CHAPTER 1

 

   I ain’t sentimental as a rule.  When you’ve spent as much time as I have away from hearth and home, one more wifeless Christmas and New Year shouldn’t come as a surprise.  But it did and I was feeling a little aggrieved.  Elspeth motored off to Leicester this morning to entrain for London where she plans to spend an indefinite period lord and ladying it with some of our late King Bertie’s hangers-on – a group with which I resolutely refuse to associate – and our parting had been less than amicable.1  

 

   She of course was full of pouts and pleadings, to demonstrate how much she’d not thought even a little of flirting freely with London’s young society blades, and I was . . . well, truth to tell I expected to enjoy having the house to myself minus its prattling ninny of a mistress.  Even so, a bit of husbandly ire always gingers ’em up for the return match so I struck a pose or two before the Lancaster set off .  And no sooner had it gone, than I found the house was not only quiet and peaceful but also (and quite simply) empty and lonely. 2 

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   Elspeth’s absence left a void that I decided to fill by searching among her private things for loose sovereigns or unsigned love letters from one – or some – of the many bounders I suspected of having sampled her charms in years past.  Or present.  So as I said, I ain’t much of a sentimental chap but elbow-deep in flimsy cottons and laces and contraptions for various and mysterious female applications I found myself lifting the contents of one drawer in a great armful and pressing it to my face to inhale the wonderful intoxicating smell of . . . and something in the bottom of the dresser drawer caught my eye.  It was a newspaper used as a lining and I set aside my bundle to carefully pull out the yellowing pages, for I had recognized what it was immediately. 

 

   Could it really be so many years since my most painful return from hostile pagan shores – America, anyway – to find the house as empty as it is today and a lonely winter holiday in prospect?   I remember that particular homecoming from America as if it were yesterday.  Even roaring at the latest cross-eyed skivvie – personally selected by Elspeth for having the body shape of a turnip and skin to match – had failed to lift my mood.  On that occasion, my beloved almost-one-and-only wife had taken it into her empty head to visit the Lake District with two of her equally foolish sisters.  For all that they are Scots and therefore born and bred in cold, bleak and barren landscapes with neither culture nor amusement, the middle of winter was no time for persons of advanced age to be wandering lonely as clouds and wondering where all the daffodils have gone.  And no plan to return until the end of April “in Plenty of time for your Birthday, dearest Harry.  You may be Sure I shall not Miss such a Grand event!” as her lengthy note, which she’d thoughtfully propped against the brandy decanter, announced in breathless prose.  

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   Somehow, she’d neglected to state exactly where she would be staying.  For all her years she was then – and still is – a toothsome piece and as always I could not be certain that such an omission was entirely innocent.  Was she truly in the Lake District in the company of Mary and the so-appropriately named Grizel?  Heaven only knows, if the positions were reversed I’d have seized the opportunity of her absence to do some seizing of my own.  But thinking back on it now, that would have been impossible for once.  Had our maid been another Lola Montez rather than a root vegetable, I’d still have been unable to get astride even with a mounting block and a boost from the groom, for I’d come home with what the sawbones diagnosed as a broken bone in the foot and some infernal Yankee parasite lodged in my bowels, perhaps the same type as has a small part to play later in this memoir.  As a result, I was unable to relieve the boredom by kicking the servants – even leaping up from the chair in urgency was damn painful and not always completely effective.  Enough said. 

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   In those days, the great-grandchildren and their assorted progenitors would have been at Gandamack for the holidays as was usual, for Elspeth and I customarily winter in Leicestershire rather than in town.  But that year the Flashman brood had also excused themselves and were spending their time, and too much of Elspeth’s money I’ll be bound, in London.  According to Elspeth’s note they were keenly anticipating a “Fairy play” at the York from the pen of Barrie, her fellow Caledonian.3   

 

   I remember having been introduced to him once, wandering Kensington Gardens with a couple of small boys – him that is, not me.  Deuced odd cove, but I was reassured that he was married which I supposed to be an improvement on that odious crinoline Dodgson.4   Personally I wouldn’t allow either one within arm’s reach of the little ones. 

