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Readers of Marbot, de Gonneville, Coignet, de Fezensac, Bourgogne, and the other French soldiers who have recorded their reminiscences of the Napoleonic campaigns, will recognise the fountain from which I have drawn the adventures of Etienne Gerard. It was an extraordinary age and produced extraordinary types. For twenty-three years France was at war, with one short breathing space of a few months. To Frenchmen war had become the normal and natural state. Children were born in war, grew up in war, fought in the war, and died in the same endless war without ever knowing what peace was like. Yet, as we read the memoirs of these fighting men, or if we consult the descriptions left by those who, like our own Napier, had met them in the field, we find that they were by no means brutalised by this strange experience, and that among them were knightly and gentle souls, playfully gallant, whose actions recall the very spirit of chivalry. A better knight than Marbot never rode in the lists, and what shall we say of that dragoon, described by Napier, who raised his sword, saluted and passed, on perceiving that his English antagonist in a fierce mélée had only one arm, or that madcap officer of cavalry who charged the whole English army single-handed. These are the men, glorious in their youth, and pathetic in their useless and poverty-stricken old age, of whom I desired to draw a type, noble, débonnaire, capable, self-sufficient, human, and garrulous. I may add that, light as the sketches are, there has been some attempt to keep the military and historical detail correct.

This was Arthur Conan Doyle’s preface to The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, when the Author’s Edition of his works was published on 16 November 1903. The first book publication, from George Newnes, had been on 15 February 1896, following the appearance of individual exploits in Newnes’s Strand magazine for December 1894, April through September 1895, and December 1895. Ironically the Author’s Edition Exploits emerged two months after Newnes’s book publication of the only other collection of Gerard stories, The Adventures of Gerard, but this was far too short an interval to permit its inclusion (save for one story) in the Author’s Edition. The Adventures, fresher in the author’s mind as he was writing his preface, accounts for his inclusion of a source not available for the Exploits, the Mémoires of Sergeant Adrien Jean Baptiste François Bourgogne, published in Paris in 1898. Bourgogne (1785–1867) was in any case purely concerned with the Russian Campaign of 1812, which is only glancingly noticed in its conclusion in the Exploits, and while ACD drew important lessons from the Journal de la Campagne de Russie by Raymond Aymery Philippe Joseph, Due de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1784–1867), its preoccupations were likewise peripheral to the Exploits though vital to the Adventures. What had launched Conan Doyle’s first series of Napoleonic short stories supposedly narrated by his Gerard, were primarily the recollections of Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcellin, Baron de Marbot (1782–1854), of Aymar Olivier Le Harivel de Gonneville (1783–1872), and of Jean-Roch Coignet (1776–1860?).

ACD’s Through the Magic Door, published in 1907, is a seminal positive criticism and celebration of his favourite works (some of its material reworked from articles in 1894, the year of Gerard’s serialised Exploits). The reader is supposedly standing with the enthusiastic author before one of his bookshelves:

Here is Marbot at this end—the first of all soldier books in the world. This is the complete three-volume French edition, with red and gold cover, smart and débonnaire like its author. Here he is in one frontispiece with his pleasant, round, boyish face, as a Captain of his beloved Chasseurs. And here in the other is the grizzled old bull-dog as a full general, looking as full of fight as ever…. the human, the gallant, the inimitable Marbot! His book is that which gives us the best picture by far of the Napoleonic soldiers, and to me they are even more interesting than their great leader, though his must ever be the most singular figure in history. But those soldiers, with their huge shakeos, their hairy knapsacks, and their hearts of steel—what men they were! …

