Flashman And The Tiger

Enough for the moment to say that Moran and I were driven absolutely into that beastly carnage. You see, with our wagon blown to pieces he and I lit out on two of the draught screws, leaving the wounded in a dry cave, Moran intent on fetching help for them, Flashy merely fleeing in his wake—and as dark fell we blundered slap into an impi, for the hills were full of the brutes by now. Then it was head down and heels in, nip and tuck for our lives through the Zulu-infested night with the fiends howling at our heels, and suddenly Moran was yelling and making for a burning building dead ahead, with all hell breaking loose around it, Zulus by the hundred and shots blazing, and there was nothing for it but to follow as he went careering through scrub and bushes, putting his beast to a stone wall, and then a barricade where black bodies and red coats were hacking and slashing in the fire-glare, bayonet against assegai, and my screw took the wall but baulked at the barricade, which I cleared in a frantic dive, launching myself from a pile of Zulu corpses, landing head first on the smoking veranda of what had been the post hospital, going clean through the charred floor, and being hauled half-conscious from the smouldering wreckage by a huge cove with a red beard who left off pistolling to ask me where the dooce I’d come from. I inquired, at the top of my voice, where the hell I was, and between shots he told me.

That, briefly, is how I came to join the garrison at Rorke’s Drift—and all the world knows what happened there. A hundred Warwickshire Welshmen and a handful of invalids stopped four thousand Udloko and Tulwana Zulus in bloody shambles at the mealie-bag ramparts, hammer and tongs and no quarter through that ghastly night with the burning hospital turning the wreckage of the little outpost into a fair semblance of Hell, and Flashy seeking in vain for a quiet corner—which I thought I’d found, once, on the thatch of the commissariat store, and damned if they didn’t set fire to that, too. Eleven Victoria Crosses they won, Chard with his beard scorched, Bromhead stone-deaf, and those ragged Taffies half-dead on their feet, but not too done to fight—oh, and talk. As an unworthy holder of that Cross myself, I’ll say they earned them, and as much glory as you like, for there never was a stand like it in all the history of war. For they didn’t only stand against impossible odds, you see—they stood and won, the garrulous little buggers, and not just ’cos they had Martinis against spears and clubs and a few muskets; they beat ’em hand to hand too, steel against steel at the barricades, and John Zulu gave them best. Well, you know what I think of heroism, and I can’t abide leeks, but I wear a daffodil as my buttonhole on Davy’s Day, for Rorke’s Drift.[8]

But that’s not to my purpose with Tiger Jack. He was in the thick of it, though I didn’t even glimpse him from the time we jumped the barricades, until next morning, when the impis had drawn off, leaving us to lick our wounds among the smoking ruins. It was only then that we learned each other’s name, when Chelmsford, who’d been traipsing out yonder with his column, rode in. When everyone had done cheering, he spotted me, and made me known to Chard and Bromhead, and that was when Moran, who was sitting by on a biscuit box cleaning his Remington, came suddenly to his feet, and for once the sliding blue eyes stared straight at me in astonishment. Presently he came over.

"Flashman? Not Sir Harry … Kabul, and the Light Brigade?"

I’m used to it; not the least irony of my undetected poltroonery is the awe my fearsome reputation inspires. They always stare, as Moran did, if not so intently. For a moment he even paled, and then the thin mouth was half-smiling again, and his eyes shifted away.

"Well, think o' that," says he, and chewed his lip. "I’d never have recognised you. By Jove—" and he gave a queer little laugh "—if I’d only known."

Then he turned on his heel and walked away, with that quick, feline stride and the Remington on his hip, out of my life for the next fifteen years. When he walked back in, it was in a place as different from Rorke’s Drift as anything on this earth could be. Instead of a smoking, blood-stained ruin, there was the plush and gilt of the circle bar at the St James’s Theatre, instead of the Sapper jacket and .44 revolver there was an opera cloak and silver-mounted cane, and instead of dead Zulus for company there was Oscar Wilde. (I make no comparisons.)