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    Greenmantle: Authorised Edition
    Greenmantle: Authorised Edition
    Greenmantle: Authorised Edition
    Ebook339 pages4 hours

    Greenmantle: Authorised Edition

    By John Buchan

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    November 1915. Richard Hannay is tasked to undertake a top-secret mission to investigate rumours of a plot to create a holy war throughout the Muslim world and draw troops and resources from the Western Front. Hannay must journey to Constantinople through war-torn Europe, recruiting three loyal friends – Peter Pienaar, John S Blenkiron and Sandy Arbuthnot – to help him as he unravels coded messages, escapes murderous mobs and tracks down the mysterious prophet who holds the key to the plot, known as ‘Greenmantle’.

    Greenmantle is a gripping reflection on the power of political Islam (to the extent that it was pulled from Radio 4’s schedule at the time of the 7 July bombings) and demonstrates Buchan’s exemplary storytelling ability and political insight.

    With an introduction by Allan Massie.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPolygon
    Release dateNov 12, 2012
    ISBN9780857905024
    Greenmantle: Authorised Edition
    Author

    John Buchan

    Author of the iconic novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan filled many roles including barrister, colonial administrator, publisher, Director of Intelligence, and Member of Parliament. The Thirty-Nine Steps, first in the Richard Hannay series, is widely regarded as the starting point for espionage fiction and was written to pass time while Buchan recovered from an illness. During the outbreak of the First World War, Buchan wrote propaganda for the British war effort, combining his skills as author and politician. In 1935 Buchan was appointed the 15th Governor General of Canada and established the Governor General’s Literacy Award. Buchan was enthusiastic about literacy and the evolution of Canadian culture. He died in 1940 and received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.

