"I have cut out the war!"
On looking through the MS. I found that he had cut out the war, in so far as his military experiences were concerned. In khaki he showed himself to be as English and John Bull as you please; and how the deuce his meteoric promotion occurred and what various splendid services compelled the exhibition on his breast of a rainbow row of ribbons, are matters known only to the War Office, Andrew Lackaday and his Maker. Well--that is 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.
Yours sincerely,
ANDREW LACKADAY
Well. There was the letter, curiously composed; half French, half English in the turning of the phrase. The last sentence was sheer translation. But it was sincere. I need not say that I sent a cordial reply. Our correspondence thenceforward became intimate and regular.
In his estimate of his manuscript from a literary point of view the poor General did not exaggerate. Anything more hopeless as a continuous narrative I have never read. But it supplied facts, hit off odds and ends of character, and--what the autobiography seldom does--it gave the ipsissima verba of conversations written in helter-skelter fashion with flowing pen, sometimes in excellent French, sometimes in English, which beginning in the elaborate style of his letter broke down into queer vernacular; it was charmingly devoid of self-consciousness, so that the man as he was, and not as he imagined himself to be or would like others to imagine him, stood ingenuously disclosed.
If the manuscript had been that of a total stranger I could not have undertaken the task of the Bon Dieu making His little arrangements to shape the earth out of chaos. An elderly literary dilettante, who is not a rabid archæologist, has an indolent way of demanding documents clear and precise. As a matter of fact, it was some months before I felt the courage to tackle the business. But knowing the man, knowing also Lady Auriol and having in the meantime made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle Elodie Figasso and Horatio Bakkus, playing, in fact, a minor rôle, say, that of Charles, his friend, in the little drama of his life, I eventually decided to carry out my good friend's wishes. The major part of my task has been a matter of arrangement, of joining up flats, as they say in the theatre, of translation, of editing, of winnowing, as far as my fallible judgment can decide, the chaff from the grain in his narrative, and of relating facts which have come within the horizon of my own personal experience.
I begin therefore at the very beginning.