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In the month of June, 1919, I received a long letter from Brigadier-GeneralAndrew Lackaday together with a bulky manuscript.
The letter, addressed from an obscure hotel in Marseilles, ran asfollows:--
MY DEAR FRIEND,
On the occasion of our last meeting when I kept you up to an ungodly hourof the morning with the story of my wretched affairs to which you patientlylistened without seeming bored, you were good enough to suggest that Imight write a book about myself, not for the sake of vulgar advertisement,but in order to interest, perhaps to encourage, at any rate to stimulatethe thoughts of many of my old comrades who have been placed in the samepredicament as myself. Well, I can't do it. You're a professional man ofletters and don't appreciate the extraordinary difficulty a layman has, notonly in writing a coherent narrative, but in composing the very sentenceswhich express the things that he wants to convey. Add to this that Englishis to me, if not a foreign, at any rate, a secondary language--I havethought all my life in French, so that to express myself clearly on anyexcept the humdrum affairs of life is always a conscious effort. Even thislittle prelude, in my best style, has taken me nearly two cigarettes towrite; so I gave up an impossible task.
But I thought to myself that perhaps you might have the time or theinterest to put into shape a whole mass of raw material which I have slungtogether--from memory (I have a good one), and from my diary. It may seemodd that a homeless Bohemian like myself should have kept a diary; butI was born methodical. I believe my mastery of Army Forms gained me mypromotion! Anyhow you will find in it a pretty complete history of mycareer up to date. I have cut out the war----"
Is there a lusus naturæ of any nationality but English, whorising from Private to Brigadier-General, could write six hundred andseventy-three sprawling foolscap pages purporting to contain the storyof his life from eighteen-eighty something to June nineteen hundred andnineteen and deliberately omit, as if it were neither here nor there, itsfour and a half years' glorious and astounding episode?
"I have cut out the war!"
On looking through the MS. I found that he had cut out the war, in so faras his military experiences were concerned. In khaki he showed himself tobe as English and John Bull as you please; and how the deuce his meteoricpromotion occurred and what various splendid services compelled theexhibition on his breast of a rainbow row of ribbons, are matters knownonly to the War Office, Andrew Lackaday and his Maker. Well--that isperhaps an exaggeration of secrecy. The newspapers have publishedtheir official paragraphs. Officers who served under him have given meinteresting information. But from the spoken or written word of AndrewLackaday 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 theother hand, the private life that he led during the four and a half yearsof war, and that which he lived before and after, was revealed with arefreshing Gallic lack of reticence which could only proceed from hisFrench upbringing.
To return to his letter:--
I have cut out the war. Thousands of brainy people will be spending thenext few years of their lives telling you all about it. But I should ratherlike to treat it as a blank, a period of penal servitude, a drugged sleepafflicted with nightmare, a bit of metempsychosis in the middle of normallife--you know what I mean. The thing that is I is not GeneralLackaday. It is Somebody Else. So I have given you, for what it is worth,the story of Somebody Else.