Tales Of Hearsay By Joseph Conrad : From the author of Books like - Heart of Darkness - Lord Jim - Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction

Book excerpt: From the author of Books like - Heart of Darkness - Lord Jim - Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction - The Secret Agent - Nostromo - Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer - Heart of Darkness and Other Tales - The Shadow-Line - The Secret Sharer - Victory - Tales Of Hearsay - Under Western Eyes - The Arrow Of Gold - The Inheritors - Tales Of Unrest About the Book: The old officer with long white moustaches gave rein to his indignation. "Is it possible that you youngsters should have no more sense than that! Some of you had better wipe the milk off your upper lip before you start to pass judgment on the few poor stragglers of a generation which has done and suffered not a little in its time." His hearers having expressed much compunction the ancient warrior became appeased. But he was not silenced. "I am one of them—one of the stragglers, I mean," he went on patiently. "And what did we do? What have we achieved? He—the great Napoleon—started upon us to emulate the Macedonian Alexander, with a ruck of nations at his back. We opposed empty spaces to French impetuosity, then we offered them an interminable battle so that their army went at last to sleep in its positions lying down on the heaps of its own dead. Then came the wall of fire in Moscow. It toppled down on them. "Then began the long rout of the Grand Army. I have seen it stream on, like the doomed flight of haggard, spectral sinners across the innermost frozen circle of Dante's Inferno, ever widening before their despairing eyes. "They who escaped must have had their souls doubly riveted inside their bodies to carry them out of Russia through that frost fit to split rocks. But to say that it was our fault that a single one of them got away is mere ignorance. Why! Our own men suffered nearly to the limit of their strength. Their Russian strength! About the Author: Joseph Conrad, original name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, (born December 3, 1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv, Ukraine]—died August 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England), English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story “Heart of Darkness” (1902). During his lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. But his initial reputation as a masterful teller of colourful adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the individual ...(100 of 2481 words). Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature.