He was born in Perth (Scotland) in 1875. He was the eldest son of a church minister. He studied at Glasgow University and at Oxford, became a lawyer, got married and had four children.
His uninspiring life changed when he went to South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century to help with the post-Boer war reconstruction. As a result of his experiences there, he wrote an adventure book, Prester John (1910).
When he came back to London, he went on working as a lawyer –he wrote legal treaties– and also for Nelson’s publishers.
Then it came the WWI; he volunteered, but couldn’t go to the front because of a duodenal ulcer and had to do his tasks in the rearguard in the military intelligence recruiting propagandists. But his most valuable contribution to the war was his History of the War in several volumes.
As a politician, he was a conservative unionist, and he was appointed General Governor of Canada, and in this post, he signed Canada’s declaration of war against Germany in 1939.
He died of a cerebral thrombosis in 1940.
As a writer he is a very singular case among the literary world: he wrote only for his own entertainment, he didn’t look for fame or academic distinctions, neither he wrote for the love of art. His idol was Walter Scott (a Scotsman as himself) and he tried to emulate his novels. So, his literary ambition was below what a literary critic is waiting for. Bucham is known mostly for Hitchcock’s adaptation of his novel The Thirty-nine Steps (1915). He wrote this novel when he was recovering from his ulcer; he said he was writing only a “shilling shocker”. He thought writing had to be only a delightful hobby, because if you wanted to make a profession of it, then it would become stale and tarnished.
Another of his novels was Hunting Tower (1922), about a Russian princess imprisoned with her jewels, bolshevists, robbers and some more people who wanted to get her and them.
SUMMARY
Peter Gabraith, a Scottish soldier, had a very bad
week in the trenches of WWI. He suffered of a lot of discomforts and was in
want of a long rest, but, although he was in the middle of the war, he hadn’t met
any German to fight with. Then his battalion retreated to the Belgian village
of Ypres for a pause.
There, he was expecting to get some rest, but as there was a lot of noise, he looked for a quiet place to go to bed and found a very deep cellar in which he slept soundly. But, when he awoke the next morning, he found out that his battalion wasn’t there, that they had forgotten him.
He was a bit confused,
but most of all, he was hungry and thirsty, and while he was thinking how to
get some breakfast, a man came out of a room of the house he slept in with the
pockets full of booty. The man, a thief, tried to attack Galbraith, but he, a rugby
player, beat him down and shut him in a cupboard. He started to feel that, as
there were no more soldiers, there was a bit of chaos in the village, and marauders
and robbers were at large.
He found a bar where he was hoping to get some refresh,
but the place was a total riot. The landlord, seeing he was an English soldier,
asked for help. Galbraith, using some amount of violence, restored the order emptying
the bar of miscreants. Finally, he could order his breakfast.
With his hunger somewhat abated and seeing so much
disorder, he decided to go and look for the mayor and ask to put the place
under control.
In the street, he found more rioters: two men were attacking a
woman. Galbraith rescued her killing one assailant and scaring away the other. As he
told her his intentions, the woman, mademoiselle Omèrine, informed him that the
mayor had run away. Then they met a priest, and the three organized a meeting
with the woman’s father, the doctor, three old men and an old soldier with only
an arm. They form a Committee of Public Safety and appointed Galbraith as the
provisional mayor. The Scotsman organized patrols and beats and edicted some
bans, and after a few days, Ypres became a safe city again... in the middle of
a war. The few honest citizens still living in Ypres were very happy with Galbraith
ways, and mademoiselle Omèrine gave him the nickname of le Roi d’Ypres.
He almost acted as a dictator, but he kept the law and
the order.
But near Ypres the war went on, and one night, a German shell fell
in a street and killed mademoiselle Omèrine.
Galbraith was very sad and angry with the Boches and became
aware that his job was being a soldier and wining the war. Moreover, he wanted
to revenge Omèrine’s death. He understood that he wasn’t really a mayor, that
he was a deserter and that when his company found him, he would be arrested,
tried and shot. So he decided to resign his post, but the Committee didn’t accept
his dismissal at all.
Finally, the English battalion came back again to Ypres, a decorous and orderly village by then. Galbraith guess was right and he was arrested, tried but…, although they found guilty, there was no penalty for him, and even his Commanding Officer congratulated him in secret for his services in Ypres.
In the end, Galbraith went back to the horrible trenches,
but he would be very satisfied if he could kill fifty thousand Germans to make up
for the death of mademoiselle Omèrine.
QUESTIONS
-Professional authors write worse / better than non-professional
authors?
-Is it a real truth that an important proportion of young criminals
become policemen when adults? Or at least, that outlaws when young respect law
and order when adults?
-Do changes in our position in life modify our
character?
-Do we need authority to behave rightly? Is man a wolf
to man? Do we all have a beast inside?
-Against wars, is deserting the best option?
VOCABULARY
din, puddler, dottle, billets, come to grips,
shelling, frowsty, pasty face, shivered, wroth, miscreants, émeute, fathom,
wastrels, scragged, posse, beats, looters, rounded up, Draconian, dicing,
upshot, cutting knots, catch it in the neck, Harry Lauder, chaff, riding
roughshod over
dialectal words:
Wipers = Ypres
that yin = that one
ken = know
mair = more
the day = today
thae = those
sae = so
canny = careful
my lone = on my own
mitchy = very
speir = ask
nae doot = no doubt, sure
when rotters = a pack of rats
sodger = soldier