Flashman And The Tiger

Notes

[1]. Henri Stefan Oppert Blowitz (1825-1903) was Paris correspondent of The Times from 1875 to 1902. A Bohemian Jew, born of a good family in what is now Czechoslovakia, he worked as a teacher in France before becoming a journalist almost by accident, and showed that he possessed to a remark-able degree that combination of talents that makes a first-class reporter: immense energy and curiosity, a nose for news, and that mysterious gift of inspiring confidence which makes people talk. He had contacts at the highest level all over Europe, a prodigious memory, a brass neck, and great ingenuity (some said lack of scruple) which together raised him to a unique position in his profession.

Flashman has drawn him faithfully, and plainly had some affection and considerable respect for the tiny, rotund, charming, bombastic, and rather comic eccentric, whose love of good living, susceptibility to female beauty, delight in extravagant dress, and generous good nature endeared him to many; naturally, he inspired considerable jealousy in his rivals, and was not without detractors to question both his methods and ability. That Blowitz the brilliant and hard-headed reporter and interviewer was at the same time an incurable romantic with a taste for melodrama and love of the sensational, is obvious from his Memoirs, a highly entertaining work made up of material published in his lifetime and episodes dictated in his last year; he kept no diaries, and is said to have taken a note only rarely.

How far the Memoirs are to be trusted is a nice point. Flashman was familiar with them, but is no guide to their reliability; part of his story is identical in outline with one chapter of the Memoirs, but since Blowitz is the source in both cases, this means nothing. The enthusiastic Bohemian was never one to spoil a good tale for want of dramatic colouring, and Frank Giles, a later Times Paris correspondent, whose biography of Blowitz is admirably fair and meticulously researched, describes the Memoirs as a remarkable collection of fact and fiction, and echoes the feeling of a former Times proprietor that, at times, "the facts have collapsed under the sheer weight of a powerful imagination". Much of what Blowitz wrote can never be checked, and there is no knowing how great a part his vivid imagination played in what he told Flashman, who seems to have believed him, for what that is worth. I do not hesitate to cite Blowitz in these footnotes, for whatever his failings he was at his best the most superior kind of journalist -, a real reporter.

Blowitz’s obsession with destiny, etc., his tales of adventures with Marseilles communards, mysterious European royalty, and his kidnapping by gypsies, are to be found in the Memoirs; the story that he and his lover threw the lady’s husband overboard in Marseilles harbour is told by Prince von Bulow, later German Chancellor, who is not regarded as an invariably reliable source. (See Blowitz’s My Memoirs (1903); Frank Giles, A Prince of Journalists (1962); Prince von Bulow, Memoirs, 1849-1897 (1932), which contains a fine picture of Blowitz in his working clothes.)

[2]. When and where Flashman served in the French Foreign Legion has not yet emerged from his Papers. Several references (like the present one) suggest North Africa, but it is not impossible that he was with the Legion in Mexico c. 1867, when he was aide-de-camp to the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian. "Au jus!" was the cry of the coffee orderlies at reveille, and "the sausage music" is presumably a reference to the Legion’s march, Tiens, voila du boudin. (See also Note 13.)

The authority for Grant’s meeting with Macmahon, and their total failure to communicate, is Grant himself. At least they bowed, and shook hands; Grant’s aversion to hand-shaking was notorious, as was his taciturnity. (See From the Tan Yard to the White House, by William M. Thayer (1886).)

[3]. In 1878 Sir Stafford Northcote’s Budget, described as "unambitious", increased the duty on dogs and tobacco and raised income tax by 2d; Mrs Brassey published "The Voyage of the Sunbeam", an account of her round-the-world cruise by yacht; the phonograph ("an instrument which prints sound for subsequent reproduction by electricity") was a popular novelty; and Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore had its first night on May 25 at the Opera Comique. The great hit of the show was "He is an Englishman", which became "almost a second national anthem".

[4]. As usual with his summaries of international affairs, Flashman’s account of events in the Balkans, the Russo-Turkish war, and the Treaty of San Stefano, is sketchy and racy, but accurate in its broad essentials. The treaty, reflecting Russia’s Panslavic ambition to bring the Balkans under Russian control, was hard on the defeated Turks, and was opposed by Austria and Britain. A conference of the European Powers had been in prospect for some time, but was jeopardised by Russia’s objection to a British demand that the San Stefano settlement should be submitted to discussion by the Powers. Largely through the "honest broker" efforts of Bismarck, the German Chancellor, an understanding was reached between Britain and Russia, and the Congress of Berlin was held in June and July of 1878 to revise the treaty and achieve a balance in South-eastern Europe.

