The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  Badmash Ruffian

  Bahadur Champion

  Bandobast Business

  Basha Native house

  Chabeli Sweet-heart

  Chaggle Canvas water-bag

  Charpoy Indian bed

  Chi-chi Half-caste

  Chico Child

  Chota-wallah Little fellow

  Chowkidar Constable

  Chubbarao Shut up!

  Cos One and a half miles

  Daffadar Cavalry commander of ten men

  Dasahra Sikh October festival

  Doab Tract of land between rivers

  Durbar Audience with royalty, audience chamber; also Punjab government

  Feringhee Foreigner

  Ghat River-landing

  Gora sahib Englishman

  Gorracharra Sikh irregular cavalry

  Hakim Chemist

  Havildar Sergeant

  Husoor Title of respect

  Jampan Kind of sedan chair

  Jangi lat Lord of war (here, British C-in-C)

  Jawan Native soldier

  Jemadar Lieutenant

  Jezzail Afghan musket

  John Company Honourable East India Company

  Khalsa The Sikh army

  Kunwari Honorific title applied to Jeendan (Kunwar=Son of Maharaja)

  Maidan Plain

  Malki lat Lord of the land (Governor-General)

  Mallum Understand!

  Munshi Teacher

  NC Native Cavalry

  Naik Corporal

  Nautch Dancing-girl

  Palki Litter

  Panch, Panchayat Sikh soldiers’ committee

  Parwana Summons

  Pice Copper coins

  Poshteen Coat

  Puggaree Turban

  Punkah Large fan

  Rissaldar-major Cavalry sergeant-major

  Shabash Bravo!

  Shave Rumour

  Sirdar Chief

  Sirkar Government (British)

  Sowar Cavalry trooper

  Subedar Senior subaltern

  Tik hai All right!

  Tulwar Sikh sword

  Vakil Agent

  Notes

  1. “A very extraordinary and interesting sight”, as the Queen recorded in her journal on May 11, 1887.

  2. Whether at Flashman’s prompting or not, the Queen engaged two Indian attendants in the following month, one of whom was the pushing and acquisitive Abdul Karim, known as “Munshi” (teacher); he became almost as great a royal favourite as the celebrated ghillie, John Brown, had been, and was even more unpopular at Court. “Munshi” not only tutored the Queen in Hindustani, which she began to learn in August 1887, but was given access to her correspondence, blotted her signature, and even buttered her toast at tea-time. He claimed to be the son of an eminent physician (one rumour said a Surgeon-General of the Indian Army) but investigation showed that his father was a prison pharmacist at Agra. There was, as Flashman says, a very Indian flavour to the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations of 1887. During her reign, the population of the rest of the Empire had increased from 4,000,000 to 16,000,000, while that of the sub-continent had risen from 96,000,000 to a staggering 254,000,000. The Indian festivities began on February 16, and ranged from illuminations and banquets to the opening of new libraries, schools, hospitals, and colleges all over the country; in Gwalior, all arrears of land-tax (£1,000,000 in all) were remitted. In Britain itself the celebrations did not reach their climax until June 21, when the Queen, at the head of a procession led by the Indian Princes, attended a service in Westminster Abbey; there were loyal demonstrations everywhere (except in Cork and Dublin, where there were riotous demonstrations), and much rejoicing in the United States, where the Mayor of New York presided over a great Festival of Thanksgiving. (See The Life and Times of Queen Victoria, vol. ii (1888), by Robert Wilson, which has a detailed account of the Jubilee; Victoria, by Stanley Weintraub (1987).)

  3. Flashman’s memory is slightly at fault here. He was not, as he says, “retired on half-pay” at this time; in fact, he had been in Singapore inspecting Australian horses for the East India Company army, and it was during this visit that his wife, Elspeth, was kidnapped by Borneo pirates, and the adventure began which culminated in the Flashmans’ rescue from Madagascar in June, 1845. In the circumstances, his failure to remember his exact military status is understandable. As to his allowing himself to be bullied into going to India, he may not have been quite as reluctant as he suggests; the Governor of Mauritius certainly had no power to compel him, and it may well have been that the Punjab crisis (which had not yet assumed serious proportions) seemed a less daunting prospect than returning to face his ill-willers in England.

