Flashman at the charge!

 

Let's spice it up with a bit of Harry Flashman. Here is his description of Lord Cardigan:

"...his lordship looked over me in his high-nosed damn-you way which I remembered so well. He would be in his mid-fifties by now, and it showed; the whiskers were greying, the gooseberry eyes were watery, and the legions of bottles he had consumed had cracked the veins in that fine nose of his. But he still rode straight as a lance, and if his voice was wheezy it had lost nothing of its plunger drawl."

I read all of these novels over and over, and they are the reason I became a writer. The author, George MacDonald Fraser, was a genius with a knack for combining historical accuracy with vivid, eloquent, funny prose; Patrick O'Brian is his only rival, in my opinion.

His character, Harry Flashman, is a self-confessed coward who lies and cheats and fornicates his way around the British Empire, from the Crimea to the Indian Mutiny. The novels were initially hailed as a vicious satire on British imperialism, something Fraser always hotly denied. A former soldier, who had served in Burma during World War II, he made a point of declaring himself a proud imperialist, and didn't care who knew it.

Equally, he knew an idiot when he saw one - such as Lord Cardigan - and wasn't afraid to attack sacred cows. To judge from Flashman's accounts, many of the British military victories in this period were won more by luck than design, and achieved in spite of our glorious generals.

The novels are extremely un-PC by modern standards, not least Flashman's frequent use of racist language. If he popped into existence in 2025, he would be cancelled in a little under five seconds - and care not a jot, damn your eyes.

However, these stories are written from the first-person perspective of a 19th century British army officer, and you would expect no less. When I worked in archives I read the journals of some real-life British officers of the period; believe me, Flashman is tame by comparison. We can cope with the reality of our history, or we can stop up our eyes and ears and turn it into something more pleasing. I know what I prefer.