It must be confessed that Marbot’s details are occasionally a little hard to believe. Never in the pages of Lever has there been such a series of hairbreadth escapes and dare-devil exploits. Surely he stretched it a little sometimes. You may remember his adventure at Eylau … how a cannon-ball, striking the top of his helmet, paralyzed him by the concussion of his spine; and how, on a Russian officer running forward to cut him down, his horse bit the man’s face nearly off. This was the famous charger which savaged everything until Marbot, having bought it for next to nothing, cured it by thrusting a boiling leg of mutton into its mouth when it tried to bite him. It certainly does need a robust faith to get over these incidents. And yet, when one reflects upon the hundreds of battles and skirmishes which a Napoleonic officer must have endured—how they must have been the uninterrupted routine of his life from the first dark hair upon his lip to the first grey one upon his head, it is presumptuous to say what may or may not have been possible in such unparalleled careers. At any rate, be it fact or fiction—fact it is, in my opinion, with some artistic touching up of the highlights—there are few books which I could not spare from my shelves better than the memoirs of the gallant Marbot.

I dwell upon this particular book because it is the best; but take the whole line, and there is not one which is not full of interest. Marbot gives you the point of view of the officer. So does De Ségur and De Fezensac and Colonel Gonville, each in some different branch of the service. But some are from the pens of the men in the ranks, and they are even more graphic than the others. Here, for example, are the papers of good old Coignet, who was a grenadier of the Guard, and could neither read nor write until after the great wars were over. A tougher soldier never went into battle.

In 1948 there was published a little biography of Marbot by Vyvyan Ferrers. It shares with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and P. G. Wodehouse’s Money in the Bank the distinction of having been written in prison, for Ferrers had been British Consul at St Malo when the Nazis took it. Before his imprisonment, Ferrers had been reading the Marbot Mémoires. Now he based his book on its memory. His manuscript was rescued after the war and returned to him. He called it The Brigadier and this was how the imprisoned consul began his book:

Conan Doyle has written a series of entertaining short stories of which the central figure is a dashing young French hussar, who, in the course of the Napoleonic Wars goes through a number of hair-raising adventures in every part of Europe. The hero is both lovable and laughable. Gallant and gay, valiant and vain, he combines two characters which are sometimes supposed to be incompatible. He is both a braggart and a brave man….

It is evident that by the word ‘brigadier’ the author intended to signify the rank which the French call général de brigade. Unfortunately, there is also in the French service a rank which bears the designation brigadier. It is a very lowly rank indeed: it is approximately equivalent to ‘lance-corporal’. This must have been pointed out to the author while the stories were appearing one by one. When they were collected and republished in book form an explanatory footnote was added. The word ‘brigadier’ is to be understood (it says) in the English sense. This is all very well, but the reader must be permitted to wonder whether the writer, when he conferred that rank upon his hero, was aware that it has a French sense also, and what that sense is.

And Ferrers then introduces his own subject, Marcellin Marbot, ‘a real officer who was undoubtedly the author’s model’. He was not alone in this identification. Andrew Lang, reviewing the Author’s Edition anonymously in the Quarterly Review (vol. 200, July 1904), wrote that

Brigadier Gerard is Sir Arthur’s masterpiece; we never weary of that brave, stupid, vain, chivalrous being, who hovers between General Marbot and Thackeray’s Major Geoghegan, with all the merits of both, and with others of his own.

We may grant ‘Geoghegan’—Conan Doyle was proud that Thackeray had been a friend of his father’s family, deeply respected the campaign in the Lowlands in Henry Esmond and thought Vanity Fair one of the three greatest novels of the nineteenth century, and these no less than Thackeray’s swashbuckling pastiche The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan must be included among the sources of Gerard—with the reservation that Gahagan recounts impossible exploits, while Gerard, no less than Marbot, prefers and reminisces in ambiguous inclination towards an adorned truth.

But there is more to Gerard than an imitation of Marbot, albeit Marbot was the initial inspiration. The Mémoires in the edition Conan Doyle prized was published in 1891, and this French text integrated the fire, and dash, and vivid sense of landscape and action, with subtleties, and of this example Conan Doyle made good use. But he used it in a fashion entirely his own. Marbot tells one story of how the elder of two Cossack prisoners attempted to assassinate him and succeeded in killing a beloved friend, whereupon Marbot shot him, but his furious intention to slaughter the murderer’s brother with his next bullet was stopped by the Cossacks’ tutor who begged him to think of his own mother and spare the innocent. Conan Doyle combined a remarkable mastery of the mingling of pathos and comedy, and one can see him simultaneously moved by the episode and thoughtfully aware of its unintended comic possibilities. So in ‘The Medal of Brigadier Gerard’ this becomes an encounter with a youth who challenges pistol with sword:

‘Rendez-vous!’ he yelled.

