



Produced by Jo Churcher.  HTML version by Al Haines.








GREENMANTLE


by

JOHN BUCHAN




To

Caroline Grosvenor




During the past year, in the intervals of an active life, I have amused
myself with constructing this tale.  It has been scribbled in every
kind of odd place and moment--in England and abroad, during long
journeys, in half-hours between graver tasks; and it bears, I fear, the
mark of its gipsy begetting.  But it has amused me to write, and I
shall be well repaid if it amuses you--and a few others--to read.

Let no man or woman call its events improbable.  The war has driven
that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest
realism.  Things unimagined before happen daily to our friends by sea
and land.  The one chance in a thousand is habitually taken, and as
often as not succeeds.  Coincidence, like some new Briareus, stretches
a hundred long arms hourly across the earth.  Some day, when the full
history is written--sober history with ample documents--the poor
romancer will give up business and fall to reading Miss Austen in a
hermitage.

The characters of the tale, if you think hard, you will recall. Sandy
you know well.  That great spirit was last heard of at Basra, where he
occupies the post that once was Harry Bullivant's.  Richard Hannay is
where he longed to be, commanding his battalion on the ugliest bit of
front in the West.  Mr John S.  Blenkiron, full of honour and wholly
cured of dyspepsia, has returned to the States, after vainly
endeavouring to take Peter with him.  As for Peter, he has attained the
height of his ambition.  He has shaved his beard and joined the Flying
Corps.



CONTENTS


   1.  A Mission is Proposed
   2.  The Gathering of the Missionaries
   3.  Peter Pienaar
   4.  Adventures of Two Dutchmen on the Loose
   5.  Further Adventures of the Same
   6.  The Indiscretions of the Same
   7.  Christmas Eve
   8.  The Essen Barges
   9.  The Return of the Straggler
  10. The Garden-House of Suliman the Red
  11. The Companions of the Rosy Hours
  12. Four Missionaries See Light in Their Mission
  13. I Move in Good Society
  14. The Lady of the Mantilla
  15. An Embarrassed Toilet
  16. The Battered Caravanserai
  17. Trouble By the Waters of Babylon
  18. Sparrows on the Housetops
  19. Greenmantle
  20. Peter Pienaar Goes to the Wars
  21. The Little Hill
  22. The Guns of the North



CHAPTER ONE

A Mission is Proposed

I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got
Bullivant's telegram.  It was at Furling, the big country house in
Hampshire where I had come to convalesce after Loos, and Sandy, who was
in the same case, was hunting for the marmalade.  I flung him the
flimsy with the blue strip pasted down on it, and he whistled.

'Hullo, Dick, you've got the battalion.  Or maybe it's a staff billet.
You'll be a blighted brass-hat, coming it heavy over the hard-working
regimental officer.  And to think of the language you've wasted on
brass-hats in your time!'

I sat and thought for a bit, for the name 'Bullivant' carried me back
eighteen months to the hot summer before the war.  I had not seen the
man since, though I had read about him in the papers.  For more than a
year I had been a busy battalion officer, with no other thought than to
hammer a lot of raw stuff into good soldiers.  I had succeeded pretty
well, and there was no prouder man on earth than Richard Hannay when he
took his Lennox Highlanders over the parapets on that glorious and
bloody 25th day of September.  Loos was no picnic, and we had had some
ugly bits of scrapping before that, but the worst bit of the campaign I
had seen was a tea-party to the show I had been in with Bullivant
before the war started.  [Major Hannay's narrative of this affair has
been published under the title of _The Thirty-nine Steps_.]

The sight of his name on a telegram form seemed to change all my
outlook on life.  I had been hoping for the command of the battalion,
and looking forward to being in at the finish with Brother Boche.  But
this message jerked my thoughts on to a new road. There might be other
things in the war than straightforward fighting. Why on earth should
the Foreign Office want to see an obscure Major of the New Army, and
want to see him in double-quick time?

'I'm going up to town by the ten train,' I announced; 'I'll be back in
time for dinner.'

'Try my tailor,' said Sandy.  'He's got a very nice taste in red tabs.
You can use my name.'

An idea struck me.  'You're pretty well all right now.  If I wire for
you, will you pack your own kit and mine and join me?'

'Right-o!  I'll accept a job on your staff if they give you a corps. If
so be as you come down tonight, be a good chap and bring a barrel of
oysters from Sweeting's.'

I travelled up to London in a regular November drizzle, which cleared
up about Wimbledon to watery sunshine.  I never could stand London
during the war.  It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out
into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my
notion of it.  One felt the war more in its streets than in the field,
or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose.  I
dare say it was all right; but since August 1914 I never spent a day in
town without coming home depressed to my boots.

I took a taxi and drove straight to the Foreign Office.  Sir Walter did
not keep me waiting long.  But when his secretary took me to his room I
would not have recognized the man I had known eighteen months before.

His big frame seemed to have dropped flesh and there was a stoop in the
square shoulders.  His face had lost its rosiness and was red in
patches, like that of a man who gets too little fresh air.  His hair
was much greyer and very thin about the temples, and there were lines
of overwork below the eyes.  But the eyes were the same as before, keen
and kindly and shrewd, and there was no change in the firm set of the
jaw.

'We must on no account be disturbed for the next hour,' he told his
secretary.  When the young man had gone he went across to both doors
and turned the keys in them.

'Well, Major Hannay,' he said, flinging himself into a chair beside the
fire.  'How do you like soldiering?'

'Right enough,' I said, 'though this isn't just the kind of war I would
have picked myself.  It's a comfortless, bloody business.  But we've
got the measure of the old Boche now, and it's dogged as does it.  I
count on getting back to the front in a week or two.'

'Will you get the battalion?' he asked.  He seemed to have followed my
doings pretty closely.

'I believe I've a good chance.  I'm not in this show for honour and
glory, though.  I want to do the best I can, but I wish to heaven it
was over.  All I think of is coming out of it with a whole skin.'

He laughed.  'You do yourself an injustice.  What about the forward
observation post at the Lone Tree?  You forgot about the whole skin
then.'

I felt myself getting red.  'That was all rot,' I said, 'and I can't
think who told you about it.  I hated the job, but I had to do it to
prevent my subalterns going to glory.  They were a lot of fire-eating
young lunatics. 