Flashman's Waterloo

by Robert Brightwell

  “Oh yes, Flash,” and he sagged with relief before correcting himself, “I mean Major Flashman. And I promise that you can count on my discretion.”

  He went off then for a fortifying glass of brandy and I did the same, not for the first time that evening. I knew he would not bother me again and if you think I had been harsh on him, well consider this. In the intervening years he has been cited in two divorce cases as a lover; in one the husband had tried to blackmail him. He has also taken a number of young homeless girls into his house ostensibly as an act of charity. It was no coincidence that they were all pretty wenches and, according to rumour, he used to inspect their quarters in his nightshirt every night and find some excuse to pull one of them over his knee for at least a spanking. Has this harmed his reputation? Of course not. He is Lord Melbourne now and until recently was the prime minister. He was the first prime minister for our new queen. It was the talk of society that while young Vicky looked up at him as a father figure, he had rather more carnal designs on her, despite being forty years her senior. King Spanky, now there is a thought! Fortunately, before he could act on this ambition, his government fell and he was replaced.

  I forgot about the rogue as I tried to enjoy myself that evening. I fell in with my brothers who were determined to help me drink the house dry. It felt like I had a quart of brandy on board when one of them suggested that I demonstrate for them the tomahawk throwing that I had just been telling them about. In no time a maid was prevailed upon to fetch the weapon from my study. The closed door to the hall was selected as the target from twenty feet, with a cross drawn on it with some billiard chalk to aim at. Soon wagers were being made amongst those near me as to whether I could hit the thing. I was quietly confident; we had aimed at the end of a tree trunk in Canada. Any warrior who could not hit a door at that distance would have been laughed out of camp.

  Once my brothers had completed their bets, I hefted the handle of the familiar weapon in my hand for a moment and let fly… Then a lot of things happened all at once.

  First I noticed that the door was starting to open as some fool chose this moment to enter. You might have expected me to be worried by this development, but I wasn’t. I don’t know if you have ever thrown a tomahawk, or a knife for that matter. If you have you know that you can feel if the throw is true as soon as the weapon has left your hand. I knew instantly the axe’s shaft left my fingertips that my throw was very wrong indeed. It had been at least three months since I had last hurled my tomahawk and I was clearly out of practice. Being tight on brandy did not help either. The steel blade of the weapon glinted in the candlelight as it whirled across the room directly towards three men standing talking to the left of the door. Foxed with drink though I was, I remember gasping in horror. This was Leicestershire rather than London, but even so, braining one of your guests was still considered something of a social faux pas. Before I could utter a cry of warning the blade brushed the hair of the nearest man with his back to me and then buried itself deep in the oak panelling of the wall just beyond him. I saw the fellow reach up and feel his head and then stiffen as he noticed the still vibrating shaft of the axe stuck in the wall.

  My brothers were hooting with mirth. The man turned to glare at them. I had already recognised the back of his head and it would be a cold day in hell before I apologised to its owner. Charles Lamb stared at me with a look of shock, still holding the back of his head, and then gazed back at the axe in disbelief.

  As usual, I felt my natural ebullience rise at surviving another moment of crisis, in this case, fuelled by a generous dose of spirits. “It’s all right, Spanker, I missed you,” I bawled at him across the room. I gestured to the grinning men around me, “These fellows had just wagered me a guinea that I could not scalp you from here.” There was more laughter at that, which slowly spread across the room as people recounted what had just happened to those who had missed it. This was the type of revenge they had been disappointed not to see when Lamb and I had shaken hands. One boozy fellow staggered across to me and, slapping me on the back, slurred, “Bided your time to catch the swine unawares, eh?” He beamed at me with unfocused eyes while his breath smelt like the fumes from a distillery. “I’ll wager you could trim off a mosquito’s eyebrows at twenty paces with your little axe what?”

  “You can depend on it, sir,” I boasted although I swore inwardly that there was more chance of another two-headed cow being born than me giving a second demonstration. As others came up to congratulate me on my marksmanship, I looked back at Lamb, who was surveying the growing mirth with a look of disgust. Then without uttering a word he strode out of the now open door. I was feeling well pleased with myself, at least until I noticed one face that was not laughing. It was clear that everyone in that room, and especially Louisa, believed that Flashy the feared soldier and temporary Iroquois warrior, had put that tomahawk exactly where he had intended.

  Chapter 4

  Things were a bit frosty between us for a day or two. Louisa was convinced I had broken my word to be pleasant to Lamb and I was not going to admit that I had been aiming at the door; not that she would have believed me if I had. We argued and I had just decided that it was time for me to return to London for a spell, when a messenger arrived carrying a letter for me from the French embassy in Paris. It was from Wellington and, compared to his normal brusque notes, it was positively cordial. He congratulated me on my survival, apologised for his earlier confirmation of my probable death and rounded off by offering me a job on his staff.

  “What is it?” asked Louisa, hearing me snort in derision as I reached the end of the missive.

  “It’s from Wellington offering me a job on his staff. He must be mad if he thinks I will accept. Being one of his staff officers has nearly got me killed more times than I can remember.” I had tossed the letter down on the table and was starting to get up when Louisa surprised me by suggesting that I should accept. “What on earth do you mean?” I demanded. “Are you hoping I will get killed so you can go back to your old friends?”