‘I must compliment monsieur upon his French’, said I, resting the barrel of my pistol upon my bridle arm, which I have always found best when shooting from the saddle. I aimed at his face, and could see, even in the moonlight, how white he grew when he understood that it was all up with him. But even as my finger pressed the trigger I thought of his mother, and put my ball through his horse’s shoulder.

It neatly makes its point about French chivalry towards a disadvantaged opponent, which deduction ACD had drawn from several sources other than Marbot. But intricate and implicit in the chivalry is the glorious laughter of ‘I thought of his mother and shot the horse’. The chivalry, and the momentary fear transmitted to the reader on the boy’s behalf, are the greater because of the delicious infelicity of the association of images, and Gerard is all the more lovable because he so blatantly and unwittingly makes such a ham-fisted business of recording his unquestionable nobility. Wilde, with whom Conan Doyle had conversed with such interest at the famous meeting which set on foot The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray, had once termed a bad stage version of The Three Musketeers ‘Athos, Pathos and Bathos’. Whether he repeated his remark to ACD or not, his interlocutor showed his capacity for using that formula to excellent (in place of execrable) effect. And if Gerard unconsciously sacrifices tact, thereby he retains his vital narrative pace.

One of the strongest points of difference between Marbot and Gerard lies in their relationship to Napoleon. Marbot, confronted by Napoleon’s Machiavellian encouragement of hostility between Charles IV of Spain and his son Ferdinand, the better to instal Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne, was disgusted

… mais disons-le sincèrement, la conduite de Napoleon dans cette scandaleuse affaire fut indigne d’un grand homme tel que lui. S’offrir comme médiateur entre le père et le fils pour les attirer dans un piège, les dépouiller ensuite l’un et l’autre … ce fut une atrocité, un acte odieux, que l’histoire a flétri et que la Providence ne tarda pas a punir, car ce fut la guerre d’Espagne qui prépara et amena la chute de Napoléon.

The farthest Gerard will go in criticism of his great man is to deplore Napoleon’s insistence that Gerard has the thickest head in his army. Of Marbot’s sense of the great diplomatic games afoot behind the battles and occupations, Gerard (unless directly informed) has hardly the slightest inkling. Beyond his own immediate experience he knows very little, and his Emperor is unquestionable save where he acts unfairly to Gerard. There are moments of similarity in their confrontations: when Napoleon is pleased with Gerard, he pulls Gerard’s ear as in reality he pulled Marbot’s, but then he also pulled Coignet’s.

