The Flashman Papers 09 - Flashman and the Mountain of Light fp-9

by George MacDonald Fraser

  9. Adapting Raleigh's famous judgment on Henry VIII, one may say that "if all the patterns and pictures of the memsahibs 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 Alexandrine 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 Ł500 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.) [p, 29]

  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 Luc-know. 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 Ł140,000), 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 with 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 brother-hood 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; Flash-man 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.)

  18. The Akalis were the commandos of the Khalsa, a strict sect known variously as the Timeless Ones, the Children of God the Immortal, and the Crocodiles; a footnote to George Broadfoot's biography typically describes them as "devoted to misrule and plunder".

  19. Since Flashman refers later in the manuscript to a Cooper pepperbox, it is probable that the pistol he drew on Dalip Singh was a Cooper also. They were manufactured from about 1840 by J. R. Cooper, a British gunsmith, and fired six rounds. (See The Revolver, 1818-65, by A. W. F. Taylerson, R. A. N. Andrews, and J. Frith (1968))

  20. There is a mystery here: the "tough, shrewd-looking heavyweight" who called on Flashman with Bhai Ram Singh hardly sounds like the "good, kind, and polite old Fakir Azizudeen" who had been Runjeet Singh's foreign minister, and was still to the fore at this time, although he died of natural causes a few weeks later. Both the physical description and the style are inconsistent; indeed, the only way in which Bhai Ram's companion resembles Azizudeen is in his uncompromising honesty. Either Flashman's visitor was another courtier altogether, and he has simply got the name wrong, or his descriptive memory is playing him false for once.

  21. Flashman has caught the spirit but slightly misquoted the letter of Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes":

  Next, when I cast mine eyes and see

  That brave vibration each way free;

  O how that glittering taketh me!

  He quotes Herrick again (p. 277), but it is doubtful if he had any special affection for the poet, or would even have recognised his name. The Flashman Papers abound in erratic literary allusions—the present volume contains echoes of Donne, Shakespeare, Macaulay, Coleridge. Voltaire, Dick-ens, Scott, Congreve, Byron, Pope, Lewis Carroll, Norse mythology, and obscure corners of the Old Testament—but it would be rash to conclude that Flashman had any close acquaintance with the authors; more probably the allusions were picked up second hand from conversations and casual reading, with two exceptions. He knew Macaulay personally, and had certainly read his Lays, and he seems to have had a genuine liking for Thomas Love Peacock, whose caustic humour and strictures on Whiggery, political economy, and academics probably appealed to him. For the rest, we may judge that Flashman's frequent references to Punch, Pierce Egan's Tom and Jerry, and sensational fiction like Varney the Vampire, more fairly reflect his literary taste; we know from an earlier volume that the word Trollope meant only one thing to him, and it was not the author.

  22. Alexander Haughton Campbell Gardner, "Gurdana Khan" (1785-1877), is an extraordinary figure even for an age and region which saw such adventurers as "Sekundar" Burnes, Count Ignatieff, Yakub Beg, Pottinger, Connolly, Avitabile, and John Nicholson. He was born on the shore of Lake Superior, in what is now Wisconsin, the son of a Scottish surgeon and his Anglo-Spanish wife; Dr Gardner had served on the American side in the War of Independence, and knew both Washington and Lafayette. Young Alexander spent some years in Ireland, where he seems to have learned military gunnery, possibly in the British Army, went to Egypt, and travelled by caravan from Jericho to Russia, where his brother was a government engineer. Thence he went to Central Asia, where for several years his life was one of continual warfare, raid, ambush, escape and exploration among the wild tribes; he fought as a mercenary, and for a time appears to have been little more than a wandering bandit—"Food we obtained by levying contributions from everyone we could master," he writes in his Memoirs, "but we did not slaughter except in self-defence." He seems to have had to defend himself with fatal frequency, both as soldier and freebooter, as well as escaping from slave-traders, being attacked by a wolf-pack, leading an expedition against Peshawar under the sacred banner of the Khalifa ("all burning with religious zeal and the desire to work their will in the rich city") and spending nine months in an under-ground dungeon. He rose to command a hill region with his own private fort under the rebel Habibullah Khan, who was opposing the Afghan monarch, Dost Mohammed, and it was on a foray to kidnap a princess from Dost Mohammed's harem (with her treasure) that he met his first wife—an incident described in his best laconic style:

  In the course of the running fight to our stronghold I was enabled to see the beautiful face of a young girl who accompanied the princess. I rode for a consider-able time beside her, pretending that my respect for the elder lady made me choose that side of her camel … On the following morning Habibulla Khan richly rewarded his followers, but I refused my share of the gold and begged for this girl to be given to me in marriage .