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   You ask, how came ye to be in America yet again, Flashy at your advanced age?  I was invited without the option, that’s why.  Someone had thought it a capital notion to send out a handful of old soldiers like me to the grand Fair in St. Louis, Missouri.  We’d serve to cheer on the Great Britain and Ireland team in the Olympics (only two bloody medals and both won by murphies, more’s the shame) and to help see fair play at the great Boer War exhibit – one war that I missed, thank God.   In other words, we relics of Vickie’s empire were on display, best behaviour and don’t piss in the flowerpots.  I didn’t mind it much; typical Yankee bluster and gargantuan vulgarity with charred meats in a bun, a cow sculpted out of butter, women screaming, children crying and the usual mixture of mudsills and what passes there for society. 5

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   One thing I did mind was seeing my old friend Geronimo again after all those years, staggering a bit after riding on the Big Wheel, himself a wrinkled exhibit shuffling through his memories as crowds pointed and exclaimed.  He recognized me at once and across his elephant’s arse face there was a brief smile and then his eyes went blank and he lowered his head.  I don’t doubt he was dreaming of collecting scalps from every gawker as he mumbled something in Apache, a language so ugly that I never made much of a fist of it.  But he repeatedly used a word that I’ve had occasion to employ myself in so many languages – including his – that at last I got the gist.  He was moaning that he should have never surrendered – rather opposite to my own inclinations.   I backed away slowly.  It don’t do to trust an Apache in that kind of mood – or any mood for all that – even when you’ve planted flowers with him and called him “Yawner”.6 

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   What with that upset and a pleasant drink or several to calm my nerves, I mistakenly exchanged words at the Boer exhibit with General de Wet while he was still a-horse, soaked from the dramatic plunge of man and beast into a pool of water, advertised as “An Incredible Escape by the Great Boer General in the Recent War”.  He took unkindly to my comparison of his show to that of William Cody – short on facts but long on manure – and caused his beast to step on my left foot with the resultant bone damage already recorded and which forced me home early.   To be fair to de Wet, it had been a mere two years since the Boers gave up skulking about their hideous wasteland pretending to resist and then going hands-up only because they were running out of farms, animals, women and children what with Kitchener burning whatever didn’t move and shooting, starving or giving diseases to whatever did. 

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   All this by the by, except that in New York on the way back to England, I picked up a newspaper carrying a report on the Fair, with photographs that might amuse Elspeth and I had packed it in my valise and forgot all about it until it turned up just now, seven years later, protecting Elspeth’s dainties from contact with rough wood.7

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   So it was that today for the first time I began to read that same newspaper, sitting alone with my luncheon in Gandamack Lodge and it was not long before a familiar name took my particular attention in a report on the opening of the New York subway system.  Of course, our London network had been running forty years by then and the Jonathans were only just catching up; but they went electric from the start while the idiots who ran our ‘tube’ were still dithering about it.  In those days I didn’t use the thing myself; filthy smoke, noisesome, populated by pickpockets and worse – like Buckingham Palace since the old Queen died.  These days we’re electric too thanks to some Yankee they imported to do the work. 

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   Anyway, back in ’04 New York’s mayor had opened the subway but not content with boring other dignitaries with the usual political gibberish and throwing a switch or wasting a perfectly good bottle of champagne, he’d actually piloted the first train.   The mayor was one George Brinton McClellan Jr. and the subway project was just one of his good works, which included building magnificently useful bridges over the East River.8

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   Now Mayor McClellan’s father was Major General George B. senior – a soldier I never really knew except by sight and reputation – and one-time commander of the Federal armies during their inaptly named ‘Civil’ War.  Like many a small man, he fancied himself another Napoleon and thought the Chief Frog’s disastrous retreat from Moscow was a sensible exercise in shortening one’s lines of supply.   I once stood within a few yards of McClellan as he vexed Lincoln near to death with all his reasons for not following up on his “victory” at Antietam.  Little Mac didn’t like his soldiers to suffer hurt, to which I say, “Hear, hear and you’ve got the Flashy vote for Field Marshal next time around”.  But Lincoln’s rather simple idea you see was that the army’s top general in the field should have the goal of inflicting pain on the enemy’s army rather than just preventing damage to his own.  And as long as it’s not my skin in question, I have to say that Sam Grant was much better at running Mr. Lincoln’s war than was McClellan because while Sam didn’t want his men to suffer either, he didn’t particularly care if they did as long as he won.  Wellington and he would have got on famously. 

