Flashman At The Charge

"Very good. This is a customs post, among other things. Have you anything to declare?"

[The end of the fourth packet of the Flashman Papers].

APPENDIX I:.

Balaclava

So much has been written about this battle, by its survivors, by journalists and historians, and even by propagandists and poets, that it is hardly necessary to say more than that Flashman"s account, while it adds certain graphic details that have not been recorded hitherto, agrees substantially with other eyewitness descriptions. Much of what he says of the actual charge of the Light Brigade, for example, may be verified by comparison with the accounts of those who survived the action, such as Paget, Trooper Farquharson, Captain Morgan, Cardigan, and others.

But the great controversy of Balaclava, which will probably never be settled satisfactorily, is why the Light Brigade attacked the battery at all. Experts and amateurs of history alike, who have read Russell, Kinglake, Woodham-Smith, Fortescue and a host of others, and who are familiar with the points of view of Raglan, Lucan, and Cardigan, may decide for themselves whether Flashman casts valuable light on the subject or not. Many believe that Raglan and Airey were princ.i.p.ally at fault for issuing an imprecise order, that Nolan"s excitement in transmitting it to Lucan led to the final fatal confusion, and that neither Cardigan nor Lucan can be fairly blamed for what followed. These are conclusions with which Flashman himself would obviously not disagree. The whole question hinges dramatically on the moment when Nolan made his wild gesture (down the valley? towards the redoubts? how great was the angle of difference anyway? did he say "our guns" or "your guns" or what?) and if he was at fault, he paid the highest price for it. So too, perhaps, did Raglan; he died in the Crimea, like the six hundred sabres, and if there was a blunder, it was buried with them.

APPENDIX II:.

Yakub Beg and Izzat Kutebar

Yakub (Yakoob) Beg, who became the greatest chief in Central Asia and the leading resistance fighter against Russian imperialism, was born in Piskent in 1820. He was one of the Persian-Tajik people, and a descendant of Tamerlaine the Great (Timur) - Flashman"s description of him corresponds closely to the reconstruction of features recently made from Timur"s skull by the Russian expert, Professor Gerasimov.

In 1845 Yakub became chamberlain to the Khan of Khokand, and then Pansad Bashi (commander of 500). He was made Kush Begi (military commander) and Governor of Ak Mechet, an important fortress on the Syr Daria, in 1847, and in the same year married a girl from Julek, a river town; she is described as "a Kipchak lady of the Golden Horde". Yakub was active in raiding the new Russian outposts on the Aral coast, and after the fall of Ak Metchet in 1853 he made strenuous efforts to retake it from the Russians, without success.

After the Russian invasion, Yakub eventually turned his attention to making his own state in Kashgar. In 1865, as commander-in-chief to the decadent Buzurg Khan, he took Kashgar, then dispossessed his own overlord, and a.s.sumed the throne himself as Amir and Atalik Ghazi; in this same year he married "the beautiful daughter of Ko Dali, an officer in the Chinese army", by whom he had several children.

As ruler of Kashgar and East Turkestan, Yakub Beg was the most powerful monarch of Central Asia. He remained a bitter enemy of Russia and a close friend of the British, whose envoys were received in Kashgar, where a British-Kashgari commercial treaty was concluded in 1874. It was Russia"s fear that he would eventually unite all the Muslims of Central Asia in a holy war against the Tsar, but in 1876 Kashgar was attacked by China, and Yakub was driven out; he was a.s.sa.s.sinated on May 1, 1877, by Hakim Khan, a son of Buzurg Khan.

His biographer has described Yakub Beg as "a great man born centuries too late". Certainly, as a nationalist leader and resistance fighter he was unique in his time and country, for "alone in Central Asia he remained free", and he fought his campaigns and ruled his independent state with-out wealth or any large following: his great gifts, according to contemporaries, were a keen intelligence, a winning and handsome appearance, and a refusal to be panicked - he also seems to have had a sense of timing, as witness the neatness with which he betrayed Buzurg Khan.

Anywhere else in the world he would probably be remembered as William Wallace, Hereward, and Crazy Horse are remembered, but not in modern Russia. In Tashkent recently I asked an educated Russian what kind of place Yakub Beg occupied in local history: his name was not even known. (See D. C. Boulger"s Yakoob Beg, 1878.) Izzat Kutebar, brigand, rebel, and guerrilla leader, was a Kirgiz, born probably in 1800. He first robbed the Bokhara caravan in 1822, and was at his height as a raider and scourge of the Russians in the 1840s. They eventually persuaded him to suspend his bandit activities, and rewarded him with a gold medal (see page 268), but he cut loose again in the early fifties, was captured in 1854, escaped or was released, raised a revolt, and lived as a rebel in the Ust-Yurt until 1858, when he finally surrendered to Count Ignatieff and made his peace with Russia.

