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 fleurs-de-lys …”
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.
Chapter 2
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.a 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 hard-earned 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 mail-sloop arrived next day, and I was bowled up to Bombay in no time. And there, by the most hellish ill-luck, 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,b 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 last-ditch 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! Kya-hai, matey! Couldn’t keep away, you young dog! Wait till George Broadfoot sees you – oh, aye, he’s on the leash up yonder, and all the old crowd! Why, ’twill be like old times – except you’ll find Gough’s no Elphy Bey,4 what?” He clapped me on the shoulder, fit to burst at the prospect of bloodshed, and added in a whisper they could have heard in Benares: “Kabul be damned – there’ll be no retreat from Lahore! Your health, Flashman.”
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 fat-headed. 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 eye-witness 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 Company 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.5 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 them, and even today T. Atkins, while admiring them as stout fighters, would rather be brigaded with anyone else – excepting their cavalry, which you’d be glad of anywhere. For my money they were the most advanced people in India – well, they were only a sixth of the Punjab’s population, but they ruled the place, so there you are.
We’d made a treaty with these strong, clever, treacherous, civilised savages, respecting their independence north of the Sutlej while we ruled south of it. It was good business for both parties: they remained free and friends with John Company, and we had a tough, stable buffer between us and the wild tribes beyond the Khyber – let the Sikhs guard the passes, while we went about our business in India without the expense and trouble of having to deal with the Afghans ourselves. That’s worth bearing in mind when you hear talk of our “aggressive forward policy” in India: it simply wasn’t common sense for us to take over the Punjab – not while it was strong and united.
Which it was, until ’39, when the Sikh maharaja, old Runjeet Singh, died of drink and debauchery (they say he couldn’t tell male from female at the end, but they’re like that, you know). He’d been a great man, and a holy terror, who’d held the Punjab solid as a rock, but when he went, the struggle for power over the next six years made the Borgia intrigues look like a vicarage soirée. His only legitimate son, Kuruk, an opium-guzzling degenerate, was quickly poisoned by his son, who lasted long enough to attend Papa’s funeral, where a building collapsed on him, to no one’s surprise. Second wicket down was Shere Singh, Runjeet’s bastard and a lecher of such enthusiasm that I’ve heard they had to pry him off a wench to seat him on the throne. He had a fine long reign of two years, surviving mutiny, civil war, and a plot by Chaund Cour, Kuruk’s widow, before they finally did for him (and his entire harem, the wasteful swine). Chaund Cour later expired in her bath, under a great stone dropped by her own slave-girls, whose hands and tongues were then removed, to prevent idle gossip, and when various other friends and relations had been taken off sudden-like, and the whole Punjab was close to anarchy, the way was suddenly clear for a most unlikely maharaja, the infant Dalip Singh, who was still on the throne, and in good health, in the summer of ’45.
It was claimed he was the child of old Runjeet and a dancing-girl named Jeendan whom he’d married shortly before his death. There were those who doubted the paternity, though, since this Jeendan was notorious for entertaining the lads of the village four at a time, and old Runjeet had been pretty far gone when he married her; on the other hand, it was pointed out that she was a practised professional whose charms would have roused a stone idol, so old Runjeet might have done the deed before rolling over and going to God.
So now she was Queen Mother and joint regent with her drunken brother Jawaheer Singh, whose great party trick was to dress as a female and dance with the nautch-girls – by all accounts it was one continuous orgy at the Court of Lahore, with Jeendan galloping every man in sight, her lords and ladies all piling in, no one sober for days on end, treasure being spent like the wave of the sea, and the whole polity sliding downhill to luxurious ruin. I must say, it sounded quite jolly to me, bar the normal murders and tortures, and the furious plotting which apparently occupied everyone’s sober moments.
And looming like a genie over all this delightful corruption was the Khalsa – the Sikh army. Runjeet had built it, hiring first-class European mercenaries who had turned it into a truly formidable machine, drilled, disciplined, modern, 80,000 strong – the finest army in India, barring the Company’s (we hoped). While Runjeet lived, all had been well, but since his death the Khalsa had realised its power, and wasn’t prepared to be cat’s paw to the succession of rascals, degenerates, and drunkards who’d tumbled on and off the throne; it had defied its officers, and governed itself by soldiers’ committees, called panches, joining in the civil strife and bloodshed when it suited, slaughtering, looting, and raping in disciplined fashion, and supporting whichever maharaja took its fancy. One thing was constant about the Khalsa: it hated the British, and was forever demanding to be led against us south of the Sutlej.
Jeendan and Jawaheer controlled it as their predecessors had done, with huge bribes of pay and privileges, but with lakhs being squandered on their depravities, even the fabulous wealth of the Punjab was beginning to run dry – and what then? For years we’d been watching our northern buffer dissolve in a welter of blood and decay, in which we were treaty-bound not to intervene; now the crisis was come. How long could Jawaheer and Jeendan keep the Khalsa in hand? Could they prevent it (did they even want to?) taking a slap at us with the loot of all India as the prize? If the Khalsa did invade, would our own native troops stand true, and if they didn’t … well, no one, except a few canny folk like Broadfoot, cared to think about that, or contemplate the kind of thing that half-happened twelve years later, in the Mutiny.