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    Reviews for Greenmantle

    3.5/5

    231 ratings19 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Unlike The 39 Steps (which I enjoyed), I found Greenmantle tedious. Something about the spirit of the book, in which steady Brits and one ridiculous American undertake a dangerous mission and are only too happy to die for their country (or something like that) rubbed me the wrong way. This, combined with the total unbelievability of one (or more) essential plot points, made Greenmantle tough to get through.
    • 3/5
      Longer than The 39 Steps and the adventure drags on too long for me. Still, it's the same sort of thing, same main character, same pre-World-War-I setting. If you loved The 39 Steps, you should love this. If you didn't love The 39 Steps, well...
    • 4/5
      It felt to me that most of the action was with the other characters, not featured in this book. And this felt like the target audience was young men.Some quotes I found interesting: SPOILER"Women have got a perilous logic which we never have, and some of the best of them don't see the joke of life like the ordinary man. They can be far greater than men, for they can grow straight to the heart of things. There never was a man so near the divine as Joan of Arc. But I think, too, they can be more entirely damnable than anything that ever was breeched, for they don't stop still now and then and laugh at themselves. . . . There is no Superman. The poor old donkeys that fancy themselves in the part are either crack-brained 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 we Americans haven't got the right poise for dealing with that kind of femail. We've exalted our womenfolk into little tin-gods, and at the same time left them out of the real business of life. [....] We aren't used to regarding them as anything except angels and children." [p. 186]When things get to the pass that nothing you can do can better them, the only thing is to live for the moment. [p. 208]"We've lived long enough to know ourselves, and to shape ourselves into some kind of decency." [p. 259]I fancy it isn't the men who get the most out of the world and are always bouyant and cheerful that most fear to die. Rather it is the weak-engined souls who go about with dull eyes, that cling more fiercely to life. [p. 260]
    • 4/5
      Six-word review: Another improbable pulp adventure with charm.Extended review:Escapism has its own appeal, and an author who knows exactly what he's doing makes for a safe escape. Buchan does not pretend to be writing literature, although his own literary background shows. He's writing entertainment. So plots that feature wild schemes and dark missions, plots that rely on amazing coincidences bolstered by daring heroics, aren't measured on a scale of realism. Rather, the question is how much fun they are.Published in 1916, Greenmantle is an adventure of international espionage and intrigue whose first-person narrator, Richard Hannay (of The Thirty-Nine Steps), is a man of action. "Under the black canopy of night," he says, "perils are either forgotten or terribly alive. Mine were forgotten."An assignment in Islamic country pits Hannay against savage Turks and menacing Germans as the tides of World War I sweep forward and back. At that time the outcome of the war, not to mention the fact that it was only Roman numeral one, was unknown. The novel, with its overt patriotism and its celebration of macho courage, spotlights the power of a small team of trained and committed operatives to turn events toward victory, regardless of personal risk.Greenmantle in its time was popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, a hundred years later, of course it's dated, and I doubt that it ever did invite deep thought. I read it for a glimpse of another era and other cultures and for an absorbing diversion. It delivered both, and it was fun.
    • 4/5
      The East is waiting for a revelation. It has been promised one. Some star—man, prophecy, or trinket—is coming out of the West. The Germans know, and that is the card with which they are going to astonish the world.''And the mission you spoke of for me is to go and find out?'He nodded gravely. 'That is the crazy and impossible mission.'While recuperating from injuries sustained in the Battle of Loos, Richard Hannay is given a secret mission that will take him all the way to Constantinople. Hannay, his friend and fellow soldier Sandy Arbuthnot, and American John S. Blenkiron must make their journey across Europe undercover, without any support from the British government should they be captured. The secret they must uncover is connected to Islam, and it is something that could ignite a jihad. The three men take different routes for their journey in the hope that at least one of them will make it all the way to Constantinople in time to meet the unknown threat.Buchan wrote Greenmantle during the war, before its outcome was known. The climactic war scene must have shored up Allied spirits in the midst of the war. Sandy Arbuthnot reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia. When I Googled to see if Buchan might have based his character on T. E. Lawrence, I discovered that it's more likely that Sandy was modeled on British diplomat Aubrey Herbert. Many of the book's themes and locations still have a timely feel, making the occasional racial epithet or stereotype even more jarring to 21st century readers. It's a good choice for readers who enjoy adventure, espionage, and a mild adrenaline rush.
    • 2/5
      Buchan had a fascinating career before his early death. Always a prolific writer, who worked In publishing at first, he authored a history of the WW1 at its inception, then worked in intelligence during the war, eventually becoming Director of Intelligence at the new British Ministry of Information. When the war ended he rewrote the background history, incorporating it into a four volume History of the Great War. He was friends with both Aubrey Herbert and T.E. Lawrence, and a composite of the two is thought to be the basis of one character in this 1916 work. A ideal background for a writer of WW1 spy stories, surely. I was fascinated by the detailed discussion of late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Middle East power gaming and politics, and views of the geared-up WW1 German War Machine, particularly given the relevance of that local history and culture to today's wars and volatile areas. Not having read up on WW1 south of the Med during school or come across useful background in other fiction, the issue of control of the Middle East as a key, possibly critical tipping point in WW1 now appears to have be unhelpfully ignored except among war history buffs.Unfortunately warning is needed that it is occasionally tainted by the contemporary attitudes to indigenous African populations, which arise largely through the odd colloquialism and the fallout of fallout of main character Hannay's background of living in South Africa with the Boer. If, as with Shakespeare or other writers of previous centuries, it is possible to wince through those now-unacceptable contemporary attitudes, the book is rather interesting and worth reading, though lacking the flow of The 29 Steps, I thought. It is again a very episodic work and I regretted that the characters are dispersed for so much of it. I'm still processing my reaction but on balance I found it an interesting rather than satisfying read, so, together with the bigotry issue which really got my hackles up, I'm tending to a harsh rating. I'm hanging on to the book though.
    • 4/5
      GreenmantleJohn BuchanApril 10, 2011This is a rollicking yarn, spy mystery, and adventure, set in WW1. The hero, Richard Hannay, is tasked to leave his battalion in France to undertake a difficult mission in Germany and Turkey, heading off a plan of the German general staff to rise up a muslim prophet, the Greenmantle of the title. The rise of the Jihad would embarass and impede the British war effort. There is a journey on a tramp steamer, evasion of sinister German officials. a trip down the Danube and into Turkey, ultimately victory by the Russians. Hannay has friends in an old Boer tracker, Peter, and a British spy, and enemies in the form of a sinister countess. Coincidence drives the plot, but the atmospherics and adventure are rich.
    • 2/5
