Flashman on the March. George Fraser MacDonald
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killed, and you and Cardigan charged to glory!’fn5
He pumped my fin like a long-lost brother, but shot if I could place him.
‘D’ye know, you launched my journalistic career?’ cries he. ‘I was in the hospital commissariat, you know, until I offered a piece to the Advertiser describing your part in the Charge, and … well, here I am, eh?’ I found myself wondering if he was the idiot who’d written that foul purple tosh which George Paget, curse him, had clipped out and framed and hung in the 4th Lights’ mess, all about ‘with what nobility and power the gallant Flashman rode, his eye flashing terribly.’ And farting like a deflating balloon, had they but known.
My immediate thought was to give this familiar brute a set-down, but it’s best to keep in with the press, so I cried, to be sure, I remembered him well, and how had he been all these years? He went rosy with gratitude at being remembered by the famous Flashy.
‘But here’s another who’s been counting the hours to see you!’ cries he, and there, emerging from a tent, came Giant Despair dressed for a gypsy wedding, and I could only stand and gape.
Bar Mangas Colorado, he was the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life, closer to seven feet than six and built like an overgrown gorilla. His enormous body was wrapped in a robe made of lions’ manes which covered him from the white scarf round his neck to his massive half-boots, he wore a black beard to his chest, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a smoking-cap, and carried a throwing spear in one hand and a straw umbrella in the other. To complete this bespoke costume, he had a sabre on his hip, a revolver in his belt, and a round native shield slung on his back. When he grinned, with a fierce glitter of teeth in the beard, he looked like a Ghazi on hasheesh – and then he spoke, brisk and high-pitched, his huge hand gently enfolding mine, and he might have been a vicar welcoming me to the sale of work.
‘Charles Speedy, Sir Harry, used to be adjutant of the Tenth Punjabis, saw you once on the Grand Trunk, near Fatehpur, oh, ever so long ago, but you didn’t see me.’
Then you must have been lying down in cover and wearing mufti, thinks I. My astonishment showed, for he gave a whimsical shrug and spread his arms in display.
‘Sir Robert Napier likes me to dress native, thinks it impresses the local sidis, bless ’em! I’m his political adviser, and at present your committee of welcome.’ He gave another alarming grin, accompanied by even more alarming words. ‘Can’t tell you how glad we all are to have you with us.’
Now, that was the very first intimation I had of the possible ghastly sequel to the mission I was carrying out simply to oblige an old school chum. Of course, you could interpret the words two ways, and I lost no time in putting him right.
‘I ain’t with you. Delivering the messages, rather.’ I nodded at the boxes which the coolies were unloading under the watchful eye of Twentyman and my Bootneck sergeant. ‘I hear it’ll take ten days to get ’em up to Napier by mule. How short o’ the ready is he?’
‘Tight, but one chestful of dollars should cover his immediate needs, and we’ll get those to him inside forty-eight hours. Can’t have his pockets to let when he meets the King of Tigre to arrange our passage through his territory. Napier’s been waiting beyond Attegrat for days, but his majesty’s hanging back, scared to commit himself, likely. Theodore may be a long way off, but these petty rulers go in terror of him still.’ He gave his great booming laugh. ‘As political, ’twill fall to me to persuade King Kussai that we’ll be the winning side, so the sooner we’re southbound the better. You and I and Henty here can split a chest of silver among our saddlebags, with a couple of led-beasts. Hear that, George? You can stop scribbling and do something useful for a change!’
‘Tain’t every day two such lions as Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., and the Basha Fallaka shake hands,’ says Henty, pocketing his notebook. ‘You’re good copy, Charlie, the pair of you. When do we leave, then?’
‘After tiffin,’ says Speedy. ‘If that suits, Sir Harry?’ Henty laughed and said no wonder the Abs called him Basha Fallaka, which means Quick Chief, and was their pun on Speedy’s name.
I was deciding he was a sight too quick for me. Here I was, hardly ten minutes ashore, and I was being dragooned into the saddle by a crazy Goliath in Hallowe’en rig to go tearing up-country on a forty-eight-hour gallop to Napier’s command post. True, I’d sworn to Speedicutfn6 that I’d see his dollars all the way to Attegrat, but that had been back in Trieste with the hosts of Midian prowling round, and now here was Napier’s own political on hand to collect the dibs – and after that mention of being ‘with’ them I’d no wish to venture nearer the theatre of operations than I must, in case Napier got a notion to drag me into the stew. I know these bloody generals. I’d been there before.
On t’other hand, I was well retired, hadn’t worn the Queen’s coat since China in ’60, and I’d need Napier’s personal kitabfn7 for a paid passage home. He’d expect me to call on him, and offhand I couldn’t think of a good excuse for not doing so, fool that I was. I should have told Speedy I was sickening for mumps, or pleaded my belly, or done any damned thing to stay at a safe distance from a campaign which, to judge from the gloom at tiffin, promised to be the biggest catastrophe since the Kabul retreat.
I’ve told you of the pessimism which, unknown to me, was prevailing at home, but now I was hearing it from the men on the spot, grousing in their shirt-sleeves in the stifling heat of the mess-tent: Native Infantry officers, Punjabi Pioneers, King’s Own, cavalrymen from the Scinde Horse irregulars and Native Cavalry regiments, Baluch, Madras Sappers, even a Dragoon Guardee, and altogether as mixed a collection as you could hope to find, all croaking like the never-wearied rook. In short order I gathered that fat-headed Bombay politicals had hampered Napier at every turn and thrown his plans into disarray; that our transport was in chaos because they’d hired drivers who were the scum of the Levant, Greeks and dagoes and the like, who’d mutinied and had to be replaced by Persians and Hindus; that we were far too soft with the Abs, as witness Pottinger’s giving way to a crowd of Shohos who’d blocked the road, and the armed attack on a sentry which had had to be repulsed by the bayonets of Cooper’s Irishmen; that we were fools to rely on local intelligence which reported Theodore and the captives in half a dozen different places at once; that with the mercury at 116 (and that on a cool day) we’d have an epidemic if the army wasn’t moved up-country to the high ground; that baboons were swinging on the telegraph wires, which would have to be coated in rubber and buried – I’d heard the like from the Khyber to Chattanooga, and if the words were different the tune was the same.
‘Oh, for the Army Works Corps that we had in Crimea!’
‘As if they’d make a ha’porth o’ difference! God Himself couldn’t lay more than a mile of road a day over solid rock sky-high with boulders.’
‘Mile a day should get us to Magdala next year, what?’
‘Ah, so we shan’t be in and out by April?’ General laughter.
‘Dam’ lucky if we get out at all. See here – twelve thousand men, three-quarters of ’em on support, depots, transport, and so on, two thousand to go for Magdala—’
‘Flyin’ column, you mean? Napier’s good at those.’
‘Flyin’ column be damned! – in country where you’ll make ten miles a day with luck? An’ it’s four hundred miles! So where d’you find mule forage for forty days, to say nothin’ of takin’ elephants and mountain guns and mortars over ground that’d have Hannibal cryin’ for his pension?’
‘Talkin’ like a book, ye are. An’ will the tribes let us be? They say Theodore can put a hundred thousand into the field.’
‘If the chiefs support him. Merewether reckons they won’t.’
‘Does he, now? D’ye know, I don’t reckon Merewether’s optimism counts for much against odds of fifty to one.’20
‘Oh, shield-and-spear niggers. Not much firepower.’
‘That’s