“For God’s sake!” cries Le Geyt. “You can’t fight them all!”
“Haven’t I just been doing that?” says I. “By God, I’ve a good mind—”
He grabbed me by the arm and pointed. The Ghazis were advancing, straggling groups of them were crossing the bridge. I didn’t see any guns among them, but they were getting uncomfortably close.
“Sending your jackals, are you?” I bawled. “It’s you I want, you Afghan bastard! Well, if you won’t, you won’t, but there’ll be another day!”
With which I wheeled about, and we made off for the cantonment gate, before the Ghazis got within charging distance; they can move fast, when they want to.
At the gate all was chaos; there were troops hastily forming up, and servants and hangers-on scattering everywhere; Shelton was wrestling into his sword-belt and bawling orders. Red in the face, he caught sight of me.
“My God, Flashman! What is this? Where is the Envoy?”
“Dead,” says I. “Cut to bits, and Mackenzie with him, for all I know.”
He just gaped. “Who – what? – how?”
“Akbar Khan cut ’em up, sir,” says I, very cool. And I added: “We had been expecting you and the regiment, but you didn’t come.”
There was a crowd round us – officers and officials and even a few of the troops who had broken ranks.
“Didn’t come?” says Shelton. “In God’s name, sir, I was coming this moment. This was the time appointed by the General!”
This astonished me. “Well, he was late,” says I. “Damned late.”
There was a tremendous hubbub about us, and cries of “Massacre!” “All dead but Flashman!” “My God, look at him!” “The Envoy’s murdered!” and so on. Le Geyt pushed his way through them, and we left Shelton roaring to his men to stand fast till he found what the devil was what. He spurred up beside me, demanding to know what had taken place, and when I told him all of it, damning Akbar for a treacherous villain.
“We must see the General at once,” says he. “How the devil did you come off alive, Flashman?”
“You may well ask, sir,” cries Le Geyt. “Look here!” And he pointed to my saddle. I remembered having felt a blow near my leg in the skirmish, and when I looked, there was a Khyber knife with its point buried in the saddle bag. One of the Ghazis must have thrown it; two inches either way and it would have disabled me or the mare. Just the thought of what that would have meant blew all the brag I had been showing clean away. I felt ill and weak.
Le Geyt steadied me in the saddle, and they helped me down at Elphy’s front door, while the crowd buzzed around. I straightened up, and as Shelton and I mounted the steps I heard Le Geyt saying:
“He cut his way through the pack of ’em, and even then he would have ridden back in alone if I hadn’t stopped him! He would, I tell you, just to come at Akbar!”
That lifted my spirits a little, and I thought, aye, give a dog a good name and he’s everyone’s pet. Then Shelton, thrusting everyone aside, had us in Elphy’s study, and was pouring out his tale, or rather, my tale.
Elphy listened like a man who cannot believe what he sees and hears. He sat appalled, his sick face grey and his mouth moving, and I thought again, what in God’s name have we got for a commander? Oddly enough, it wasn’t the helpless look in the man’s eyes, the droop of his shoulders, or even his evident illness that affected me – it was the sight of his skinny ankles and feet and bedroom slippers sticking out beneath his gown. They looked so ridiculous in one who was a general of an army.
When we had done, he just stared and said:
“My God, what is to be done? Oh, Sir William, Sir William, what a calamity!” After a few moments he pulled himself together and said we must take counsel what to do; then he looked at me and said:
“Flashman, thank God you at least are safe. You come like Randolph Murray, the single bearer of dreadful news. Tell my orderly to summon the senior officers, if you please, and then have the doctors look at you.”
I believe he thought I was wounded; I thought then, and I think now, that he was sick in mind as well as in body. He seemed, as my wife’s relatives would have said, to be “wandered”.
We had proof of this in the next hour or two. The cantonment, of course, was in a hubbub, and all sorts of rumours were flying. One, believe it or not, was that McNaghten had not been killed at all, but had gone into Kabul to continue discussions with Akbar, and in spite of having heard my story, this was what Elphy came round to believing. The old fool always fixed on what he wanted to believe, rather than what common sense suggested.
However, his daydream didn’t last long. Akbar released Lawrence and Mackenzie in the afternoon, and they confirmed my tale – They had been locked up in Mohammed Khan’s fort, and had seen McNaghten’s severed limbs flourished by the Ghazis. Later the murderers hung what was left of him and Trevor on hooks in the butchers’ stalls of the Kabul bazaar.
Looking back, I believe that Akbar would rather have had McNaghten alive than dead. There is still great dispute about this, but it’s my belief that Akbar had deliberately lured McNaghten into a plot against the Douranis to test him; when McNaghten accepted Akbar knew he was not to be trusted. He never intended to hold power in Afghanistan in league with us: he wanted the whole show for himself, and McNaughten’s bad faith gave him the opportunity to seize it. But he would rather have held McNaghten hostage than kill him.
