Gasconade: Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard
Gasconade: Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard is an article written by John Whitehead published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
This critical study reassesses Arthur Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard stories, analysing their historical background, narrative technique, internal chronology, and literary influences, while arguing that they deserve greater scholarly attention. It situates the tales within Napoleonic history and Conan Doyle's wider oeuvre, defending Gerard as one of the liveliest heroes in romantic fiction.
Gasconade: Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard
"THE CARDS FLUTTERED FROM HIS SERVELESS FINGERS."
- Every scene is superbly executed, every character is brilliantly etched, and every episode is heightened by a humour that ranges from satire to burlesque, the contrast between the boastfulness of the protagonist and the humiliating situations in which he sometimes finds himself providing much of the fun. The Brigadier is by turns shrewd and obtuse; his stupidity is matched by his intrepidity; his brain is slow but his impulses are brilliant; he is both Quixote and Panza, a sort of Watsonish Holmes, and, with d'Artagnan, the liveliest hero in romantic fiction.
Despite testimonials such as that, which comes from Hesketh Pearson's biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Brigadier Gerard stories have received nothing like the critical attention that has turned the study of the Sherlock Holmes canon into a flourishing light industry. First printed in the Strand Magazine, they were published in book form in two separate volumes, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard in 1896 and Adventures of Gerard in 1903, except for a final story 'The Marriage of the Brigadier' first printed in the September 1910 number of the Strand and included in the following year in The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales. Once widely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, the Brigadier is in danger of dropping out of sight altogether.
Gerard was born in 1783 in a small town beside the Garonne in Gascony, the only child of bourgeois parents of modest means, who had him baptised Etienne. He was only sixteen and his mother already a widow when, after undergoing such education as the local lycée could provide, he joined the army. That was the year in which Massena defeated a Russian army under Suvarov at Zurich, securing France's frontier with Switzerland, and Napoleon Buonaparte, having extricated himself from Egypt with a small staff, managed to dodge the English and Russian warships on the look-out for him in the Mediterrancan and make his way to Paris, where shortly afterwards the coup was sprung which made him, at the age of thirty, First Consul of France. Never was time and place more auspicious for an ambitious lad to enlist, for there lay ahead fifteen years of the most spectacular campaigning Europe had seen since the conquests of Julius Caesar.
The curtailing of his formal education meant that during his most impressionable years Gerard's principal teacher was the quartermaster, with the result that, in subjects unconnected with his profession, his knowledge remained sketchy in the extreme. In Italy, for example, although he learnt enough about art to be able to tell which pictures were worth looting, he always got the names of the masters who painted them hopelessly wrong. His religious education, too, was inevitably neglected, and he soon lost the habit of saying his prayers, only resorting to them in the tightest corners; but he did retain enough tags of church Latin to enable him once to impersonate a Franciscan friar. He also acquired during his service some knowledge of several European languages. In the months before Danzig, Adjutant Obriant, who claimed descent from the Irish kings, taught him the brand of bog English which was to amuse his English hosts when he was a prisoner of war in their country. For the most part, though, his language instructors were complaisant young ladies encountered on his travels, and in this way he picked up a few lover's phrases in Italian, Spanish, and Russian, though these were not much use for ordinary purposes. Above all, life as an army officer taught Gerard the manners and code of a gentleman, that blend of chivalry and philandering which, engrafted to his native Gascon swagger, made of him a figure both debonair and absurd.
In tracing the course of Gerard's career from his random reminiscences it is necessary to pick one's way carefully among a number of improbabilities and inconsistencies. He could hardly have served with the French Army of Italy in 1796-7, or taken part, as he implied, in the fighting round Zurich in 1799, nor the following year at Marengo when northern Italy was recovered for France. It must have been due to an old man's failing memory that, when telling the story of his courtship in 1803, he described how he had thrilled his intended with tales of exploits he did not perform until some years later. And it is not casy to reconcile the accounts he gave at different times of his early career in the Hussars. In 1807 he was serving in Prussia, Poland, and France as a lieutenant in the 10th Hussars, during which period he was chosen to fight a duel with the champion of the Hussars of Chambarand, the regiment with which he later served as lieutenant and junior captain in Germany, before being transferred at the age of twenty-five to the Hussars of Conflans, then with Lannes' Fifth Army Corps besieging Saragossa in Spain.
