NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY

KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS TO THE ETEXT OR ANY

MEDIUM IT MAY

BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR

FITNESS

FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not al ow disclaimers of implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you may have other legal rights. INDEMNITY

You wil indemnify and hold the Project, its directors, officers, members and agents harmless from al liability, cost and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the fol owing that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext, [2]

alteration, modification, or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect. DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT BookishMall.com-tm"

You may distribute copies of this etext electronical y, or by disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this "Smal Print!" and al other references to Project BookishMall.com, or:

[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the etext or this "smal print!" statement. You may however, if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form, including any form resulting from conversion by word processing or hypertext software, but only so long as *EITHER*:

[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and does *not* contain characters other than those intended by the author of the work, although tilde (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may be used to convey punctuation intended by the author, and additional characters may be used to indicate hypertext links; OR

[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at no expense into plain ASCI , EBCDIC or equivalent form by the program that displays the etext (as is the case, for instance, with most word processors); OR

[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the etext in its original plain ASCI form (or in EBCDIC or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this "Smal Print!" statement.

[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the net profits you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are payable to "Project BookishMall.com Association/Carnegie-Mel on University" within the 60 days fol owing each date you prepare (or were legal y required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return. WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?

PART I 5

The Project grateful y accepts contributions in money, time, scanning machines, OCR

software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money should be paid to "Project BookishMall.com Association /

Carnegie-Mel on University". We are planning on making some changes in our donation structure in 2000, so you might want to email me, [email protected] beforehand.

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

The Good Soldier

by Ford Madox Ford

PART I

I

THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy--or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as wel as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at al about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, til today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shal ows. I don't mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You wil gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a

"heart", and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer. Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence's broken years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor's orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing might wel kil the poor thing. When we al first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three; Mrs Ashburnham Leonora --was thirty-one.