Greenmantle | Page 3

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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