  She was, and for two years they lived happily, until Gardner returned from an action in which he had lost 51 men out of 90, to find that his fort had been attacked, and his wife had stabbed herself rather than be taken prisoner; their baby son had also been murdered. Although he continued in Afghanistan for some years, and was reconciled with Dost Mohammed, he eventually took service in the Punjab with Runjeet Singh, training the Khalsa in gunnery, fought in various actions, and was in Lahore in the six years of bloodshed and intrigue following Runjeet's death. He was guard commander to the infant Dalip Singh and Rani Jeendan at the time of his meeting with Flashman, but he was strongly pro-British (his friends included Henry Lawrence) and believed that India's future would be best served by ever closer communion with the United Kingdom. In his letter "from John Bull of India to John Bull of England", he envisaged the development of India as a great industrial nation, with Indians playing their part in the highest posts in civil and military life, and being represented in both Houses at Westminster. Physically, Gardner was as Flashman describes him—six feet tall, fierce, lean, and of iron constitution. As a result of one of his numerous wounds he was unable to swallow solid food, and could drink only with the help of an iron collar, but even in his eightieth year he was said to be as active as a man of fifty, lively and humorous, and speaking an English which was "quaint, graphic, and wonderfully good considering his fifty years among Asiatics". The photograph in his Memoirs shows a splendid old war-horse, beak-nosed and with bristling whiskers, seated sword in hand and clad in a full suit of tartan, even to his plumed turban. He bought the cloth from a Highland regiment in India, but which tartan it is cannot be told from the monochrome picture, and thereby hangs a small mystery.

  Flashman says it was the tartan of the 79th (Cameron) Highlanders, and describes it as red or crimson—which is slightly puzzling, since the 79th's kilt is largely dark blue, being a hybrid of the MacDonald and a crimson element from the Lochiel Cameron. It may be that Flashman, who knew his military tartans, regarded it as "red" only by contrast with those of the four other Highland regiments, which are predominantly dark blue-green. The only other explanation is that he was entirely mistaken, and Gardner was wearing not the 79th tartan but the red and resplendent Lochiel Cameron—in which case the Colonel must have been a sight to behold. (See Memoirs of Alexander Gardner, ed. Hugh W. Pearse (1890).)

  23. It is quite possible that Kipling based Daniel Dravot, the hero of The Man Who Would Be King, on Dr Harlan. He would surely have heard of the American, and there is a strong echo, in Dravot's fictional Kafiristan adventure (published in 1895), of Harlan's aspirations first to the throne of Afghanistan, and later successfully to the kingship of Ghor, as described in Gardner's Memoirs (published in 1890); whether Harlan's story was true is beside the point. Like many passages in his astonishing career, it lacks corroboration; on the other hand it was accepted, along with the rest, by such authorities as Major Pearse, who was Gardner's editor, and the celebrated Dr Wolff.

  Josiah Harlan (1799-1871) was born in Newlin Township, Pennsylvania, the son of a merchant whose family came from County Durham. He studied medicine, sailed as a supercargo to China, and after being jilted by his American fiancee, returned to the East, serving as surge
on with the British Army in Burma. He then wandered to Afghanistan,—where he embarked on that career as diplomat, spy, mercenary soldier, and double (sometimes treble) agent which so enraged Colonel Gardner. The details are confused, but it seems that Harlan, after trying to take Dost Mohammed's throne, and capturing a fortress, fell into the hands of Runjeet Singh. The Sikh maharaja, recognising a rascal of genius when he saw one, sent him as envoy to Dost Mohammed; Harlan, travelling disguised as a dervish, was also working to subvert Dost's throne on behalf of Shah Sujah, the exiled Afghan king; not content with this, he ingratiated himself with Dost and became his agent in the Punjab—in effect, serving three masters against each other. Although, as one contemporary remarks with masterly understatement, Harlan's life was now somewhat complicated, he satisfied at least two of his employers: Shah Sujah made him a Companion of the Imperial Stirrup, and Runjeet gave him the government of three provinces which he administered until, it is said, the maharaja discovered that he was running a coining plant on the pretence of studying chemistry. Even then, Runjeet continued to use him as an agent, and it was Harlan who successfully suborned the Governor of Peshawar to betray the province to the Sikhs. He then took service with Dost Mohammed (whom he had just betrayed), and was sent with an expedition against the Prince of Kunduz; it was in this campaign that the patriotic doctor "surmounted the Indian Caucasus, and unfurled my country's banner to the breeze under a salute of 26 guns …the star-spangled -banner waved gracefully among the icy peaks." What this accomplished is unclear, but soon after-wards Harlan managed to obtain the throne of Ghor from its hereditary prince. This was in 1838; a year later he was acting as Dost's negotiator with the British invaders at Kabul; Dost subsequently fled, and Harlan was last seen having breakfast with "Sekundar" Burnes, the British political agent.