman, p.226, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.