NOTES.

Possibly because of the war scare, as Flashman suggests, there was a craze for growing moustaches, in addition to beards and whiskers, in the early months of 1854. Another fashion among the young men was for brilliantly-coloured shirts with grotesque designs, skulls, snakes, flowers, and the like. Both fads bore an interesting resemblance to modern "hippy" fashions, not least in the reactions they provoked: Bank of England clerks were expressly forbidden to join "tie moustache movement", as it was called. (p.14) The "eunuchs". The open-range musketry target in use at this time consisted of the usual concentric circles, but with a naked human figure in the centre; the bull was a black disc discreetly placed below the figure"s waist-line. (p.17) Although Britain was not formally at war until March 28, 1854, the preparations for conflict had been going on for many weeks amid growing popular determination for a showdown with Russia. The Scots (3rd) Guards had embarked a month earlier, and Palmerston, the Home Secretary, and Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty, made their jingoistic Reform Club speeches on March 7. These were brilliantly parodied by Punch ("Shomeshay we"re norrawar. Norrawar! Hash-ha! No! Norrawar! Noshexactly awar. But . . .") But while the war fever was strong in Britain it was not as universal as Flashman suggests; there was an active peace movement, and anti-war sentiments could be pa.s.sionate. For an extreme but interesting view, see J. McQueen"s The War: who"s to blame? (1854). (p.18) The play was almost certainly Balzac"s "The Married Unmarried", which caused a minor controversy. (p.19) Sh.e.l.l-out, skittle pool, go-back, etc. The rules of these early variations on pool (and forerunners of snooker) are to be found in "Captain Crawley"s" standard Victorian work, Billiards, which is a mine of practical information and billiards lore, and contains much information on pool-room sharks and-swindles. Joe Bennet was a champion player of the time. A jenny is a difficult in-off shot to the middle pocket, usually with the object ball close to the side-cushion; a pair of breeches is a simultaneous in-off and pot red in the top pockets. (p.19) Sir William Molesworth"s Commons committee met in March, 1854, to consider small arms production. Lord Paget was among the members, and Lt-Col. Sam Colt, the American inventor of the Colt revolver, was among those who gave evidence. (p.27) Quite apart from the popular criticism he had been receiving for allegedly meddling in State affairs, Prince Albert"s zeal for designing military clothing attracted considerable ridicule in the spring of 1854. In fact, judging from contemporary sketches, the so-called "Albert Bonnet" for the Guards was a sensible, if ugly, multi-purpose forage cap. But there was growing controversy at this time about British uniforms - the traditional tight stocks and collars being a princ.i.p.al target - and any suggestions from H.R.H. were, as usual, unwelcome. (p.35) The main bombardment of Odessa by British ships took place on April 22, but without doing great dam-age. (p.47) "Villikins and his Dinah" was the hit song of 1854. (p.49) From this, and one later reference, it seems obvious that Flashman was particularly impressed by a Punch cartoon, published shortly after Balaclava, showing a stout British father brandishing a poker with patriotic zeal in the morning-room as he reads news of the Charge of the Light Brigade. (p.57) The Cabinet did meet at Pembroke Lodge, Richmond, on the evening of June 28, 1854, and agreed on important orders to be sent to Lord Raglan for the invasion of the Crimea. "Agreed" may be too strong a word, since most of the Cabinet were asleep during the meeting, and were not fully aware of what orders were being sent; they woke up once, when someone knocked over a chair, and then dozed off again. The authority for this is no less than A. W. Kinglake, the great Crimea historian, who devotes a separate appendix to the incident in his ma.s.sive history of the war, The Invasion of the Crimea. Kinglake was obviously uneasy about disclosing that the Cabinet had taken the vital decision of the war while in a state of torpor, and speculated about the possibility "of a narcotic substance having been taken by some mischance" in their food. He was too tactful or charitable to mention the obvious conclusion, which is that they had had too much to drink. (p.58) Flashman"s account of this important meeting between Raglan and Sir George Brown is largely corroborated by Brown"s own version in Kinglake. Both Newcastle"s despatch and his personal note to Raglan were definite on the need to besiege Sevastopol, while leaving" the final responsibility with Raglan and his French colleagues. (p.62) Mrs Duberly, wife of an officer of the 8th Hussars, and an old friend of Flashman"s (see Flash for Freedom!), left a vivid journal of her experiences in the Crimea, including the incident described here, when she boarded a transport "wrapped up in an old hat and shawl . . . an extraordinary figure" to avoid detection by Lord Lucan. (See E. E. P. Tisdall"s Mrs Duberly"s Campaigns.) (p.65) "The policeman at Herne Bay". This mythical police-man was a humorous by-word of the time. (p.80) It is interesting to note that William Howard Russell, in his original despatch to The Times, made the mistake of reporting that the Highlanders were involved in the attack on the Redoubt, but corrected this in later despatches. His histories of the Crimea are the work of a brilliant newspaperman, and even those who question his criticism of Raglan and other British leaders (see Colonel Adye"s The Crimean War) acknowledge the quality of his reporting. Anyone interested in verifying Flashman"s statements cannot do better than refer to Russell, or to Kinglake, who was also an eye-witness. Incidentally, Flashman"s account of the Alma action is extremely accurate, especially where Lord Raglan"s movements are concerned, but his memory has surely played him false in a slightly earlier pa.s.sage when he suggests that the Russian gunners fired on the