      This is a book that hasn't aged well. What may have once seemed a rollicking good yarn in the style of Boys Own or Biggles now seems very thin - the plot sparse, the characterisation limited and the whole concept quite unrealistic. But the basic plot line, that someone, or something, could bring pious muslims together in rebellion against the west, could have seemed prescient in retrospect. Sadly, the author fails totally to flesh out this idea and the plot device remains a repeated hollow phrase with no any attempt to fill in any details.
    • 5/5
      This is the second book in the WWI-era Richard Hannay espionage/adventure series.This installment finds Hannay embedded with the enemy as he travels through Europe and Turkey seeking the enemy's greatest secret.It was a simple read, and at times the author used obvious plot devices to get the protagonist out of a sticky situation. But who cares? It was a great ride!
    • 4/5
      I don't believe this was the case with this novel, but I can definitely visualize it as a serialization back in its day, with lots of cliffhangers and people fidgeting in their seats waiting for the next installment. Once it gets started, the action just doesn't let up, and I can remember thinking, okay, Richard Hannay has a couple of more adventures in store by this author so he has to come out okay. It's one of those books where you find yourself inwardly rooting for the good guys, and where you are also inwardly waiting for the bad guys to get theirs. Greenmantle follows Buchan's "Thirty-nine Steps" not as a sequel so much (imho), but rather as something along the line of the further adventures of Richard Hannay, the main protagonist and overall hero of the Thirty-nine Steps. Hannay has since been a soldier in WWI, in which he was injured at Loos. Now he is called into action once again, this time by the Foreign Office. Sir Walter Bullivant, the senior man at the FO, explains to Hannay that there is a German plot to drag Turkey into the war. The problem is not so much Turkey, per se, but all of the provinces where Islam is very strong; and the rumor is that Germany has something to bring all of the provincial Muslims together to fan the flames against the allies under German auspices. Just what Germany has is the unknown factor, and it's up to Hannay to figure it out. He is given only one clue: a half-piece of paper with the words "Kasredin", "cancer," and "v.I." It is from here that an incredible adventure begins which will keep the reader pretty much glued to the book.Phenomenal read, and I recommend it highly. Yes, there are some improbable spots in the novel, but hey...it's an adventure and it's fun. The characters are great, and as noted at the beginning, you'll be wondering after a while how the good guys are ever going to get out of each predicament in which they find themselves. Also...consider the subject matter. This book was written in 1916, but in some ways is quite relevant to the world's situation today.I can't recommend this one highly enough; those who like older stories of espionage and spycraft will really enjoy it. Others who may enjoy it are those who like good old-fashioned stories of adventure; and those who read The Thirty-Nine Steps by the same author may wish to read it to find out what happens next to Richard Hannay. Very well done.
    • 3/5
      Overall, an OK yarn, but the geographic and political detail prevalent through out this tale revealed the fact that i apparently know absolutely nothing about the global relationships defining WWI!!! Now, that would be my fault; but holy cow, the name-dropping of people, places, historic relationships from Britain, throughout Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Middle East was a bit overwhelming....much of it without any explanation...merely an assumption that the reader would know exactly what was being discussed. Also, along the line of Buchan's "The 39 Steps," the string of lucky coincidences that allows this small band of spies to accomplish the impossible gets a little hard to swallow after awhile. With that said, there were some sections of exciting adventure that made it worthwhile....and maybe it has embarrassed me enough to do a little boning up on my early 20th century world history!
    • 4/5
      Excellent Richard Hannay adventure.
    • 3/5
      Read this with the knowledge that it is simple pulp-fiction. Action packed and full of unlikely co-incidences and old fashioned rascism (It was written in 1920's)
    • 4/5
      This was an uneven book for me.I know it is not about characterisation, but the Blenkiron character did not work in this book for me, although I enjoyed his personality. I do not know whether that was Buchan trying to get the Americans "on board" (as part of the war effort), but Blenkiron felt an artificial character to introduce into an adventure yarn. The femme fatale (Hilda von Einem) also did not work, with us being told what effect she had on the protagonists, rather than this being shown.Subject to these flaws, it is an enjoyable adventure story, about a First World War plot to raise an Islamic "prophet" figure in Asia Minor to reinforce the German war effort in Palestine. Richard Hannay (of The 39 Steps) is the main character, having been serving in the trenches at Loos. However, after having been wounded and invalided out, he is offered an opportunity to perform an intelligence mission to find out the identity and location of a threat in the East (Asia Minor), although it ends up as an adventure story as the intelligence cannot be relayed back in time. He is accompanied in this mission by Peter Pienaar, a friend from Hannay's African days (who coincidentally turns up as Hannay gets ashore in Portugal), in his travel through Germany and Austria - I really enjoyed this and Sandy Arbuthnot, a fellow soldier who is a polymathic multi-lingual friend. The adventure moves on to Instanbul and then to Asia Minor.It was made really interesting by it being published in 1916 and the comments regarding trench warfare, the Germans and Turkish being enlightening as to British attitudes, as individuals are regarded mainly in a sympathetic light, even the Colonel von Stumm character.The Sandy Arbuthnot character also appears incredibly prescient, but one must assume that this type of English character was around (this is before T E Lawrence was sent to Arabia).
    • 4/5
      A good adventure story and espionage thriller. Again we find Richard Hannay from "The Thirty-Nine Steps" on the run - this time not in Scotland running from the police and central intelligence - but on the run as an undercover agent in Germany. He and his three fellow spies set out to get behind the enemy lines and find out the truth about the mysterious Greenmantle - they eventually end up in Turkey where the Germans and their Turkish allies are plotting to create a Muslim uprising. Written in 1916 in the thick of WWI it’s an interesting read from a literary and historical perspective. I liked the fresh tone of the book, and the very, very British all in the good sense of cheerful comeraderie, displaying fair play, honour and courage in the worst of situations. In a “I-say-steady-on-old-chap-jolly-good-fellows” kind of way.
    • 3/5
      A piece of great nonsense. Very much fun, however, as Richard Hannay continues his undercover career. The author later went on to be appointed as the governor general of Canada. (1935 - 40) the Book itself seems to be part of the Indiana Jones neighbourhood.Written as escapism in 1916.
    • 5/5
      A dying British agent reports a handful of words as clues to German plot to inflame the Near East against the British in World Wr 1. Richard Hannay, the hero of The 39 Steps, and his Boer friend Peter Pienaar disguise themselves as pro-German Boers, while their friend Sandy Arbuthnot goes out in the guise of a Muslim himself. (Spoiler warning) After divers adventures on the way in Germany, they end up in Ottoman Turkey and find there is indeed a plot to revive the islamic caliphate with a man who possesses all the qualities to be a credible candidate, being managed by a brilliant and beautiful German spy, Hilda von Einem and a capable but thuggish German colonel named Stumm. Unfortunately for them, the potential caliph dies of cancer, and Hilda attempts to persuade Sandy to replace him. He pretends to agree, but turns against her at a critical moment., jut as the Russians are successfully invading eastern Turkey.
    • 5/5
      i loved this book. must have read it a few times. hope you enjoy it.
    • 4/5
      Really solid WWI spy adventure from Buchan, party of the Richard Hannay series. Really a ripping good adventure story. Unfortunately, it started out so slow and talky that I almost gave up on it. I'm glad I didn't though. This one has Hannay spying for the Brits in the Ottoman Empire. Interesting and fun.

