The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  Henty’s boys’ stories were hugely popular, and in them he covered a vast range, mostly of military and naval campaigns, skilfully blending juvenile derring-do with well-researched background. As a typical Victorian, imbued with patriotic pride and holding by straight and sturdy old-fashioned values, he is well out of step with modern fashionable thought, but even today his books, antique in style and outlook though they are, can be of great value to the student of history. He was a good writer with a fine descriptive gift, and can give a more vivid and convincing picture of a period and its people than most academic historians; as an example I would cite his In Times of Peril, in which he brought day-to-day experience of the Indian Mutiny to life for his young readers – and not a few older ones. The late John Paul Getty owned a complete set of Henty, and was said to read them over and over again.

  Henty’s memoir of the Abyssinian War, The March to Magdala, was published in 1868.

  20. This implied criticism does less than justice to Brigadier-General (later Sir) William Merewether, who was one of the stars of the expedition. An experienced frontier fighter in India, where he served in the Scinde Horse (Flashman’s “Scindees”) he was also a shrewd and decisive political officer, and was agent at Aden when the Abyssinian crisis arose. It was as a result of his urgings that a reply to Theodore’s letter was eventually sent, and he kept in constant touch with the prisoners. He carried out the first reconnaissance and chose Zoola as the beachhead, and as political officer was in charge of intelligence for the expedition.

  21. There is little to add to Flashman’s description and assessment of Captain Charles Speedy except to note that he was in fact six feet six inches in height and broad in proportion. A splendid picture of him in full Abyssinian costume is held by the Army Museums Ogilby Trust; he is indeed an overpowering sight.

  22. This suggests that a much greater quantity of silver was carried up to Napier with Flashman’s party than the contents of a single strong-box. Half a dozen riders would hardly be needed to carry 2000 dollars, large coins though they were.

  23. The flogging of the driver caused understandable indignation, but whether the Rev. Johann Krapf was responsible is unclear. He was an old Abyssinian “hand” with a great affection for the country, and it was for his long experience of Africa that he was enrolled in the expedition. He was apparently the first explorer to report snow in Africa, on Mount Kilimanjaro.

  24. The popular fame of Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) rests on his memorable greeting to Dr Livingstone, and to a lesser extent on his African exploration, but he was also a first-class reporter, and his despatches from the campaigns which he covered for the New York Herald put him in the first rank of war correspondents. Born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales, he ran away from a workhouse, sailed to America as a cabin boy, and was adopted by a New Orleans merchant named Stanley. He served on both sides in the U.S. Civil War, and then became a journalist, covering the Abyssinian War, the Ashanti War, and the opening of the Suez Canal; his explorations included his finding Livingstone and leading an expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, who was “Chinese” Gordon’s governor of the Equatorial province of Sudan. Whether Emin or Livingstone needed or wanted to be found is a point still debated. Stanley settled back in Britain, was knighted, and was Unionist M.P. for Lambeth, 1895–1900. His account of the Abyssinian campaign, in Coomassie and Magdala (1874), is racy, colourful, packed with good detail, and essential for any study of the expedition.

  Captain Speedy’s anxiety is a tribute to Stanley’s reporting skill, but it is not clear why he refers to him as “the Chicago wallah” when Stanley was working for a New York paper.

  25. George Broadfoot and Lord Elgin, Flashman’s political chiefs in the Punjab and China respectively.

  26. Napier was married twice. His first wife, by whom he had three sons and three daughters, died in 1849, and he married his second wife, Mary Cecilia Scott, in 1861, when he was 50 and she was 18. According to Alan Moorehead, “She appears to have run his household in Bombay – and it was an entertaining household where good dinners were served and French was spoken – with something of her husband’s air of quiet authority.” They had six sons and three daughters. (Moorehead, The Blue Nile, 1962.)

