An army of Indians had prepared for months to go to the interior and when Flashman arrives he is roped in to join them. It involved building a port, railroad and telegraph lines into wild and barren mountains where every provision needed to be brought in.
Lord Napier embarked upon a punitive expedition, the most expensive in British colonial history. Two diplomats and several missionaries were imprisoned by the Abyssinian Christian King Theodore after he was refused military assistance against his Muslim enemies, the Ottoman Turks and Egyptians. Chased by the Austrian army he boards a steamship bound for Suez, then south along the Red Sea. After returning from Mexico with the body of Maximilian and landing in Trieste it is discovered Flash was shagging the Admiral’s sixteen year old niece aboard the ship. He agrees to deliver silver to Africa for the Army, to rescue a handful of subjects of the British Empire held by a ‘mad cannibal king’. It picks up 7 years after his stint in the Taiping Rebellion and marks a return to an earlier, nastier Flash. It is an account of his adventures in Abyssinia, now named Ethiopia, in 1867.
This is George MacDonald Fraser’s 12th and final Flashman book in the series written over 36 years, published in 2005. There were no false excuses, no deceits, no cover ups or lies, just a decent resolve to do a government’s first duty: to protect its people, whatever the cost. It served no political vanity or interest. It went with the fear of disaster hanging over it, but with the British public in no doubt that it was right. It was not sent without initial follies and hesitations in high places, or until every hope of a peaceful issue was gone. Flashman was still the vital part on which success or failure hung, in a war torn land of mystery, treachery, intrigue, lonely castles, ghost cities, the most beautiful and savage women in Africa, and at last into the power of the demented tyrant in his stronghold at the back of beyond.įlashman’s story is about a British army sent out in a good and honest cause by a government who knew what honour meant. It took twelve thousand men, a mighty fleet, nine million pounds, a meticulous if extravagant organization and all to rescue a tiny group of British citizens held captive by a mad monster of an African king. There has never perhaps been a success like it in the history of war. “In the Abyssinian War of 1868, surely the strangest of all imperial campaigns, when a British Indian army invaded one of the least known and most dangerous countries on earth, and in the face of apparently insuperable hazards, and predictions of certain failure, marched and fought their way across a trackless wilderness of rocky chasm and jagged mountain to their goal, did what they had come to do, and marched out again with hardly a casualty.
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