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   The combination of those three things – the Fair being in St. Louis, bridge building and the name McClellan – prompted the thought that Elspeth’s current absence might be supplied by setting down as much of the unvarnished truth about Abraham Lincoln, Jeb Stuart and the American Civil War as I care to reveal.  Or at least my part in it all, which is, God knows, one of the strangest episodes of my life and dreadfully prolonged my longest separation from home and Elspeth. 

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   Even so, I might never have bothered starting this memoir at all if not for a letter from America that our driver – he takes care of the shrubberies and such too, for unlike His Majesty’s government I won’t pay a man to sit and do nothing – brought back with him from the railway station this very afternoon.  It was from Philip Sheridan Junior, yet another eponymous descendant of a Union general but a good one this time and one I’d known quite well during the war.  Elspeth and I had even attended General Sheridan’s wedding – to a pretty thing more than twenty years younger than he.  I remember giving her a chaste kiss of congratulation and foregoing the pleasure of a dance with the bride – considerably encumbered as I was by Elspeth’s death grip on my right arm.  Yes, Irene was very comely and much taller than Little Phil – prompting that oaf Pope to go round the gardens whispering that Sheridan only married her because someone put him up to it.  

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   The younger Sheridan’s letter, with suitable enclosures, informs me that there is to be a grand 50th Gettysburg Reunion; that as a friend of Lincoln, a holder of the Medal of Honour and a veteran of that very battle I am invited by the Grand Army of the Republic to attend as an honoured guest – and “here’s a trick, for the Confederates have invited you as well under the pretense that you served in their ranks under another name!”   To prove it, there was a much-creased piece of paper addressed to “Colonel Comber CSA, otherwise styled Major Harry P. Flashman” from one B. H. Young on behalf of the United Confederate Veterans.  As I write, I have in front of me both of my commissions, Union and Confederate – that last just as much my own as the first although the name on it is not mine.  Perhaps it wasn’t honestly earned but Lord knows I suffered enough for it to insist upon the chap at Debrett putting it in. 

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    How this Mr. Young knew of my various names and ranks in America will never be known for I shall neither reply to young Sheridan’s letter nor go again to that terrible place in Pennsylvania.  I’ve no time at all for old men posturing and posing for photographs in places where they claimed to have firmly stood, extending their shaking canes where once they held shaking rifles – soiling themselves too some of them, just as they did in 1863 – laughing, teary-eyed, lying relics who managed not to die as they strove to set men free or to prevent that freedom from happening.  I can never forget what they did there – swearing, screaming, running, charging, laying down and shooting the intestines out of boys and men who were trying to do the same to them – and so many of those in grey dying because of me.  I had a suspicion that Mr. Young of the UCV – or rather those behind his invitation – intended that my aged bones should at long last lay with those of their brothers. 

   

   But I ramble, which is a privilege of age, and the railway bridges, St. Louis and McClellan still haven’t entered the story but they will as I tell how I came to be one of the Boys of ’61 (well almost), if perhaps less of a willing volunteer than all the rest. 

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Notes:

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1 Edward VI died in 1910

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2 The Vulcan “Lancaster” automobile was first produced in 1910 and offered for sale at 610 pounds sterling

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3 J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre on December 28th, 1904

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4 Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carrol author of the “Alice” books.  Flashman presumably alludes to allegations of paedophilia, a subject that vexes Dodgson’s biographers to this day

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5 The World’s Fair of St. Louis ran from April 30 to December 1, 1904.  Among its attractions were the Summer Olympics, dominated by Americans because the expense of travel prevented many European and other teams from attending.  The team competing as Great Britain and Northern Ireland took only two medals (one gold, one silver), both won by Irish athletes as Flashman notes.

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6 Flashman evidently made another trip to the U.S.A. in 1908 or 1909.  The memoir published as “Flashman and the Redskins” makes reference to such a visit during which he and Geronimo managed to set aside old suspicions and walk arm in arm together. 

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7 This and other information indicates that this packet of papers was written in the winter of 1911-12 

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8 Reported in the New York Times of Friday, October 28th 1904.

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