The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gundamuck
during the Retreat from Kabul in 1841
during the Retreat from Kabul in 1841
William Barnes Wollen (1898)
Again I am reading Flashman, and while Fraser had a gift for comedic writing, he also wrote very evocatively of the dooms and travails of soldiers in the field ...
For they were doomed. Even as we watched the grey and black robed figures came charging up the slope again, from all sides, another volley cracked out, and then the wave had broken over them. It boiled and eddied on the hilltop, the knives and bayonets flashing, and then it rolled slowly back with one great, wailing yell of triumph, and on the hilltop there were no figures standing up. Of the man with the colours round his waist there was no sign; all that remained was a confusion of vague shapes scattered among the rocks, and a haze of powder smoke that presently drifted off into nothing on the frosty air.In few places is the repetition of history illustrated more clearly than Afghanistan: read The Ghosts of Gandamak.
2 comments:
Aha! Great minds think alike. I just reread "Flashman." Now I am into "Flashman in the Great Game."
Haw haw!
Yes, that first packet of The Flashman Papers makes me wonder why we bothered with Afghanistan. The place hasn't changed much.
"When you're wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains..." Oh, sorry, that's Kipling. But it does beg the question.
I love Flashman. I learned more history from those books than I ever did in school.
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