  27. Speedy here is referring to the Blue Nile, which flows from Lake Tana south-eastwards before looping west and north-west to join the White Nile at Khartoum in the Sudan. James Bruce reached the source of the Blue Nile in 1770 and supposed he had reached the source of the main Nile river, but this (the White Nile) was not conclusively identified until 1860–2 when John Hanning Speke and James Grant traced its course from Lake Victoria, which Speke had discovered some years before. Grant served as a political officer on Napier’s Abyssinian expedition. (See also Note 35.)

  28. Several members of the expedition mention the lady in the tower as a mysterious figure, but there is much disagreement about her and the whereabouts of her captive husband. To one writer she is a “princess” whose husband is held by Kussai of Tigre; Stanley and another name the captor as King Theodore himself; Holland and Hozier’s official account agrees with Flashman that the persecutor is Gobayzy of Lasta. She is also variously described as “high-born and disconsolate”, “inconsolable”, and pining away her life “in incessant grief and pinching poverty”; there is general agreement about her vow of seclusion in her tower. Only Flashman gives her a name and personal description, and since he knew her intimately and none of the others seems even to have seen her, readers may be inclined to accept his account as authoritative. (Henty, Stanley, Holland and Hozier, and William Simpson, Diary of a Journey to Abyssinia, 1868. Simpson was a journalist and artist with the Illustrated London News whose diary has been edited and annotated by Richard Pankhurst, 2002.)

  29. Flashman does not exaggerate. Mr St John is an enthusiast whose observations are to be found in Hotten’s Abyssinia and Its People (see Note 14).

  30. Readers of the Flashman Papers do not need to be told that his one real talent (aside from his boasted expertise with horses and women) was for languages. He was a brilliant linguist and an unusually quick study, often mastering a language in weeks; he was being modest in telling Napier that he could “scratch by” in a dozen but was fluent in only six, and it is not surprising that he quickly acquired enough Amharic for simple conversation. It has been the Abyssinian language since the late Middle Ages, when it replaced Ge’ez, the tongue of those Semitic people who crossed from Arabia to Ethiopia long ago. Ge’ez means literally “the free” and was applied to the people also; it is still used for liturgical purposes. An expert on Ethiopian languages, E. Ullendorf, says that Amharic bears the same kind of relationship to Ge’ez as French does to Latin. (See E. Ullendorf, Exploration and Study of Abyssinia, 1945.)

  31. “Palmer’s Vesuvians”, a patent match which burned with a sputtering flame, a favourite with cigar smokers.

  32. The atrocities described by Uliba-Wark are all well attested; indeed they are only part of the catalogue of horrors to be found in the histories written by two of the prisoners held by Theodore: Narrative of the British Mission to Theodore of Ethiopia by Hormuzd Rassam, 2 vols, 1869, and A Narrative of the Captivity in Abyssinia, 1868, by Dr Henry Blanc. These are two of the most essential works on the Abyssinian War, and between them give a graphic and detailed picture not only of the privations of their imprisonment, and of the plotting and politicking which took place between them and their captors, but are invaluable for their portraits of Theodore himself. They will be referred to frequently in these Notes.

  33. Flashman is almost certainly referring to the First Sikh War of 1845–6 and the China War of 1860, which he has described in Flashman and the Mountain of Light and Flashman and the Dragon.

  34. The yellow scorpions of the genus Buthus are found in north-east Africa and the Sahara. Baby scorpions climb on the mother’s back after birth and remain there until they are big enough to fend for themselves.

  35. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke attempted to
find the source of the Nile in 1857–9, but Burton fell ill and Speke reached the source on Lake Victoria alone. Burton queried his findings, and after Speke and Grant in 1868 confirmed Speke’s original discovery (see Note 27) Burton renewed the controversy. He and Speke were due to debate the question before the British Association on September 15, 1864, but on that same morning Speke was accidentally killed while partridge-shooting.