    Book preview

    Greenmantle - John Buchan

    GREENMANTLE

    JOHN BUCHAN led a truly extraordinary life: he was a diplomat, soldier, barrister, journalist, historian, politician, publisher, poet and novelist. He was born in Perth in 1875, the eldest son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, and educated at Hutcheson's Grammar School in Glasgow. He graduated from Glasgow University then took a scholarship to Oxford. During his time there – 'spent peacefully in an enclave like a monastery' – he wrote two historical novels.

    In 1901 he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and a private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa. In 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor; they had three sons and a daughter. After spells as a war correspondent, Lloyd George's Director of Information and a Conservative MP, Buchan moved to Canada in 1935 where he became the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.

    Despite poor health throughout his life, Buchan's literary output was remarkable – thirty novels, over sixty non-fiction books, including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell, and seven collections of short stories. His distinctive thrillers – 'shockers' as he called them – were characterised by suspenseful atmosphere, conspiracy theories and romantic heroes, notably Richard Hannay (based on the real-life military spy William Ironside) and Sir Edward Leithen. Buchan was a favourite writer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose screen adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps was phenomenally successful.

    John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940, the year his autobiography Memory Hold-the-door was published.

    ALLAN MASSIE was born in Singapore and educated at Glenalmond and Trinity College, Camebridge. He is the author of over twenty novels and his non-fiction books include works about Muriel Spark, Colette and Byron. His latest book is Death in Bordeaux (Quartet, 2010). He lives in Selkirk with his family.

    JOHN BUCHAN

    Greenmantle

    Introduced by Allan Massie

    This eBook edition published in 2012 by

    Birlinn Limited

    West Newington House

    Newington Road

    Edinburgh

    EH9 1QS

    www.birlinn.co.uk

    First published in 1916 by Hodder & Stoughton

    This edition published in Great Britain in 2008 by Polygon,

    an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

    Copyright © Lord Tweedsmuir

    and Jean, Lady Tweedsmuir Introduction copyright © Allan Massie, 2011

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

    ISBN: 978-1-84697-197-6

    eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-502-4

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

    Introduction

    'I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant's telegram . . .'

    Splendid opening. Breakfast and the pipe, with Sandy Arbuthnot in the next sentence 'hunting for the marmalade', give us the taste of the normality from which Richard Hannay is going to be dragged and launched into an adventure even more perilous and demanding than that which he had recounted in The Thirty-Nine Steps.

    Buchan wrote Greenmantle between February and June 1916; it was published that October. It was still, in the months before the Battle of the Somme revealed the full horror of modern war, possible to have a hero ready to declare he liked soldiering 'right enough' even though it was 'a comfortless, bloody business'. Buchan knew it was grim enough; since the outbreak of the war he had been writing its history for the Edinburgh publishing firm Nelson, of which he was a director, the work being serialised in The Times. Many of his close friends were killed in the war, as was a much loved younger brother. The adventure stories he wrote were a form of escapism for himself as well as his readers, among them those he described as 'my friends in the trenches'.

