Chapter One. In which the author describes his early years.
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It is a curious thing how soldiers, banished to some desolate outpost or perhaps just keeping sleep at bay during a cold night's watch will turn to speech as their main form of amusement, jokes, anecdotes, dubious legends and exaggerated reports of battles none but the teller have witnessed are all weaved into a comforting blanket to make one miss home a little less, and make the time between battles pass a little faster.
But no subject elicits a warmer interest or a more genuine narration than the biographical details of ones own life, and having been encouraged by my fellow officers and the enlisted men to put down on paper the particulars of mine, I hope that you derive some measure of the comfort they gave to those first hearing them.
I will warn you as I did them, that everything I am about to relate is the honest truth, though sometimes it falls short of such an ideal, and other times can only be said to be distantly related to the truth.
It is customary in such accounts to begin one's tale at the beginning, in childhood, and I have no wish to be original on this point. I was born Benjamin Finn in the small hamlet of Gunk, somewhere east of Brightwood. Gunk was not its true name, but it is the one my brothers and I gave it, and I see no reason to betray my heritage so early in this narrative.
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The Life and Adventures of Benjamin Finn
Non-FictionThe Life and Adventures of Benjamin Finn. Being a preliminary, fragmentary, confidential and much unedited first draft of Captain Ben Finn as told by himself.
