Читать книгу Flashman and the Tiger: And Other Extracts from the Flashman Papers - George Fraser MacDonald - Страница 9

When Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., the celebrated Victorian soldier, scoundrel, amorist, and self-confessed poltroon, began to write his memoirs early in the present century, he set to work with a discipline remarkable in one whose life and conduct were, to put it charitably, haphazard and irregular. Disdaining chronology, he adopted a random method, selecting episodes in his adventurous life and shaping them into complete, self-contained narratives, in the fashion of a novelist rather than an autobiographer. This was of immense help to me when the Flashman Papers, which were still unpublished at Sir Harry’s death in 1915, turned up as a collection of packets in a tea-chest at a Midlands saleroom in 1966, and were entrusted to me, as editor, by Flashman’s executor, the late Mr Paget Morrison of South Africa.

In accordance with his strict instructions, I dealt with the packets one at a time and found that, thanks to Sir Harry’s methodical approach, only a minimum of editing – correcting his occasional spelling mistakes and providing footnotes – was necessary to render the work fit for publication. Each packet contained a book almost ready-made, and soon the public, who until then had been aware of Flashman only as the cowardly bully of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, were in possession of his illuminating and often scandalous accounts of the First Afghan War, the Schleswig-Holstein Question, the African-American slave trade, and the Crimean War.

It was with the fifth packet that the pattern changed. Along with his account of the Indian Mutiny, Sir Harry had enclosed a separate brief narrative on an entirely different subject which he plainly felt did not call for extended treatment. Since it was too short for separate publication, and its inclusion with the Mutiny memoir would have made for an unwieldy book, I put it by, hoping the later packets would yield similar fragments which, with the first, might make a full volume.

Since then, two other such pieces have come to light, and the result is this collection of minor episodes in the career of an eminent if disreputable Victorian. One deals with a hither-to-unknown European crisis which, but for Flashman’s reluctant intervention, might well have advanced the outbreak of the First World War by three decades, with incalculable consequences. Since it is by far the longest fragment, presents a picture of a great monarch, involves if only at a distance many leading statesmen of the time, and finds Flashman in alliance with the shade of an old adversary, I have given it priority. The second piece clears up at last one of the most puzzling mysteries of the Victorian era, the notorious Baccarat Scandal in which the Prince of Wales was an unhappy actor. The third extract touches briefly on two of the most spectacular military actions of the century, and sees Flashman pitted against one of the great villains of the day, and observing, with his usual jaundiced eye, two of its most famous heroes. As this extract was the first to come to light, more than twenty years ago, and its known existence has caused some speculation among students of the Papers, I have given its title to the full volume.

G.M.F.