"You were—and you shall, one o' these days! But you don’t think I’m letting you slip now? Not when Fate has delivered you into my hands?" He was all jocularity—and earnest an instant later, gripping my coat. "Flashman, this is big, believe me. Bigger than China, even—perhaps bigger than anything since the Mutiny. I don’t k now yet—but I do know it calls for the best we’ve got. It’s going to he the hardest thing I’ve ever tackled … and I need you, old comrade." He was a head shorter than I, and having to stare up at me with those pale hypnotic eyes that made you feel like a rabbit before it snake. "See here, I know it’s sudden, and here I am springing it on you like a jack-in-the-box—but the Mahdi’s sudden too, and Osman Digna, and every minute counts! Let me tell you on the train—too much to explain now—and I don’t even know how I’ll set about it, only that we’ve got to set the Sudan to rights before that madman destroys it. It may mean a fight, it may mean a rearguard action, can’t tell yet—and neither can they." He jerked his head at the others. "But they’re putting the power in my hands, flashman, and I can choose whoever I wish."
He stepped back, and he was grinning again. "And I have no hesitation in asking leave of His Grace the Commander-in-Chief—" a duck of the head towards Cambridge "—and the Cabinet—" a nod to Granville "—and our chief man-at-arms—" a flourish at Joe, who was trying to interrupt "—to enlist Sir Harry Flashman, and to the dickens with regulations and usual channels! Well, Harry, what d’ye say?"
Before I could speak, Joe got his word in. "Short notice—" he was beginning, and got no further.
"When did he ever need notice? Some notice he had at Pekin, didn’t he? Remember, Garnet? Or at Balaclava, or Cawnpore, or Kabul!" He wasn’t soft-spoken at the best of times, and in his excitement he was almost shouting, and passengers were turning to stare at us. "He don’t need more than a word and a clear road! Do you?"
This was desperate, but the suddenness of it all still had me at a loss for words—that was the effect that Gordon had, you know, when he was in full cry. He was all over you, beating you down by his vanity-fed fervour, blind to everything but his own point of view. Five minutes ago I’d been carelessly eyeing a jaunty backside while Fred or Ginger looked for my luggage—and now I was being dragooned into God knew what horror by this arrogant zealot—and they called the Mahdi a fanatic!
"Hold on, Charley!" I blurted out. "I … I’m looking for my traps, dammit! And … and I haven’t seen my wife yet, or … or—"
"Your traps can be sent on!" cries he. "Why, you’re all packed! And Wolseley’ll make your excuses at home, won’t you, Garnet? We shan’t be away forever, you know. Besides," cries he merrily, "if I know bonny Elspeth she’ll never let you hear the last of it if you don’t fall in now! Why, if she were here she’d be bustling you aboard!"
That was the God’s truth, by the way. Duty was Elspeth’s watch-word, especially when it was my duty—hadn’t she shot me off to India more than once, weeping, I grant you (though what she’d been up to with those grinning Frogs after Madagascar, once I’d been despatched to the cannon’s mouth, I didn’t care to imagine). But just the thought of her now, not a couple of miles away, and the radiant smile and glad cry with which she’d run to me, lovelier by far than those stale loves I’d been wasting my time on for weeks past, and her adoring blue eyes … no, the hell with Gordon, the selfish lunatic, having the impudence to buttonhole me in this outrageous fashion! And I was bracing myself to put my foot down when Cambridge spoke.
"Irregular, I suppose," says he, shaking his fat head—but not in denial. "But, even so … well, nothing to hinder … if you’re sure, Gordon?"
"Of course I’m sure!" He always was, and not about to have his judgment questioned by a mere grandson of George the Third. He was absolutely frowning at them—the Army commander, the Foreign Secretary, and the greatest soldier of the age (who was carrying his bag for him, God love me!)[24] And they were helpless, glancing resignedly at each other and apologetically at me—because he was Gordon, you see. What he was doing wouldn’t have washed with them for a moment, if he had been any other man. But then, no other man would have done it.
Granville was raising his fine brows in a why-not fashion. "It rests with Colonel Flashman, of course." There was a silence, and then Joe Wolseley gave me a shrug and a nod. "I’d be only too glad … to explain to Lady Flashman, if you …" He left it there.
They were all looking at me … and I knew it was all up. It was appalling, and beyond belief, and no fate was too dreadful for Gordon, damn his arrogant confidence as he stood there smiling triumphantly … but I knew, as I’d known so often, what the answer must be. The Great Christian Hero had tapped my shoulder and I’d never live it down if I refused. I could have wept at the cruelty of the malign fate that had guided me to Platform Three at that hour—ten minutes later, and the blasted train would have been away, carrying Gordon to Hell or Honolulu for all I cared.
But when the cards are dealt, you must play ’em—and with style, for your reputation’s sake. Flashy has his own way of bowing t o the inevitable—and I knew dam' well it would run round Horse Guards and the clubs like wildfire in the morning …
"I say—you know Chinese Gordon’s gone to the Sudan? Fact and taken Flashman with him! Met him quite by chance at the station, told Wolseley and Cambridge he must have him along."
Appendix
The Emperor Franz-Josef (1830-1916) and Empress Elisabeth (1837-1898)
"The last European monarch of the old school", was how the Emperor Franz-Josef I described himself to Theodore Roosevelt, with good reason, for he enjoyed a longer full sovereignty than any other European ruler, from the 1848 revolution when, as a dashing prince of eighteen, he succeeded to the throne abdicated by his uncle, until the middle of the First World War, by which time he had become the venerable, bald, bewhiskered grandpaternal figure which gazes benevolently out from his best-known portrait, ;a fine old Austrian gentleman, revered but remote from his subjects and the terrible conflict which he had helped to make. It was a tragic climax to a reign which had been neither successful nor happy; his empire had dwindled in size and power to the brink of extinction, and his personal life had been darkened by misfortunes his adored Empress had been assassinated, his son had committed suicide, his brother had died before a firing squad, and the murder of his nephew and heir had plunged Europe into war.
If he does not emerge as an attractive figure from his biographies, or from Flashman’s brief sketch on short acquaintance, it is still hard not to feel sympathy for Franz-Josef. His own faults may have contributed to his ill luck in love and war and statecraft, but it would have taken a ruler of unusual intelligence and political skill to bridge successfully the long imperial sunset from the end of Europe’s ancien régime to the age of jazz and democracy and mechanised warfare, and these he simply did not have. He had tried to rule as an absolute monarch presiding over a centralised bureaucracy and suppressing nationalist ambitions (especially those of Hungary) among the ill-assorted races of his unwieldy empire; changing times had forced him into reluctant concessions, but his reactionary nature and passion for the detail of administration, over which he laboured conscientiously, had blinded him to those greater issues which he had neither the vision nor the temperament to understand.
Such virtues as he had were physical rather than intellectual, which befitted the romantic prince of his early days. Tall, hand-some, recklessly brave if unsuccessful as a soldier, a splendid horseman and ardent sportsman, he seems to have been amiable and kindly at his best, although one biographer writes of his "haughty and offensive arrogance", and quotes examples. His personal tastes were spartan, his manner dignified and formal, and he was punctilious in matters of protocol, a characteristic which was no help in his marriage.