army at the start of its march down the Crimea coast: this took place some hours later. (p.81) For an account of this incident, see Russell"s The War from the landing at Gallipoli to the death of Lord Raglan (1855). (p.83) Generally Flashman disagrees with other eye-witnesses no more than they disagree among themselves, and these discrepancies are minor ones. For example, some authorities suggest that the Highlanders fired three volleys against the Russian cavalry, not two, and at fairly long range (E. H. Nolan actually says that there was properly speaking "no cavalry charge upon the Highlanders", but this is not borne out by others). Again, as to casualties in the Heavy Brigade charge, Flashman saw comparatively few, but Trooper Farqu- harson of the 4th Light Dragoons, who rode over the ground immediately afterwards, "saw dozens .. . with the ugliest gashes about their heads and faces." (See R. S. Farquharson, Reminiscences of Crimean Campaigning.) (p.105) The original pencilled order, scribbled by Airey, is still preserved. It reads: "Lord Raglan wishes the Cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the Enemy & try to prevent the Enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Attily may accompany. French Cavalry is on yr left. Immediate." As to what verbal instructions may have been added, there is no certainty, but one of the rumours which later arose (see H. Moyse-Bartlett"s Louis Edward Nolan) was that Nolan had been told to tell Lucan to act on the defensive, but had pa.s.sed on the vital word as offensive. (p.111) It is one of the true curiosities of the charge of the Light Brigade that Lord George Paget rode into action smoking a cheroot - obviously the one which Flashman gave him - and did not actually draw his sabre until the moment of entering the battery, when his orderly, Parkes, advised him to do so. Paget"s coolness, which as much as anything saved the remnants of the Light Brigade, was notorious: Trooper Farquharson, who rode with him in the charge, recalled how earlier in the battle Paget was. .h.i.t by a sh.e.l.l splinter, and reacted only by telling his orderly to collect it as a souvenir. (p.125) The recklessness of the British cavalry charge so amazed the Russians that Liprandi"s immediate conclusion was that the Light Brigade must have been drunk. (See Cecil Woodham-Smith"s The Reason Why, and Kinglake.) (p.129) Whatever may be said of his opinions, Flashman"s information about the plight of the Russian serfs in the 1850s is entirely accurate, and is borne out by several other contemporary authorities. The best of these are perhaps Baron von Haxthausen, whose The Russian Empire, appeared in 1856, and Shirley Brooks"s The Russians of the South (1854). They also corroborate his descriptions of Russian life in general, as does The Englishwoman in Russia, by "a Lady ten years resident in that country", published in 1855. Savage and Civilised Russia, by "W.R." (1877), is an informative work; two largely political tracts by S. Stepniak, Russia under the Tsars (1885) and The Russian Peasantry (1888), contain useful material and interesting bias; and the Memoirs of the celebrated Russian radical, Alexander Herzen (1812-70), give an illuminating insight into the serf mentality. Like Flashman, he observed how his family"s land serfs "somehow succeed in not believing in their complete slavery", and contrasted this with the plight of the house serfs who, although they were paid wages, had their existence destroyed and poisoned by "the terrible consciousness of serfdom". (p.140) Captain Count Nicholas Pavlovitch Ignatieff was later to become one of Russia"s most brilliant agents in the Far East. He served in China, undertook daring missions into Central Asia, and was also for a time military attache in London. There is evidence that early in the Crimean War he was serving on the Baltic, and this must have been shortly before his encounter with Flashman. He was twenty-two at this time. (p.143) For confirmation, and other details of Harry East"s military career, see Tom Brown at Oxford, by Thomas Hughes (1861). (p.148) The commander of Prince Vigenstein"s Hussars in 1837 was, in fact, Colonel Pencherjevsky. (p.153) If anything, Flashman"s description of the punishments meted out to Russian serfs by their owners appears to be on the mild side. The works cited earlier in these notes contain examples of fearful cruelty and the carelessness with which extraordinary penalties were sometimes imposed - Alexander Herzen gives instances of atrocities, and also recalls the psychological misery caused when his father, a n.o.bleman, ordered a village patriarch"s beard to be shaved off. Turgenev the novelist, another n.o.bleman who saw serfdom at first hand, described how his mother banished two young serfs to Siberia because they failed to bow to her in pa.s.sing - and how they came to bid her fare-well before leaving for exile. (See A. Yarmolinsky"s Turgenev the Man.) (p.160) It was a folk-saying - and may still be - that one could tell a true Russian by the fact that he would go with his neck open and unprotected, even in the coldest weather. (p.161) It is interesting that Pencherjevsky had heard of Marx at this time, for although the great revolutionary had already gained an international notoriety, his influence was not to be felt in Russia for many years. Non-Communist agitators were, however, highly active in the country, and no doubt to the Count they all looked alike. (p.164.) Flashman seems to suggest that this incident took place in February, 1855. If it did, then Tsar Nicholas I had only weeks, and possibly days, to live: he died on March 2 in St Petersburg, after influenza which had lasted about a fortnight. There is no evidence that he visited the south in the closing weeks of his life; on the other hand Flashman"s account seems highly circ.u.mstantial. Possibly he has confused the dates, and Nicholas came to Starotorsk earlier than February. However, anyone scenting a mystery here may note that while the Tsar died on March 2, he was last seen in public on February 22 at an infantry review.

