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
