The Mountebank

by

William J. Locke




Chapter I



In the month of June, 1919, I received a long letter from Brigadier-General
Andrew Lackaday together with a bulky manuscript.

The letter, addressed from an obscure hotel in Marseilles, ran as
follows:--

MY DEAR FRIEND,

On the occasion of our last meeting when I kept you up to an ungodly hour
of the morning with the story of my wretched affairs to which you patiently
listened without seeming bored, you were good enough to suggest that I
might write a book about myself, not for the sake of vulgar advertisement,
but in order to interest, perhaps to encourage, at any rate to stimulate
the thoughts of many of my old comrades who have been placed in the same
predicament as myself. Well, I can't do it. You're a professional man of
letters and don't appreciate the extraordinary difficulty a layman has, not
only in writing a coherent narrative, but in composing the very sentences