Flashman on the March. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ led-beasts. Hear that, George? You can stop scribbling and do something useful for a change!’

      ‘Tain’t every day two such lions as Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., and the Basha Fallaka shake hands,’ says Henty, pocketing his notebook. ‘You’re good copy, Charlie, the pair of you. When do we leave, then?’

      ‘After tiffin,’ says Speedy. ‘If that suits, Sir Harry?’ Henty laughed and said no wonder the Abs called him Basha Fallaka, which means Quick Chief, and was their pun on Speedy’s name.

      I was deciding he was a sight too quick for me. Here I was, hardly ten minutes ashore, and I was being dragooned into the saddle by a crazy Goliath in Hallowe’en rig to go tearing up-country on a forty-eight-hour gallop to Napier’s command post. True, I’d sworn to Speedicut^fn6 that I’d see his dollars all the way to Attegrat, but that had been back in Trieste with the hosts of Midian prowling round, and now here was Napier’s own political on hand to collect the dibs – and after that mention of being ‘with’ them I’d no wish to venture nearer the theatre of operations than I must, in case Napier got a notion to drag me into the stew. I know these bloody generals. I’d been there before.

      On t’other hand, I was well retired, hadn’t worn the Queen’s coat since China in ’60, and I’d need Napier’s personal kitab^fn7 for a paid passage home. He’d expect me to call on him, and offhand I couldn’t think of a good excuse for not doing so, fool that I was. I should have told Speedy I was sickening for mumps, or pleaded my belly, or done any damned thing to stay at a safe distance from a campaign which, to judge from the gloom at tiffin, promised to be the biggest catastrophe since the Kabul retreat.

      I’ve told you of the pessimism which, unknown to me, was prevailing at home, but now I was hearing it from the men on the spot, grousing in their shirt-sleeves in the stifling heat of the mess-tent: Native Infantry officers, Punjabi Pioneers, King’s Own, cavalrymen from the Scinde Horse irregulars and Native Cavalry regiments, Baluch, Madras Sappers, even a Dragoon Guardee, and altogether as mixed a collection as you could hope to find, all croaking like the never-wearied rook. In short order I gathered that fat-headed Bombay politicals had hampered Napier at every turn and thrown his plans into disarray; that our transport was in chaos because they’d hired drivers who were the scum of the Levant, Greeks and dagoes and the like, who’d mutinied and had to be replaced by Persians and Hindus; that we were far too soft with the Abs, as witness Pottinger’s giving way to a crowd of Shohos who’d blocked the road, and the armed attack on a sentry which had had to be repulsed by the bayonets of Cooper’s Irishmen; that we were fools to rely on local intelligence which reported Theodore and the captives in half a dozen different places at once; that with the mercury at 116 (and that on a cool day) we’d have an epidemic if the army wasn’t moved up-country to the high ground; that baboons were swinging on the telegraph wires, which would have to be coated in rubber and buried – I’d heard the like from the Khyber to Chattanooga, and if the words were different the tune was the same.

      ‘Oh, for the Army Works Corps that we had in Crimea!’

      ‘As if they’d make a ha’porth o’ difference! God Himself couldn’t lay more than a mile of road a day over solid rock sky-high with boulders.’

      ‘Mile a day should get us to Magdala next year, what?’

      ‘Ah, so we shan’t be in and out by April?’ General laughter.

      ‘Dam’ lucky if we get out at all. See here – twelve thousand men, three-quarters of ’em on support, depots, transport, and so on, two thousand to go for Magdala—’

      ‘Flyin’ column, you mean? Napier’s good at those.’

      ‘Flyin’ column be damned! – in country where you’ll make ten miles a day with luck? An’ it’s four hundred miles! So where d’you find mule forage for forty days, to say nothin’ of takin’ elephants and mountain guns and mortars over ground that’d have Hannibal cryin’ for his pension?’

      ‘Talkin’ like a book, ye are. An’ will the tribes let us be? They say Theodore can put a hundred thousand into the field.’

      ‘If the chiefs support him. Merewether reckons they won’t.’

      ‘Does he, now? D’ye know, I don’t reckon Merewether’s optimism counts for much against odds of fifty to one.’²⁰

      ‘Oh, shield-and-spear niggers. Not much firepower.’

      ‘That’s not the point, confound it!’ This from a grizzled major of Baluch. ‘Time and distance are our enemy – not the tribes! We’re not here for conquest or victory, even! Eating, not fighting, is going to be what matters! Aye, survival!’ This was greeted by a brief silence, followed by a drawl from a Scinde Horse subaltern.

      ‘Ah, well … any volunteers for the relief expedition in two years’ time?’ Some laughter, by no means hearty.

      The usual grumble-and-grin of men in the field, if you like, but with a decided note of uncertainty in it – and these weren’t just any soldiers, but the best India could show. Still, I might have dismissed them as croakers if Speedy’s silence during the meal hadn’t convinced me that he shared their misgivings.

      You see, we poltroons have a talent for spotting heroes – we have to, in order to steer well clear of them – and from what I learned from Henty, who sat by me at tiffin, Speedy was a prime specimen, and an expert to boot. A gentle giant who looked like the wrath of God but had no side at all, had served in four armies, and probably killed more men than the dysentery. He knew Abyssinia inside out, spoke Amharic, which is the principal lingo of the country, and had been drill instructor in the service of Emperor Theodore, who had particularly admired his party trick of cleaving a sheep in two (lengthwise, God help us) with a single sword-stroke. But they’d fallen out, and Speedy had been farming and fighting Maoris in New Zealand when the present crisis arose; Napier had insisted on having him as his political, and Speedy had rolled up for service with nothing but the clothes he stood in and a couple of blankets.

      That tells you the sort of chap he was,²¹ another of the crazy gentleman-adventurers who infested the frontiers in the earlies, and when a fellow with his authority don’t contradict croaking, you draw your own conclusions – mine being that I must lose no time in tapping Napier for my ticket home.

      Just for interest I asked Speedy, when we were making ready for our departure up-country, how he thought Napier might set about the campaign, and was shocked when he said coolly that his only hope was to go hell-for-leather for Magdala with a small force, trust to luck he’d find the prisoners there, and high-tail it back to civilisation double-quick.

      ‘You went with Grant to Pekin, didn’t you, and Gough to the Sutlej – aye, and Sherman to the sea?’ He shook his shaggy head. ‘’Tain’t that kind of trip. They knew where they were going, with proper transport, commissariat, lines of communication, knowing who and where their enemy was, and with force enough to do the trick. Napier’s got none o’ that. As that old Baluch said, it’s time and the country he’s up against, and all he can do is raid and run.’

      ‘Man to man, what are the odds?’

      He thought a moment, tugging his beard. ‘Even chance. Six to four against if ’twas anyone else, but Napier’s the best since old Colin Campbell. Yes, I’d risk a monkey^fn8 on him – if I had one!’

      He was all action now, breaking the seals on one of the strong-boxes and having the glittering mass of Maria Theresas transferred to saddlebags by the Marines, with the sergeant watching like a hawk СКАЧАТЬ