Flashman's Escape

by Robert Brightwell

  Editor’s Note: Incredible as it may seem, Grant’s release in Bayonne and his journey on to Paris and many of the events that follow are confirmed by various historical sources. Further details can be found in the historical notes at the end of the book.

  Chapter 23

  I was beyond speechless at these revelations. I was frozen to the spot, and while my mouth opened and shut a couple of times no words came out. What Jorge must have thought seeing my expression I cannot guess, but he had the sense to stay out of the square. “What… How…” I tried, speaking in English before words failed me again.

  “You should speak in French, Lieutenant,” Grant warned in that language. “The general does not speak English. May I introduce to you General Souham?”

  I was still lost for words as I took in the rapidly changing circumstances, but at least I had the presence of mind to come to attention and give a sharp salute. Souham took my inability to speak as due to being overwhelmed in his presence.

  “Don’t worry, lad,” he said, walking over and offering a hand to shake. “I was once a private in the old royal French army. I know it is the sergeants and you junior officers that do most of the work.” I shook his hand and he led me towards Grant and the carriage beyond. “Where will you be going when you get to Paris, sir?” he asked Grant.

  “Oh, I suspect I will get orders when I reach the city,” explained Grant airily. “And I must thank you again for your generous offer of transport.”

  “Think nothing of it. My adjutant has heard all my stories at least once and has few good ones of his own to tell. It will be good to have someone new to talk to on the way.”

  With that I found myself steered towards the shining landau carriage… and Paris beyond. I wracked my addled brain, but I could not think of a way to slide out of this one. With the dragoons mounting up in front and behind the carriage, a run for it was also out of the question. The general and Grant took the forward-facing seats while the adjutant, who introduced himself as Gaston, and I took the seats opposite. The coachman cracked his whip and we moved off.

  I sat there, feeling like I was in a daze, as I watched the buildings pass by. Grant refused to meet my eye and contented himself asking the general about Bayonne. One person who did meet my eye, though, was Jorge, who stood in a doorway watching the carriage drive past. With the general sitting opposite me I could not make any signal and had to just stare blankly back.

  Within a few minutes we were crossing the bridge, which was a damn rickety affair. The original stone bridge had been swept away by floods years before and a temporary bridge had replaced it. The noisy wooden roadway was suspended between some of the original stone supports of the old structure and some anchored boats. The flimsy construction had already been cleared of other users so that the general and his escort could have an uninterrupted passage. It was as we reached dry land again that I saw Gomez. He was standing amongst the crowd forced to wait to use the crossing. I saw him look scornfully at the general and then curiously at the man in red beside him. When his gaze switched to me sitting opposite the general, his jaw dropped and then his face was suffused with rage.

  Thinking back, I can see things from his point of view. He had been convinced I was false from the outset, a French infiltrator only pretending to be British. Now, instead of rescuing Grant as planned, he saw me sitting opposite a French general who was carrying Grant away to Paris with a guard of dragoons.

  “Flashman, you treacherous bastard,” he roared in Spanish. Then he had the audacity to raise one of my own pistols against me.

  The carriage was already picking up speed as the gun fired. Pistols are notoriously inaccurate at any range and I thought I would be safe, but this ball managed to smash the top of the carriage door. As this was just inches from me it was one of the truest pistol shots I have seen against a moving target. Gomez did not have long to appreciate his marksmanship, though, as a second later a dragoon’s carbine shot him in chest. More guns fired as several more of the Basques tried to make a run for it, when they would have been perfectly safe if they had just stood still and looked innocent. I watched in horror as two more of the partisans were hit and the crowd waiting to cross the bridge dissolved into chaos and panic.

  “What did he shout?” asked the general, who had half stood in the carriage and was now kneeling on his seat to see what was happening behind us. “It was in Spanish,” the general continued. “I understood ‘bastard’ but what is a ‘flashman’?”

