Greenmantle quotes

Many of us counted on that. But we have been disappointed. The Syrian army is as fanatical as the hordes of the Mahdi. The Senussi have taken a hand in the game. The Persian Muslims are threatening trouble.

There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark.

And that wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you?”

“I may be sending you to your death, Hannay—Good God, what a damned taskmistress duty is!—If so, I shall be haunted with regrets, but you will never repent. Have no fear of that.

You have chosen the roughest road, but it goes straight to the hilltops.

”

What’s life anyhow? For me, it’s living on a strict diet and having frequent pains in my stomach. It isn’t such an almighty lot to give up, provided you get a good price in the deal. Besides, how big is the risk?

About one o’clock in the morning, when you can’t sleep, it will be the size of Mount Everest, but if you run out to meet it, it will be a hillock you can jump over.

The grizzly looks very fierce when you’re taking your ticket for the Rockies and wondering if you’ll come back, but he’s just an ordinary bear when you’ve got the sight of your rifle on him.

Albert. Von Papen’s spies had tried to murder him, after he had defeated an attempt to blow up one of the big gun factories. Sir Walter had written at the end: “The best man we ever had. Better than Scudder.

He would go through hell with a box of bismuth tablets and a pack of Patience cards.

”

“You feel like that? Same with me.

It’s idiocy, but all war is idiotic, and the most wholehearted idiot is apt to win.

We’re to go on this mad trail wherever we think we can hit it. Well, I’m with you. But I don’t mind admitting that I’m in a blue funk. I had got myself adjusted to this trench business and was quite happy.

“There you’re wrong, Dick,” he said earnestly. “

Every man who isn’t a maniac knows fear.

I have done some daft things, but I never started on them without wishing they were over. Once I’m in the show I get easier, and by the time I’m coming out I’m sorry to leave it. But at the start my feet are icy.”

God, I wonder what’s happened to old Solly Maritz, with his bottle face? Yon was a fine battle at the drift when I was sitting up to my neck in the Orange praying that Brits’ lads would take my head for a stone.”

Peter was as thorough a mountebank, when he got started, as Blenkiron himself.

All the way back to Lisbon he yarned about Maritz and his adventures in German South West till I half believed they were true.

You won’t make a factory look like a house, though you decorate its front and plant rosebushes all round it.

The place depressed and yet cheered me. It somehow made the German people seem smaller.

At three o’clock the lieutenant took us to a plain white building in a side street with sentries at the door. A young staff officer met us and made us wait for five minutes in an anteroom.

He stared at me with his small bright eyes and I stared back. I had struck something I had been looking for for a long time, and till that moment I wasn’t sure that it existed.

Here was the German of caricature, the real German, the fellow we were up against.

He was as hideous as a hippopotamus, but effective. Every bristle on his odd head was effective.

I had struck something I had been looking for for a long time, and till that moment I wasn’t sure that it existed. Here was the German of caricature, the real German, the fellow we were up against.

He was as hideous as a hippopotamus, but effective. Every bristle on his odd head was effective.

The man at the table was speaking. I took him to be a civilian official of sorts, pretty high up from his surroundings, perhaps an Undersecretary. His Dutch was slow and careful, but good—too good for Peter.

In another room a fellow was lecturing on something to a dozen hearers and drawing figures on a blackboard. Some were in ordinary khaki, others in any old thing they could pick up, and most wore greatcoats.

Your blood gets thin when you have nothing to do but hope against hope and think of your pals and the old days.

I was moving along, listening with half an ear to the lieutenant’s prattle and the loud explanations of the deputy-commandant, when I pitchforked into what might have been the end of my business.

but I brightened up when I heard I was going somewhere with Stumm. If he wanted to see me again he must think me of some use, and if he was going to use me he was bound to let me into his game.

I liked Stumm about as much as a dog likes a scorpion, but I hankered for his society.

At the station platform, where the ornament of the Landsturm saved me all the trouble about tickets, I could not see my companion. I stood waiting, while a great crowd, mostly of soldiers, swayed past me and filled all the front carriages.

The last I saw of him was a figure moving like a sleepwalker, with no spring in his step, amid his tall suite. I felt that I was looking on at a far bigger tragedy than any I had seen in action.

Here was one that had loosed Hell, and the furies of Hell had got hold of him.

He was no common man, for in his presence I felt an attraction which was not merely the mastery of one used to command. That would not have impressed me, for I had never owned a master.