    From childhood he had always been telling himself stories:

    or rather, being told stories, for they seemed to work themselves out independently. I generally thought of a character or two, and then of a set of incidents, and the question was how my people would behave. They had the knack of just squeezing out of unpleasant places, and of bringing their doings to a rousing climax.

    This is a fair description of the novel of adventure, which always has an air of improvisation, although Buchan wrote that the story was complete in his mind before he began to write it. I suppose he meant the outline of the story.

    Greenmantle is a fuller and richer novel than its predecessor. That was essentially a 'chase novel; Greenmantle is a 'quest' one, with a mystery to be unravelled. The scene is set – brilliantly and unforgettably – in Hannay's conversation with Sir Walter Bullivant at the Foreign Office. The war is being fought on the Western Front, but it may be lost in the East. 'There is,' Sir Walter tells him, 'a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you?'

    This departure from the language of official diplomacy is also splendid, as is Hannay's perceptive reply: 'It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought. I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire.'

    Indeed, yes. 'There is a Jehad [Buchan's spelling] preparing. The question is, How?'

    This makes Greenmantle a novel of our time too. After years of hearing about Arab Nationalism and Arab Socialism, we have grown accustomed again to the idea of an Islamic jihad. Hannay's task will be to find the Osama bin Laden figure, and put a spoke in the German plans to let loose a Holy War. We can be quite confident that he will do so.

    Pointless – and wrong – in an introduction to follow the narrative: those who are reading the novel for the first time are entitled to be granted the undiluted pleasure of discovery. They will read it as Buchan wrote it, at the gallop. Those of us for whom it is an old friend recognise that the plot exists only, as Scott put it, 'to bring in fine things', and that the novel offers many other varied and comfortable delights. For this is one of Buchan's many merits; he is a reassuring writer. That fine, if eccentric, novelist Peter Vansittart thought there were few things more satisfying than to settle on a winter evening with a bottle of whisky and The Three Hostages or Greenmantle.

    One of the pleasures Buchan offers is, admittedly, that, as John Gross wrote he is often 'so preposterous'. The plots are far-fetched. Buchan himself called these novels 'shockers', and said that his 'master' in this kind of fiction was the now all-but forgotten Edwardian writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, whom, no doubt with tongue in cheek, he described as 'the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah'. Buchan followed Oppenheim in devising plots which were highly improbable, but stopped just short of the impossible. In this respect Ian Fleming may be regarded as his disciple, but not Eric Ambler or John le Carré.

    Buchan's characters are incapable of development. Hannay, like James Bond, is the same man from start to finish; he merely becomes more respectable as he is admitted to membership of the British Establishment. Long before he made that at most half-serious acknowledgement of his debt to Oppenheim, Buchan's master had been Stevenson, whose influence is evident in his first novel, John Burnet of Barns, and can be detected again in Buchan's masterpiece Witch Wood. Stevenson wrote that 'drama is the poetry of conduct; romance the poetry of circumstance'. He himself provided both. Kidnapped is a tale of adventure, a marvellous romance, which is also a drama, for David Balfour is changed as a result of his experience and his association with Alan Breck, but nothing changes in Buchan's 'shockers'. They are pure romance, books in which, to quote Stevenson again, 'the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life'. This is a fair description of Greenmantle and the other Hannay books. They offer pure enjoyment, partly because they pose no disturbing questions.

    If Greenmantle is a richer book than its predecessor, though no more gripping, it is partly because Hannay is not acting alone. He has been given companions. I don't know if Buchan had Dumas' musketeers in mind, but it is quite possible.

    Writing about his youthful reading in his autobiography Memory-Hold-The-Door, he says: 'While I revelled in Alexandre Dumas I could not rank him high.' Perhaps not, but just as D'Artagnan is given Athos, Porthos and Aramis as brothers-in-arms, each with his distinct personality, so now Hannay is joined in his quest by Sandy Arbuthnot, son of a Scottish peer, the American engineer John S. Blenkiron and the Boer hunter and tracker Peter Pienaar. Each has his particular qualities. Each is, we are told, remarkable in his way. Yet, just as the young D'Artagnan is wiser and more resourceful than the musketeers who are his elders, so Hannay, the plain, uncomplicated Scots-South African engineer, remains the man in charge. The brilliance of his colleagues serves to add lustre to him.

    Greenmantle is a generous book, remarkably so, given that it was written in wartime. Though Blenkiron justifies his adherence to the British cause, despite America's neutrality, on the grounds that 'there's a skunk been let loose in the world, and the odour of it is going to make life none too sweet till it is cleared away', Buchan does not demonise the Germans. There are honourable Germans like the engineer Gaudian (who will reappear to help Hannay in The Three Hostages) and the poor woman who shelters Hannay when he is suffering from an attack of fever. More striking still is the sympathetic portrait of the Kaiser to whom Hannay is introduced as he travels through Germany:

    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. But here was a human being who . . . had the power of laying himself alongside other men . . . [He] . . . paid the price in war for the gifts that had made him successful in peace, he had imagination and nerves, and the one was white hot and the others were quivering. I would not have been in his shoes for the throne of the Universe.

