About this Book

Davis, known for his fiction and plays, also wrote about real people in Real Soldiers of Fortune, originally published in 1910.The Real Soldiers of Fortune are: Major-General Henry Ronald Douglas MacIver --- from none of the eighteen countries he has served has he a pension, birth, or billet and at sixty he finds himself at home in every land, but with a home in none, Baron James Harden-Hickey --- the man who made himself king, the man who was born after his time, Winston Spencer Churchill --- his is a picturesque career. Of any man of his few years speaking our language, his career is probably the most picturesque. And that he is half an American gives all of us an excuse to pretend we share in his successes, Captain Philo Norton McGriffin --- bitter indeed must have been the reflections of the young wounded American, robbed, by the parsimony of his country, of the right he had earned to serve it, and who was driven out to give his best years and his life for a strange people under a strange flag, William Walker --- the most distinguished of all American Soldiers of Fortune --- and because the people of his own day destroyed him is no reason that we should withhold from this American, the greatest of all filibusters, the recognition of his genius and Major Burnham, Chief of Scouts --- but Burnham himself we will leave "cooling off " in the Yaqui River, maybe, with Indians hunting for him along the banks. And we need not worry about him. We know they will not catch him.