For one thing, the Envoy’s death could have cost Akbar all his hopes, and his life. A more resolute commander than Elphy – anyone, in fact – would have marched out of the cantonment to avenge it, and swept the killers out of Kabul. We could have done it, too; the troops that Elphy had said he couldn’t rely on were furious over McNaghten’s murder. They were itching for a fight, but of course Elphy wouldn’t have it. He must shilly-shally, as usual, so we skulked all day in the cantonment, while the Afghans themselves were actually in a state of fear in case we might attack them. This I learned later; Mackenzie reckoned if we had shown face the whole lot would have cut and run.
Anyway, this is history. At the time I only knew what I had seen and heard, and I didn’t like it a bit. It seemed to me that having slaughtered the Envoy the Afghans would now start on the rest of us, and having seen Elphy wringing his hands and croaking I couldn’t see what was to stop them. Perhaps it was the shock of my morning escape, but I was in the shivering dumps for the rest of the day. I could feel those Khyber knives and imagine the Ghazis yelling as they cut us to bits; I even wondered if it might not be best to get a fast horse and make off from Kabul as quickly as I could, but that prospect was as dangerous as staying.
But by the next day things didn’t look quite so bad. Akbar sent some of the chiefs down to express his regrets for McNaghten’s death, and to resume the negotiations – as if nothing had happened. And Elphy, ready to clutch at anything, agreed to talk; he didn’t see what else he could do, he said. The long and short of it was that the Afghans told us we must quit Kabul at once, leaving our guns behind, and also certain married officers and their wives as hostages!
It doesn’t seem credible now, but Elphy actually accepted. He offered a cash subsidy to any married officer who would go with his family as hostages to Akbar. There was a tremendous uproar over this; men were saying they would shoot their wives sooner than put them at the mercy of the Ghazis. There was a move to get Elphy to take action for once, by marching out and occupying the Bala Hissar, where we could have defied all Afghanistan in arms, but he couldn’t make up his mind, and nothing was done.
The day after McNaghten’s death there was a council of officers, at which Elphy presided. He was in terribly poor shape; on top of everything else, he had had an accident that morning. He had decided to be personally armed in view of the emergency, and had sent for his pistols. His servant had dropped one while loading it, and the pistol had gone off, the ball had passed through Elphy’s chair, nicking his backside but doing no other damage.
Shelton, who could no
t abide Elphy, made the most of this.
“The Afghans murder our people, try to make off with our wives, order us out of the country, and what does our commander do? Shoots himself in the arse – doubtless in an attempt to blow his brains out. He can’t have missed by much.”
Mackenzie, who had no great regard for Elphy either, but even less for Shelton, suggested he might try to be helpful instead of sneering at the old fellow. Shelton rounded on him.
“I will sneer at him, Mackenzie!” says he. “I like sneering at him!”
And after this, to show what he thought, he took his blankets into the council and lay on them throughout, puffing at a cheroot and sniffing loudly whenever Elphy said anything unusually foolish; he sniffed a good deal.
I was at the council, in view of my part in the negotiations, I suppose, and for pure folly it matches anything in my military career – and I was with Raglan in the Crimea, remember. It was obvious from the first that Elphy wanted to do anything that the Afghans said he must do; he desired to be convinced that nothing else was possible.
“With poor Sir William gone, we are at a nonplus here,” he kept repeating, looking around dolefully for someone to agree with him. “We can serve no purpose that I can see by remaining in Afghanistan.”
There were a few spoke out against this, but not many. Pottinger, a smart sort of fellow who had succeeded by default to Burnes’s job, was for marching into the Bala Hissar; it was madness, he said, to attempt to retreat through the passes to India in midwinter with the army hampered by hundreds of women and children and camp followers. Anyway, he didn’t trust Akbar’s safe conduct; he warned Elphy that the Sirdar couldn’t stop the Ghazis cutting us up in the passes, even if he wanted to.
It seemed good sense to me: I was all for the Bala Hissar myself, so long as someone else led the way and Flashy was at his post beside Elphy Bey, with the rest of the army surrounding us. But the voices were all against Pottinger; it wasn’t that they agreed with Elphy, but they didn’t fancy staying in Kabul through the winter under his command. They wanted rid of him, and that meant getting him and the army back to India.
“God knows what he’ll do if we stay here,” someone muttered. “Make Akbar Political Officer, probably.”
“A quick march through the passes,” says another. “They’ll let us go rather than risk trouble.”
They argued on, until at last they were too tired and dispirited to talk any further. Elphy sat glooming round in the silence, but not giving any decision, and finally Shelton got up, ground out his cheroot, and snaps:
“Well, I take it we go? Upon my word, we must have a clear direction. Is it your wish, sir, that I take order for the army to remove to India with all possible speed?”
Elphy sat looking miserable, his fingers twitching together in his lap.
“It will be for the best, perhaps,” he said at last. “I could wish it were otherwise, and that you had a commander not incapacitated by disease. Will you be so kind, Brigadier Shelton, as to take what order you think most fitting?”
So with no proper idea of what lay ahead, or how we should go, with the army dispirited and the officers divided, and with a commander announcing hourly that he was not fit to lead us, the decision was taken. We were to quit Kabul.
