Zealots and cynics, portrayed with varying skill

I don't recall Myles writing about war bores; if he had he might have considered Sir Harry Flashman V.C., an old codger who loves to reminisce about the part he played in the most famous and infamous tiffs of the 19th century, among them the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the retreat from Kabul. There is just one problem. Flashman is never boring. As imagined by novelist George MacDonald Fraser, he is enduringly entertaining, invariably shocking, and always bad. Very bad.

''I'm a cynical rotter," the military cad admits in ''Flashman on the March," the 12th of the fictional ''Flashman Papers." This volume records his reluctant participation in the Abyssinian War of 1868, a melodrama cuttingly described as ''twelve thousand horse, foot, and guns bound for the heart of darkness at a cost of £333 a man. . . . And all to rescue a handful of Britons from a savage prison at the back of beyond. Aye, those were the days."

True to form, Flashman stumbles into history, this time by agreeing to deliver half a million Austrian dollars to the British general who is about to invade Abyssinia from India in order to free the aforementioned prisoners. But things are not that simple. Before he has had time to seduce his first African beauty (his scantily clad guide), Flashman is ordered to enlist a notorious tribal queen as an ally in Britain's confrontation with crazy King Theodore. Guided by his unwavering principles of venality, lechery, and self-preservation, he navigates Abyssinia's whitewater rapids and bloody feuds, and survives torture, massacres, ravening females, and a royal orgy all in the name of, well, of good old Flashy.