The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories. Arthur Conan Doyle

I do not care to see red and white together. Even my red cap thrown down on my white counterpane has given me dreams in which I have seen those monstrous plains, the reeling, tortured army, and the crimson smears which glared upon the snow behind them. You will coax no story out of me about that business, for the thought of it is enough to turn my wine to vinegar and my tobacco to straw. (‘How the Brigadier Played for a Kingdom.’)

      But of course in that refusal, ACD had accepted the challenge. In so doing he used vibrations brought to perfect pitch within his creative orchestra, but not much used elsewhere in the Gerard stories−not simply horror or terror (several have those) but fear of future haunting. M.R. James (1862–1936) was to borrow this precise use of haunting by symbol for the closing lines of the masterpiece among his ghost stories ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, composed a few years later. As with Tolstoy, ‘1812’ awoke in ACD the sound of the supernatural. Nevertheless, even after he had crossed his Rubicon (or in context, his Niemen) in 1894, he was still uneasy with his Russian story when he finally attempted it. ‘Yes, I’ll have a Brigadier ready this month’, he told the editor of the Strand ‘though perhaps not up to the mark of the last two. You can’t always hit the bull.’ (ACD to Herbert Greenhough Smith, n.d. [1902], Conan Doyle mss, University of Virginia.) But the Athenaeum, of 28 November 1903, reviewing its appearance between book covers as part of The Adventures of Gerard, singled out ‘the ride to Minsk’ alongside ‘the rout at Waterloo’ as ‘among the most vivid of the most tragic scenes’. ACD may have feared that ‘How the Brigadier Rode to Minsk’ was too close in its early intrigue to ‘Kingdom’, but their resolutions are very different−the magnificent realisation of the poetic origins of German nationalism in ‘Kingdom’ as against the essentially Tolstoyan close (if by very un Tolstoyan means) in ‘Minsk’ when Gerard risks everything to save a woman whose hand he would not take and whose lips he would not kiss. ‘ … there is no greatness where simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent’, proclaims War and Peace, Book 14, chapter 18: there is greatness in Gerard when he rides from Minsk.

      Indeed the entire story seems written within parameters already asserted by Tolstoy in a preceding passage:

      The movements of the Russian and French armies during the campaign from Moscow back to the Niemen were like those in a game of Russian blindman’s buff, in which two players are blindfolded and one of them occasionally rings a little bell to inform the catcher of his whereabouts. First he rings his bell fearlessly, but when he gets into a tight place he runs away as quickly as he can, and often thinking to escape runs straight into his opponent’s arms.

      At first while they were still moving along the Kaluga road, Napoleon’s armies made their presence known, but later when they reached the Smolensk road they ran holding the clapper of their bell tight−and often thinking they were escaping ran right into the Russians.

      … If news was received one day that the enemy had been in a certain position the day before, by the third day when something could have been done, that army was already two days’ march farther on and in quite another position. (Book 14, chapter 17.)

      Conan Doyle, as ‘Minsk’ shows, intertextualised; or wrote his gloss in Tolstoy’s margin. It does contain−as so much of his work contains−covert as well as overt humour (where parallels in Tolstoy will not, perhaps, be easily found). Gerard is not only ludicrously gullible in riding to Minsk; he could never have made the journey in the time required. Similarly, it takes him only two days to return well over 200 miles from Minsk to Smolensk, via the Berezina whose crossing gave the French their worst moments in the entire retreat from Moscow. This is Tolstoy in miniature, and the ‘sense of space’ for which ACD so much admired Tolstoy, is miniaturised too.