  4. “Elphy Bey” was Major-general William Elphinstone, commander of the British force which was wiped out on the retreat from Kabul in 1842, in which Flashman ingloriously won his first laurels. A fine soldier who distinguished himself at Waterloo, Elphinstone was hopelessly inept in Afghanistan; crippled by gout, worn out, and according to one historian, prematurely senile, he was incapable of opposing either his political advisers or the Afghans, but in fairness he was less to blame than those who appointed him to a post for which he was unfitted. Flashman gives a perceptive but characteristically uncharitable sketch of him in the first volume of the Flashman Papers. (See also J. W. Fortescue’s History of the British Army, vol. xii (1927); Subedar Sita Ram’s From Sepoy to Subedar (1873), and Patrick Macrory’s Signal Catastrophe (1966).)

  5. “John Company” – the Honourable East India Company, described by Macaulay as “the strangest of all governments … for the strangest of all empires”, was Britain’s presence in India, with its own armed forces, civil service, and judiciary, until after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when it was replaced by direct rule of the Crown. Flashman’s definition of its boundaries in 1845 is roughly correct, and although at this period it controlled less than half of the sub-continent, his expression “lord of the land” is well chosen: the Company was easily the strongest force in Asia, and at its height had a revenue greater than Britain’s and governed almost one-fifth of the world’s population. (See The East India Company, by Brian Gardner (1971).)

  Flashman, writing in the early years of the present century, occasionally uses the word Sirkar when referring to the British power; the word in this sense means “government”, but it was probably not applied exclusively to British authority as early as 1845.

  6. The origins and development of the Sutlej crisis are controversial, and it is difficult even today to give an account that will satisfy everyone; nevertheless, Flashman’s summary seems an eminently fair one. His racy little narrative of the power struggle at Lahore after the death of Runjeet Singh is accurate so far as it goes; indeed, it spares readers some of the gorier details (no doubt only because Flashman was unaware of them). His view of the gathering storm, the precarious position of the Lahore durbar, the menace of the Khalsa, and the misgivings of the British authorities about the loyalty of their native troops, and their ability to deal with an invasion, are reflected in the journals and letters of his contemporaries. Other points and personalities he mentions will be dealt with more fully in subsequent Notes. (See Appendix I, and G. Carmichael Smyth, History of the Reigning Family of Lahore (1847); W. Broadfoot, The Career of Major George Broadfoot (1888); Charles, Viscount Hardinge, Viscount Hardinge (1891); W. L. M’Gregor, History of the Sikhs, vol. ii (1846); Khushwant Singh, History of the Sikhs, vol. 2 (1966); J. D. Cunningham, History of the Sikhs (1849); George Bruce, Six Battles for India (1969); Fortescue; Vincent Smith, Oxford History of India (1920).)

  7. Sir Hugh Gough (1779–1869) was that not unusual combination: a stern and ruthless soldier, but a kindly and likeable man. He was also entirely “Irish” – reckless, good-humoured, careless of convention and authority, and possessed of great charm; as a general, he was unpredictable and unorthodox, preferring to engage his enemy hand-to-hand and trust to the superiority of the British bayonet and sabre rather than indulge in the soph
istications of manoeuvre. He attracted numerous critics, who drew attention to his shortcomings as a military organiser and tactician but could not deny his saving grace as a commander – he kept on winning. By 1845 he had a combat record unequalled by any soldier living, Wellington included, having been commissioned at 13, fought against the Dutch in South Africa and Surinam, pursued brigands in Trinidad, served throughout the Peninsular War (in which he received various wounds and a knighthood), commanded a British expedition to China, stormed Canton, forced the surrender of Nanking, and beaten the Mahrattas in India. At the time of the Sutlej crisis he was 66 years old, but sprightly in body and spirit, handsome, erect, with long receding white hair and fine moustaches and side-whiskers. The best-known portrait shows him in his famous white “fighting coat”, pointing with an outstretched arm: it is said to illustrate one of the many critical moments in his career when, at Sobraon, he shouted: “What? Withdraw? Indeed I will not! Tell Sir Robert Dick to move on, in the name of God!” (See R. S. Rait, Life and Campaigns of Hugh, 1st Viscount Gough (1903); Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers (1985) and other works cited in these Notes.)

