Flashman Papers 3-Book Collection 2: Flashman and the Mountain of Light, Flash For Freedom!, Flashman and the Redskins. George Fraser MacDonald

       Explanatory Note

      The life and conduct of Sir Harry Flashman, VC, were so irregular and eccentric that it is not surprising that he was also erratic in compiling his memoirs, that picturesque catalogue of misadventure, scandal, and military history which came to light, wrapped in oilskin packets, in a Midlands saleroom more than twenty years ago, and has since been published in a series of volumes, this being the ninth. Beginning, characteristically, with his expulsion from Rugby in 1839 for drunkenness (and thus identifying himself, to the astonishment of literary historians, with the cowardly bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays), the old Victorian hero continued his chronicle at random, moving back and forth in time as the humour took him, until the end of his eighth packet found him, again the worse for drink, being shanghaied from a Singapore billiard-room after the China War of 1860. Along the way he had ranged from the First Afghan War of 1842 to the Sioux campaign of 1876 (with a brief excursion, as yet unpublished, to a brawl in Baker Street as far ahead as 1894, when he was in his seventy-second year); it goes without saying that many gaps in his story remain to be filled, but with the publication of the present volume, which reverts to his early manhood, the first half of his life is almost complete; only an intriguing gap in the early 1850s remains, and a few