Don't misunderstand; I ain't superstitious either. But I've learned to be leery of the savage gods, and I'll admit that the sight of that infernal gewgaw winking among the teacups had taken me flat aback … forty years and more … I could hear the tramp of the Khalsa again, rank on bearded rank pouring out through the Moochee Gate: 'Wah Guru-ji! To Delhi! To London!' … the thunder of guns and the hiss of rockets as the Dragoons came slashing through the smoke … old Paddy Gough in his white 'fighting coat', twisting his moustaches—'Oi nivver wuz bate, an' Oi nivver will be bate!' … a lean Pathan face under a tartan turban—'You know what they call this beauty? The Man Who Would Be King!' … an Arabian Nights princess flaunting herself before her army like a nautch-dancer, mocking them … and defying them, half-naked and raging, sword in hand … coals glowing hideously beneath a gridiron … lovers hand in hand in an enchanted garden under a Punjab moon … a great river choked with bodies from bank to bank … a little boy in cloth of gold, the great diamond held aloft, blood running through his tiny fingers …
The Queen and Elspeth were deep in talk over a great book of photographs of crowns and diadems and circlets, 'for I know my weakness about jewellery, you see, and how it can lead me astray, but your taste, dear Rowena, is quite faultless … Now, if it were set so, among the
I could see I wasn't going to get a word in edgeways for hours, so I slid out for a smoke. And to remember.
I'd vowed never to go near India again after the Afghan fiasco of '42, and might easily have kept my word but for Elspeth's loose conduct. In those salad days, you see, she had to be forever flirting with anything in britches— not that I blame her, for she was a rare beauty, and I was often away, or ploughing with other heifers. But she shook her bouncers once too often, and at the wrong man: that foul nigger pirate Solomon who kidnapped her the year I took five for 12 against All-England, and a hell of a chase I had to win her back.*(*See Flashman's Lady) I'll set it down some day, provided the recounting don't scare me into the grave; it's a ghastly tale, about Brooke and the headhunting Borneo rovers, and how I only saved my skin (and Elspeth's) by stallioning the mad black queen of Madagascar into a stupor. Quaint, isn't it? The end of it was that we were rescued by the Anglo-French expedition that bombarded Tamitave in '45, and we were all set for old England again, but the officious snirp who governed Mauritius takes one look at me and cries: ''Pon my soul, it's Flashy, the Bayard of Afghanistan! How fortunate, just when it's all hands to the pumps in the Punjab! You're the very man; off you go and settle the Sikhs, and we'll look after your missus.' Or words to that effect.
I said I'd swim in blood first. I hadn't retired on half pay just to be pitched into another war. But he was one of your wrath-of-God tyrants who won't be gainsaid, and quoted Queen's Regulations, and bullied me about Duty and Honour—and I was young then, and fagged out with tupping Ranavalona, and easily cowed. (I still am, beneath the bluster, as you may know from my memoirs, as fine a catalogue of honours won through knavery, cowardice, taking cover, and squealing for mercy as you'll ever strike.) If I'd known what lay ahead I'd have seen him damned first—those words'll be on my tombstone, so help me—but I didn't, and it would have shot my hardearned Afghan laurels all to pieces if I'd shirked, so I bowed to his instruction to proceed to India with all speed and report to the C-in-C, rot him. I consoled myself that there might be advantages to stopping abroad a while longer: I'd no news from home, you see, and it was possible that Mrs Leo Lade's noble protector and that greasy bookie Tighe might still have their bruisers on the lookout for me—it's damnable, the pickle a little harmless wenching and welching can land you in.3
So I bade Elspeth an exhausting farewell, and she clung to me on the dockside at Port Louis, bedewing my linen and casting sidelong glances at the moustachioed Frogs who were waiting to carry her home on their warship—hollo, thinks I, we'll be calling the first one Marcel at this rate, and was about to speak to her sternly when she lifted those glorious blue eyes and gulped: 'I was never so happy as in the forest, just you and me. Come safe back, my bonny jo, or my heart Will break.' And I felt such a pang, as she kissed me, and wanted to keep her by me forever, and to hell with India—and I watched her ship out of sight, long after the golden-haired figure waving from the rail had grown too small to see. God knows what she got up to with the Frogs, mind you, I had hopes of a nice leisurely passage, to Calcutta for choice, so that whatever mischief there was with the Sikhs might be settled long before I got near the frontier, but the Cape mailsloop arrived next day, and I was bowled up to Bombay in no time. And there, by the most hellish illluck, before I'd got the ghee-smell in my nostrils or even thought about finding a woman; I ran slap into old General Sale, whom I hadn't seen since Afghanistan, and was the last man I wanted to meet just then.
