Sir Montague Merline and his platoon get into a bloody combat in Africa and they are all massacred except for one man. Since her husband is presumed dead, Lady Merline remarries, but Montague emerges a couple of years later in some African village, with no memory. After finding out about his wife's new life, he decides not to ruin her happiness and goes off to join French Foreign Legion. The descriptions of Legion garrison life closely match those contained in the autobiographical In the Foreign Legion by ex-legionnaire Edwin Rosen.

The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

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Two tales, historical fiction.