    This is a long way from the 'Hang the Kaiser' hysteria of 1918, and, if the portrait does him more credit than most historians would allow, it is evidence of Buchan's sympathetic imagination, though I wonder what his first readers made of it.

    Buchan's villains are rarely convincing. Moxon Ivery, the master of disguise, who appears in both The Thirty-Nine Steps and Mr Standfast is a mere convenience, made out of cardboard. Medina, the villain in The Three Hostages, is way over the top, and his motivation does not stand up to examination. Here in Greenmantle, Hilda von Einem with 'her strange potent eyes . . . like a burning searchlight which showed up every cranny and crack of the soul' is a figure of melodrama, capable of tushery like 'What came you forth to seek?' Buchan was never much good at portraying women (unless they were old, hard-working or humble), and Hilda is no exception. She is necessary to the plot, but incredible.

    Colonel von Stumm, however, is another matter. Stumm is splendid and truly formidable. He is a brute and a bully, but one who may command respect, for Buchan grants him courage. In his fine Buchan biography, The Presbyterian Cavalier, Andrew Lownie strangely calls Stumm 'effeminate'. He is anything but that, despite the hint of sexual perversion which Buchan delicately drops into his description of the room in his castle, which at first sight seems like a woman's drawing room.

    But it wasn't . . . There had never been a woman's hand in the place. It was the room of a man who . . . had a perverted taste for soft delicate things . . . I began to see the queer other side of my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. The room seemed a horribly unwholesome place, and I was more than ever afraid of Stumm.

    The passage hints at the homosexual scandals surrounding the Kaiser's friend Philip von Eulenberg and others in his coterie. But I doubt if Stumm had any designs on Hannay's virtue.

    Part of the charm of Buchan lies in incidentals. He is a master of the throwaway line. Introducing us, for instance, to Peter Pienaar, Hannay tells us 'he was in Swaziland with Bob Macnab, and you know what that means'. Actually we don't, for this is the only mention of Bon Macnab in the novel, and we never learn what he and Peter got up to in Swaziland. We don't need to. The offhand man-of-the-world remark has done its work, hinting at Peter's not always reputable past. It is indeed one of my favourite lines in the canon, almost as good as Sandy's observation in The Three Hostages that 'nothing wastes so much time as dodging assassins'.

    Buchan is wise enough to know that the most vivid tale benefits from pauses in the action. His characters don't forget to stop to eat – meals are usually good in Buchan, partly no doubt because his own wretched state of health confined him to a diet. Blenkiron, like his creator, suffers from a duodenal ulcer, and when we think of him we are most likely to remember his diet of boiled fish, dry toast and a glass of hot milk; also the games of Patience he plays to aid digestion and the cigars he smokes – the 'long black abominations' he prefers to the Havanas Hannay offers him. Food is comforting, because food represents normality – the normality that will be disturbed by the demands of the quest. So, when Hannay goes to report the result of his visit to the Foreign Office, he finds Sandy tucking into tea-cakes and muffins.

    Not everything works, or continues to work. When as a boy of twelve or thirteen I first read Greenmantle, I found the Garden-House of Suleyman the Red wonderfully exotic and sinister, and Sandy, as the man in skins leading the Companions of the Rosy Hours in their mad dervish dance, genuinely frightening. This magic has faded, and now seems tawdry. Indeed for me now the novel falls away once we reach Constantinople even though the pace quickens and the final battle at Erzerum is a wonderfully fine piece of bravura writing.

    Those who come to the novel for the first time are not likely to agree, for they will be caught up in the excitement of the narrative, but, whether on account of advancing years or simply familiarity – one knows the story – I now find that the first half of a Buchan novel, where he is setting the scene and preparing to get the action underway, is always more satisfying than the second half where the narrative quickens and action predominates. But the same may be said of other writers of adventure fiction such as Ian Fleming again and Dick Francis. Once you know the story it is the mood and atmosphere which the author evokes in his own distinctive manner that offer the deepest pleasure – a purring self-indulgent pleasure like that of a cat lying in front of a log fire.

