The General

by C. S. Forester

  Greven saved Curzon’s life – or at least always thought he did, although the credit ought really to be given to the two lightly wounded R.A.M.C. men who came to the rescue, and put on bandages and tourniquets, and stopped a passing lorry by the authority of Greven’s red tabs, and hoisted Curzon in.

  Pain came almost at once. No torment the Inquisition devised could equal the agony Curzon knew as the lorry heaved and pitched over the uneven road, jolting his mangled leg so that the fragments of bone grated together. Soon he was groaning, with the sweat running over his chalk-white face, and when they reached the hospital he was crying out loud, a mere shattered fragment of a man despite his crossed swords and baton and crown, and his red tabs and his silly sword.

  They had drugged him and they operated upon him, and they operated again and again, so that he lay for months in a muddle of pain and drugs while England fought with her back to the wall and closed by a miracle the gap which had been torn in her line at Saint-Quentin.

  While he lay bathed in waves of agony, or inert under the drugs, he was sometimes conscious of Emily’s presence beside him, and sometimes Emily was crying quietly, just as she had done at that revue he took her to on the last night of his last leave after Paschendaele and someone sang ‘Roses of Picardy’. It was a long time before he was sure enough of this solid world again to put out his hand to her.

  And now Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon and his wife, Lady Emily, are frequently to be seen on the promenade at Bournemouth, he in his bathchair with a plaid rug, she in tweeds striding behind. He smiles his old-maidish smile at his friends, and his friends are pleased with that distinction, although he plays such bad bridge and is a little inclined to irascibility when the east wind blows.

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  Payment Deferred

  Brown on Resolution

  Plain Murder

  Death to the French

  The Gun

  The African Queen

  The Peacemaker

  The Happy Return

  A Ship of the Line

  Flying Colours

  The Earthly Paradise

  The Captain from Connecticut

  The Ship

  The Commodore

  Lord Hornblower

  The Sky and the Forest

  Mr Midshipman Hornblower

  Lieutenant Hornblower

  Randall and the River of Time

  Hornblower and the Atropos

  The Nightmare

  The Good Shepherd

  Hornblower in the West Indies

  Hornblower and the Hotspur

  OMNIBUS

  Captain Hornblower, R.N.

  Horatio Hornblower

  TRAVEL

  The Voyage of the ‘Annie Marble’

  The ‘Annie Marble’ in Germany

  BIOGRPAHY

  Nelson

  PLAYS

  U.97

  Nurse Cavell (with C. E. Bechofer Roberts)

  MISCELLANEOUS

  Marionettes at Home

  The Naval War of 1812

  Hunting the Bismarck

  Copyright

  William Collins

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

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  First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014

  Copyright © C. S. Forester 1936

  Introduction © Max Hastings 2014

  C. S. Forester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  ‘The General’ and ‘Base Details’ copyright Siegfried Sassoon, reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780007580057

  Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007580064

  Version: 2014-05-24

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