Crimea in Works of Foreign Literature: Even One Man Can Make an Army... If He's a Warrior
The adventures of the characters in the novels of the Scottish writer George MacDonald Fraser during the Crimean War.
Valeriy Verkhovskyi. "Krymska Svitlytsia" Newspaper, 2019, Issues No. 11-12
Today we will remember the brave soldier Harry Flashman — from the series of adventure novels by the Scottish writer George MacDonald Fraser (1926–2008), written in 1969–2005. Interestingly, Fraser borrowed this character from the 19th-century novel by English writer Thomas Hughes, "Tom Brown's School Days," where the antagonist had the nickname Flashman. Deciding a hundred years later to continue the epic of that fictional person, G. M. Fraser "enlists" Flashman in a lancer regiment and dispatches him to all fronts of the struggle for the world's largest empire. And these fronts lay all over the planet — everywhere where the power of Queen Victoria spread, who was accompanied by victoria (victory) throughout her reign.
Of course, our hero could not avoid the Crimean War: "In case someone says: 'How is it that our Flashy, the old cutthroat, is not going to Turkey to beat up the Cossacks?' — I'll explain with a serious face about the importance of administration and supply, and also about the importance of having a few people in the staff who have smelled gunpowder...". But Flashman, of course, will not look for excuses. He will simply head to Crimea along with the rest of the royal army.
And without hesitation, he will execute an obviously insane order. For, of course, how could the crazy charge at Balaklava on October 13, 1854, do without "old Flashy," when General Raglan ordered the light cavalry to attack the Russian positions head-on. In this battle, every third cavalryman died, but Flashman's adventures did not start yesterday, so they will not end anytime soon. He and 57 other Britons fall into Russian captivity. The only thing they want to find out from them during interrogation is whether the Britons went into the attack drunk; to the great surprise of the Russians, both Colonel Flashman and the rest of the captured cavalrymen turned out to be absolutely sober.
Further — the prisoners are taken to the rear, away from the theater of operations and the temptation to escape to their own side. "The path from Yalta to Kerch, which passed through mountains overgrown with forest, was not remarkable: once you see a piece of Crimea, it is the same as seeing all of Crimea; however, this region is completely different from the rest of Russia. From Kerch, where I was handed over to the supervision of a gloomy and taciturn civilian who spoke French (and for persuasiveness two dragoons), we crossed by ship across the Sea of Azov to Taganrog — a small dirty port...".
But even in Starotorsk, where he and his fellow sufferer Major East (who had been captured earlier) were sent from Taganrog until the end of the war, they did not stay long. Taking advantage of a serf rebellion against a landowner, the Britons escaped. "What do you see?" East asks, looking at the map. "A town named Henichesk," Flashman replies. Then they (of course, on a sleigh, in winter) reach this town to get to Crimea from there along the Arabat Spit and then reach their own lines.
"It is unlikely that Henichesk or its single street is worth a kind word, but for me they seemed more beautiful than Piccadilly then," Flashman says; however: "The prospect was bleak. Behind the bridge thrown over the frozen canal, we saw the Arabat Spit: a long narrow tongue of snow-covered land that, like a giant railway embankment, stretched south along the shore of the Sea of Azov. The sea itself, covered with ice as far as the eye could see, lay to the left; and to the right was a stinking inland lagoon called Syvash."
The fugitives manage to travel the entire spit to the Arabat Fortress itself, but the pursuit was catching up with them when the shaft horse stumbled, the sleigh overturned, pinning Flashman, and for his own rescue East takes the horse and flees, leaving his partner to his fate.
Flashman is in captivity again, and this time he is exiled very far — to the Orenburg region. But the restless Briton escapes from there too. He runs home, and for him home is the entire empire with its possessions scattered across different continents.
Flashman will still have to overcome a long way: through the Aral Sea and Central Asia, where he had every chance of dying at the hands of the "dushman dushmane" (enemy of enemies); but Flashman got out of it here too, and took part in the struggle of the natives against the Russian colonizers. Knowing how to make and use rockets (the British army mastered rocket weapons back in 1812), he burned with a rocket salvo a squadron of Russian ships that were to transport thousands of soldiers up the Amu Darya River to the foothills of the Hindu Kush. This army, according to the plans of Russian generals, was intended to defeat the British Empire in India, but Flashman had other plans.
Then Flashman reached the border of the British Empire's possessions on foot. And at the final point of this dangerous long journey, he heard from a British customs officer, who was bored in Peshawar and did not immediately recognize Flashman as a compatriot, only: "Do you have anything to declare?".