Conan Doyle has given us the clue: Marbot was an officer, and an officer’s son. De Gonville was an aristocrat: he supplies something of Gerard too, notably in his intoxication with chivalry and its ancient French traditions, but these he says came from his boyhood reading while to Gerard his own place in the tradition is instinctive and unliterary. It is to Coignet, the illiterate soldier, that we must turn for many of Gerard’s qualities and situations. Coignet had been promoted, as Les cahiers du capitaine Coignet proudly asserts, but he started as a private. Gerard we know as an officer, but he shares with Coignet his creation as a soldier by the Napoleonic wars. Of Gerard’s family we know little, save that he loved them, a quality he holds in common with many Napoleonic soldier memorialists—Coignet is an exception here, saying much of his hatred of his stepmother and of the father who sired 45 children (Marbot is far from the least credible of these raconteurs) and abandoned his legitimate offspring to misery and illiteracy and possible death. But Coignet’s harsh background led him into more detail than Marbot on the savagery, and treachery of Spanish guerilla warfare, and Gerard’s adventures in Spain can recall this horrific undertone of Coignet’s Cahiers, however different the actual episodes. It is Coignet who at the end of the war is sent to plant cabbages like Gerard, unlike the officer aristocrats who continue with military careers. It is Coignet who goes to the Café Milon after the war, thus supplying the location where Gerard tells his stories. What Conan Doyle had produced was a hero who moved between the harshly divided classes, and who reflected some of the attitudes of each. His experiences are those of an officer; his circumstances have more in common with the soldiers who originated without family advantages. Ferrers was shrewder than he realised in raising the question of a brigadier’s being a lance-corporal: the aged soldier whose life has been meaningless other than during his Napoleonic experiences has as his counterpart in Conan Doyle’s English fictions the nonagenarian Corporal Brewster in ‘A Straggler of ’15’ still absolutely dominated by his moment of glory at Waterloo. In real life it was this kind of veteran whom ACD would have most naturally encountered as a Portsmouth doctor. And Brewster sees nothing later or greater than his ‘Dook’, Wellington, much as Gerard has no horizons beyond Napoleon. Coignet gives the soldiers’ heartbreak at Napoleon’s abdication, and behind all the laughter and thrilling involvement in each episode, the heartbreak is fundamental to Gerard’s narratives.

Gerard, however many influences he reflected from the literature of Napoleonic veterans, was Conan Doyle’s own creation, and no warmed-over fictionalisation of Marbot, Coignet, or anyone else. In saluting Marbot as ‘inimitable’, ACD quietly served notice that he was not imitating him. His declaration of ‘attempt to keep the military and historical detail correct’ intermingled humour with modesty, for the stories followed a massive absorption in the sources. But when all is said Gerard is not writing or dictating his memoirs: he is giving a series of oral reminiscences to buyers of drinks in his chosen café. His obvious emulator is Bertie Wooster in the work of Conan Doyle’s most impressive disciple, Wodehouse, whose oral narratives are presumably delivered to Drones Club or country-house audiences. Like Bertie, Gerard is literate (and thus lacks Coignet’s ambition to master the education of which he had been deprived), but he wears what little non-military education he had assimilated very lightly. Their breezy indifference to conventions of art appreciation (more evident in the Adventures of Gerard than the Exploits) is but one aspect of a Gerard-Wooster affinity: neither are absolute Philistines, for both can warm to some aesthetic epiphany entirely in terms of their own personal reactions. And both creations make masterly use of narrative to reveal the narrator’s absurdity all the more clearly in the conviction of their own profundity. Simultaneously the narrators’ gallantry, good humour, altruism, loyalty and sense of code invite the admiration their declarations of intelligence so seldom obtain. On the other hand within their own limited area of special knowledge each has a startling shrewdness: Gerard can predict a soldier’s tactical reaction in an immediate military situation, Bertie can foretell a woman’s fury if deprived of her afternoon tea. The all-revealing military narrator reappears in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, but the work here is much less subtle: Flashman is a coward and a fraud, while Gerard is neither, nor, fundamentally, is Bertie, however much circumstances force them into ludicrous attempts at disguise from time to time—and Flashman’s unintentional revelations are to the depth of his depravity, not to its existence. The frank poltroon is easier to draw than the thickhead stoutheart, who must feed audience irony while warming emotions.