The wound had healed well enough, but I had pains there on a cold day. His fingers found the place and it hurt like hell.

There is a very narrow line between despair and black rage.

I had about given up the game, but the sudden ache of my shoulders gave me purpose again. He must have seen the rage in my eyes, for his own became cruel.

I kept half an eye on the clock. I was hopeful now, and was looking for the right kind of chance. The risk was that I might tire sooner than him and be at his mercy.

Then I learned a truth I have never forgotten. If you are fighting a man who means to kill you, he will be apt to down you unless you mean to kill him too.

Stumm did not know any rules to this game, and I forgot to allow for that. Suddenly, when I was watching his eyes, he launched a mighty kick at my stomach. If he had got me, this yarn would have had an abrupt ending.

It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany’s madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside?

To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.

The place, as I have said, was desperately poor. The woman’s face had the skin stretched tight over the bones and that transparency which means under-feeding; I fancied she did not have the liberal allowance that soldiers’ wives get in England.

It sounded lunacy, for I guessed that munitions of war would be as jealously guarded as old Hindenburg’s health. All the safer, I replied to myself, once I get there.

If you are looking for a deserter you don’t seek him at the favourite regimental public-house.

If you’re after a thief, among the places you’d be apt to leave unsearched would be Scotland Yard.

But you might have knocked me over with a straw when I saw you come on shore. That was good fortune, my friend … I have been thinking much about the Germans, and I will tell you the truth.

It is only boldness that can baffle them. They are a most diligent people. They will think of all likely difficulties, but not of all possible ones.

They have not much imagination. They are like steam engines which must keep to prepared tracks. There they will hunt any man down, but let him trek for open country and they will be at a loss. Therefore boldness, my friend; forever boldness.

It is only boldness that can baffle them. They are a most diligent people. They will think of all likely difficulties, but not of all possible ones. They have not much imagination.

They are like steam engines which must keep to prepared tracks. There they will hunt any man down, but let him trek for open country and they will be at a loss.

Therefore boldness, my friend; forever boldness. Remember as a nation they wear spectacles, which means that they are always peering.”

I don’t quite know what I had expected—a sort of fairyland Eastern city, all white marble and blue water, and stately Turks in surplices, and veiled houris, and roses and nightingales, and some sort of string band discoursing sweet music.

I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere.

It was a drizzling day, with a southeast wind blowing, and the streets were long troughs of mud. The first part I struck looked like a dingy colonial suburb—wooden houses and corrugated iron roofs, and endless dirty, sallow children.

It took me a moment or two to realize that we were attacked.

Every man has one special funk in the back of his head, and mine was to be the quarry of an angry crowd.

I hated the thought of it—the mess, the blind struggle, the sense of unleashed passions different from those of any single blackguard. It was a dark world to me, and I don’t like darkness.

I can’t tell you what the dance was. I had seen the Russian ballet just before the war, and one of the men in it reminded me of this man. But the dancing was the least part of it.

It was neither sound nor movement nor scent that wrought the spell, but something far more potent.

In an instant I found myself reft away from the present with its dull dangers, and looking at a world all young and fresh and beautiful. The gaudy drop-scene had vanished.

The African natives know it, and I remember a learned man once telling me that the Greeks had the same art. Those silver bells broke out of infinite space, so exquisite and perfect that no mortal words could have been fitted to them.

That was the music, I expect, that the morning stars made when they sang together.

Slowly, very slowly, it changed. The glow passed from blue to purple, and then to an angry red. Bit by bit the notes spun together till they had made a harmony—a fierce, restless harmony.

If the worst happens, Kaiser will fling overboard a lot of ballast in Europe, and it will look like a big victory for the Allies, but he won’t be beaten if he has the road to the East safe.

Germany’s like a scorpion: her sting’s in her tail, and that tail stretches way down into Asia.

“I got that clear, and I also made out that it wasn’t going to be dead easy for her to keep that tail healthy. Turkey’s a bit of an anxiety, as you’ll soon discover.

“Say rather the Turkish police. The current in the Bosporus is pretty strong, and these sad relics of two misguided Dutchmen will be washed up tomorrow about Seraglio Point.

In this game you must drop the curtain neat and pat at the end of each Scene, if you don’t want trouble later with the missing heir and the family lawyer.

