Conan Doyle's "Great Shadow"
Conan Doyle's "Great Shadow" is an article published in The Kansas City Star on 18 january 1893.
Conan Doyle's Great Shadow
Two new books by A. Conan Doyle on the booksellers' counters are "The Great Shadow" and "A Study in Scarlet," an historical novel, and a detective story, two books which have nothing in common.
The battle of Waterloo, and the fear of Napoleon which possessed all the quiet seashore of England, are subjects not new in fiction, yet in "The Great Shadow," Dr. Doyle has made of them a fresh and impressive book. The narrator of the story is an old Scotch sheep farmer who tells of bis boyhood in the first chapters and, in the last, of his seven boys "who are all taller than their father, and take mighty good care that he shall not forget it."
While "the great shadow" overhung England, there were beacons built up, ready to be lighted to give the alarm, wherever the coast offered an opportunity for the French landing, and this small boy of 8 had his eyes usually turned toward the beacon at Berwick, feeling, he writes, "as though the fate of the country hung in some fashion upon me and my vigilance." The boy's home was on the border, the tradition being that his bed stood on the very lines, and he records, that, in consequence, "when at school there was a battle between the Scotch and the English boys, one side would kick my shins and the other cuff my ears, and then they would both stop and laugh as though it were something funny." Telling of how schoolboys worship strength, he says: "There was Willie Earnshaw who had every date from the killing of Abel on the tip of his tongue, so that the masters themselves would turn to him if they were in doubt; yet he was but a narrow chested lad, overlong for his breadth, and what did his dates help him when Jack Simons of the lower third chivied him down the passage with the buckle end of a strap?"
There is a little girl too, who is good. She used to tell stories of a wondertul knight who had given her a ring which he would redeem when the time came, and then she would show the ring which she said was virgin gold but which she had really taken from the curtains. And then she told that she had been followed by a disguised prince; she knew he was a prince "by his disguise." This little girl grew up into a charming coquette who fooled two country boys and married a colonel of Napoleon's Guards.
But the remarkable part of the book is the battle of Waterloo, such a moving, stirring, picture as it is, of hurrying soldiers, of danger and daring and destruction. This is from the march where the British are getting into position.
There came the grumbling of a cannonade away somewhere to the cast of us, deep and hoarse, like a roar of some blood-daubed beast that thrives on the lives of men. At the same instant there was a shouting of "Hey! hey! hey!" from behind, and somebody roared, "Let the guns get through." Looking back I saw the rear companies split suddenly in two and bur! themselves down on either side into the ditch, while six cream colored horses, galloping two and two, with their bellies to the ground, came thundering through the gap with a fine twelve pound gun whirling and creaking behind them. Following were another and another, four and twenty in all, flying past us with such a din and clatter, the blue coated men clinging on to the guns and the tumbrils, the drivers cursing and cracking their whips, the manes flying, the mops and buckets clanking and the whole air filled with the heavy rumble and the jingling of chains. During the battle when the brigade had been halted and formed into squares, this passage occurs:
There was a low rolling bill on our right flank, and from behind this there came a sound like nothing on this earth so much as the beat of waves on Berwick coast when the wind blows from the east. The earth was all shaking with that dull, waving sound, and the air was full of it. "Steady, Seventy-first, for God's sake, steady!" shrieked the voice of the colonel behind us, but in front was nothing but the green gentle slope of the grass land, all mottled with daisies and dandelions.
And then suddenly, over the curve, we saw 800 brass helmets rise up, all in a moment, each with a long tag of horse hair flying from its crest, and then 800 fierce brown faces, all pushed forward, and glaring out from between the cars of as many horses. There was an instant of gleaming breast plates, waving swords, tossing manes, fierce red nostrils opening and shutting, and hoofs pawing the air before us, and then down came the line of muskets, and our bullets smacked up against their armor like the clatter of a hail storm upon a window.
"The Great Shadow" is not a pretentious book; it has no aims and no subtle development of character; it is a small and simple story, but it is quite faultless; there is no break in its consistency; the sheep farmer never loses his identity, nor does anyone in the book ever act out of character, and the narration is so clever that under the apparently elaborate slowness of the old man one finds that the movement of the story is really rapid, without hesitation or interruptions. This is all the more surprising when the book is compared with a "Study in Scarlet," of which Sherlock Holmes is the hero and his friend, Dr. Watson, the narrator. The account of the crime and its detection is really exciting and well told, but the second part of the book which gives the history of the criminals, and an explanation of Sherlock Holmes's methods and the motive of the crime, is a piece of composition, stilted, tedious and unplausible. All the Sherlock Holmes stories are told by Dr. Watson, and in most of them the good doctor is ingeniously stupid, but he never before was quite as dull as in his latest book. Dr. Doyle is now at work on "Tales of a Doctor's Waiting Room;" the title seems to promise, not a successor to "The Great Shadow," but more of Dr. Watson, and makes one wish that the author would neglect his garrulous imaginary doctor for a time.
BALLANTRAE.
