The Prussian Officer and Other Stories is a collection of early short stories by D. H. Lawrence. It was published by Duckworth in London on 26 November 1914, and in America by B. W. Huebsch in 1916. The stories collected in this volume are: "The Prussian Officer" "The Thorn in the Flesh" "Daughters of the Vicar" "A Fragment of Stained Glass" "The Shades of Spring" "Second Best" "The Shadow in the Rose Garden" "Goose Fair" "The White Stocking" "A Sick Collier" "The Christening" "Odour of Chrysanthemums" The first narrative in the collection is "The Prussian Officer," which tells of a Captain and his orderly. Having wasted his youth gambling, the captain has been left with only his military career, and though he has taken on mistresses throughout his life, he remains single. His young orderly is involved in a relationship with a young woman, and the captain, feeling sexual tension towards the young man, prevents the orderly from engaging in the relationship by taking up his evenings. These evenings lead to the captain abusing his orderly and leaving large, painful bruises on his thighs, making it hard for the orderly to walk. Whilst isolated in a forest during manoeuvres, the orderly takes out murderous revenge on the captain, but finds himself in a daze seemingly due both to the pain of the bruises and thirst. The orderly eventually collapses and dies in the hospital shortly there after. The corpses of the two men lay side by side.

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, Lawrence's first collection of short stories, was published in England in 1914 and in the USA in 1916. It contains some of the greatest stories he ever wrote: 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', 'Daughters of the Vicar', 'The Prussian Officer', and 'The White Stocking', with settings ranging from the mining community of Eastwood to Germany before the First World War. The text of this new edition is based on Lawrence's manuscripts, typescripts and corrected proofs, and is the first to remove the corruptions introduced by copyists, typists and printers. The introduction sets out the history of each story and of the collection itself. There is a textual apparatus recording variant readings and full notes explain historical references and other allusions, dialect forms and foreign words. Two important appendixes print the earliest surviving fragment of 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' and the 1911 version of 'Daughters of the Vicar'.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

A CLASSIC STORY OF HUMAN CRUELTY.