The Mountebank

The Mountebank

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Locke #5 in our series by William J. Locke
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Title: The Mountebank
Author: William J. Locke
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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 which express the things
that he wants to convey. Add to this that English is to me, if not a
foreign, at any rate, a secondary language--I have thought all my life in
French, so that to express myself clearly on any except the humdrum
affairs of life is always a conscious effort. Even this little prelude, in
my best style, has taken me nearly two cigarettes to write; so I gave up
an impossible task.
But I thought to myself that perhaps you might have the time or the
interest to put into shape a whole mass of raw material which I have
slung together--from memory (I have a good one), and from my diary.
It may seem odd that a homeless Bohemian like myself should have
kept a diary; but I was born methodical. I believe my mastery of Army
Forms gained me my promotion! Anyhow you will find in it a pretty
complete history of my career up to date. "I have cut out the war----"
Is there a lusus naturæ of any nationality but English, who rising from
Private to Brigadier-General, could write six hundred and seventy-three
sprawling foolscap pages purporting to contain the story of his life
from eighteen-eighty something to June nineteen hundred and nineteen
and deliberately omit, as if it were neither here nor there, its four 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
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