The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard

You do very well my friends to treat me with some little reverence for in honouring me you are honouring both France and yourselves. It is not merely an old greymoustached officer whom you see eating his omelette or draining his glass but it is a fragment of history. In me you see one of the last of those wonderful men the men who were veterans when they were yet boys who learned to use a sword earlier than a razor and who during a hundred battles had never once let the enemy see the colour of their knapsacks. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard originally published in 1896. A true literary gem.