He used to recall how he (and the army) had sped on wings of victory from Boulogne to Vienna and had stabled their horses in Berlin, Naples, Vienna,
Madrid, Lisbon, and Moscow; and how in twelve years' soldiering he had taken part in seventy-four engagements, twelve (or nine, or fourteen-the figure varied) campaigns, and more than two hundred skirmishes. It would be a waste of time to try to identify them. He also boasted that he was the best blade in the six light cavalry brigades and the first swordsman of the Grand Army. He was also a celebrated duellist who killed, among others, the fencing-master at Milan in an affair involving a lady's honour, and the aide-de-camp of the Emperor of Russia with a back-handed cut of his sabre, which thereafter bore the notch made by his opponent's shoulder-bone. He had seen, he said, many a hundred die in battle and himself slain more than he cared to think of. Although without means or influence, he was four times mentioned in despatches, was recommended for the sword of honour, and finally achieved his ambition when awarded a special medal on the express orders of the Emperor. Nobody ever accused him of reticence.
In one of his more boastful moods he described himself as the man who broke the square and captured the guns at Austerlitz (1805) and guided the army across the Danube, as the victor of Jena (1806), and as the hero of Ratisbon (1809). Too young to have taken part in the Egyptian business (1798-9), and spared the worst horrors of the Russian campaign (1812) having been left behind at Borodino, his combat experience was still formidable. He had led the charge of a single squadron on spent horses against an unshaken square of Hungarian Grenadiers at Elchingen (1805); had lain with a broken leg at Eylau (1807) watching the horse artillery galloping down on him; had served under Massena at Busaco (1810) and in the subsequent fighting that pushed Wellington back behind the lines at Torres Vedra; and had fought at Leipzig (1813) when he saved old Bouvet's life making good use of the English rifled pistols he had bought at Trouvel's in the rue de Rivoli. After Fere-Champenoise when conscripts had made a gallant stand it was clear that the end was near, and he had seen his brigade virtually destroyed at Craonne (1814) where the Young Guard had shown their mettle and their inexperience. He had been present when the Prussians were defeated at Ligny (1815) and the remnant of the Hussars of Conflans, his own little rascals, had covered themselves with glory. To the end he cherished the notion that, had Napoleon not sent him off on a wild goose chase during the opening hours of Waterloo. the outcome of the battle might have been very different. And yet he would reflect that he had seen more soldierly work in outpost skirmishes and little gallop-and-hack affairs than in any of the Emperor's big battles.
From all these encounters Gerard did not emerge unscathed, sustaining a total of seventeen wounds. Besides being hit by musket balls, pistol bullets and bursting shell fragments, he was pierced by bayonet, lance, sabre, and brad-awl-and yet somehow survived to tell his tales. Colonel at the age of twenty-eight, chief of brigade at thirty-one, well might he declare that Fortune is a woman who cannot resist a dashing young hussar.
Dismounted-for a hussar is incomplete without his better half-Gerard cut no very impressive figure, being of medium to low stature. Crop-cared through having lost the tip of his right ear in one of his nobler adventures, his face was redeemed from insignificance by the splendour of his moustaches, to which he gave the Marengo twist that brought a point into either eye, and a fine pair of cavalry whiskers. A miserably bad sailor, for the most part abstemious though he had his countrymen's love of good wine, and a shrewd cardplayer, he hated life at court as much as he loved the camp. He was in fact a soldier--a cavalryman at that-par excellence all spurs and moustaches, with never a thought beyond women and horses'. as Talleyrand described him, though putting Gerard's preferences in the wrong order.
A picked horseman and a fine judge of a horse, his fondness for them was profound. He would notice how they differed in character according to the province they came from, and how their natures could be told by their colour, from the coquettishness of the light bay, full of nerves and fancies, to the hardy chestnut; from the docile roan to the pig-headed rusty black. In early campaigning days he thought much of his big black charger Rataplan, staunch companion on many a desperate mission, which once inadvertently put a hoof through the canvas of Nymphs Surprised in a Wood, a painting Gerard had looted and carried safely through two campaigns. There was Voltigeur, swiftest horse in the army, which had been lent him for a reconnaissance in Spain by Massena, a dapple-grey of a little over fifteen hands with the short neck that comes from Arab blood. He later acquired an even superior mount in the black English hunter which carries him on his notorious fox-chase behind the English lines. Late in his career he rode the Emperor's own charger until he fell dead beneath him, shot by a British redcoat.