(See E. H. Nolan"s History of the War against Russia.) (p.181) The Khruleff and Duhamel plans were only two in a long list of proposed Russian invasions of British India. As far back as 1801 Tsar Paul, hoping to replace British rule by his own, agreed to a joint Franco-Russian invasion through Afghanistan (Napoleon was at that time in Egypt, and the French Government were to pave the invaders" way by sending "rare objects" to be "distributed with tact" among native chiefs on the line of march.) The Russian part of the expedition actually got under way, but with the death of the Tsar and the British victory at Copenhagen the scheme was abandoned.

General Duhamel"s plan for an invasion through Persia was first put to the Tsar in 1854, and was followed in early 1855 by General Khruleffs pro-posed Afghan-Khyber expedition. The details of the two plans, as given by Flashman, correspond almost exactly with the versions subsequently published as a result of British intelligence work (see Russia"s March to India, published anonymously by an Indian Army officer in 1894). Indeed, at various points in Flashman"s account Ignatieff repeats pa.s.sages from Duhamel and Khruleff almost verbatim. (p.184) The "soul tax" was simply a tax on each male, of 86 silver kopecks annually (see J. Blum"s Lord and Peasant in Russia). If a serf died, his family had to continue to pay the tax until he was officially declared dead at the next census. Blocking the family stove was a common inducement to pay. (p.193) It is probably mere coincidence, but one of V. I. Lenin"s immediate ancestors bore the surname Blank. (p.194) "... with his belt at the last hole". Obviously a corpulent Cossack, or one near retiring age. It was a rule that the Cossacks wore belts of a standard length, and were not permitted to grow stouter than the belt allowed. (p.194) Leaking Russian stoves could be highly poisonous. At least three British officers were killed by fumes ("smothered in charcoal") at Balaclava in the first week of January 1855. (See General Gordon"s letters from the Crimea, Jan. 3-8, 1855.) (p.196) The serf rising at Starotorsk may have astonished Flashman, but such rebellions were exceedingly common (as he himself remarks elsewhere in his narrative). More than 700 such revolts took place in Russia during the thirty years of Nicholas I"s reign. (p.197) Fort Raim was built on the Syr Daria (the Jaxartes) in 1847, the year after Russia"s first occupation on the Aral coast, and was immediately raided by Yakub Beg. The Russian policy of expansion followed the fort"s establishment, and their armed expeditions eastward began in 1852 and 1853. (p.238) Yakub Beg (1820-77), fighting leader of the Tajiks, chamberlain to the Khan of Khokand, warlord of the Syr Daria, etc. (See Appendix II.) (p.243) Izzat Kutebar, bandit, guerrilla fighter, so-called "Rob Roy of the Steppe". (See Appendix II.) (p.244) "Khan Ali" was Captain Arthur Conolly, a British agent executed at Bokhara in 1842, along with another Briton, Colonel Charles Stoddart. They had been kept in terrible conditions in the Shah"s dungeons, but Conolly was told his life would be spared if he became a Muslim, as Stoddart had done. He refused - his words quoted by an eye-witness were: "Do your work." (p.246) The language would not be pure Persian, as Flashman suggests, but the Tajik dialect of that language - the Tajiks, being of Persian origin, considered themselves a cut above other Central Asians, and clung to their traditional language and customs. (p.248) Presumably such works as England and Russia in Central Asia (1879), Central Asian Portraits (1880), by D. C. Boulger, and Caravan Journeys and Wanderings, by J. P. Ferrier. These, and companion