Books: Whose Who’s Who?

FLASHMAN : FROM THE FLASHAAAN PAPERS 1839-1842, edited and arranged by George MacDonald Fraser. 256 pages. World. $5.95.

It should have been obvious that Brigadier General Sir Harry Flashman was just too bad to be true. Liar, lecher, bully, coward and (according to his Who’s Who entry, reprinted here) survivor of nearly every 19th century military disaster from the Siege of Lucknow to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he is as appalling and implausible a scoundrel as has ever shambled through the purlieus of the past. All the odder then that since this first volume of his purported “memoirs” was published recently in the U.S., all decked out with notes and glossary, no fewer than ten out of 42 reviewers—one of them a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University —have been gulled into taking Flashman seriously as a real historical character. Being wholly unreal, as well as wholly lacking in character, the archcad would have been delighted.

Drunk at Rugby. The present installment of “recollections” was supposedly set down after 1900, when Flashman was an octogenarian, and only recently discovered in a forgotten tea chest. It sees him through his expulsion from the Rugby School of Tom Brown’s Schooldays for drunkenness, from Lord Cardigan’s 11th Hussars for marrying the daughter of a tradesman, and from Afghanistan—along with an entire British army, most of which dies in the process—for having as commanding officer the grossly incompetent Major General William George Keith Elphinstone. “Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat,” remarks Flashman with customary charity. “We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.” At his best when savaging real people and slinking through real events. Flashman keeps his narrative moving smartly. Perhaps to make room for other sorts of depravity, sex is at a happy minimum, though he does deal out the Kama Sutra (“It is all nonsense, for the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed”).

“Editor” Fraser, a Scottish journalist, has struck upon a splendidly entertaining and relatively effortless way of replaying some of those military histories that have so proliferated in recent years, in this case a fine review of the Afghan Wars by British Barrister-Author Patrick Macrory called The Fierce Pawns. No satirist could have invented a scene as bizarre as Afghanistan in 1841, or one so suited to showing the military mind at its silliest.

Fraser has plenty of wars left, and more from Flashman is inevitable.

As the apotheosis of the antihero, Flashman never loses. This could be come boring, but does not, chiefly be cause for him the wages of sin are well above union scale. Trapped in a hill fort by thousands of screaming Ghazis, he struggles to reach the Union Jack.

To defend the colors? Not at all — to surrender. But he passes out first, just in time to be rescued still embracing the flag, and is shipped back to London as the sole hero of the campaign. For that he wins the Victoria Cross and a handshake from the Duke of Wellington.

Until Flashman gets round to telling, we can only surmise how he earned another decoration, mentioned in that come-on Who’s Who entry, the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth (4th Class).