Flashman Papers 3-Book Collection 1: Flashman, Royal Flash, Flashman’s Lady. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ eyes, the droop of his shoulders, or even his evident illness that affected me – it was the sight of his skinny ankles and feet and bedroom slippers sticking out beneath his gown. They looked so ridiculous in one who was a general of an army.

      When we had done, he just stared and said:

      “My God, what is to be done? Oh, Sir William, Sir William, what a calamity!” After a few moments he pulled himself together and said we must take counsel what to do; then he looked at me and said:

      “Flashman, thank God you at least are safe. You come like Randolph Murray, the single bearer of dreadful news. Tell my orderly to summon the senior officers, if you please, and then have the doctors look at you.”

      I believe he thought I was wounded; I thought then, and I think now, that he was sick in mind as well as in body. He seemed, as my wife’s relatives would have said, to be “wandered”.

      We had proof of this in the next hour or two. The cantonment, of course, was in a hubbub, and all sorts of rumours were flying. One, believe it or not, was that McNaghten had not been killed at all, but had gone into Kabul to continue discussions with Akbar, and in spite of having heard my story, this was what Elphy came round to believing. The old fool always fixed on what he wanted to believe, rather than what common sense suggested.

      However, his daydream didn’t last long. Akbar released Lawrence and Mackenzie in the afternoon, and they confirmed my tale – They had been locked up in Mohammed Khan’s fort, and had seen McNaghten’s severed limbs flourished by the Ghazis. Later the murderers hung what was left of him and Trevor on hooks in the butchers’ stalls of the Kabul bazaar.

      Looking back, I believe that Akbar would rather have had McNaghten alive than dead. There is still great dispute about this, but it’s my belief that Akbar had deliberately lured McNaghten into a plot against the Douranis to test him; when McNaghten accepted Akbar knew he was not to be trusted. He never intended to hold power in Afghanistan in league with us: he wanted the whole show for himself, and McNaughten’s bad faith gave him the opportunity to seize it. But he would rather have held McNaghten hostage than kill him.

      For one thing, the Envoy’s death could have cost Akbar all his hopes, and his life. A more resolute commander than Elphy – anyone, in fact – would have marched out of the cantonment to avenge it, and swept the killers out of Kabul. We could have done it, too; the troops that Elphy had said he couldn’t rely on were furious over McNaghten’s murder. They were itching for a fight, but of course Elphy wouldn’t have it. He must shilly-shally, as usual, so we skulked all day in the cantonment, while the Afghans themselves were actually in a state of fear in case we might attack them. This I learned later; Mackenzie reckoned if we had shown face the whole lot would have cut and run.

      Anyway, this is history. At the time I only knew what I had seen and heard, and I didn’t like it a bit. It seemed to me that having slaughtered the Envoy the Afghans would now start on the rest of us, and having seen Elphy wringing his hands and croaking I couldn’t see what was to stop them. Perhaps it was the shock of my morning escape, but I was in the shivering dumps for the rest of the day. I could feel those Khyber knives and imagine the Ghazis yelling as they cut us to bits; I even wondered if it might not be best to get a fast horse and make off from Kabul as quickly as I could, but that prospect was as dangerous as staying.

      But by the next day things didn’t look quite so bad. Akbar sent some of the chiefs down to express his regrets for McNaghten’s death, and to resume the negotiations – as if nothing had happened. And Elphy, ready to clutch at anything, agreed to talk; he didn’t see what else he could do, he said. The long and short of it was that the Afghans told us we must quit Kabul at once, leaving our guns behind, and also certain married officers and their wives as hostages!

      It doesn’t seem credible now, but Elphy actually accepted. He offered a cash subsidy to any married officer who would go with his family as hostages to Akbar. There was a tremendous uproar over this; men were saying they would shoot their wives sooner than put them at the mercy of the Ghazis. There was a move to get Elphy to take action for once, by marching out and occupying the Bala Hissar, where we could have defied all Afghanistan in arms, but he couldn’t make up his mind, and nothing was done.

      The day after McNaghten’s death there was a council of officers, at which Elphy presided. He was in terribly poor shape; on top of everything else, he had had an accident that morning. He had decided to be personally armed in view of the emergency, and had sent for his pistols. His servant had dropped one while loading it, and the pistol had gone off, the ball had passed through Elphy’s chair, nicking his backside but doing no other damage.

      Shelton, who could not abide Elphy, made the most of this.

      “The Afghans murder our people, try to make off with our wives, order us out of the country, and what does our commander do? Shoots himself in the arse – doubtless in an attempt to blow his brains out. He can’t have missed by much.”

      Mackenzie, who had no great regard for Elphy either, but even less for Shelton, suggested he might try to be helpful instead of sneering at the old fellow. Shelton rounded on him.

      “I will sneer at him, Mackenzie!” says he. “I like sneering at him!”

      And after this, to show what he thought, he took his blankets into the council and lay on them throughout, puffing at a cheroot and sniffing loudly whenever Elphy said anything unusually foolish; he sniffed a good deal.

      I was at the council, in view of my part in the negotiations, I suppose, and for pure folly it matches anything in my military career – and I was with Raglan in the Crimea, remember. It was obvious from the first that Elphy wanted to do anything that the Afghans said he must do; he desired to be convinced that nothing else was possible.

      “With poor Sir William gone, we are at a nonplus here,” he kept repeating, looking around dolefully for someone to agree with him. “We can serve no purpose that I can see by remaining in Afghanistan.”

      There were a few spoke out against this, but not many. Pottinger, a smart sort of fellow who had succeeded by default to Burnes’s job, was for marching into the Bala Hissar; it was madness, he said, to attempt to retreat through the passes to India in midwinter with the army hampered by hundreds of women and children and camp followers. Anyway, he didn’t trust Akbar’s safe conduct; he warned Elphy that the Sirdar couldn’t stop the Ghazis cutting us up in the passes, even if he wanted to.

      It seemed good sense to me: I was all for the Bala Hissar myself, so long as someone else led the way and Flashy was at his post beside Elphy Bey, with the rest of the army surrounding us. But the voices were all against Pottinger; it wasn’t that they agreed with Elphy, but they didn’t fancy staying in Kabul through the winter under his command. They wanted rid of him, and that meant getting him and the army back to India.

      “God knows what he’ll do if we stay here,” someone muttered. “Make Akbar Political Officer, probably.”

      “A quick march through the passes,” says another. “They’ll let us go rather than risk trouble.”

      They argued on, until at last they were too tired and dispirited to talk any further. Elphy sat glooming round in the silence, but not giving any decision, and finally Shelton got up, ground out his cheroot, and snaps:

      “Well, I take it we go? Upon my word, we must have a clear direction. Is it your wish, sir, that I take order for the army to remove to India with all possible speed?”

      Elphy sat looking miserable, his fingers twitching together in his lap.

      “It СКАЧАТЬ