Quotes from George MacDonald Fraser

I'm rather a cynic, I suppose. I do not believe in the niceness of humanity.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.

and suddenly, without the slightest volition on my part, there was the most crashing discharge of wind, like the report of a mortar. My horse started; Cardigan jumped in his saddle, glaring at me.....Be Silent! snaps he, and he must have been in a highly nervous condition himself, otherwise he would never have added, in a hoarse whipser: Can you not contain yourself, you disgusting fellow?--Flashman at the start of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled

when the games going against you, stay calm - and cheat.

That guttural, hissing mumble, with all its "Tz" and "zl" and "rr" noises, like a drunk Scotch-Jew having trouble with his false teeth, is something you don't forget in a hurry. So

you see, and the folly of sitting smug in judgment years after, stuffed with piety and ignorance and book-learned bias. Humanity is beastly and stupid, aye, and helpless, and there's an end to it.

England had another line of defence, in the establishment of numbers of "slewdogges"48 for the tracking down of raiders; money was raised for their maintenance, and from the number of them stolen in raids it is obvious that they were highly prized. They could be worth as much as £10.

the Borderers regarded reiving as legitimate (which is true), but that they held murder to be a crime, and consequently were reluctant to commit it—except in the heat of action or when covered by the virtual absolution of deadly feud. It is rather like saying that a heavy drinker, in his sober moments, is an abstemious man.

just a decent resolve to do a government's first duty: to protect its people, whatever the cost.

before serious Anglo-Scottish political differences began, there was a north-south dispute over the manner in which priestly heads should be shaved.

On the credit side, there is a Border virtue which in the human scale should outweigh all the rest, and it is simply the ability to endure, unchanging. Perhaps the highest compliment that one can pay to the people of the Anglo-Scottish frontier is to remark that, in spite of everything, they are still there.

Now Malcolm was back again, but he came once too often, and was killed at Alnwick in 1093.

And then peace broke out. It seems surprising, in view of what had been and what would one day follow, but there now began an era of tranquillity between England and Scotland, and consequently along the Border, which was to endure almost uninterrupted for nearly two hundred years.

The golden age, of Scotland, of Anglo-Scottish harmony, and of the Border country, ended when King Alexander III of Scotland fell over a cliff in 1286. Few stumbles—if indeed His Majesty was not pushed—have been more important than that one.

One thing the war ensured; whatever treaties might be made and truces agreed at the top, however often a state of official peace existed, there was never again to be quiet along the frontier while England and Scotland remained politically separate countries.

People who have suffered every hardship and atrocity, and who have every reason to fear that they will suffer them again, may submit tamely, or they may fight for survival. The English and Scots of the frontier were not tame folk.

They scorched the earth, destroyed their own homes and fields, took to the hills and the wilderness with their beasts and all they could move, and carried on the struggle by onfall, ambush, cutting supply lines, and constant harrying.

Some human faults are military virtues, like stupidity, and arrogance, and narrow-mindedness.

wordy descriptions of the journey, which you can get from Parkman or Gregg if you want them – or from volume

man when I see one – and he was the best.7

Unfortunately, to the ordinary people, war and peace were not very different. The trouble with all Anglo-Scottish wars was that no one ever won them; they were always liable to break out again.

Now, in my experience there is only one way to fight a ship, and that is to get below on the side opposite to the enemy and find a snug spot behind a stout bulkhead.

The Border, in a sense, was a bloody buffer state which absorbed the principal horrors of war. With the benefit of hindsight, one could almost say that the social chaos of the frontier was a political necessity.