In case you don't know my journal of the Afghan disaster,*(*See Flashman). I must tell you that I was one of that inglorious army which came out in '42 a dam' sight faster than it went in—what was left of it. I was one of the few survivors, and by glorious misunderstanding was hailed as the hero of the hour: it was mistakenly believed that I'd fought the bloodiest lastditch action since Hastings—when in fact I'd been blubbering under a blanket—and when I came to in dock at Jallalabad, who should be at my bedside, misty with admiration, but the garrison commander, Fighting Bob Sale. He it was who had first trumpeted my supposed heroism to the world—so you may picture his emotion when here I was tooling up three years later, apparently thirsting for another slap at the paynim.
'This is the finest thing!' cries he, beaming. 'Why, we'd thought you lost to us—restin' on your laurels, what? I should ha' known better! Sit down, sit down, my dear boy!
It was sickening, but I looked keen, and managed a groan of dismay when he admitted that the war hadn't started yet, and might not at all if Hardinge, the new Governor-General, had his way. Right, thinks I, count me as one of the Hardinge Ring, but of course I begged Bob to tell me how the land lay, feigning great eagerness—in planning a campaign, you see, you must know where the safe billets are likely to be. So he did, and in setting it down I shall add much information which I came by later, so that you may see exactly how things were in the summer of '45, and understand all that followed.
A word first, though. You'll have heard it said that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind --one of those smart Oscarish squibs that sounds well but is thoroughly fatheaded. Presence of mind, if you like— and countless other things, such as greed and Christianity, decency and villainy, policy and lunacy, deep design and blind chance, pride and trade, blunder and curiosity, passion, ignorance, chivalry and expediency. honest pursuit of right, and determination to keep the bloody Frogs out. And often as not, such things came tumbling together, and when the dust had settled, there we were, and who else was going to set things straight and feed the folk and guard the gate and dig the drains—oh, aye, and take the profit, by all means.
That's what study and eyewitness have taught me, leastways, and perhaps I can prove it by describing what happened to me in '45, in the bloodiest, shortest war ever fought in India, and the strangest, I think, of my whole life. You'll find it contains all the Imperial ingredients I've listed—stay, though, for 'Frogs' read 'Muslims', and if you like, 'Russians'—and a few others you may not believe. When I'm done, you may not be much clearer on how the map of the world came to be one-fifth pink, but at least you should realise that it ain't something to be summed up in an epigram. Absence of mind, my arse. We always knew what we were doing; we just didn't always know how it would pan out.
First of all, you must do as Sale bade me, and look at the map. In '45 John Company5 held Bengal and the Carnatic and the east coast, more or less, and was lord of the land up to the Sutlej, the frontier beyond which lay the Five Rivers country of the Sikhs, the Punjab.' But things weren't settled then as they are now; we were still shoring up our borders, and that north-west frontier was the weak point, as it still is. That way invasion had always come, from Afghanistan, the vanguard of a Mohammedan tide, countless millions strong, stretching back as far as the Mediterranean. And Russia. We'd tried to sit down in Afghanistan, as you know, and got a bloody nose, and while that had been avenged since, we weren't venturing that way again. So it remained a perpetual threat to India and ourselves—and all that lay between was the Punjab, and the Sikhs.
You know something of them: tall, splendid fellows with uncut hair and beards, proud and exclusive as Jews, and well disliked, as clannish, easily-recognised folk often are—the Muslims loathed them, the Hindoos distrusted I hem, and even today T. Atkins, while admiring them as stout fighters, would rather be brigaded with anyone else