”

I don’t say your highbrows use the noos well. I don’t take much stock in your political push. They’re a lot of silver-tongues, no doubt, but it ain’t oratory that is wanted in this racket. The William Jennings Bryan stunt languishes in wartime.

Politics is like a chicken-coop, and those inside get to behave as if their little run were all the world.

But if the politicians make mistakes it isn’t from lack of good instruction to guide their steps. If I had a big proposition to handle and could have my pick of helpers I’d plump for the Intelligence Department of the British Admiralty.

We’ve got to go on with this adventure and nose our way down into Mesopotamia, hoping that our luck will hold … God knows how we will get out of it; but it’s no good going out to meet trouble. As I observed before,

I believe in an all-wise and beneficent Providence, but you’ve got to give him a chance.

”

That talk did a lot to cheer my spirits, for I realized that it was the biggest of big game we were hunting this time.

I’m an economical soul, and if I’m going to be hanged I want a good stake for my neck.

Then began some varied experiences. I used to wake up in the morning, wondering where I should be at night, and yet quite pleased at the uncertainty. Greenmantle became a sort of myth with me.

I didn’t think I wanted him as a friend—he was too cold-blooded and artificial; and I was pretty certain that I didn’t want those steady black eyes as an enemy. But it was no good denying his quality.

The little fellow was all cold courage, like the fine polished blue steel of a sword.

I fancy I was rather a success at that dinner. For one thing I could speak German, and so had a pull on Blenkiron. For another I was in a good temper, and really enjoyed putting my back into my part.

“Why, no, but I have reached one conclusion. I opine that the hapless prophet has no sort of time with that lady. I opine that he will soon wish himself in Paradise.

For if Almighty God ever created a female devil it’s Madame von Einem.

”

When I made my pile and came home I looked to see a little society, but I had first the business of the Black Stone on my hands, and then the war, so my education languished.

I had never been in a motorcar with a lady before, and I felt like a fish on a dry sandbank.

The soft cushions and the subtle scents filled me with acute uneasiness. I wasn’t thinking now about Sandy’s grave words, or about Blenkiron’s warning, or about my job and the part this woman must play in it.

I cannot describe that calm appraising look. There was no sex in it, nothing even of that implicit sympathy with which one human being explores the existence of another. I was a chattel, a thing infinitely removed from intimacy.

Even so I have myself looked at a horse which I thought of buying, scanning his shoulders and hocks and paces.

Even so must the old lords of Constantinople have looked at the slaves which the chances of war brought to their markets, assessing their usefulness for some task or other with no thought of a humanity common to purchased and purchaser. And yet—not quite.

“Old Nietzsche has been blamed for a great deal of rubbish he would have died rather than acknowledge. But it’s a craze of the new, fatted Germany. It’s a fancy type which could never really exist, any more than the Economic Man of the politicians.

Mankind has a sense of humour which stops short of the final absurdity.

There never has been, and there never could be a real Superman … But there might be a Superwoman.”

The poor old donkeys that fancy themselves in the part are either crackbrained professors who couldn’t rule a Sunday-school class, or bristling soldiers with pint-pot heads who imagine that the shooting of a Duc d’Enghien made a Napoleon.

But there is a Superwoman, and her name’s Hilda von Einem.

”

“I guess that’s correct. But I could wish that the good God would see fit to take that lovely lady to Himself. She’s too much for a quiet man at my time of life.

When she invites us to go in on the ground-floor I feel like taking the elevator to the roof-garden.

”

Besides, the thing had gone clean beyond our power to direct. It was no good planning and scheming, for none of us had a notion what the next step might be.

We were fatalists now, believing in Kismet, and that is a comfortable faith.

All but Blenkiron. The coming of Hilda von Einem into the business had put a very ugly complexion on it for him. It was curious to see how she affected the different members of our gang. Peter did not care a rush:

None of us spoke, for the futility of the business clogged our spirits. I bit hard on my lip to curb my restlessness, and I think I would have sold my soul there and then for anything that could move fast.

I don’t know any sorer trial than to be mad for speed and have to crawl at a snail’s pace.

I was getting ripe for any kind of desperate venture.

The shells were bursting four or five miles away, and the guns must have been as many more distant. But in that upland pocket of plain in the frosty night they sounded most intimately near.

They kept up their solemn litany, with a minute’s interval between each

—no rafale which rumbles like a drum, but the steady persistence of artillery exactly ranged on a target. I judged they must be bombarding the outer forts, and once there came a loud explosion and a red glare as if a magazine had suffered.