  36. Flashman’s cavalier attitude to dates is a vexation, but this passage gives some indication of his movements in the mid – 1860s. The reference to Chancellorsville places him in the United States in May 1863, and we know he was at Gettysburg two months later, and in Washington when Lincoln was shot (April 1865). It is just possible, but highly unlikely, that his service (to both sides) in the U.S. Civil War was interrupted by a return to England in late 1863 or 1864. When he arrived in Mexico is uncertain, but his mention of Queretaro places him in the country between February and May of 1867, since that was the period in which Maximilian based himself at that royalist stronghold, where he was captured by the Juaristas. It seems plain, then, that between April 1865 and February 1867 Flashman returned to England at least once, and probably twice, since he speaks of “intervals” in the plural.

  One would be inclined to commiserate with Elspeth if it were not clear from the Papers that, while they were deeply attached to each other, she bore his frequent absences with equanimity.

  37. It is not surprising that Flashman expected to be disbelieved, since in his day no one had survived such a plunge down a waterfall. Not until October, 2003, when an enterprising American deliberately allowed himself to be borne over the Canadian section of Niagara Falls, and lived, did anyone make such a descent. The Canadian Fall is estimated at 158 ft; the Tisisat Fall which Flashman survived is approximately 150 ft. Tisisat is one of the most glorious sights in Africa, the Blue Nile bordered by beautiful green banks and flowing smoothly past little jungly islands and rocks before it plunges over the lip. “It is an extraordinary thing that they should be so little known,” writes Alan Moorehead, “for they are, by some way, the grandest spectacle that either the Blue or the White Nile has to offer.” The Victoria Falls are considerably higher, and are known as “the smoke that thunders”. Tisisat, “the silver smoke”, was discovered by two Portuguese missionaries, Paez and Lobo, in the early seventeenth century. (Moorehead, The Blue Nile.)

  38. We cannot tell where this camp was, and must assume from Flashman’s account that it was less than a day’s ride from Tisisat, probably in the direction of Magdala. Queen Masteeat was evidently on the move at this time, and a week or so later we know from Holland and Hozier that she was at a place called Lugot, not given on the maps but said to be only five miles from Magdala.

  39. Lucien Maxwell (1818–75), frontiersman and landowner, was one of a party of mountain men, led by Kit Carson, who rescued Flashman from Apaches in 1850 (see Flashman and the Redskins); he later became proprietor of one of the largest private estates ever known, the Maxwell Land Grant. The trick which he taught Flashman of proffering a pistol-butt in apparent surrender to an opponent and suddenly rolling it into the palm to cover him, was known to gunfighters as the road-agent’s spin; the border shift consisted simply of tossing a pistol from one hand to the other. The Las Vegas referred to is not the Nevada gambling resort, but an earlier settlement in New Mexico.

  40. Flashman was not exaggerating. His account of an Abyssinian orgy is almost identical to that of James Bruce a century earlier, the chief difference being that at the feast Bruce attended in Gondar, the steaks were cut from a living cow indoors in the presence of the guests, the beast’s bellowing being the summons to table. Both sexes were present, and Bruce describes how, after the banquet, “Love lights all its fires, and everything is permitted with absolute freedom. There is no coyness, no delays, no need of … retirement to gratify their wishes … they sacrifice both to Bacchus and to Venus. The two men nearest the vacuum a pair have made on the bench by leaving their seats, hold their upper garment like a screen before the two … and if we may judge by sound, they seem to think it as great a shame to make love in silence as to eat. Replaced in their seats again, the company drink the happy couple’s health, and their example is followed … as each couple is disposed. All this passes without remark or scandal, not a licentious word is uttered, nor the most distant joke upon the transaction.”

  41. Theodore used guerrilla raiding parties during his march from Debra Tabor, and after his arrival in Magdala, and prominent among them were his “Amazons”. Dr Blanc writes: “He had formed the strongest and hardiest of the women of his camp into a plundering band; he was much pleased with their bravery, and one of them having killed a petty chief … he was so delighted that he gave her a title of rank and presented her with one of his own pistols.” This description seems to fit Flashman’s “Diana”, with her silver shield and pistol.