  Grant stayed silent but caught my eye. He must have realised that those men were some of my accomplices and that they had died as a result of his decision to head north.

  As no one else offered a suggestion, the adjutant spoke up. “Perhaps a flashman is another one of their words for the French.”

  “Come on, leave them,” roared the general, waving for his escort to break off the pursuit and re-join the carriage. “So,” he called, turning and slumping back down in his seat, “apart from the American here, we are all flashmans.” He paused and grunted. “Well, that cove looked furious, so it is bound to mean something foul.”

  “Quite so,” agreed Grant, now recovering his spirit. “Probably a dishonourable and treacherous creature. You certainly would not want to be called a flashman.” He shot me a spiteful glance and I came within an ace of denouncing him as a wanted British prisoner there and then. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I would be arrested instantly too.

  “Oh, I am sure that there are worse things than flashmans,” I claimed coolly. “The Scots for example.”

  Grant bristled at that; he was immensely proud of his Scottish heritage. But Souham got in first. “Ah, I think you have faced their Highlanders, have you, Lieutenant? Damn brutal creatures, aren’t they?”

  “I have come across them, sir, yes,” I agreed. In fact I had commanded a company of them in India, and so I spoke with some authority on the subject. “They fight like tigers but they stink.”

  “Stink, eh?” The general laughed. “Well, I never got that close to one. Still, I would not say that in front of Marshal MacDonald, but he is on his way to Russia now.”

  With Grant glowering at me, we settled down to the journey, the general happily regaling us with his adventures. He had been born into poverty and joined the royal French army as a boy, serving as a private for eight years before the revolution. By the time we met him, he had been a general for nineteen years with a string of victories behind him. It never occurred to the general to question our intentions. After all, why would an escaping prisoner try to reach Paris, the centre of the enemy empire? But he did have a curiosity, particularly about America, and that was nearly our undoing. The closest Grant had ever been to America was a posting in the Caribbean. It was just as well that the rest of us in the coach had not even been that far.

  “I must say,” said Souham as we bowled through the French countryside that first afternoon. “I am surprised that the American army fights in red. Did that not cause confusion when you were fighting the British?”

  “It does, sir,” agreed Grant, taken by surprise. He said no more, and while the general looked at him expectantly, Grant just stared at the floor of the carriage. He was clearly unable to think of anything more to say on the matter.

  The general was just about to ask how this confusion was avoided when I decided to speak up. “I imagine that they have soldiers in all sorts of uniforms, like us. In the French army we have men, Hanoverians and Swiss I think, who fight in red coats. I have not seen them but I imagine that causes confusion too.”

  “Yes,” agreed Grant, latching on to my lead. “We have men who fight in all sorts of colours.” He paused, plainly racking his brains for some fact that would add more authenticity to this lame confirmation. “And we have the savages of course; they fight in brightly coloured war paint and are festooned with feathers and tiger and leopard skins.”

  “Really?” enquired the general. “I had no idea that they had tigers in America.”

&nb
sp; “Oh yes,” confirmed Grant, warming to his theme. “We have lions and tigers, and buffalo the size of elephants for them to hunt. No man starves in America as there is always plenty of game to eat and good land for farming too.”

  He went on at length, extolling the paradise that he claimed was the land of his birth. We all sat there taking it in, and if the Frenchmen believed every word, I was not sure what was true and what wasn’t. I thought Grant must have heard something about America from his time in the Caribbean islands, while I had not been further west than Lisbon. He did make it sound a fantastic place, but as I discovered later his grasp on the flora and particularly the fauna of this new land was not exact. I remember Gaston, the adjutant, interrupting at one point to ask about snakes. Someone he had met in Spain had been to the Spanish colonies in America and claimed that the snakes had rattles on their tails so that you could hear them coming.

