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
1814, and, as stated, 14 March, a month before Napoleon’s abdication and retirement to Elba. Despite facing several foreign armies on French soil, confidence among Napoleon’s soldiers was running high, having just scattered the Russians from Rheims with 6000 enemy casualties and less than 700 French. Napoleon had now to decide between three different routes to reach Paris.
The Duke of Tarentum, or Macdonald, as his old comrades prefer to call him, was, as I could perceive, in the vilest of tempers. His grim Scotch face was like one of those grotesque door-knockers which one sees in the Faubourg St Germain. Weheard afterwards that the Emperor had said in jest that he would have sent him against Wellington in the South, but that he was afraid to trust him within the sound of the pipes. Major Charpentier and I could plainly see that he was smouldering with anger.
‘Brigadier Gerard of the Hussars,’ said he, with the air of the corporal with the recruit.
I saluted.
‘Major Charpentier of the Horse Grenadiers.’
My companion answered to his name.
‘The Emperor has a mission for you.’
Without more ado he flung open the door and announced us.
I have seen Napoleon ten times on horseback to once on foot, and I think that he does wisely to show himself to the troops in this fashion, for he cuts a very good figure in the saddle. As we saw him now he was the shortest man out of six by a good hand’s breadth, and yet I am no very big man myself, though I ride quite heavy enough for a hussar. It is evident, too, that his body is too long for his legs. With his big round head, his curved shoulders, and his clean-shaven face, he is more like a Professor at the Sorbonne than the first soldier in France. Every man to his taste, but it seems to me that, if I could clap a pair of fine light cavalry whiskers, like my own, on to him, it would do him no harm. He has a firm mouth, however, and his eyes are remarkable. I have seen them once turned on me in anger, and I had rather ride at a square on a spent horse than face them again. I am not a man who is easily daunted, either.
He was standing at the side of the room, away from the window, looking up at a great map of the country which was hung upon the wall. Berthier stood beside him, trying to look wise, and just as we entered, Napoleon snatched his sword impatiently from him and pointed with it on the map. He was talking fast and low, but I heard him say, ‘The valley of the Meuse,’ and twice he repeated ‘Berlin.’ As we entered, his aide-de-camp advanced to us, but the Emperor stopped him and beckoned us to his side.
‘You have not yet received the cross of honour, Brigadier Gerard?’ he asked.
I replied that I had not, and was about to add that it was not for want of having deserved it, when he cut me short in his decided fashion.
‘And you, Major?’ he asked.
‘No, sire.’
‘Then you shall both have your opportunity now.’
He led us to the great map upon the wall and placed the tip of Berthier’s sword on Rheims.
‘I will be frank with you, gentlemen, as with
