The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ through a foot of snow on the worst ground on earth, with the temperature at freezing. Why, man, with an army of Highland ghillies I doubt if it could be done in under a week. If we’re lucky we might do it in two – if the Afghans let us alone, and the food and firing hold out, and Elphy doesn’t shoot himself in the other buttock.”

      I’d never seen Mackenzie in such a taking before. Usually he was as cool as a trout, but I suppose being a serious professional and having to work with Elphy had worn him thin.

      “I wouldn’t say this to anybody but you, or George Broadfoot if he were here,” says he, “but if we come through it’ll be by pure luck, and the efforts of one or two of us, like you and me. Aye, and Shelton. He’s a surly devil, but he’s a fighting soldier, and if Elphy will let him alone he might get us to Jallalabad. There, now, I’ve told you what I think, and it’s as near to croaking as I hope I’ll ever get.” He gave me one of his wintry smiles. “And you’re worried about Parker!”

      Having heard this, I was worried only about me. I knew Mackenzie; he wasn’t a croaker, and if he thought our chances were slim, then slim they were. Of course, I knew from working in Elphy’s office that things weren’t shaping well; the Afghans were hampering us at every turn in getting supplies together, and there were signs that the Ghazis were moving out of Kabul along the passes – Pottinger was sure they were going to lie in wait for us, and try to cut us up in the really bad defiles, like Khoord-Kabul and Jugdulluk. But I had reasoned that an army fourteen thousand strong ought to be safe, even if a few fell by the wayside; Mac had put it in a different light, and I began to feel again that looseness low down in my guts and the sick sensation in my throat. I tried to tell myself that soldiers like Shelton and Mackenzie, yes, and Sergeant Hudson, weren’t going to be stopped by a few swarms of Afghans, but it was no good. Burnes and Iqbal had been good soldiers, too, and that hadn’t saved them; I could still hear the hideous chunk of those knives into Burnes’s body, and think of McNaghten swinging dead on a hook, and Trevor screaming when the Ghazis got him. I came near to vomiting. And half an hour back I had been scheming so that I could tumble Mrs Parker in a tent on the way back to Jallalabad; that reminded me of what Afghan women do to prisoners, and it didn’t bear thinking about.

      I was hard put to it to keep a good face on things at Lady Sale’s last gathering, two nights before we left. Betty was there, and the look she gave me cheered me up a little; her lord and master would be half way to Kandahar by now, and I toyed with the notion of dropping in at her bungalow that night, but with so many servants about the cantonment it would be too risky. Better to wait till we’re on the road, thinks I, and nobody knows one tent from another in the dark.

      Lady Sale spent the evening as usual, railing about Elphy and the general incompetence of the staff. “There never was such a set of yea-and-nays. The only certain thing is that our chiefs have no mind for two minutes on end. They seem to think of nothing but contradicting each other, when harmony and order are most needed.”

      She said it with satisfaction, sitting in her last chair while they fed her furniture into the stove to keep the room tolerably warm. Everything had gone except her chest-of-drawers, which was to provide fuel to cook her meals before our departure; we sat round on the luggage which was piled about the walls, or squatted on the floor, while the old harpy sat looking down her beaky nose, her mittened hands folded in front. The strange thing was that no one thought of her as a croaker, although she complained unendingly; she was so obviously confident that she would get to Jallalabad in spite of Elphy’s bungling that it cheered people up.

      “Captain Johnson informs me,” says she, sniffing, “that there is food and fodder for ten days at the most, and that the Afghans have no intention of providing us with an escort through the passes.”

      “Better without ’em,” says Shelton. “The fewer we see the better I’ll like it.”

      “Indeed? And who, then, is to guard us from the badmashes and brigands lurking in the hills?”

      “Good God, ma’am,” cries Shelton, “aren’t we an army? We can protect ourselves, I hope.”

      “You may hope so, indeed. I am not so sure that some of your native troops will not take the first opportunity to make themselves scarce. We shall be quite without friends, and food, and firewood.”

      She then went on to tell us cheerfully that the Afghans certainly meant to try to destroy our whole force, in her opinion, that they meant to get all our women into their possession, and that they would leave only one man alive, “who is to have his legs and hands cut off and is to be placed at the entrance of the Khyber pass, to deter all feringhees from entering the country again.”

      “My best wishes to the Afghan who gets her,” growled Shelton as we were leaving. “If he’s got any sense he’ll stick her up in the Khyber – that’ll keep the feringhees out with a vengeance.”

      The next day I spent making sure that my picked lancers were all in order, that our saddle-bags were full, and that every man had sufficient rounds and powder for his carbine. And then came the last night, and the chaos of last-minute preparations in the dark, for Shelton was determined to be off before first light so that we might pass Khoord-Kabul in the first day’s march, which meant covering fifteen miles.

       Chapter 10

      Possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabal; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason of Elphy Bey and his advisers. If you had taken the greatest military geniuses of the ages, placed them in command of our army, and asked them to ruin it utterly as speedily as possible, they could not – I mean it seriously – have done it as surely and swiftly as he did. And he believed he was doing his duty. The meanest sweeper in our train would have been a fitter commander.

      Shelton was not told that we would march on the morning of the 6th January, until evening on the 5th. He laboured like a madman through the night, loading up the huge baggage train, assembling the troops within the cantonment in their order of march, and issuing orders for the conduct and disposal of the entire force. It is a few words on paper: as I remember it, there was a black night of drifting snow, with storm lanterns flickering, troops tramping unseen in the dark, a constant babble of voices, the neighing and whining of the great herd of baggage animals, the rumble of wagons, messengers dashing to and fro, great heaps of luggage piled high outside the houses, harassed officers demanding to know where such-and-such a regiment was stationed, and where so-and-so had gone, bugle calls ringing in the night wind, feet stamping, children crying, and on the lighted verandah of his office, Shelton, red-faced and dragging at his collar, with his staff scurrying about him while he tried to bring some order out of the inferno.

      And as the sun came up from the Seeah Sung hills, it seemed that he had done it. The army of Afghanistan was standing ready to march – everyone was dead tired, of course – strung out through the length of the cantonment, with everything loaded (except sufficient food), and all the troops fallen in and armed (with hardly any powder and ball among them), and Shelton shouting his last orders in a voice gone hoarse, while Elphy Bey finished an unhurried breakfast of devilled ham, omelette, and a little pheasant. (I know because he invited me to join him with the other staff officers.)

      And while he was making his final toilet, with his staff and servants fussing round him, and the army waiting in the cold, I rode out to the cantonment gate to see what was happening over towards Kabul. The city was alive, with crowds on the roof-tops and scattered over the snowy ground СКАЧАТЬ