The Flashman Papers 09 - Flashman and the Mountain of Light

(1891); W. L. M'Gregor, History of the Sikhs, vol. ii (1846); Khushwant Singh, History of the Sikhs, vol. 2 (1966); J. D. Cunningham, History of the Sikhs (1849); George Bruce, Six Battles for India (1969); Fortescue; Vincent Smith, Oxford History of India (1920).)

7. Sir Hugh Gough (1779-1869) was that not unusual combination: a stern and ruthless soldier, but a kindly and likeable man. He was also entirely 'Irish'—reckless, good-humoured, careless of convention and authority, and possessed of great charm; as a general, he was unpredictable and unorthodox, preferring to engage his enemy hand-to-hand and trust to the superiority of the British bayonet and sabre rather than indulge in the sophistications of manoeuvre. He attracted numerous critics, who drew attention to his shortcomings as a military organiser and tactician but could not deny his saving grace as a commander—he kept on winning. By 1845 he had a combat record unequalled by any soldier living, Wellington included, having been commissioned at 13, fought against the Dutch in South Africa and Surinam, pursued brigands in Trinidad, served throughout the Peninsular War (in which he received various wounds and a knighthood), commanded a British expedition to China, stormed Canton, forced the surrender of Nanking, and beaten the Mahrattas in India. At the time of the Sutlej crisis he was 66 years old, but sprightly in body and spirit, handsome, erect, with long receding white hair and fine moustaches and side-whiskers. The best- known portrait shows him in his famous white 'fighting coat', pointing with an outstretched arm: it is said to illustrate one of the many critical moments in his career when, at Sobraon, he shouted: 'What? Withdraw? Indeed I will not! Tell Sir Robert Dick to move on, in the name of God!' (See R. S. Rait, Life and Campaigns of Hugh, 1st Viscount Gough (1903); Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers (1985) and other works cited in these Notes.)

Sir Robert ('Fighting Bob') Sale was another highly combative general, celebrated for leading from the front, and once, when his men were mutinous, inviting them to shoot him. He fought in Burma, and in the Afghan War, where he was second-in-command of the army, and earned distinction as the defender of Jallalabad. (See also Note 9.)

8. War with the Gurkhas in 1815 brought the British to Simla, and the first European house was built there in the 1820s by one Captain Kennedy, the local superintendent, whose hospitality may have laid the foundations of its popularity as a resort. Emily Eden was the sister of Lord Auckland, Governor-General 1835-41. (See the excellently- illustrated Simla: a British Hill Station, by Pat Barr and Ray Desmond (1978).)

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 L500 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 L140,000), 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