“I don’t take no stock in highfalutin’. If you’re trying to scare me by that dime-novel talk I guess you’ve hit the wrong man.

You’re like the sweep that stuck in the chimney, a bit too big for your job.

I reckon you’ve a talent for romance that’s just wasted in soldiering.

“Ja. I was the man.

There are more ways of getting into kraals than there are ways of keeping people out.

”

He shivered like a frightened colt. “Woman!” he cried. “Does a woman drag a man through the nether-pit? She’s a she-devil. Oh, it isn’t madness that’s wrong with her. She’s as sane as you and as cool as Blenkiron.

Her life is an infernal game of chess, and she plays with souls for pawns.

She is evil—evil—evil.” And once more he buried his head in his hands.

It was Blenkiron who brought sense into this hectic atmosphere.

His slow, beloved drawl was an antiseptic against nerves.

“Say, boy,” he said, “I feel just like you about the lady. But our job is not to investigate her character. Her Maker will do that good and sure some day.

I looked at that lean, tight figure and the gentle, resolute face, and I changed my mind. “I’m hanged if I think there are any odds,” I said. “With anybody else it would want a miracle, but with Peter I believe the chances are level.”

“Two to one,” Peter persisted. “If it was evens I wouldn’t be interested.”

“Let me go,” Sandy cried. “I talk the lingo, and can pass as a Turk, and I’m a million times likelier to get through. For God’s sake, Dick, let me go.”

It was a torrent swollen with melting snow and rains in the hills, and it was running fifty yards wide. Peter thought he could have swum it, but he was very averse to a drenching.

“A wet man makes too much noise,”

he said, and besides, there was the off-chance that the current would be too much for him. So he moved up stream to look for a bridge.

The side below the road was a little undercut and very steep. He resolved to plaster himself against it, for he would be hidden from the road, and a searcher in the ditch would not be likely to explore the unbroken sides.

It was always a maxim of Peter’s that the best hiding-place was the worst, the least obvious to the minds of those who were looking for you.

He waited until the lights both in the road and the ditch came nearer, and then he gripped the edge with his left hand, where some stones gave him purchase, dug the toes of his boots into the wet soil and stuck like a limpet.

He was so interested in it all that he poked his nose where he shouldn’t have been, and dropped plump into the pit behind a gun-emplacement.

Gunners all the world over are the same⁠—shy people, who hide themselves in holes and hibernate and mortally dislike being detected.

A gruff voice cried “Wer da?” and a heavy hand seized his neck.

Peter felt very sick. He had not believed there could be so much noise in the world, and the drums of his ears were splitting.

Now, for a man to whom courage is habitual, the taste of fear⁠—naked, utter fear⁠—is a horrible thing.

It seems to wash away all his manhood. Peter lay on the crest, watching the shells burst, and confident that any moment he might be a shattered remnant.

The thought of a chapel and a bell gave him the notion of some human agency. And then suddenly the notion was confirmed. The sound was regular and concerted—dot, dash, dot—dash, dot, dot.

The branch of a tree and the wind may play strange pranks, but they do not produce the longs and shorts of the Morse Code.

This was where Peter’s intelligence work in the Boer War helped him. He knew the Morse, he could read it, but he could make nothing of the signalling. It was either in some special code or in a strange language.

It was a wise man who said that the biggest kind of courage was to be able to sit still.

I used to feel that when we were getting shelled in the reserve trenches outside Vermelles. I felt it before we went over the parapets at Loos, but I never felt it so much as on the last two days in that cellar.

I had got back all my exhilaration. Indeed I was intoxicated with the movement, and could have laughed out loud and sung.

Under the black canopy of the night perils are either forgotten or terribly alive.

Mine were forgotten. The darkness I galloped into led me to freedom and friends. Yes, and success, which I had not dared to hope and scarcely even to dream of.

But as she stood with heightened colour, her eyes like stars, her poise like a wild bird’s, I had to confess that she had her own loveliness.

She might be a devil, but she was also a queen.

I considered that there might be merits in the prospect of riding by her side into Jerusalem.

When it was done we covered her face with the linen cloak which Sandy had worn that morning. He lifted the body and laid it reverently in its place.

“I did not know that anything could be so light,” he said.

It wasn’t for me to look on at that kind of scene. I went to the parapet with Blenkiron’s field-glasses and had a stare at our friends on the road.