But best of all he loved his dainty little grey mare Violette, the fastest horse in the six brigades of light cavalry, and between them there existed a touching mutual attachment. She carried him on some of his most desperate rides, her hoofs going like a Spanish girl's castanets, and he cared for her tenderly, watering her and fetching her forage, rubbing her down and sponging her legs with his own hands, and rewarding her with pieces of sugar soaked in cognac from his flask or with a kiss between the nostrils. Wounds she would take in her stride. On one occasion a bullet grazed her above the near fetlock, on another shots struck her off shoulder and passed through the muscle of her neck. Truly feminine, her feelings were easily hurt. When Gerard made his getaway from Senlis disguised as a Cossack riding one of their mangy ponies and leading Violette by the bridle with a bag of plunder on her back she kept rubbing her nose against his knee and looking up at him as if to ask how she had deserved that such a hairy doormat should be preferred to herself. Once he declined Napoleon's offer to lend him one of his own Arab chargers, knowing if he accepted he could never look Violette in the face again; for he loved the poor, silent, patient creature more than anything in the world except his mother and the Emperor.
Certainly more than any of the one hundred and forty women in fourteen separate kingdoms he claimed to have kissed, more even than Marie the Normandy farmer's daughter with cheeks dusky as moss-roses, into a brief marriage with whom he was ignominiously propelled when quartered at Les Andelys after the signing of the Treaty of Amiens. The word-portraits he painted of some of his other lights-o'-love compose a charming picture gallery. In Poland after the taking of Danzig there was the ivory-skinned, black-haired daughter of a post-house keeper, and in Paris a girl called Leonie who used to meet him three times a week in the Forest of Fontainebleu, apparently unaware that he was also spending time with Coralie of the Opera, one of whose garters he kept in the bosom of his tunic. On a later visit to Paris it was Lisette with whom he supped in the rooms of an old friend in the rue Miromesnil.
In Spain he wore a heavy gold ring, the gift of a German baroness, though at the time he was renewing his vows to an innkeeper's daughter. As a prisoner of war in England he had a passing fancy for Lady Meredith whom he met by chance sitting in her carriage while he was on the run from Dartmoor prison, but more serious, if also unreciprocated, was his attachment to Lady Jane Dacre, sister of Lord Rufton, in whose house in north Devonshire he stayed after the order for his exchange had come through and he was awaiting a passage back to France. English women he used to say were the most lovely and tender he had ever known. In Venice he fell for the exquisite Lucia who belonged to a senatorial family and was of the dark type he particularly admired, equalled only by Dolores of Toledo, a little brunette at Santorem in Portugal, and a certain Agnes. At Dobrova in Russia he dallied with the village priest's daughter Sophie, another brunette, who by a cruel deception frustrated his mission before arranging his escape from his captors. At an inn in the German village of Lobenstein he fell for the oldest of tricks played on him by a German princess masquerading as a Polish countess, a lovely woman with a noble figure, queenly head, and eyes as blue as the Garonne and as chilling as its winter waters.
When the Emperor's star began to wane Gerard had less opportunity, perhaps less inclination, for dalliance. Of the Countess Walewski, from whom he was ordered to collect certain securities and dynastic papers as she travelled in her blue berline from Paris to Fontainebleu, he barely had time to notice her cream-tinted complexion. Shortly afterwards, while the battle of Waterloo raged nearby, his debonair charm worked its old magic on the wife of a Belgian innkeeper, who got him out of a tight corner for the sake of his magnificent whiskers; saved by a whisker, in fact.
A veteran of great battles and personally acquainted with the marshals and statesmen who for a few years translated Napoleon's dreams into brutal reality, the exploits and adventures Gerard liked most to recall in after years were private ones, arising either from special missions for which he had been chosen or from his own quixotry: those in which his individuality found amplest scope for expression. He could not resist young Duroc's appeal to help him avenge his father's murder at the instigation of a notorious Jacobin, and bore himself with much credit when the Emperor employed him on a delicate assignment connected with his Corsican youth, a feat for which Gerard received his captaincy. After the act of bravery that led to the raising of the siege of Saragossa his promotion was rapid, for he was already a colonel two years later when he earned notoriety for his unconventional prowess in the hunting field. That year, 1810, when acting as aide-de-camp to Massena, he twice narrowly escaped death at the hands of Spanish guerillas, on the second occasion being rescued by a young English officer of dragoons he was pleased to call the Hon. Sir Russell, Bart., or Bart for short.