  Sir Robert (“Fighting Bob”) Sale was another highly combative general, celebrated for leading from the front, and once, when his men were mutinous, inviting them to shoot him. He fought in Burma, and in the Afghan War, where he was second-in-command of the army, and earned distinction as the defender of Jallalabad. (See also Note 9.)

  8. War with the Gurkhas in 1815 brought the British to Simla, and the first European house was built there in the 1820s by one Captain Kennedy, the local superintendent, whose hospitality may have laid the foundations of its popularity as a resort. Emily Eden was the sister of Lord Auckland, Governor-General 1835–41. (See the excellently-illustrated Simla: a British Hill Station, by Pat Barr and Ray Desmond (1978).)

  9. Adapting Raleigh’s famous judgment on Henry VIII, one may say that “if all the patterns and pictures of the mem-sahibs of British India were lost to the world, they might be painted to the life from Lady Sale”. Born Florentia Wynch, she was 21 when she married the dashing young Captain Robert Sale, by whom she had twelve children, one of whom, as Mrs Alexandrina Sturt, shared with her mother the horrors of the march from Kabul. Lady Sale was then 54, but although she was twice wounded and had her clothing shot through by jezzail bullets, she worked tirelessly for the sick and wounded, and for the women and children who took part in that fearful journey over the snowbound Afghan passes. Throughout the march, and during the months which she suffered in Afghan captivity, she kept the diary which is the classic account of the Kabul retreat in which all but a handful died out of 14,000. It is one of the great military journals, and a remarkable personal memoir of an indomitable woman, who recorded battle, massacre, earthquake, hardship, escape, and everyday detail with a sharp and often caustic eye. Her reaction, when soldiers were reluctant to take up their muskets to form an advance guard was: “You had better give me one, and I will lead the party.” Other typical observations are: “I had, fortunately, only one ball in my arm,” and the brisk entry for July 24, when she was a prisoner: “At two p.m. Mrs Sturt presented me with a grand-daughter – another female captive.” During the march her son-in-law, Captain Sturt, had died beside her in the snow. Her heroism on the march was rewarded by an annual pension of £500 from Queen Victoria, and when she died, in her sixty-sixth year, her tombstone was given the appropriate inscription: “Under this stone reposes all that could die of Lady Sale”.

  Flashman writes of her with considerable affection; no doubt her forthright and unconventional style appealed to him. Her habit of putting a foot on the table to ease her gout (not rheumatism) is also recorded by one of Simla’s medical officers, Henry Oldfield. (See her Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan (1843), ed. Patrick Macrory (1969); Barr and Desmond; DNB.)

  10. Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew was published in 1845, and may conceivably have been available in Simla that September, but Flashman’s memory has probably confused it with the author’s equally popular Mysteries of Paris which appeared in 1842–3. Dumas’s The Three Musketeers was first published in 1844; Flashman may well have borrowed it from one of the French officers who rescued him from Madagascar in June, 1845.

  11. George Broadfoot, a large, red-haired, heavily-bespectacled and pugnacious Orcadian, was one of the early paladins of the North-west Frontier. He had distinguished himself in the Afghan War as a ferocious fighter, engineer, and military organiser, and it was in large part due to him that Jallalabad was successfully defended after the disastrous Kabul retreat. He was awarded a C.B. and a special mention in despatches, and went on to serve in Burma before being appointed North-west Agent in 1845. He and Flashman served together on the Kabul road, and Broadfoot’s brother William had been killed in the residency siege of November, 1841, in which Flashman took a reluctant part. The reference to Broadfoot’s “Scotch burr” is interesting, since although he was born in Kirkwall he had lived in London and India from the age of ten.

  Captain (later Sir) Henry Havelock, known to Flashman as “the Gravedigger”, no doubt because of his grim appearance and religious zeal, was to become famous in the Indian Mutiny, where he relieved and was besieged in Lucknow. Flashman knew him there, and also during the Afghan campaign.

  The “cabbage-eating nobleman” with the lisp was certainly Prince Waldemar of Prussia, who visited Simla in 1845 and subsequently accompanied the British army in the field. He travelled under the name of Count Ravensburg, but his hosts seem to have addressed him by his real title.

  12. The rate of pay for an East India Company sepoy at this time was 7 rupees a month. The Khalsa was paying 14, and 45 rupees for cavalrymen.

