Greenmantle
By John Buchan
Sir Walter lay back in an armchair and spoke to the ceiling. It was the best story, the clearest and the fullest, I had ever heard of the war. He told me how and why, and when Turkey had left the rails. I heard about her grievances over our seizure of her ironclads, the mischief the coming of the Goeben had wrought, Enver and his precious Committee, and how they had got a cinch on the old Turk.
When he had spoken for a bit, he began to question me. ‘You are an intelligent fellow, and you will ask how a Polish adventurer, meaning Enver and a collection of Jews and gipsies, should have got control of a proud race. The ordinary man will tell you it was a German organization backed up with German money and German arms. You will inquire again how, since Turkey is primarily a religious power, Islam has played so small a part in it all.
The Sheikh-ul-Islam is neglected, and though the Kaiser proclaims a Holy War, he calls himself Hadji Mohammed Guilliamo and says the Hohenzollerns are descended from the Prophet, which seems to have fallen flat. The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet—I don’t know. I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number.’
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John Buchan
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir GCMG GCVO CH KStJ PC DL ( 26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation.
Biography.
After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort during the First World War. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927. Still, he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction.
In 1935, King George V, on the advice of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, appointed Buchan to replace the Earl of Bessborough as Governor General of Canada, for which purpose Buchan was raised to the peerage. He occupied the post until he died in 1940. Buchan was enthusiastic about literacy and the development of Canadian culture, and he received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.
John Buchan
