The life and conduct of Sir Harry Flashman, VC, were so irregular and eccentric that it is not surprising that he was also erratic in compiling his memoirs, that picturesque catalogue of misadventure, scandal, and military history which came to light, wrapped in oilskin packets, in a Midlands saleroom more than twenty years ago, and has since been published in a series of volumes, this being the ninth. Beginning, characteristically, with his expulsion from Rugby in 1839 for drunkenness (and thus identifying himself, to the astonishment of literary historians, with the cowardly bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays), the old Victorian hero continued his chronicle at random, moving back and forth in time as the humour took him, until the end of his eighth packet found him, again the worse for drink, being shanghaied from a Singapore billiard-room after the China War of 1860. Along the way he had ranged from the First Afghan War of 1842 to the Sioux campaign of 1876 (with a brief excursion, as yet unpublished, to a brawl in Baker Street as far ahead as 1894, when he was in his seventy-second year); it goes without saying that many gaps in his story remain to be filled, but with the publication of the present volume, which reverts to his early manhood, the first half of his life is almost complete; only an intriguing gap in the early 1850s remains, and a few odd months here and there.
Thus far, it is not an improving tale, and this latest chapter is consistent in its depiction of an immoral and unscrupulous rascal whose only commendable quality (terms like “virtue” and “saving grace” are not to be applied to one who gloried in having neither) was his gift of accurate observation; it was this, and the new and often unexpected light which it enabled him to cast on great events and famous figures of his time, that excited the interest of historians, and led to comparison of his memoirs with the Boswell Papers. Be that as it may, it was a talent fully if nervously employed in the almost forgotten imperial campaign described in this volume – “the shortest, bloodiest … and strangest, I think, of my whole life”. Indeed it was strange, not least in its origins, and Flashman’s account is a remarkable case-history of how a war can come about, and the freaks and perfidies and intrigues of its making and waging. It is also the story of a fabulous jewel, and of an extraordinary quartet – an Indian queen, a slave-girl, and two mercenary adventurers – who would be dismissed as too outlandish for fiction (although Kipling seems to have made use of one of them) if their careers were not easily verifiable from contemporary sources.
This, as with previous packets of Flashman’s papers entrusted to me by their owner, Mr Paget Morrison, has been my chief concern – to satisfy myself that Flashman’s narrative tallies with historic fact, so far as it can be tested. Beyond that I have only corrected occasional lapses in spelling, and supplied the usual footnotes, appendices and glossary.
G.M.F.