Conan Doyle tells us in Memories and Adventures (1923, 1930) that he ‘began the Brigadier Gerard series of stories’ in Davos where he had gone to do what might be possible to save his wife whose health had collapsed from tuberculosis. So ‘The Medal of Brigadier Gerard’, published well in advance of the rest, was written there early in 1894. There were excellent reasons for it. Convinced that he was being mercilessly tagged as the Sherlock Holmes man at the expense of all of his other literary work, ACD had resolved on ending the Holmes series. But with ‘the death of Sherlock Holmes’, emblazoned on the frontispiece of the Strand for December 1893, ACD had to provide a new character or characters for a short story series, having established so well the public appetite for his innovation of two interacting characters in otherwise unrelated episodes. If Holmes supposedly met his death in order to destroy ‘the Napoleon of Crime’, Professor Moriarty, it was what Holmes would call an obvious chain of reasoning that his own place should be taken by a creation dominated by Napoleon himself. There were decided risks. Holmes was the author’s to do with as he wished, as he so drastically showed in ‘The Final Problem’; Napoleon would be absolutely circumscribed by what was known about him, and it was a great deal. Hence the Napoleon-Gerard association became the natural partnership with which to succeed Holmes and Watson, but Gerard, while a very well worked-out character, is also symbolic of countless French soldiers, and Napoleon was too much occupied to play a part in each instalment. Gerard, therefore, does all that he does in the cause of a Napoleon constantly in his mind, but we seldom see Napoleon—he enters only three Exploits. Naturally Napoleon had to make a personal appearance in the ‘Medal’, as the pilot story to launch the series, so neatly accomplished in the Strand of December 1894, exactly a year after it had carried ‘The Final Problem’. ACD had found the formula with which to mollify, though not to silence, his devoted and infuriated readers.

‘The Medal of Brigadier Gerard’ was an excellent pilot for the series, but it has some instructive points of difference from what was to follow. As a story it is very much a unity, with everything subordinated to its beginning and end, an ironic though intensely thrilling Odyssey with a decidedly mixed reception for the returned Odysseus. It reflects the speed and isolation in which it was written, and it makes magnificent reading aloud as the author proved on his American tour late in 1894 when, in the Homeric tradition, he delivered it to lecture audiences. The main body of the Exploits indicates the renewed accessibility of his mass of source-material for ACD, beginning with ‘How the Brigadier Held the King’, an Aeneid rather than an Odyssey whose ultimate destination, let alone adventures en route, is unknown to Gerard and to his audience, whereas the reader of the ‘Medal’ may sense or deduce the true nature of the mission which Gerard will only discover at its conclusion. ‘How the Brigadier Held the King’ maintains its ironies while piling twist upon turn as the hero is moved by forces outside his control through events and characters of dizzying but sharply-etched contrasting individualities. The brigand chief so powerfully struck the imagination that he was appropriated by Conan Doyle’s iconoclastic neighbour at Hindhead, George Bernard Shaw, for his Mendoza in Man and Superman, with some additional blooms purloined from the Marshal Millefleurs. ‘The theft of the brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate’, declared Shaw in the Epistle Dedicatory prefacing his published play. Napoleon and his romantic, thick-headed lieutenant in Shaw’s earlier The Man of Destiny also have obvious Gerardine origins.

Andrew Lang commented in his Quarterly Review essay of 1904:

The vanity of the Brigadier and his extreme simplicity are a little exaggerated; perhaps the author did not know at first how dear Gerard was to grow to himself and to his readers.

This was written after publication of The Adventures of Gerard, which ends with the Brigadier in supreme command of the reader’s affections and loyalties as he looks on the face of his dead Napoleon. But he had grown dear to Lang from the first, witness the notice of the Exploits in Longman’s (vol. XXVII, April 1896), in Lang’s column ‘At the Sign of the Ship’:

He is an absolutely delightful brigadier—brave, vain, not too clever. … For humour, excitement, adventure, and manly feeling Mr Doyle has never excelled this new work, which is a thing of the open air, and much superior to (as I trust it will be even more popular than) Sherlock Holmes. ‘Mair meat’, we say, as the ghost said to King Jamie, more Brigadier, please, Mr Doyle, when your leisure serves!

