20. There is a mystery here: the "tough, shrewd-looking heavyweight" who called on Flashman with Bhai Ram Singh hardly sounds like the "good, kind, and polite old Fakir Azizudeen" who had been Runjeet Singh's foreign minister, and was still to the fore at this time, although he died of natural causes a few weeks later. Both the physical description and the style are inconsistent; indeed, the only way in which Bhai Ram's companion resembles Azizudeen is in his uncompromising honesty. Either Flashman's visitor was another courtier altogether, and he has simply got the name wrong, or his descriptive memory is playing him false for once.
21. Flashman has caught the spirit but slightly misquoted the letter of Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes":
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!
He quotes Herrick again (p. 277), but it is doubtful if he had any special affection for the poet, or would even have recognised his name. The Flashman Papers abound in erratic literary allusions—the present volume contains echoes of Donne, Shakespeare, Macaulay, Coleridge. Voltaire, Dick-ens, Scott, Congreve, Byron, Pope, Lewis Carroll, Norse mythology, and obscure corners of the Old Testament—but it would be rash to conclude that Flashman had any close acquaintance with the authors; more probably the allusions were picked up second hand from conversations and casual reading, with two exceptions. He knew Macaulay personally, and had certainly read his Lays, and he seems to have had a genuine liking for Thomas Love Peacock, whose caustic humour and strictures on Whiggery, political economy, and academics probably appealed to him. For the rest, we may judge that Flashman's frequent references to Punch, Pierce Egan's Tom and Jerry, and sensational fiction like Varney the Vampire, more fairly reflect his literary taste; we know from an earlier volume that the word Trollope meant only one thing to him, and it was not the author.
22. Alexander Haughton Campbell Gardner, "Gurdana Khan" (1785-1877), is an extraordinary figure even for an age and region which saw such adventurers as "Sekundar" Burnes, Count Ignatieff, Yakub Beg, Pottinger, Connolly, Avitabile, and John Nicholson. He was born on the shore of Lake Superior, in what is now Wisconsin, the son of a Scottish surgeon and his Anglo-Spanish wife; Dr Gardner had served on the American side in the War of Independence, and knew both Washington and Lafayette. Young Alexander spent some years in Ireland, where he seems to have learned military gunnery, possibly in the British Army, went to Egypt, and travelled by caravan from Jericho to Russia, where his brother was a government engineer. Thence he went to Central Asia, where for several years his life was one of continual warfare, raid, ambush, escape and exploration among the wild tribes; he fought as a mercenary, and for a time appears to have been little more than a wandering bandit—"Food we obtained by levying contributions from everyone we could master," he writes in his Memoirs, "but we did not slaughter except in self-defence." He seems to have had to defend himself with fatal frequency, both as soldier and freebooter, as well as escaping from slave-traders, being attacked by a wolf-pack, leading an expedition against Peshawar under the sacred banner of the Khalifa ("all burning with religious zeal and the desire to work their will in the rich city") and spending nine months in an under-ground dungeon. He rose to command a hill region with his own private fort under the rebel Habibullah Khan, who was opposing the Afghan monarch, Dost Mohammed, and it was on a foray to kidnap a princess from Dost Mohammed's harem (with her treasure) that he met his first wife—an incident described in his best laconic style:
In the course of the running fight to our stronghold I was enabled to see the beautiful face of a young girl who accompanied the princess. I rode for a consider-able time beside her, pretending that my respect for the elder lady made me choose that side of her camel … On the following morning Habibulla Khan richly rewarded his followers, but I refused my share of the gold and begged for this girl to be given to me in marriage .