So that’s how things stood in August ’45,6 but my alarms, as usual, were entirely personal. Meeting Sale had scuppered my hopes of lying low for a spell: he would see to it that I had a place on Gough’s staff, says he, beaming paternally while I frisked in feigned enthusiasm with my bowels dissolving, for I knew that being old Paddy’s galloper would be a one-way trip to perdition if the bugles blew in earnest. He was Commander-in-Chief, was Gough, an ancient Irish squireen who’d fought in more battles than any man living and was forever looking for more; loved by the troops (as such lunatics always are), and much sympathised with just then, when he was sweating to secure the frontier against the coming storm, and calling down Celtic curses on the head of that sensible chap Hardinge in Calcutta, who was forever cautioning him not to provoke the Sikhs, and countermanding his troop movements.7
But I had no way out; Sale was off now post-haste to resume his duties as Quartermaster-General on the frontier, with poor Flashy in tow, wondering how I could catch measles or break a leg. Mind you, as we rode north I was much reassured by the assembly of men and material along the Grand Trunk Road: from Meerut up it was aswarm with British regiments, Native Infantry, dragoons, lancers, Company cavalry, and guns by the park – the Khalsa’ll never tackle this crowd, thinks I; they’d be mad. Which of course they were. But I didn’t know the Sikhs then, or the incredible shifts and intrigues that can make an army march to suicide.
Gough wasn’t at headquarters in Umballa, which we reached early in September; he’d gone up to Simla for a breather, and since Sale’s wife was living there we pushed straight on, to my delight. I’d heard of it as a great place for high jinks and good living, and, I foolishly supposed, safety.
It was a glorious spot then,8 before Kipling’s vulgarians and yahoos had arrived, a little jewel of a hill station ringed in by snow-clad peaks and pine forests, with air that you could almost drink, and lovely green valleys like the Scotch border country – one of ’em was absolutely called Annandale, where you could picnic and fête to heart’s content. Emily Eden had made it the resort in the ’30s, and already there were fine houses on the hillsides, and stone bungalows with log fires where you could draw the curtains and think you were back in England; they were building the church’s foundations then, on the ridges above the Bazaar, and laying out the cricket ground; even the fruits and flowers were like home – we had strawberries and cream, I remember, that first afternoon at Lady Sale’s house.
Dear dreadful Florentia. If you’ve read my Afghan story, you know her, a raw-boned old heroine who’d ridden with the army all through that nightmare retreat over the passes from Kabul, when a force of 14,000 was whittled almost to nothing by the Dourani snipers and Khyber knives. She hadn’t shut up the whole way, damning the administration and bullying her bearers: Colin Mackenzie said it was a near thing which was more fearsome – a Ghazi leaping from the rocks yelling murder, or Lady Sale’s red nose emerging from a tent demanding to know why the water was not thoroughly boiling. She hadn’t changed, bar the rheumatics from
which she could get relief only by cocking a foot up on the table – damned unnerving it was, to have her boot beside your cup, and a great lean shank in red flannel among the muffins.9
“Flashman keeps staring at my ankle, Sale!” cries she. “They are all alike, these young men. Don’t make owl eyes at me, sir – I remember your pursuit of Mrs Parker at Kabul! You thought I had not noticed? Ha! I and the whole cantonment! I shall watch you in Simla, let me tell you.” This between a harangue about Hardinge’s incompetence and a blistering rebuke to her khansamahc for leaving the salt out of the coffee. You’ll gather I was a favourite of hers, and after tea she had me reviving Afghan memories by rendering “Drink, puppy, drink” in my sturdy baritone while she thumped the ivories, my performance being marred by a sudden falsetto when I remembered that I’d last sung that jolly ditty in Queen Ranavalona’s boudoir, with her black majesty beating time in a most unconventional way.
That reminded me that Simla was famous for its diversions, and since the Sales were giving dinner that night to Gough and some cabbage-eating princeling who was making the Indian tour, I was able to cry off, Florentia dropping a hint that I should be home before the milk. I tooled down the hill to the dirt road that has since become the famous Mall, taking the air among the fashionable strollers, admiring the sunset, the giant rhododendrons, and Simla’s two prime attractions – hundreds of playful monkeys and scores of playful women. Unattached, the women were, their men-folk being hard at it down-country, and the pickings were choice: civilian misses, saucy infantry wives, cavalry mares, and bouncing grass widows. I ran my eye over ’em, and fastened on a fortyish Juno with a merry eye and full nether lip who gave me a thoughtful smile before turning in to the hotel, where by the strangest chance I presently encountered her in a secluded corner of the tea verandah. We conversed politely, about the weather and the latest French novels (she found The Wandering Jew affecting, as I recall, while I stood up for the Musketeers),10 and she ate a dainty water-ice and started to claw at my thigh under the table.
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