  Grant instantly dismissed this as nonsense. “How,” he asked, “could the serpent hunt if its prey could hear it coming?” He laughed at the adjutant and suggested that he had been the victim of a tall story. I confess that at the time I thought Grant’s dismissal made sense. It was only years later that I was to discover the hard way that he was wrong.

  If you are going to flee as a fugitive across a country then I can heartily recommend an enemy general as a travelling companion. As members of Souham’s party we were given the finest rooms in every coaching inn we stopped at and the best food and wine available too. Even if the French had been searching for a missing fugitive, and there was no sign that they were, we would have been beyond all suspicion. If it were not for the fact that we were travelling in precisely the opposite direction to the one I wanted to go then things would have been perfect. Twice I tried to get Grant on his own so that we could talk in private, but each time he ducked away back to where people were standing. He knew I was livid with him, but now I was committed to travelling to Paris as he had wanted. To try to escape or do anything to raise suspicion would only land us in deeper trouble.

  For most of the journey we stayed on the safer topic of the war in Spain. It was something we all knew a lot about, even if Grant and I had to try to remember to see things from the French perspective. Souham had been fighting the Spanish in eastern Spain and sported a nasty scar above one eye, incurred when his division had routed a Spanish army twice the size of the French force. He had followed the war against the British but had not seen any of it. I remember describing the horror of Albuera from the imagined perspective of a French officer. Grant talked about being taken on a reconnaissance ride to see the British army marching after Badajoz fell. He seemed to be describing the scene he must have witnessed before he rode away and was captured. But for the most part Souham talked about his earlier campaigns.

  Grant and I encouraged him by asking questions and prompting more tales. There was less chance of us giving ourselves away if the general was talking. But the stories of his rapid promotion during the chaos of the revolution and the early Napoleonic campaigns were genuinely fascinating. Despite his humble beginnings and lack of education, he had a sharp strategic understanding. I was not surprised to learn later that when he returned to Spain and commanded an army against Wellington he manoeuvred cleverly to force the British army back some two hundred miles without the need to fight a battle.

  The roads from Paris into Spain were among those that Napoleon had ordered straightened and tree lined so that he could move his troops quickly around his empire, with some protection from the sun and wind. While the days were hot, there was not yet much shade from the very young poplar trees that lined many of the new, fast roads we travelled along. Several times we passed semaphore towers that could transmit messages from Paris to Bayonne and the Spanish border in a matter of hours. One was relaying a message as we passed it. A man with a telescope was watching the next tower in the chain and calling out the signals to his colleagues, who with ropes controlled the huge signal arms at the top of the structure. I could not help wondering if a message about Grant had already overtaken us. But we would not have long to find out. With Souham’s tales to keep us entertained, it seemed no time at all before we were approaching the outskirts of Paris.

  Chapter 24

  Souham was travelling to his home at the north of the city and so I asked him to leave us near the Tuileries, the old royal palace gardens which were now a public park. It was a place I remembered from my only other visit to Paris back in ’02. I had no idea if there even was an American embassy in the city, never mind where it was. I told Souham that Grant would want to find some lodgings and rest from the journey before reporting to his superiors. As the old boy was keen to get home to his family he did not press me with questions. After brief handshakes and good wishes for the future all round, Grant and I were left standing on a street in the middle of Paris as Souham and his carriage disappeared around a nearby corner.

  Without the influence of a general to speed our progress and allay any suspicions, I suddenly felt very alone and exposed. We were now in the absolute heart of enemy territory, with no friends or allies and no means to get back to England or Spain. On top of that, my companion was a wanted man and an idiot who insisted on wearing the uniform of France’s most notorious enemy.

  I suspected that his American persona would fall apart like a loaf in sea water as soon as we met anyone from that country, and there were bound to be some Americans in Paris. What really made my blood boil was that we were both in this dire situation because the buffoon had given his word to a French marshal who had planned to betray him anyway. Feeling the rage start to build in me again, I turned away from Grant and walked through the gates of the Tuileries. There was a bench screened from much of the park by rose beds and hedges and I walked towards it, needing to find a space to think. Grant made the mistake of following me.