      ‘Minsk’ is but one Tolstoyan moment. But the entire corpus of Gerard stories makes for nothing less than a Tolstoyan totality. What Lukacz called history ‘as a mass experience … on a European scale’ comes to life through these stories, particularly given that, as Lukacz continues, ‘The Napoleonic wars everywhere evoked a wave of national feeling, of national resistance to the Napoleonic conquests, an experience of enthusiasm for national independence’. We should qualify this, for in fact Poland (the martyred nation of nineteenth-century Europe) found its national self-realisation in support of Napoleon, as indeed Gerard conveys in the very first of his narratives, ‘The Medal of Brigadier Gerard’−reinforced again in ‘How the Brigadier came to the Castle of Gloom’. In fact one of the greatest strengths of the Gerard series is surely its insistence on the varieties of national response to the crises of the time−the last flickers of ancient institutions we behold in Venice; the embers of recent but stifled flame in Corsica; the rage against conquest in Zaragoza; the self-discovery of popular revolt in Spain or in Portugal; and the awakening of new national feeling in Germany and even in Russia. If we want to understand how the era brought nationalism into focus, we need go no farther than these stories.

      It is a startling reminder of how objective a sturdy British patriot like Conan Doyle could be when we realise that the sole country with no national self-regeneration from encounter with Napoleon, is England. (Significantly he does suggest a popular self-discovery in the struggle against Napoleon in his pre-Gerard short novel The Great Shadow, 1892, but this is in his native Scotland, not in England.) We have charming, tender, amusing, heroic, and at times almost unbearably funny visions of the English, but there is not the slightest indication of a national struggle. The focus is entirely on the upper classes and their servants or subalterns, and the only idea in their heads aside from war seems to be sport. Gerard adds to the fun by often getting the meaning of the sport wrong, but we are to infer that he is still quite right about its pre-eminence. The closest we get to national hatred is in the person of Lord Dacre, probably as a compensation for spending the war years in quarrelling at home with his wife and his neighbours. The one Englishman with an ideological response to the wars is a deserter who assembles a gang to prey on all sides, Captain Alexis Morgan aka the Marshal Millefleurs. He converses ‘in an excellent sardonic fashion’, and is thoroughly deserving of a place alongside fascinating reprobates such as Long John Silver and Professor Moriarty.

      The curious intellectual isolation of the English during the European cataclysm brings ACD remarkably close to his admirer, critic, emulator and adversary G.K. Chesterton as he expressed himself in his poem ‘The Secret People’ (1907):

      In foam and flame at Trafalgar, on Albuera plains, We did and died like lions, to keep ourselves in chains

      We lay in living ruins; firing and fearing not The strange fierce face of the Frenchmen who knew for what they fought,

      And the man who seemed to be more than man we strained against and broke;

      And we broke our own rights with him. And still we never spoke.

      Yet if ACD is as influential here on GKC as Sherlock Holmes was to prove on Father Brown, their vantage-points were still different. Chesterton’s is a very Left-wing perspective in this poem (it was published for Neolith, a new journal edited by the Fabian Socialist E. Nesbit), and he had been as hostile to the British cause in the Boer War as ACD was embattled on its behalf; Chesterton was Anglo-Catholic and would become a Roman Catholic, whereas the Jesuit-educated ACD had abandoned his ancestral faith as a schoolboy; Chesterton writes as an Englishman by birth whereas Conan Doyle was at most a convert to Englishness; and Chesterton was often pro-French, while Conan Doyle was not, even though he sees things through French eyes more easily than Chesterton.

      Because Conan Doyle stressed his Englishness in works such as The White Company (1891) and Sir Nigel (1906) celebrating fourteenth-century English knight-errantry and patriotism, and because his most famous creation Sherlock Holmes is vulgarly equated with quintessential Englishness, we tend to undervalue his debt to his Scottish origins and his Irish antecedents. But it is these which supplied such bite and wit, such clarity and profundity, in his revelation of the English as they might appear in foreign eyes. He could do it because his own eyes were foreign enough to observe.

      Englishness in ACD’s eyes showed itself as a series of laws of awesome significance to their upholders, but wholly vulnerable to a different logic. ACD’s Irish friend Oscar Wilde had shown something of the same dual perception