volumes, give in addition to biographical details an account of the occupation of the Eastern lands by Russia, which had its origins in the agreement of 1760, when the Kirgiz-Kazak peoples, under their khan, Sultan Abdul Faiz, became nominal subjects of the Tsar, receiving his protection in return for their promise to safeguard the Russian caravans. Neither side kept its bargain. (p.260) The Russian expansion into Central Asia in the middle of the last century, which swallowed up all the independent countries and khanates east of the Caspian as far as China and south to Afghanistan, was con-ducted with considerable brutality. The ma.s.sacre at Ak Mechet (the White Mosque), by General Perovski, on August 8, 1853, took place as Yakub Beg describes it, but it was surpa.s.sed by such atrocities as Denghil Tepe, in the Kara k.u.m, in 1879, when the Tekke women and children, attempting to escape from the position which their men-folk were holding, were deliberately shot down by Lomakin"s troops. In this, as in other places, the Russian commanders made it clear that they were not interested in receiving surrenders.

It is customary nowadays for Russians to refer to this expansion as "Tsarist imperialism"; however, it will be noted that while the much-abused Western colonial powers have now largely divested themselves of their empires, the modern Russian Communist state retains an iron grip on the extensive colonies in Central Asia which the old Russian empire acquired. (p.273) The Mongols were said to be descended from a sky-blue wolf. Flashman"s Khokandian friends seem to have used the term rather loosely, possibly because many of them were part Mongol by descent. Incidentally, much of Kutebar"s speech at this point is almost word for word with a rallying-call heard in the Syr Daria country at the time of the Russian advance. (p.274) The military rockets devised by Sir William Congreve were used in the War of 1812, and those described by Flashman were obviously similar to this early pattern, which continued in use for many years. The Congreve was a gigantic sky-rocket, consisting of an iron cylinder four inches in diameter and over a yard long, packed with powder and attached to a fifteen-foot stick. It was fired from a slanting trough or tube, and travelled with a tremendous noise and a great trail of smoke and sparks, exploding on impact. Although they could fly two miles, the rockets were extremely erratic, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century frequent modifications were made, including William Hale"s spinning rocket, and the grooved and finned rocket, which could be fired without a stick. (p.302) The secret society of a.s.sa.s.sins, founded in Persia in the eleventh century by Ha.s.san el Sabbah, "the Old Man of the Mountains", were notorious for their policy of secret murder and their addiction to the hashish drug from which they took their name. At their height they operated from hill strongholds, mostly in Persia and Syria, and were active against the Crusaders before being dispersed by the Mongol invasion of Hulagu Khan in the thirteenth century. Traces of the sect exist today in the Middle East. (p.314)

By the same author THE FLASHMAN PAPERS.

Flashman Royal Flash Flash for Freedom!Flashman at the ChargeFlashman"s- Lady Flashman and the Redskins Flashman and the Dragon Flashman and the Mountain of Light Flashman and the Angel of the Lord *

Mr American The Pyrates The Candlema.s.s Road *

SHORT STORIES.

The General Danced at Dawn McAuslan in the Rough The Sheikh and the Dustbin *

HISTORY.

The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers *

AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

Quartered Safe Out Here *