  “Look, Flashman, I know you did not want to come to Paris. But as you know it was a matter of honour for me and well, now we are here, I think honour is satisfied.”

  “Well, that is a weight off my mind,” I muttered in a tone of sarcasm that was entirely lost on Grant.

  “It is for me too,” he agreed, smiling. “In fact now I think we can try to escape… Oof.”

  There is something eminently satisfying about punching someone really hard in the solar plexus. Watching their eyes bulge as they double over in agony, then there is that gasping sound as they try to get their breath. The best part, though, is that they are incapable of interrupting as you tell them what you really think of them.

  “Yes, your honour is a huge comfort to us all, isn’t it?” I whispered hoarsely at him in English, heedless of any passers-by who could be watching. “I am sure that you will find it immensely helpful when they are pulling out your fingernails and breaking your bones. As you are screaming for them to let you die, having given away all of Wellington’s agents, at least in your last babbling moments of agony you will know that you have kept your honour.”

  I glanced up and saw two Parisian ladies standing in a gap between the rose beds, appearing alarmed at the scene before them. “An English prisoner. He has eaten some bad mussels,” I explained, gesturing to Grant, who had by now sunk to his knees and was still bent double, gasping for breath.

  “It must be very bad,” exclaimed the younger one while her companion smiled in amusement.

  “Don’t be naive, Beatrice; he punched the prisoner,” stated the companion as she walked past. “Food poisoning does not stop you breathing.” At that she glanced over her shoulder to give me a smile, clearly not minding a British prisoner getting roughed up.

  I waited until the pair had disappeared around a corner and turned again to Grant, who was by now trying to get back to his feet. I kicked his legs from under him, sending him crashing back to the ground.

  “You think this is all about you, don’t you?” I snarled. “What use is your honour to me, standing in front of firing squad when I am found in an enemy uniform? Did you use your brain at all before yo
u marched up to Souham’s coach?”

  “You can’t…” Grant gasped between breaths, “hit me… I am senior… to you… Oof!”

  Having proved Grant wrong, I left him writhing on the ground and strolled off through the park. Once I had outdistanced the groaning and retching sound behind me, it was a pleasant sunny day. I walked across the park until I got to a bench where I could watch the boats going up and down the Seine and the people walking on the opposite bank of the river.

  When I was last in France I had spent most of my time with other British people here to enjoy the sights during the brief peace treaty of Amiens. I had met an old French general who had served in India and might have helped us, but that was ten years ago. I had no idea if he was still alive or in Paris, and I could not remember my way to his house even if he was still in the city. Scrutinising the people going about their business, I saw that my French lieutenant’s uniform could be a blessing or a curse. It was a curse if I was caught in it for I would be shot as a spy. But it was a blessing as the perfect disguise if I was not caught. Virtually every man I could see was in some uniform or clothing relating to his occupation. Had I been in civilian clothes I could still have been shot for a spy, but I would have stood out far more.

  I reached down and touched my belt. Since Albuera I had restocked it with a dozen gold guineas and that seemed the only positive in my situation. I could not stay in Paris as sooner or later I would be caught and executed. So I had to try to make my way back to safety. The shortest route was north and across the Channel to Britain. But with the navy blockading French ports and the English Channel to cross, it seemed unlikely that I would get home that way. This left trying to retrace my route back to Spain. Without a general’s carriage and escort to speed my progress through roads and checkpoints it would take weeks. As well as the French, I would also have to deal with the partisans if any of the Basques survived to report my apparent treachery. Even if I eventually returned to Spain I would then have to make my way across the occupied half of the country before I reached safety. I looked up as the two ladies I had seen earlier walked along the path in front of my bench. The older girl smiled at me and nodded over my shoulder. “Your prisoner seems to be recovering, monsieur.”