    Buchan's continuing popularity raises interesting questions, which like most such questions are not easily answered. Why is he still widely read when most of his contemporaries working in a comparable vein are forgotten? E. Phillips Oppenheim is one example; Edgar Wallace, a sensational bestseller in his day, another. It is easy to say that Buchan wrote better than they did, and certainly some popular authors, then as now, wrote abominably, William Le Queux being a good example, if one painful to read. Yet there were others – E. W. Horning (Raffles) and Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda) who wrote well enough, yet now lag far behind Buchan in popularity. One can only suggest that, though Buchan is a period piece – and this of course is one of his charms – there is something timeless about his books. He has outlasted popular writers of the inter-war and even post-1945 period such as 'Sapper' ('Bulldog Drummond'), Dornford Yates, Peter Cheney and Dennis Wheatley. The world Buchan invites the reader to share is a welcoming place, notably free from brutality and sadism. There is violence, of course, but Buchan never describes it in detail and with relish.

    More curiously still, his work remains fresh while the books of serious literary novelists, popular, even bestsellers, in their own time, such as Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Galsworthy and, a generation later, J. B. Priestley, have dated. In 1940 Graham Greene, reviewing Buchan's last novel Sick Heart River, praised him for having shown us 'how thin is the protection of civilisation'. 'Buchan in his thrillers prepared better than he knew for the death that may come to any of us, as it nearly came to Leithen by the railings of the Park or the doorway of a mews.'

    Perhaps so. Greene's praise, to some extent explicable as the expression of the feeling of the Blitz, has often been quoted. This awareness is certainly present in Buchan's work. His Calvinism, however diluted by his material success in the long journey from the manse to the Governor-General's mansion in Canada, gave him an awareness of both the power and attraction of evil. He knew that civilisation has been built by effort and with difficulty and must be defended against the forces of destruction. Its survival could not be taken for granted.

    All this is true. Greene also wrote that 'Buchan was the first to realise the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men, members of parliament and members of the Athenaeum lawyers and barristers, business men and minor peers.' There is something in this, and it is a device that others such as Ambler, Francis and Geoffrey Household have successfully employed since. Yet, as an explanation of Buchan's popularity, it doesn't really satisfy – and not only because Richard Hannay can't accurately be described as an unadventurous man, no matter how conventional his moral and social attitudes are. It doesn't satisfy because I don't think people read Buchan for thrills – certainly this is not why they re-read him – any more than they read and re-read Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories for this reason. What attracts is rather the completeness of the world these writers create, a completeness that is delightful because it is reassuring. There are moments which may give you a frisson. There is much that is exciting, but chiefly the Hannay novels, like the Holmes stories, are comforting. They offer us an escape into a world which is apparently dangerous but is really safe. And Greenmantle is my favourite among them because it does this without ever striking a wrong note.

    Buchan and Conan Doyle have this too in common. They both achieved their greatest success and won enduring popularity with works that they threw off lightly, that they seem even to have written first for their own amusement, rather than with those on which they laboured more diligently. Conan Doyle seems to have resented the public's preference for Sherlock Holmes rather than for his certainly very fine historical novels, Sir Nigel, The White Company and Micah Clarke, all the fruit of deep research and hard writing. Buchan likewise set a higher store on his historical novels and his biographies than on his 'shockers', but he had the good sense not to complain and instead to be happy that books he had written with enjoyment gave pleasure to so many.

    Pleasure is the word one comes back to, for it is what Greenmantle and its fellows offer the reader. These books are in the best sense of the word escapist. They invite you to lay aside your cares and troubles and escape into a happy dream. We should be grateful. So: roll on Hannay's interrupted breakfast and his visit to the Foreign Office that sets him on his travels . . .

    Allan Massie

    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 Christmastide

    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 Embarassed 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

    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 that 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 no prouder man on earth than Richard Hannay when he took his Lennox Highlanders over the parapets on that glorious and bloody 25th day of September. Loos was no picnic, and we had had some ugly bits of scrapping before that, but the worst bit of the campaign I had seen was a tea-party to the show* I had been in with Bullivant before the war started.

    The sight of his name on a telegram form seemed to change all my outlook on life. I had been hoping for the command of a battalion, and looking forward to being in at the finish with Brother Boche. But this message jerked my thoughts on to a new road. There might be other things in the war than straightforward fighting. Why on earth should the Foreign Office want to see an obscure major of the New Army, and want to see him in double-quick time?

    'I'm going up to town by the ten train,' I announced; 'I'll be back in time for dinner.'

    'Try my tailor,' said Sandy. 'He's got a very nice taste in red tabs. You can use my name.'

    An idea struck me. 'You're pretty well all right now. If I wire for you, will you pack your own kit and mine and join me?'

    'Right-o! I'll accept a job on your staff if they give you a corps. If so be as you come down tonight, be a good chap and bring a barrel of oysters from Sweeting's.'

