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 two comrades. You have both been with me since Marengo, I believe?’ He had a strangely pleasant smile, which used to light up his pale face with a kind of cold sunshine. ‘Here at Rheims are our present headquarters on this the th of March. Very good. Here is Paris, distant by road a good twenty-five leagues. Blucher lies to the north, Schwarzenberg to the south.’ He prodded at the map with the sword as he spoke.
‘Now,’ said he, ‘the further into the country these people march, the more completely I shall crush them. They are about to advance upon Paris. Very good. Let them do so. My brother, the King of Spain, will be there with a hundred thousand men. It is to him that I send you. You will hand him this letter, a copy of which I confide to each of you. It is to tell him that I am coming at once, in two days’ time, with every man and horse and gun to his relief. I must give them forty-eight hours to recover. Then straight to Paris! You understand me, gentlemen?’
Ah, if I could tell you the glow of pride which it gave me to be taken into the great man’s confidence in this way. As he handed our letters to us I clicked my spurs and threw out my chest, smiling and nodding to let him know that I saw what he would be after. He smiled also, and rested his hand for a moment upon the cape of my dolman. I would have given half my arrears of pay if my mother could have seen me at that instant.
‘I will show you your route,’ said he, turning back to the map. ‘Your orders are to ride together as far as Bazoches.