  42. The “falling out” had taken place when Theodore’s troops plundered the villagers of the Dalanta plateau, who had previously helped him as road-makers and porters on his march from Debra Tabor to Magdala. Furious at his betrayal, they gave their assistance to Napier’s advance. It is estimated that Theodore destroyed no fewer than 47 villages around Magdala, massacring 7000 people and pressing men into his service. According to Blanc, he was concluding a final raid in person at the time of Napier’s arrival at the Bechelo river (April 6–7); this must have been the raid, which was partly a foray for supplies as well as a scouting operation against the Gallas, which resulted in Flashman’s rescue and capture. (See Note 45, which confirms the date.)

  43. If Theodore’s conversational flights seem outlandish, they are nevertheless authentic. He obviously had a habit of repeating himself, and giving free rein to his paranoia, during his drinking bouts, and his curious comparison of himself to an expectant mother, his allusions to the sword of Damocles, and the Scriptures, and making a great bloodbath, are all to be found in Blanc and Rassam. His attitude towards Britain was a mixture of genuine admiration (he seems to have been truly excited at the prospect of seeing her army in action, even against himself) and deep resentment, for which he can hardly be blamed, at her apparent contempt for him; he seems to have suspected that he was despised for being primitive and black.

  44. Hormuzd Rassam, an Iraqi Christian born in Mosul, was considered an odd choice as envoy to Theodore by his contemporaries, and by historians since. He had worked with the archaeologist Sir Henry Layard in what was then Mesopotamia, studied at Oxford, became a British citizen, and was assistant to Merewether at Aden when he was sent to Abyssinia to try to persuade Theodore to release the prisoners. The general opinion of him seems to have been that he was altogether too submissive in his dealings with the Emperor; “too soft, too compliant, too yielding,” says Moorehead; Stanley was not favourably impressed, and there were many who thought a tough senior soldier would have been a better choice. Maybe; in Rassam’s defence it has to be pointed out that while he may have been deferential, and caused Theodore to treat him more as a courtier than an envoy, it worked; a tougher and more outspoken ambassador might well have provoked the Emperor into much harsher measures against the prisoners.

  Prideaux and Blanc had been in Rassam’s mission and were taken prisoner with him; the other captives apart from Cameron were German and other European missionaries, with their wives and servants, and the German artisans already in Theodore’s employ were prisoners in all but name. The total of Europeans held prisoner has been put at 60, of whom only Cameron and Rassam can be said to have had diplomatic status.

  45. For once Flashman gives an exact date, and we can deduce his movements for the previous week at least. He must have arrived at Queen Masteeat’s camp on April 6, been kidnapped the same night and rescued by Theodore’s women, arrived in Theodore’s camp at Islamgee on April 7 and spent the night in chains, and met Rassam and the other prisoners on April 8.

  Before April 6 we can only estimate that he spent about a week with the fisher-folk who
nursed him through his fever, so he probably went over the Tisisat Falls near the end of March. Working back, we place him at the Zaze monastery about March 24, which does not accord with his statement that it was then a week before Palm Sunday, which in that year fell on April 5. Plainly this was just a mistake on his part; for Flashman, an error of four days more or less is nothing, and we can only be grateful that he deigned to make a note of April 9 when it arrived. Since he was with Napier on February 25, his journey with Uliba-Wark must have taken about four weeks.

  46. Of the many atrocities committed by Theodore, the massacre of prisoners at Islamgee is by far the best documented. The principal witness is his valet and gun-bearer, Wald Gabr, who in a statement taken by Speedy testified that he himself had shot three of the victims on the Emperor’s orders. His account bears Flashman out entirely; indeed he is if anything more horrific, for he says that the first victim, the bound woman, was actually cut in two by Theodore, who then shot two more women before ordering the other prisoners to be thrown over the cliff alive, those who survived the fall being shot. Blanc and Rassam both describe the cold-blooded examination of the prisoners remaining after Theodore’s first drunken rage had subsided, each person being asked for name, country, and crime, many of which were utterly trivial; the great majority were then flung over the cliff. Blanc and Rassam differ on the numbers killed; Wald Gabr says simply: “No one counted the victims, we were all afraid.” (Blanc, Rassam, Wald Gabr’s statement to Speedy, in Holland and Hozier.)