    I travelled up to London in a regular November drizzle, which cleared up about Wimbledon to watery sunshine. I never could stand London during the war. It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my notion of it. One felt the war more in its streets than in the field, or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose. I dare say it was all right; but since August 1914 I never spent a day in town without coming home depressed to my boots.

    I took a taxi and drove straight to the Foreign Office. Sir Walter did not keep me waiting long. But when his secretary took me to his room I would not have recognized the man I had known eighteen months before.

    His big frame seemed to have dropped flesh, and there was a stoop in the square shoulders. His face had lost its rosiness and was red in patches, like that of a man who gets too little fresh air. His hair was much greyer and very thin about the temples, and there were lines of overwork below the eyes. But the eyes were the same as before, keen and kindly and shrewd, and there was no change in the firm set of the jaw.

    'We must on no account be disturbed for the next hour,' he told his secretary. When the young man had gone he went across to both doors and turned the keys in them.

    'Well, Major Hannay,' he said, flinging himself into a chair beside the fire. 'How do you like soldiering?'

    'Right enough,' I said, 'though this isn't just the kind of war I would have picked myself. It's a comfortless, bloody business. But we've got the measure of the old Boche now, and it's dogged as does it. I count on getting back to the Front in a week or two.'

    'Will you get the battalion?' he asked. He seemed to have followed my doings pretty closely.

    'I believe I've a good chance. I'm not in this show for honour and glory, though. I want to do the best I can, but I wish to Heaven it was over. All I think of is coming out of it with a whole skin.'

    He laughed. 'You do yourself an injustice. What about the forward observation post at the Lone Tree? You forgot about the whole skin then.'

    I felt myself getting red. 'That was all rot,' I said, 'and I can't think who told you about it. I hated the job, but I had to do it to prevent my subalterns going to glory. They were a lot of fire-eating young lunatics. If I had sent one of them he'd have gone on his knees to Providence and asked for trouble.'

    Sir Walter was still grinning.

    'I'm not questioning your caution. You have the rudiments of it, or our friends of the Black Stone would have gathered you in at our last merry meeting. I would question it as little as your courage. What exercises my mind is whether it is best employed in the trenches.'

    'Is the War office dissatisfied with me?' I asked sharply.

    'They are profoundly satisfied. They propose to give you command of your battalion. Presently, if you escape a stray bullet, you will no doubt be a Brigadier. It is a wonderful war for youth and brains. But . . . I take it you are in this business to serve your country, Hannay?'

    'I reckon I am,' I said. 'I am certainly not in it for my health.'

    He looked at my leg where the doctors had dug out the shrapnel fragments, and smiled quizzically. 'Pretty fit again?' he asked.

    'Tough as a sjambok. I thrive on the racket and eat and sleep like a schoolboy.'

    He got up and stood with his back to the fire, his eyes staring abstractedly out of the window at the wintry park.

    'It is a great game, and you are the man for it, no doubt. But there are others who can play it, for soldiering today asks for the average rather than the exception in human nature. It is like a big machine where the parts are standardized. You are fighting, not because you are short of a job, but because you want to help England. How if you could help her better than by commanding a battalion – or a brigade – or, if it comes to that, a division? How if there is a thing which you alone can do? Not some embusqué business in an office, but a thing compared to which your fight at Loos was a Sunday-school picnic. You are not afraid of danger? Well, in this job you would not be fighting with an army around you, but alone. You are fond of tackling difficulties? Well, I can give you a task which will try all your powers. Have you anything to say?'

    My heart was beginning to thump uncomfortably. Sir Walter was not the man to pitch a case too high.

    'I am a soldier,' I said, 'and under orders.'

    'True; but what I am about to propose does not come by any conceivable stretch within the scope of a soldier's duties. I shall perfectly understand if you decline. You will be acting as I should act myself – as any sane man would. I would not press you for worlds. If you wish it, I will not even make the proposal, but let you go here and now, and wish you good luck with your battalion. I do not wish to perplex a good soldier with impossible decisions.'

    This piqued me and put me on my mettle.

    'I am not going to run away before the guns fire. Let me hear what you propose.'

    Sir Walter crossed to a cabinet, unlocked it with a key from his chain, and took a piece of paper from a drawer. It looked like an ordinary half-sheet of notepaper.

    'I take it,' he said, 'that your travels have not extended to the East.'

    'No,' I said, 'barring a shooting trip in East Africa.'

    'Have you by any chance been following the present campaign there?'

    'I've read the newspapers pretty regularly since I went to hospital. I've got some pals in the Mesopotamia show, and of course I'm keen to know what is going to happen at Gallipoli and Salonika. I gather that Egypt is pretty safe.'

    'If you will give me your attention for ten minutes I will supplement your newspaper reading.'

    Sir Walter lay back in an arm-chair and spoke to the ceiling. It

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