This brings the realisation that it is in Brigadier Gerard we meet the true rival of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle had not realised it when he made Dr Watson ‘take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr Sherlock Homes was distinguished’, but it was to bring Gerard to life that Holmes had ‘died’, and Lang, for one, thought the contrivance of the linked short story series had now been given a more worthy protagonist. Lang’s reservations on Holmes were not, perhaps, entirely divorced from the ill-success of his own murder story The Mark of Cain (published in 1886, a year before A Study in Scarlet), but his verdict must have been a relief to Conan Doyle after inevitable gnawing doubts as to the wisdom of Holmes’s sacrifice. Reviewers were so ready to insist one’s true métier had been found in the literary form one had just abandoned, and indeed the Athenaeum on 4 April 1896 had welcomed Gerard bleakly enough:

Sherlock Holmes was a considerable creation, and none can write a better detective story than Dr Conan Doyle; but Sherlock Holmes is dead, and the tangled tales of crime and the avengers of crime are replaced by the exploits of a veteran warrior moulded on the lines at present popular. … No doubt a novel of this sort will meet with a hearty reception from those who like tales full of stir and movement.

The reviewer called Gerard a ‘fine old fellow’, but ACD had hopes of a somewhat younger audience than would be induced to spring to the bookseller on that information. The Bookman (April, 1896), reviewing the Exploits, was a comparable relief:

Mr Conan Doyle has never done anything better than this—and, remembering the good things he has already given us, this is saying a good deal. If this book had appeared ten years ago it would have made a great impression. But it is the fate of a novelist who has made a new departure to be quickly followed by a score of imitators, and only the sifting power of time can give him the distinction he deserves. Mr Conan Doyle’s work will keep. It has the salt of an excellent style; and when a score of books of a like kind are dead and forgotten, his will be read.

The Bookman judged the critical market well. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard won many friends and made many other reviewers very happy, bringing favourable reports first from the Scotsman, on 17 February 1896, a mere two days after publication; followed by The Speaker which paid tribute to the scholarship of the book, and the Spectator (both on 25 April), which responded as so many did, to what it saw as the Brigadier’s childlike or schoolboy qualities.

It was, no doubt, to be expected that the reviewers’ chief reaction should be one of some satisfaction at their own intellectual superiority to Etienne Gerard. And this certainly helped to make him a favourite. Indeed, the reviewers seem to have agreed in seeing Gerard as appropriate to their notion of a Napoleonic officer, stage-French above all in his un-British self-admiration. Yet there was real historical insight here, too, for to read ‘How the Brigadier Played for a Kingdom’, for example, is to gain purchase on the awakening of German romantic nationalism in a form the cold print of scientific history cannot supply. The measure of Arthur Conan Doyle’s success may be shown by the final passage in which Gerard for once shows himself a visionary of the Zeitgeist, and with nothing incongruous about his understanding having for once transcended the limits of Napoleon’s.

The quality which enabled Conan Doyle to strike so hard and so acutely in the furtherance of historical understanding was in itself a highly scientific one. He had followed the principle Sir Herbert Butterfield was to single out as essential for the historian, that of considering the problem from a reversal of the loyalties the historian discovered in himself. The Gerard stories themselves are such an attempt: his The Great Shadow (1892) had looked on Napoleon with a sense of the menace indicated by its title which he posed to Britain, specifically to a Scots boy, and ‘A Straggler of ’15’ had given a memory of the struggle through the dying eyes of an aged British soldier, transformed to his old force at the moment of death. And in ‘The Lord of Chateau Noir’, published in the Strand, in July of the year whose December saw the first Gerard exploit in that periodical, ACD had produced a haunting work of power and anger on the German occupation of France during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, ominously detailing the intransigence of French revenge. For all of his charm, Gerard is the patriot transformed into the aggressor, and the nationalism his master’s aggression calls forth in Germany was to become aggression in its turn with comparable responses.

As the United Kingdom enters on its new destiny in deeper involvement with the European continent, it is still faced by the difficulty that ailed Conan Doyle’s reviewers: how to think European. It is all the more appropriate, then, to turn to a delightful but instructive group of stories from a Scotsman dismayed at the isolation which led his fellow-British to devalue and to miss the realities of the European continental peoples. Of that dismay he gave frank testimony in Through the Magic Door. Of his attempts to counter its causes few are so timely for our needs today as the fascinating panorama of European identities first put before the world in The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard.

Owen Dudley Edwards