Indian Mutiny and Flashman

I have just read Saul David’s The Indian Mutiny followed by George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman in the Great Game, which make for a fantastic combination. I wouldn’t have understood a word of the latter without reading the former, which is so (excellently) preposterous that it doesn’t matter knowing what happens. How Flashman ends up in Jahnsi (twice), Meerut, Cawnpore, Lucknow, and Gwalior, i.e. all the worst places (save Delhi) of the mutiny, by trying to run away from danger is quite wonderful.

A notable lack was John Nicholson, who appears only briefly at the beginning of the Flashman book, and who was holed up in Peshawar (presumably) eating naan bread before getting killed in Delhi. John Nicholson was such a chap his Sikh soldiers started a cult, the members of which he had flogged. Saul David tells of how he rode round a tiger in decreasing circles to confuse it before killing it. He also rode alone into a hostile tribal village to decapitate the head of an notorious outlaw. Nails.