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
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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.
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Source ISBN: 9780007580057
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007580064
Version: 2014-05-24
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The General Page 27