Safety in numbers, what?

      “Careful o’ that one, sir. She’d a Haymarket Hussar,* and quite desperate altogether.” From which I gathered he, too, had taken the lady’s fancy, and avoided her for his own good.
      “Haymarket or Grant Road?” says I, and he said ’twas no joke, Theodore being a real mad miser with his women. “A fellow on sentry-go at the hareem cadged a cup of tej from one of the concubines, and was lashed to a pulp. Best to keep together when the likes of Madam Tamagno’s on the prowl; safety in numbers, what?”
      Unless she likes to drill by platoons,” says I, and he exclaimed “I say!” . . .


*Haymarket Hussar: a courtesan of the better class. Grant Road was the prostitutes’ quarter in Bombay


Flashman on the March, p.217, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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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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Slave of duty

Alas, though, subalterns’ minds travel a fixed road, and he was no exception: faced with a momentous decision, my dashing escort of the Lahore Road had turned into a Slave of Duty — and Safety.


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.322, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


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Princes or prime ministers

I should have known that it’s never safe to get within range of princes or prime ministers.

Flashman in the Great Game, p.28, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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The noble art of survival

It was touch and go at this point whether I launched myself head first through the open window or not; for a moment it seemed that the wiser course might well be headlong flight. But then I steadied. I cannot impress too strongly on young fellows that the whole secret of the noble art of survival, for a single man, lies in knowing exactly when to make your break for safety.

Flash For Freedom!, p.132-33, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashy got beastly drunk

I learned in later years that the only safe place to get drunk is among friends in your own home, but that evening I made a thorough pig of myself, and the long and short of it was that ‘Flashy got beastly drunk’, to quote my old friend Tom Hughes.

Royal Flash, p.85, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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