It took about a week to conclude the agreement with the Aghans, and even longer to gather up the army and all its followers and make it even half-fit for the road. As Elphy’s aide I had my hands full, carrying his orders, and then other orders to countermand the first ones, and listening to his bleating and Shelton’s snarling. One thing I was determined on, that Flashy at any rate was going to get back to India, whoever else did not. I had my idea about how this should be done, and it did not consist of taking my simple chance with the rest. The whole business of getting the army to pull up its roots, and provisioned and equipped for the journey, proved to be such a mess that I was confident most of them would never see Jallalabad, beyond the passes, where Sale was now holding out and we could count ourselves safe.
So I looked out Sergeant Hudson, who had been with me at Mogala, and was as reliable as he was stupid. I told him I wanted twelve picked lancers formed into a special detail under my command – not my Gilzais, for in the present state of the country I doubted whether they would be prepared to get their throats cut on my behalf. The twelve would make as good an escort as I could hope for, and when the time came for the army to founder, we could cut loose and make Jallalabad on our own. I didn’t tell Hudson this, of course, but explained that this troop and I would be employed on the march as a special messenger corps, since orders would be forever passing up and down the column. I told Elphy the same thing, and added that we could also act as mounted scouts and general busybodies. He looked at me like a tired cow.
“This will be dangerous work, Flashman,” says he. “I fear it will be a perilous journey, and this will expose you to the brunt of it.”
“Never say die, sir,” says I, very manful. “We’ll come through, and anyway, there ain’t an Afghan of the lot of them that’s a match for me.”
“Oh, my boy,” says he, and the silly old bastard began piping his eye. “My boy! So young, so valiant! Oh, England,” says he, looking out of the window, “what dost thou not owe to thy freshest plants! So be it, Flashman. God bless you.”
I wanted rather more insurance than that, so I made certain that Hudson packed our saddlebags with twice as much hardtack as we would need; supplies were obviously going to be short, and I believed in getting our blow in first. In addition to the lovely little white mare I had taken from Akbar, I picked out another Afghan pony for my own use; if one mount sank I should have the other.
These were the essentials for the journey, but I had an eye to the luxuries as well. Confined to the cantonments as we were, I had not had a woman for an age, and I was getting peckish. To make it worse, in that Christmas week a messenger had come through from India with mails; among them was a letter from Elspeth. I recognised the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, “To my most beloved Hector,” and I thought, by God, she’s cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whoremongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not so far off the mark.
It was a commonplace enough letter, I suppose, with news that she and my father were well, and that she was Desolate without her True Love, and Counted the Hours till my Triumphant Return from the Cannon’s Mouth, and so on. God knows what young women think a soldier does for a living. But there was a good deal about how she longed to clasp me in her arms, and pillow my head on her breast, and so on (Elspeth was always rather forthright, more so than an English girl would have been), and thinking about that same breast and the spirited gallops we had taken together, I began to get feverish. Closing my eyes, I could imagine her soft, white body, and Fetnab’s, and Josette’s, and what with dreaming to this tune I rapidly reached the point where even Lady Sale would have had to cut and run for it if she had happened to come within reach.
However, I had my eye on younger game, in the excellent shape of Mrs Parker, the merry little wife of a captain in the 5th Light Cavalry. He was a serious, doting fellow, about twenty years older than she, and as fondly in love as only a middle-aged man with a young bride can be. Betty Parker was pretty enough, in a plump way, but she had buck teeth, and if there had been Afghan women to hand I would hardly have looked at her. With Kabul City out of all bounds there was no hope of that, so I went quickly to work in that week after Christmas.
I could see she fancied me, which was not surprising in a woman married to Parker, and I took the opportunity at one of L
ady Sale’s evenings – for the old dragon kept open house in those days, to show that whoever was dismayed, she was full of spirit – to play loo with Betty and some others, and press knees with her beneath the table. She didn’t seem to mind by half, so I tested the ground further later on; I waited till I could find her alone, and gave her tits a squeeze when she least expected it. She jumped, and gasped, but since she didn’t swoon I guessed that all was well and would be better.
The trouble was Parker. There was no hope of doing anything while we remained in Kabul, and he was sure to stick close as a mother hen on the march. But chance helped me, as she always does if you keep your wits about you, although she ran it pretty fine and it was not until a couple of days before we were due to depart that I succeeded in removing the inconvenient husband.
It was at one of those endless discussions in Elphy’s office, where everything under the sun was talked about and nothing done. In between deciding that our men must not be allowed to wear rags round their legs against the snow as the Afghans did to keep off frost-bite, and giving instructions what fodder should be carried along for his fox-hounds, Elphy Bey suddenly remembered that he must send the latest instructions about our departure to Nott at Kandahar. It would be best, he said, that General Nott should have the fullest intelligence of our movements, and Mackenzie, coming as near to showing impatience as I ever knew him, agreed that it was proper that one half of the British force in Afghanistan should know what the other half was doing.
“Excellent,” says Elphy, looking pleased, but not for long. “Who shall we send to Kandahar with the despatches?” he wondered, worrying again.
“Any good galloper will do,” says Mac.
“No, no,” says Elphy, “he must be a man in whom we can repose the most perfect trust. An officer of experience is required,” and he went rambling on about maturity and judgement while Mac drummed his fingernails on his belt.
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 17