  13. Sind, the territory lying between the Punjab and the sea, was annexed in 1843 by Lord Ellenborough, Sir Henry Hardinge’s predecessor as Governor-General; this gave Britain control of the Indus, and an important buffer against possible Moslem invasion from the north-west (see map). It was a cynical piece of work, in which Ellenborough goaded the Sind Amirs by forcing an unacceptable treaty on them; when this provoked an attack by the Baluchi warriors, Sir Charles Napier promptly conquered the country, winning the battles of Miani and Hyderabad. Public reaction to the annexation was reflected by the House of Commons, which postponed for a year the normal vote of thanks to the successful general, and by Punch, which gleefully accepted a contribution from a Miss Catherine Winkworth, aged 17, suggesting that Napier’s despatch to Ellenborough must have read: “Peccavi”, “I have Scinde”, (sinned).” (See under Foreign Affairs, Punch, May 18, 1844.) The annexation did not pass unnoticed in Lahore, and no doubt convinced many Sikhs that it would be their turn next.

  14. Young as he was, Flashman should have known that Afghanistan was not an exception, and that political officers, who were usually Army, normally fought along with the rest. It is true that no post in battle was more dangerous than general’s aide, and he may well have been right to assume that it would be especially perilous when the general was Hugh Gough.

  Alexander Burnes had been Flashman’s political chief at Kabul, where Sir William McNaghten was head of the Political Mission; he saw both of them murdered by the Afghans. (See Flashman.)

  15. The details which Flashman gives of the Soochet legacy case are substantially correct. Raja Soochet had sent his fortune, amounting to 14 lakhs of rupees (about £140,000), to Ferozepore shortly before his death in March 1844; it was buried there in three huge copper vessels and dug up by Captain Saunders Abbott. Dispute as to the ownership then arose, with the Lahore durbar claiming its return, and the British government holding that it was the property of Soochet’s heirs. (See Broadfoot, pp. 229–32, 329.)

  16. The famous Shalamar or Shalimar gardens and pleasure grounds were laid out in the seventeenth century by Shah Jehan, creator of the Taj Mahal. Originally there were seven gardens, representing the seven divisions of Paradise, but now only three remain, covering about 80 acres. The Lahore Shalamar is not to be confused wi
th the gardens of the same name in Kashmir.

  17. When Flashman talks of the Khalsa he means simply the Punjabi army, but the term has much deeper significance. The Sikhs (“disciples”) founded by Nanak in the fifteenth century as a peaceful religious sect, were transformed two hundred years later by their tenth and last Guru, Gobind Singh, into a military power to resist Muslim persecution. Gobind founded the Khalsa, the Pure, a baptised brotherhood which has been likened to the Templars and the Praetorian Guard, and rapidly became the leading order of Sikhism and the embodiment of Sikh nationhood. Among Gobind’s institutions were the abolition of caste, the adoption of the surnames Singh and Kaur (lion and lioness), and the famous five k’s (bangle, shorts, comb, dagger, and uncut hair). It was a fighting order, soon numbering 80,000, and under Runjeet Singh it reached the height of its power. Contact with the British seems to have inspired him to build an army on European lines, with the assistance of French, Italian, British, American, German, and Russian instructors. The result was a superb force, quite as disciplined and formidable as Flashman describes it, well trained and equipped, and (a point not to be overlooked in examining the origins of the Sikh War) bent on conquest. Once Runjeet’s iron hand was gone, the Khalsa was the real power in the Punjab, whose rulers could only hope to conciliate it. The panches which controlled it were elected by the men in accordance with village tradition.

  At Runjeet’s death, the numerical strength of the Khalsa was estimated at 29,000, with 192 guns. By 1845 this had risen to 45,000 regular infantry, 4000 regular cavalry, and 22,000 irregular horse (gorracharra), with 276 guns. That this figure rose further during the year seems certain; Flashman and his contemporaries mention both 80,000 and 100,000, but how many of these would be effectives it is impossible to say. He also uses the terms Khalsa, Sikhs, and Punjabis loosely when referring to the Punjab army; it should be remarked that the Khalsa as he knew it was not composed exclusively of Sikhs. (For a breakdown of the Khalsa’s strength in 1845, see Carmichael Smyth, Reigning Family, appendix; for notes on the foreign mercenaries employed by Runjeet Singh, see Gardner’s Memoirs. Also works already cited in Note 6.)