She was, and for two years they lived happily, until Gardner returned from an action in which he had lost 51 men out of 90, to find that his fort had been attacked, and his wife had stabbed herself rather than be taken prisoner; their baby son had also been murdered. Although he continued in Afghanistan for some years, and was reconciled with Dost Mohammed, he eventually took service in the Punjab with Runjeet Singh, training the Khalsa in gunnery, fought in various actions, and was in Lahore in the six years of bloodshed and intrigue following Runjeet's death. He was guard commander to the infant Dalip Singh and Rani Jeendan at the time of his meeting with Flashman, but he was strongly pro-British (his friends included Henry Lawrence) and believed that India's future would be best served by ever closer communion with the United Kingdom. In his letter "from John Bull of India to John Bull of England", he envisaged the development of India as a great industrial nation, with Indians playing their part in the highest posts in civil and military life, and being represented in both Houses at Westminster. Physically, Gardner was as Flashman describes him—six feet tall, fierce, lean, and of iron constitution. As a result of one of his numerous wounds he was unable to swallow solid food, and could drink only with the help of an iron collar, but even in his eightieth year he was said to be as active as a man of fifty, lively and humorous, and speaking an English which was "quaint, graphic, and wonderfully good considering his fifty years among Asiatics". The photograph in his Memoirs shows a splendid old war-horse, beak-nosed and with bristling whiskers, seated sword in hand and clad in a full suit of tartan, even to his plumed turban. He bought the cloth from a Highland regiment in India, but which tartan it is cannot be told from the monochrome picture, and thereby hangs a small mystery.
Flashman says it was the tartan of the 79th (Cameron) Highlanders, and describes it as red or crimson—which is slightly puzzling, since the 79th's kilt is largely dark blue, being a hybrid of the MacDonald and a crimson element from the Lochiel Cameron. It may be that Flashman, who knew his military tartans, regarded it as "red" only by contrast with those of the four other Highland regiments, which are predominantly dark blue-green. The only other explanation is that he was entirely mistaken, and Gardner was wearing not the 79th tartan but the red and resplendent Lochiel Cameron—in which case the Colonel must have been a sight to behold. (See Memoirs of Alexander Gardner, ed. Hugh W. Pearse (1890).)
23. It is quite possible that Kipling based Daniel Dravot, the hero of The Man Who Would Be King, on Dr Harlan. He would surely have heard of the American, and there is a strong echo, in Dravot's fictional Kafiristan adventure (published in 1895), of Harlan's aspirations first to the throne of Afghanistan, and later successfully to the kingship of Ghor, as described in Gardner's Memoirs (published in 1890); whether Harlan's story was true is beside the point. Like many passages in his astonishing career, it lacks corroboration; on the other hand it was accepted, along with the rest, by such authorities as Major Pearse, who was Gardner's editor, and the celebrated Dr Wolff.
Josiah Harlan (1799-1871) was born in Newlin Township, Pennsylvania, the son of a merchant whose family came from County Durham. He studied medicine, sailed as a supercargo to China, and after being jilted by his American fiancee, returned to the East, serving as surgeon with the British Army in Burma. He then wandered to Afghanistan,—where he embarked on that career as diplomat, spy, mercenary soldier, and double (sometimes treble) agent which so enraged Colonel Gardner. The details are confused, but it seems that Harlan, after trying to take Dost Mohammed's throne, and capturing a fortress, fell into the hands of Runjeet Singh. The Sikh maharaja, recognising a rascal of genius when he saw one, sent him as envoy to Dost Mohammed; Harlan, travelling disguised as a dervish, was also working to subvert Dost's throne on behalf of Shah Sujah, the exiled Afghan king; not content with this, he ingratiated himself with Dost and became his agent in the Punjab—in effect, serving three masters against each other. Although, as one contemporary remarks with masterly understatement, Harlan's life was now somewhat complicated, he satisfied at least two of his employers: Shah Sujah made him a Companion of the Imperial Stirrup, and Runjeet gave him the government of three provinces which he administered until, it is said, the maharaja discovered that he was running a coining plant on the pretence of studying chemistry. Even then, Runjeet continued to use him as an agent, and it was Harlan who successfully suborned the Governor of Peshawar to betray the province to the Sikhs. He then took service with Dost Mohammed (whom he had just betrayed), and was sent with an expedition against the Prince of Kunduz; it was in this campaign that the patriotic doctor "surmounted the Indian Caucasus, and unfurled my country's banner to the breeze under a salute of 26 guns …the star-spangled -banner waved gracefully among the icy peaks." What this accomplished is unclear, but soon after-wards Harlan managed to obtain the throne of Ghor from its hereditary prince. This was in 1838; a year later he was acting as Dost's negotiator with the British invaders at Kabul; Dost subsequently fled, and Harlan was last seen having breakfast with "Sekundar" Burnes, the British political agent.