perhaps an exaggeration of secrecy. The newspapers have published
their official paragraphs. Officers who served under him have given me
interesting information. But from the spoken or written word of Andrew
Lackaday I have not been able to glean a grain of knowledge. That, I say,
is where the intensely English side of him manifested itself. But, on the
other hand, the private life that he led during the four and a half years
of war, and that which he lived before and after, was revealed with a
refreshing Gallic lack of reticence which could only proceed from his
French upbringing.

To return to his letter:--

I have cut out the war. Thousands of brainy people will be spending the
next few years of their lives telling you all about it. But I should rather
like to treat it as a blank, a period of penal servitude, a drugged sleep
afflicted with nightmare, a bit of metempsychosis in the middle of normal
life--you know what I mean. The thing that is _I_ is not General
Lackaday. It is Somebody Else. So I have given you, for what it is worth,
the story of Somebody Else. The MS. is in a beast of a muddle like the
earth before the Bon Dieu came in and made His little arrangements. Do with
it what you like. At the present moment I am between the Devil and the Deep
Sea. I am hoping that the latter will be the solution of my difficulties.
(By the way, I'm not contemplating suicide.) In either case it doesn't
matter.... If you are interested in the doings of a spent meteor, I shall
be delighted to write to you from time to time. As you said, you are the
oldest friend I have. You are almost the only living creature who knows the
real identity of Andrew Lackaday. You have been charming enough to give me
not only the benefit of your experience, riper than mine, of a man of the
world, but also such a very human sympathy that I shall always think of you
with sentiments of affectionate esteem.