[5]. Blowitz’s opinion of Shuvalov is echoed in von Bulow: "Count Shuvalov was a clever, skilful, amiable and distinguished man, but like so many Russians, he worshipped more than was fitting at the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemos." (Bulow, My Memoirs.) (See also Note 7.)

[6]. The cartoons of the two English grooms and the crafty fishmonger, and the article headed "Hankey Pankey", are to be found in Punch of May 11, 1878; the voluptuous figure entitled "Harlequin Spring Fashions—really a very little addition to the too-scanty and bespangled costumes Mr Punch has noticed so often lately", appeared in the previous week.

[7]. According to von Bulow: "On one of his evening walks in the Friederichstrasse … which the Berlin police supervised so discreetly, to prevent any unpleasant incident, he (Shuvalov) had made the acquaintance of a too-facile lady, from whose arms it was difficult to entice him." (See My Memoirs.)

[8]. Flashman’s version of the Congress of Berlin tallies fairly well with Blowitz’s, which does not differ in its essentials from other accounts. From whom Blowitz obtained the advance copy of the treaty is unknown. Waddington, the French Foreign Minister, has been suggested; he was English by blood, though born in Paris, and like Flashman was educated at Rugby, but there is no evidence that he was the source of the leak. What is certain is that Blowitz had an excellent source at the heart of the Congress, and scooped his rivals in day-to-day reporting as well as in obtaining the treaty, much to their annoyance, especially the Germans. He did interview Bismarck (whose under-the-table complaint is authentic), and seems to have bluffed him into withholding the Treaty from the German press by himself demanding an exclusive copy. He left the Congress early, pretending to sulk, dictated from memory a substantial portion to his secretary, had the text telegraphed from Brussels by his secretary, and the following day had the satsifaction of an exclusive story in The Times. It was one of the greatest scoops in newspaper history, although Flashman is wrong in saying that all the clauses appeared; in fact, seven did not.

There is one important difference between Flashman’s version of the Congress, and that given by Blowitz in his Memoirs. Blowitz says that his information source and go-between was "a young foreigner" who had approached Blowitz for help, and whom he infiltrated into the entourage of an unidentified statesman at the Congress; once installed, he passed information to Blowitz by means of the hat exchange. This seems a highly unlikely story, and it is reasonable to assume that Blowitz, in writing his Memoirs, invented it to protect the identities of Flashman, Caprice, and Shuvalov. It is worth noting that von Bulow’s story of Shuvalov’s infatuation with a courtesan (quoted in Note 7) is consistent with Flashman’s version.

[9]. Sir Garnet (later Viscount) Wolseley confirmed his reputation as Britain’s first soldier by his suppression in 1882 of the Egyptian army’s revolt against the Khedive. The rebellion was led by Arabi Pasha, an ardent nationalist and anti-European, and after the massacre of more than a hundred foreigners at Alexandria, the port’s defences were bombarded by the Royal Navy and Egypt was invaded by Wolseley’s force which eventually numbered 40,000. He gained control of the Suez Canal, and when his advance guard was attacked by Arabi at Kassassin on August 28, the Egyptian infantry were routed by a moonlight charge of the British cavalry, in which the Life Guards and the Blues of the Household Brigade ("Tin Bellies", to Flash-man) were prominent. Sir Baker Russell’s horse was shot under him, but he mounted another, presumably with Flashman’s assistance. Arabi’s army of about 40,000 was strongly entrenched at Tel-el-Kebir, but after a remark-able night march of six miles in silence, Wolseley’s force made a surprise dawn attack, headed by the Highland Brigade, who overwhelmed the Egyptian position. About 2000 of the defenders were killed for the loss of 58 British dead and 400 wounded and missing. Cairo was occupied after a forced march, Arabi was captured and exiled to Ceylon, and the rebellion had been crushed in 25 days. (See Charles Lowe, "Kassassin and Tel-el-Kebir", in Battles of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Major Arthur Griffiths, 1896.)

[10]. One can only take Flashman’s word for it that there was a "strong shave" (rumour) in the clubs about Gordon as early as the beginning of October. The situation in the Sudan did not begin to look critical until after the wipe-out of Hicks' command by the Mahdi at Kashgil early in November, and Gordon’s name does not appear to have been mentioned in official circles until some weeks later, when Gordon himself was still contemplating service in the Congo. No doubt Flashman’s instinct for self-preservation made him unusually prescient.

