24. Schönhausen. Flashman’s view of the castle’s “medieval ghastliness” was echoed by Bismarck himself; he described it to a friend as an “old haunted castle, with pointed arches and walls four feet thick, (and) thirty rooms of which two are furnished.” He also complained about its rats and the wind in the chimneys.

25. Flashman’s summary of the Schleswig-Holstein Question is accurate so far as it goes; enthusiasts in diplomatic history who wish greater detail are referred to Dr David Thomson’s Europe Since Napoleon, pp. 242–3 and 309–11. German and Danish versions of the problem should not be read in isolation.

26. The schlager-play of the German students, whereby they could receive superficial head and face wounds which left permanent scars for public admiration, was a unique form of the duel. The equipment is as Flashman describes it; the schlager itself was three-and-a-half feet long, with an unusually large guard (“the soup-plate of honour”). The practice of leaving the wounds open to form the largest possible scar is curiously paralleled by the custom of certain primitive African tribes. In the duel itself, thrusting was strictly forbidden, except at the University of Jena, where there were many theological students. These young men would have found facial scars an embarrassment in their careers, so instead of cutting at the head, Jena students were allowed to run each other through the body, thus satisfying honour without causing visible disfigurement.

27. Bismarck liked to picture himself eventually becoming a rustic landowner; his remark about Stettin wool market occurs again in his recorded conversation, when he spoke of his ambition to “raise a family, and ruin the morals of my peasants with brandy”.

28. Bandobast: organisation (Hindustani).

29. In 1847 Germany suffered its second successive failure of the potato crop. In the northern areas wheat had doubled its price in a few years.

30. The emblem of Holstein was, in fact, a nettle-leaf shape.

31. “a plumed helmet, à la Tin-bellies”. Flashman is here almost certainly referring to the New Regulation Helmet which had been announced for the British Heavy Dragoons in the previous autumn. Its ridiculously extravagant plumage—popularly supposed to be an inspiration of Prince Albert’s—had been the talk of fashionable London in the weks shortly before Flashman’s departure for Munich.

32. Libby Prison, in Richmond, Va., was notorious in the U.S. Civil War. Federal officers were confined there by the Confederates, often in conditions of dreadful overcrowding; it was the scene of a mass escape by tunnel in 1864, and two subsequent Federal cavalry raids to rescue prisoners. Flashman’s reference seems to suggest that he was confined there himself; no doubt examination of those packets of his papers as yet unopened will confirm this.

33. Kibroth-Hattaavah—“there they buried the people that lusted” (Numbers 11: 34, 35)—seems to have been a popular subject for sermons at public schools. Dr Rowlands preached on this text in Eric, or Little by Little, by Dean Farrar.