Flashman writes of her with considerable affection; no doubt her forthright and unconventional style appealed to him. Her habit of putting a foot on the table to ease her gout (not rheumatism) is also recorded by one of Simla's medical officers, Henry Oldfield. (See her Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan (1843), ed. Patrick Macrory (1969); Barr and Desmond; DNB.) [p, 29]
10. Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew was published in 1845, and may conceivably have been available in Simla that September, but Flashman's memory has probably confused it with the author's equally popular Mysteries of Paris which appeared in 1842-3. Dumas's The Three Musketeers was first published in 1844; Flashman may well have borrowed it from one of the French officers who rescued him from Madagascar in June, 1845.
11. George Broadfoot, a large, red-haired, heavily-bespectacled and pugnacious Orcadian, was one of the early paladins of the North-West Frontier. He had distinguished himself in the Afghan War as a ferocious fighter, engineer, and military organiser, and it was in large part due to him that Jallalabad was successfully defended after the disastrous Kabul retreat.
He was awarded a C.B. and a special mention in despatches, and went on to serve in Burma before being appointed North-West Agent in 1845. He and Flashman served together on the Kabul road, and Broadfoot's brother William had been killed in the residency siege of November, 1841, in which Flashman took a reluctant part. The reference to Broadfoot's "Scotch burr" is interesting, since although he was born in Kirkwall he had lived in London and India from the age of ten.
Captain (later Sir) Henry Havelock, known to Flashman as "the Gravedigger", no doubt because of his grim appearance and religious zeal, was to become famous in the Indian Mutiny, where he relieved and was besieged in Luc-know. Flashman knew him there, and also during the Afghan campaign.
The "cabbage-eating nobleman" with the lisp was certainly Prince Waldemar of Prussia, who visited Simla in 1845 and subsequently accompanied the British army in the field. He travelled under the name of Count Ravensburg, but his hosts seem to have addressed him by his real title.
12. The rate of pay for an East India Company sepoy at this time was 7 rupees a month. The Khalsa was paying 14, and 45 rupees for cavalrymen.
13. Sind, the territory lying between the Punjab and the sea, was annexed in 1843 by Lord Ellenborough, Sir Henry Hardinge's predecessor as Governor-General; this gave Britain control of the Indus, and an important buffer against possible Moslem invasion from the north-west (see map). It was a cynical piece of work, in which Ellenborough goaded the Sind Amirs by forcing an unacceptable treaty on them; when this provoked an attack by the Baluchi warriors, Sir Charles Napier promptly conquered the country, winning the battles of Miani and Hyderabad. Public reaction to the annexation was reflected by the House of Commons, which postponed for a year the normal vote of thanks to the successful general, and by Punch, which gleefully accepted a contribution from a Miss Catherine Winkworth, aged 17, suggesting that Napier's despatch to Ellenborough must have read: "Peccavi", "I have Scinde", (sinned)." (See under. Foreign Affairs, Punch, May 18, 1844.) The annexation did not pass unnoticed in Lahore, and no doubt convinced many Sikhs that it would be their turn next.
14. Young as he was, Flashman should have known that Afghanistan was not an exception, and that political officers, who were usually Army, normally fought along with the rest. It is true that no post in battle was more dangerous than general's aide, and he may well have been right to assume that it would be especially perilous when the general was Hugh Gough.
Alexander Burnes had been Flashman's political chief at Kabul, where Sir William McNaghten was head of the Political Mission; he saw both of them murdered by the Afghans. (See Flashman.)
15. The details which Flashman gives of the Soochet legacy case are substantially correct. Raja Soochet had sent his fortune, amounting to 14 lakhs of rupees (about Ł140,000), to Ferozepore shortly before his death in March 1844; it was buried there in three huge copper vessels and dug up by Captain Saunders Abbott. Dispute as to the ownership then arose, with the Lahore durbar claiming its return, and the British government holding that it was the property of Soochet's heirs. (See Broadfoot, pp. 229-32, 329.)
16. The famous Shalamar or Shalimar gardens and pleasure grounds were laid out in the seventeenth century by Shah Jehan, creator of the Taj Mahal. Originally there were seven gardens, representing the seven divisions of Paradise, but now only three remain, covering about 80 acres. The Lahore Shalamar is not to be confused with the gardens of the same name in Kashmir.
17. When Flashman talks of the Khalsa he means simply the Punjabi army, but the term has much deeper significance, The Sikhs ("disciples") founded by Nanak in the fifteenth century as a peaceful religious sect, were transformed two hundred years later by their tenth and last Guru, Gobind Singh, into a military power to resist Muslim persecution. Gobind founded the Khalsa, the Pure, a baptised brother-hood which has been likened to the Templars and the Praetorian Guard, and rapidly became the leading order of Sikhism and the embodiment of Sikh nationhood. Among Gobind's institutions were the abolition of caste, the adoption of the surnames Singh and Kaur (lion and lioness), and the famous five k's (bangle, shorts, comb, dagger, and uncut hair). It was a fighting order, soon numbering 80,000, and under Runjeet Singh it reached the height of its power.
Contact with the British seems to have inspired him to build an army on European lines, with the assistance of French, Italian, British, American, German, and Russian instructors. The result was a superb force, quite as disciplined and formidable as Flashman describes it, well trained and equipped, and (a point not to be overlooked in examining the origins of the Sikh War) bent on conquest. Once Runjeet's iron hand was gone, the Khalsa was the real power in the Punjab, whose rulers could only hope to conciliate it. The panches which controlled it were elected by the men in accordance with village tradition.
At Runjeet's death, the numerical strength of the Khalsa was estimated at 29,000, with 192 guns. By 1845 this had risen to 45,000 regular infantry, 4000 regular cavalry, and 22,000 irregular horse (gorracharra), with 276 guns. That this figure rose further during the year seems certain; Flash-man and his contemporaries mention both 80,000 and 100,000, but how many of these would be effectives it is impossible to say. He also uses the terms Khalsa, Sikhs, and Punjabis loosely when referring to the Punjab army; it should be remarked that the Khalsa as he knew it was not composed exclusively of Sikhs. (For a breakdown of the Khalsa's strength in 1845, see Carmichael Smyth, Reigning Family, appendix; for notes on the foreign mercenaries employed by Runjeet Singh, see Gardner's Memoirs. Also works already cited in Note 6.)
18. The Akalis were the commandos of the Khalsa, a strict sect known variously as the Timeless Ones, the Children of God the Immortal, and the Crocodiles; a footnote to George Broadfoot's biography typically describes them as "devoted to misrule and plunder".
19. Since Flashman refers later in the manuscript to a Cooper pepperbox, it is probable that the pistol he drew on Dalip Singh was a Cooper also. They were manufactured from about 1840 by J. R. Cooper, a British gunsmith, and fired six rounds. (See The Revolver, 1818-65, by A. W. F. Taylerson, R. A. N. Andrews, and J. Frith (1968))