  “No of course not, but the war is over and Wellington is not in the army any more.”

  “Not in the army? Why the devil is he in France, then?” Wellington had been a soldier for all the time that I had known him. I could not imagine what else the man who had defeated every army France had sent at him could be doing in Paris.

  “He is the British ambassador to France,” said Louisa grinning. “So you see this is not an army job at all, but a diplomatic one.”

  “They have sent Wellington as the British ambassador to France?” I repeated in disbelief that the British government could be quite that tactless.

  “Yes, and according to Lady Melbourne, he is quite enjoying himself. He has already slept with two of Napoleon’s mistresses and taken as his embassy a mansion that used to belong to Napoleon’s sister.”

  I forgot our row and burst out laughing. For all his starch I knew Wellington for a randy devil; in fact he had once made a play for Louisa when we were in India.

  “So why don’t you consider the job,” Louisa persisted. “You know you are bored here in the country.”

  “But it is in Paris. I have been there twice before and neither visit ended well.” I still harboured dark memories of being there just two years previously, when I had been reluctantly recruited into a plot to overthrow Napoleon and had been forced to escape with the secret police on my heels.

  “But it is different now,” Louisa continued. “The war is over and the government is already laying up ships and dismissing regiments to cut its costs. Your reputation as a soldier will soon be forgotten as people turn their attention back to trade and getting rich. This is a great opportunity for you to start a new career. You will be a person of influence and diplomats always get a lion’s share of honours and titles. You could have a British knighthood to go with your Spanish one, maybe even a peerage.”

  For a brief moment I was seduced by the thought of Lord Flashman, but then my natural cynicism cam
e to the fore again. I have heard such speeches a dozen times from Wellington, Wickham, who had been in charge of Britain’s spies, and countless others. The bastards all look you in the eye and assure you that the simple task that they are asking you to perform will be perfectly safe. The next thing you know, your bowels are churning in terror as you are forced to flee from one nightmare situation to the next. Well I was not falling for it again. I was home and safe and that was where I was going to stay. Not only that, I had the perfect excuse to stay out of harm’s way. “Never mind honours,” I insisted, “I have been away from my family long enough.” I gave Louisa what I thought was my most winning smile as I played my trump card. “You said yourself that I have not spent much time with you and the boy and you are right. We need to spend time together as a family.”

  To my surprise Louisa just beamed in delight. “Oh but we will, darling. Because when you go to Paris we will be coming too.”

  So it was that two weeks later, despite my very best endeavours, I found myself with Louisa, little Thomas, the harridan of a governess, two maids and a valet, climbing up the gangplank of some squalid little packet ship to stand on the soil of France once more. It had been a miserable, choppy crossing and I took some satisfaction from the sickly pallor of our party as they climbed gratefully up onto solid ground. The trip from Dover had only taken a few hours and we had shared the meagre first class accommodation with a family of émigrés returning to France. The man was a loud and obnoxious Frenchman, who claimed to be a noble and was very prickly over his status. I can’t remember his title but I called him the Comte de Grenouille or ‘Count of Frogs’ behind his back to amuse my son. The comte insisted on his party sitting at the head of the dining table on either side of the bemused captain for the luncheon that was served. I was happy to let him for the food on those ships is always as appetising as a pig’s swill bucket. We had brought our own. I tucked into a game pie while watching the poor countess trying to spoon a green soup into a face that was verging on the same colour.

  “She was telling me her parents were both guillotined during the Revolution,” Louisa recounted while we ate. “She is terrified of going back, but her husband is determined to reclaim the family estate.” I had read that the new French government had decided against restoring lands to their pre-revolutionary owners, but it appeared the good comte was not going to give up his inheritance so easily.

  “Those lands have been in my family for three hundred years,” he had told me as we waited to embark. “I will be damned if I will leave them in the hands of those treacherous villains, damned do ye hear, sir.” With that, he led his brood up the gangplank before us and started shouting at nearby harbour officials as though he was there to reclaim the whole country as his birth right, not just his estate. They shook their heads wearily and largely ignored the fool. They had probably seen this kind of performance many times before over recent weeks.

  Once it was clear I could not escape this trip I had been reading up on French affairs. Following Napoleon’s forced abdication, the brother of the king guillotined during the Revolution had been installed as King Louis XVIII. By all accounts he was an unappealing, grotesquely fat man, who made our own lard-arsed prince regent look like an emaciated urchin in comparison. After years of war, the country was bankrupt and certainly in no position to compensate the swarms of returning nobles like the comte for their lost estates. Nor could the new king risk the resentment of the French middle classes by confiscating property bought legally from the government of the last twenty years. No, I reflected, in all probability the comte would indeed be damned, although he would not go quietly.

