Flashman And The Tiger

As to what he could want of me, I was no wiser. What could it matter what the Emperor and Empress of Austria thought of a mere British soldier? She had an eye for men, and it was common talk that Franz-Josef had warned her off various gallants with whom her relations had probably been innocent enough, but I hadn’t been among ’em. I dare say I could have added her scalp to my belt, but I’d never tried, for good reason: everyone knew that Franz-Josef, whose ambition seemed to be to bag every chamois and woman in Austria, had given her cupid’s measles, and while the poultice-wallopers had doubtless put her in order again, you can’t be too careful. And while she looked like Pallas Athene, I suspected she was half-cracked—flung herself about in gymnasiums and went on starvation diets and wrote poetry and asked for a lunatic asylum as a birthday present, so I’d been told. She and Franz-Josef hadn’t dealt too well since he’d poxed her, and she’d taken to wandering Europe while he pleaded with her to forgive and forget. Royal marriages are the very devil.

I tell you this because it’s pertinent to the catechism which Willem resumed as soon as we’d pulled out of Munich. He began by asking what I knew of the Austrian Empire. I retorted that they seemed to be good at losing wars and territory, having been licked lately by France, Prussia, and Italy, for heaven’s sake, and that the whole concern was pretty ramshackle. Beyond that I knew nothing and cared less.

He nodded. "Aye, ramshackle enough. Fifty million folk of a dozen different nations bound together in a discontented mass under a stiff-necked autocrat who don’t know how to manage ’em. He’s a dull dog, Franz-Josef, whose blunders have cost him the popularity he enjoyed as the handsome boy-emperor of thirty-five years ago. But his empire’s the heart and guts of Europe, and if it were to suffer any great convulsion … well, it better not. Know anythin' about Hungary?"

I understood it was the biggest state in the empire bar Austria itself, and that the natives were an ornery lot, but fine horsemen. He grinned.

"Proper little professor of international politics, you are! Well, I’m quarter Hungarian myself, through Mama; rest o' me’s Prussian. And you’re right, they’re an ornery lot, and don’t care above half for Austrian rule. They’ve declared independence in the past, risin' in revolt, and Franz-Josef made the mistake of gettin' the Tsar to put ’em down with Russian troops—they’ll never forgive him that. He’s been at his wit’s end to keep ’em quiet, makin' concessions, havin' himself and Sissi crowned King and Queen of Hungary, but there are still plenty of Magyar nationalists who’d like to cut with Austria altogether. People like Lajos Kossuth, regular firebrand who led the uprisin', now in his eighties and exiled in Italy but still hatin' the Hapsburgs like poison and dreamin' of Free Hungary. Believe it or not, he and his nationalist pals have the sympathy of Empress Sissi and the Emperor’s son and heir, Crown Prince Rudolf, who favour constitutional reform.[14] And there are others, extremists who’d like to take a shorter way."

He paused to light a cigarette, blowing out the match and watching its smoke. "Terrorists like the Holnup, which is Hungarian for `tomorrow', ’nuff said. They skulk in secret, plottin' bloody revolution, but most Hungarians regard ’em as a squalid gang of fanatics not to be taken seriously." He threw aside the spent match. "So did we … until about a month ago, when Bismarck got word, through his private intelligence service, that the Holnup were about to take the warpath in earnest. Here, let me give you another brandy."

He poured out a stiff tot, and a cloud must have passed over the sun just then, for the brightness faded from the pretty autumn colours speeding past the window, and to my nervous imagination it seemed that the shadow penetrated into the compartment, robbing the trickling brandy of its sparkle, and that even the rumble of the wheels had taken on a menacing, insistent note.