[11]. The first official journey of the famous Orient Express began at the Gare de l’Est, Paris, on the evening of Sunday, October 4, 1883. The great train was the brainchild of Georges Nagelmackers of Liege, founder of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits, and realised his dream of a through express of unsurpassed luxury which should run to the ends of Europe. That first train consisted of the locomotive, two baggage cars, two sleeping-cars, and a dining salon which was to become justly famous; about forty passengers (all male as far as Vienna, where two ladies came aboard), made the inaugural trip from Paris to Constantinople, among them ministers of the French and Belgian governments, several journalists including Blowitz, a Turkish diplomat, Mishak Effendi (identified by Flashman), and Nagelmackers himself. It is interesting, in view of the alias supplied by Blowitz for Flashman in Berlin five years earlier, that on the Orient Express Blowitz shared Voiture 151 with a Dutchman named Janszen. Blowitz got a book out of the trip, which was a memorable one even by his standards, for in Constantinople he obtained the first interview ever granted by the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdul-Hamid II; in Bucharest he also inter-viewed the King of Roumania. And being Blowitz, he thoroughly enjoyed the luxury and conviviality of the journey, especially the dining salon. One cannot blame him; as all who have travelled on it agree, there is no train like the Orient Express. (See Michael Barsley, Orient Express: The Story of the World’s Most Fabulous Train, 1966; Blowitz, Memoirs. For the stops and times of Flashman’s journey, see Express Trains, English and Foreign, by E. Foxwell and T. C. Farrer, 1889.)

[12]. Whoever "Princess Kralta" may have been, she was obviously a lady of considerable attraction and character. It is possible that Blowitz concealed her real name, since it is a device he employs elsewhere in his Memoirs; the only hint he gives of her origin is to describe her mother as "an Oriental flower", but from Flashman’s description it would seem that her father at least was European, and Northern European at that. Be that as it may, "Kralta" appears to have occupied an influential position in Continental diplomatic and royal society; the account of her activities which Blowitz gave to Flashman tallies closely with the Memoirs—her acquaintance with Bismarck, his employment of her to discover how Blowitz had got the Berlin Treaty, the melodramatic incident of the candle in the draught which alerted Blowitz to her treachery, and the sensational tale of how, at the German Emperor’s request, she soothed the distracted Bismarck with "some kind of diversion"—all these are in the chapter entitled, with Blowitzian panache, "The Revenge of Venus". He does not state bluntly how she "diverted" Bismarck, but the inference could hardly be clearer. For Flashman’s experiences with "Kralta" we have only his own testimony. As to her appearance and personality, he is more detailed than Blowitz, but there are no contradictions between them: both agree that she was imperious and charming, and while Flashman is more specific about what are called vital statistics, he can have had no quarrel with the little Bohemian’s romantic raptures. Blowitz was beglamoured on first sight of the Princess at a dinner party, to such an extent that he could not remember who else was present—a most unusual lapse of his remarkable memory. He enthuses about her beauty, radiance, "exquisite elegance", "silky hair" (chesnut at their first meeting, but subsequently "golden"), "melodious voice," "blue eyes which lighted up one of the most fascinating faces I have ever seen", and so on; he even notes the "brilliancy" of her teeth. There is something approaching awe in his description of her crossing a room with "the vague rustle of her silken robes … like a rapid vision", and one gets the impression sometimes that he was rather afraid of her.

[13]. This is the first substantial reference in the Papers to Flashman’s sojourn in Mexico in the latter half of the 1860s; hitherto we have known only that he spent time in a Mexican prison, and was an aide-de-camp to the unfortunate Emperor Maximilian, younger brother of Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria. Maximilian, an amiable and well-intentioned prince, interested in botany, was a pawn in the ambitious schemes of Napoleon III of France, who took advantage of civil war in Mexico to send in a French army, ostensibly to collect war debts from the victorious `Liberals' of Benito Juarez, but in fact to establish a puppet empire under Maximilian, who was persuaded to accept the Mexican crown in 1863. He set up a government and was planning social and educational reforms, including freedom for the Indians, but Juarez’s forces remained hostile to the imperial regime, and when Napoleon withdrew his forces, partly due to pressure from the Americans, who were sympathetic to Juarez’s republicans, Maximilian was left to his fate. He made a brave fight of it, but was captured by the Juaristas in May 1867, and executed by firing squad in the following month.

What part Flashman played in these events will no doubt be revealed when his Mexican papers come to light. We know that he was in the U.S. with President Lincoln a few days before the latter’s death in April 1865, so his Mexican adventures were presumably confined to the next two years at most. The reference to Princess Salm-Salm, the wife of Prince Felix Salm-Salm, a German officer who served in the U.S. Civil War (possibly with Flashman) and was later chief a.d.c. to Maximilian in Mexico, suggests that Flashman was involved in the efforts which both the Prince and Princess made to save the Emperor’s life; she was a handsome and fearless lady who has left a spirited account of her adventures in Mexico, and of her later life in European royal circles and in the Franco-Prussian war, in which her husband was killed. Her Ten Years of My Life (1868) and the Prince’s My Diary in Mexico (1874) which she published after his death, give invaluable details of Maximilian’s last days.