  He was still raging as I led our party past him towards the customs sheds, beside which carriages for hire could be seen waiting for business. I looked about me and saw that while it had been over ten years since I had last been in the port of Calais, it was very different. Before, during the Peace of Amiens in ’02, the place had been swarming with uniforms; soldiers, sailors, port officials, all had official dress, often with sashes of red, white and blue. Now the white royalist ensign flapped forlornly from a flagpole, with just three gold fleur de lys embroidered on it to show that it was not the town’s sign of surrender. The few officials that could be seen were now mostly in civilian clothes and at first I thought that they would not bother to check our papers at all. But at length one did shamble over to intercept us and examine the invitation from Wellington that served as our passport. The official’s eyes widened in surprise as he recognised the signature at the bottom of the document. Our ambassador might have been a former enemy, but he was clearly respected and soon two carriages and a cart for our party were whistled up while our luggage was being hoisted onto the jetty from the packet ship.

  I have always found that an easy manner and a few coins is the best way to oil bureaucracy and in ten minutes, with the help of half a dozen porters, we were all loaded up and ready to go. At the same time, the good comte was learning the hard way that things had changed a lot since his childhood in his mother country. His title carried little weight and harbour masters did not cower like some feudal serf on his family estate. Mules could learn a trick or two from French officials when it comes to stubbornness and intractability. The man in charge was just then insisting to the comte that it was necessary to search all of their baggage for contraband. They were clearly just getting their revenge for his tirades as Christ knows what you would want to smuggle into France. All the good stuff such as brandy and silks comes out of the country. I guessed that once they got the noble’s luggage open they would rob the poor bastard of all the valuables they could lay their hands on. Judging from his apoplectic reaction to their demands, the good comte realised the same. It was turning out to be a fine homecoming for him and for devilment I could not help but lean out of the carriage window as the wheels rattled past the scene and wish him a happy return to his estates. He absolutely dashed his hat to the ground and stamped on it in frustration as a reply.

  It took two days to reach Paris and in that time my fear over being on French soil again completely disappeared. The differences we had seen in the port were only exaggerated further in the countryside. The land we crossed had been invaded the previous year by Russian, Prussian and Austrian armies, who had driven back Bonaparte’s French defenders, while the British army had driven up into the south-west of the country from Spain. Wherever we went the people had a weary, beaten look about them. Many businesses in towns had closed – some looked to have been looted, perhaps by the foreign armies – and in the markets we saw there was little food to be had.

  In towns where we stopped to change the horses or stay the night, the populace generally treated us with surly indifference. The exception was the old soldiers. In each village we visited there would invariably be a table outside a café where a group of crippled men would be gathered sitting in the last of the autumn sunshine. The old army greatcoats they had on did nothing to hide the empty sleeves or trouser legs of these wounded old war horses. As a soldier, albeit a reluctant one, myself, I knew how close I had come to sharing their fate, or worse. So I always made a point of going over to them and buying a bottle or a loaf to share and more often than not we fell into talking about old times even though we had been on different sides.

  I met a few who had fought in battles against me while I had been in Spain, but the majority had been wounded in the 1812 campaign in Russia. I thought I had known cold in Canada, but there I had at least been wrapped up in furs. The stories they told of that awful retreat literally chilled the blood. It had been a struggle for them just to stay alive with few winter clothes or supplies and swarms of Cossack cavalry picking off the stragglers and harrying the rear-guard every step of the way.

  I remember they told one tale of when the army was trapped up against a huge river with Russian armies coming up behind for the kill. All seemed lost until some Dutch engineers plunged into the water with wood and ropes. Despite the ice floes they managed to build two rickety bridg
es that saved the bulk of the army – although the freezing water killed most of the engineers. Berezina I think they called the place and those that had been there had a sad haunted look on their faces as they told the tale. When I congratulated them on their capital escape they did not look any happier. They explained that they had been forced to pull down the bridges after they had crossed to stop the Russians from using them and that many civilian camp followers and wounded stragglers had been trapped without hope on the Russian side when they did so.

  I could not begin to imagine the horror of that scene as those still to cross realised what was happening. I had thought the French soldiers in Spain had suffered with the partisans, but I was swiftly realising that they were the lucky ones compared to those who went to Russia. Three quarters of a million men from all over the French empire had started the campaign but only a fifth came back. Now, despite all their sacrifices, everything that they had fought for was being swept away. They were scornful of their new king, who apparently needed help to climb into a carriage, never mind ride a horse. He had never commanded an army and according to them had surrounded himself with courtiers who were determined to return the country back to the days before the Revolution.

  “Before we were led by men of destiny,” grumbled one old corporal. “Now we are led by profiteers and lickspittles.” He actually used a rather coarser French word for toady than ‘lickspittle’ but you get his meaning.

  He was not wrong about the profiteers either. Previously when I had been in France the price of goods for an English tourist was double that for a French citizen. But now, when that Englishman arrived with a party in two coaches and a wagon for luggage, the cost of food and wine rose to extortionate levels. But the cost of vittles did nothing to dampen my spirits for the French fervour for revolution had clearly been quelled. This meant that a posting in Paris for a while would be a safe one for Flashy. Already my mind had begun to turn to the delights of a diplomatic career; embassy receptions aplenty, perhaps invitations to the French court, a soft bed to sleep in every night and not the slightest whiff of gun smoke.