That the Emperor Maximilian was a cricketer seems to be confirmed by a photograph in a Brussels museum in which he is seen posing at the end of a match with members of the British Legation in Mexico City, c. 1865. The editor is indebted to Colonel J. M. C Watson for a copy of this picture.

[14]. Flashman seldom elaborates on international affairs, and it is probable that he has summarised, with commendable accuracy, the information given him by Willem von Starnberg touching on the state of the Austrian Empire and its ruler, the Hungarian question, and the relations of Emperor Franz-Josef, the Empress Elisabeth ("Sissi"), and their son, the Crown Prince Rudolf. (See Appendix.)

[15]. In 1853 Franz-Josef of Austria had escaped with a bad neck wound when he was stabbed by a Hungarian apprentice whose knife was impeded by the Emperor’s stiff military collar. Uniform also saved the life of the elderly German Emperor in 1878, when the helmet which he insisted on wearing in accordance with regulations took the blast of a double-barrelled shotgun; he had survived another shooting attempt only three weeks earlier. Tsar Alexander II of Russia was less fortunate; he was killed by a second bomb in St Petersburg in 1881, only minutes after an earlier device had wrecked his carriage. (See Bulow, and works cited in the Appendix.)

[16]. The quotation is from "In Ambush", in Stalky and Co.

[17]. Which it still retains. Ischl in Flashman’s time had a population of fewer than 3000, and seems to have changed little since then; its lack of size makes it a pleasant little gem among European resorts, tranquil and unhurried in its grand surroundings, and its shops and coffee-houses, with their remark-able range of confections, remain as attractive as ever. It is appropriate that such a Ruritanian setting should have been home to Franz Lehar (after Flashman’s day); his villa remains on the banks of the Traun, the Golden Ship was serving excellent cabbage a few years ago, and Frosch and his colleagues were still amusing audiences at the little theatre.

[18]. Anyone visiting the "Kaiservilla", the royal lodge at Bad Ischl, will probably share Flashman’s abiding memory. The lodge today is much as he describes it, and the horns of the Emperor’s quarries still adorn its walls in profusion. There is in fact a secret stairway from the Emperor’s rooms, remarkably modest chambers simply furnished with, among other items, the plain iron bedstead which he used. It is such an ordinary bedroom that it is hard to realise that this is where the First World War began.

Flashman’s brief acquaintance with Franz-Josef illustrates many of the Emperor’s characteristics: his passion for the military, his poor grasp of languages other than his own, his rather stuffy formality, his devotion to administrative detail, and the simplicity of his tastes—boiled beef and beer was a favourite meal. He enjoyed his rubbers of tarok, and in his later years especially it was a regular evening pastime. (See Appendix.)

[19]. There is an old salt-mine in the mountains of the Saltzkammergut above Ischl which corresponds so closely to Flashman’s description that it must surely be the same one. The strange pool is still there, and the bogies run on rails from the mine entrance into the great cavern.

[20]. The quoted line is spoken by Rudolf Rassendyll to Count Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda. Flashman claimed that he had told the story of his Strackenz adventure to Anthony Hope Hawkins (later Sir Anthony Hope) and that the novelist used it as the basis for his famous romance, modelling the Count of Hentzau on Rudi von Starnberg.

[21]. Caprice must have charmed at least three copies of Punch from her English tourist, including the most recent issue (October 13) in which France is depicted as a homely old woman. The cartoon of Gladstone dancing the hornpipe is from a September number (he was on a cruise with Lord Tennyson) and the alluring figure labelled "Manchester Ship Canal" is earlier still. Punch’s anti-Gallic prejudice runs through all three numbers. The blimpish British officers cited by Flashman are characters in Hector Servadac, one of Jules Verne’s later science-fiction novels (1877). Police whistles came into use in 1883.

[22]. There were many distinguished de la Tour d’Auvergnes, principally Theophile Maio Corret of that name, a French soldier renowned for his courage and chivalry, who died in 1800, having consistently refused pro-motion beyond the rank of captain. He was known as the First Grenadier of France.

[23]. W. Pembroke Fetridge was the author of The American Traveller’s Guide: Harper’s Handbook, for Travellers in Europe, which first appeared in 1862. Flashman probably had the 1871 edition.

[24]. The unique position which Chinese Gordon held in the eyes of officialdom and the public was demonstrated by the fact that when he left Charing Cross Station for the Sudan, the Foreign Secretary bought his ticket, the Duke of Cambridge held the carriage door for him, and Lord (formerly Sir Garnet) Wolseley carried his bag. (See Charles Chenevix Trench, Charley Gordon, 1978.)