It was owing to Bart's passion for wagering-he was the best card-player at Watier's — that while the two were absorbed in a game of écarté Gerard was made a prisoner of war on the orders of Wellington himself. Bart, though eventually acquitted of the charge of neglect of duty, was lucky to avoid being broken for not having cleared his trumps before leading his suit. On returning to Spain after six months in England, Gerard was sent to Massena with a small detachment of hussars to hang the leader of a band of renegades occupying the Abbey at Almeixel, a foray in which he joined forces with a detachment of English dragoons commanded by Bart, who had been sent on a similar mission and whose luck in the encounter that ensued finally ran out.
When acting as aide-de-camp to Suchet in Venice, Gerard, having been shanghai'd in a gondola on his way to meet Lucia, had the adventure that lost him the tip of an ear. His Russian experience took place late in 1812 when, falling victim to Sophie's wiles, he not only failed in his mission to seize the stores of grain at Minsk for the stricken French army, but also led many of his hussars, including Sergeants Oudin and Papilette, to their death and, while making his own escape, abandoned the survivors to their fate in the salt-mines of Siberia. His next exploit also ended in failure when the German princess foiled his attempt to win over her husband the Prince of Saxe-Felstein from the influence of the Tugenbund and Korner's bewitching poetry, and so prevent resurgent Germany from throwing off her allegiance to France. Gerard was then in his thirtieth year, and Napoleon's star well on the wane.
By next spring the French capital itself was threatened by Blücher from the north and Swarzenberg from the south, and the Emperor at Rheims twenty-five leagues away entrusted Gerard-by now a chief of brigade though in accordance with French custom still addressed as colonel, not brigadier-with a message for his brother the King of Spain beleaguered in Paris. It was Gerard's, and Violette's, finest hour, and though their success after hair's breadth escapes at first only earned a harsh rebuff, the Emperor soon relented. Gerard's loyalty to him never wavered, neither at the time of the French defeat at Waterloo, nor afterwards during
Napoleon's ignominious retreat from the battlefield. Six years later he was brought out of retirement to take part in a plot to rescue the exile from St Helena, but once more his enterprise was frustrated, and the man whom the Emperor had described as having the thickest head but the stoutest heart in the army returned to the life of a retired cavalry officer, planting cabbages on a pension of a hundred francs a month.
Que de souvenirs! Que de regrets! [1]
Conan Doyle's interest in the Napoleonic Wars dated back to his childhood when his imagination had been stirred by the tales his mother told him of one of her ancestors Sir Denis Pack, who as a major-general had commanded a brigade at Waterloo. In his writings the subject made its first appearance in a short story published in 1891, 'A Straggler of '15', about on old ex-corporal, the last survivor of the Third Regiment of Guards which had held a vital sector of the British position at Hougoumont. Dramatised under the title Waterloo, the play was bought by Henry Irving who for ten years had a great popular success in the role of the corporal. In 1892 Conan Doyle published a short novel The Great Shadow, which culminated in a gruesome description of the battle of Waterloo, and that same year saw the publication of an English translation of the Memoirs of Baron de Marbot, the French general who had commanded the 23rd Chasseurs in Napoleon's Grande Armée and was to provide the model for the character which became Brigadier Gerard.
Now in his mid-thirties, Conan Doyle had already established a comfortable literary reputation with three substantial historical novels — Micah Clarke, The White Company, and The Refugees — countless magazine stories and, above all, the first two novels and the first two collections of short stories starring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. When practising as a doctor in Southsea he had married Louise Hawkins — known as Touie — who bore him two children, a daughter and, after the family had moved to Upper Norwood, a son, before it was diagnosed that she was suffering from tuberculosis. For the sake of her health the family moved to Davos in Switzerland where Conan Doyle wrote, besides The Stark Munro Letters, a story called 'The Medal of the Brigadier', which was so well received when he read it to American audiences during a reading tour in the United States in late 1894 that on his return to Switzerland he continued the series with seven more stories before embarking on his novel of the Fancy' in Regency days, Rodney Stone.
On a trip up the Nile the following winter, an experience which suggested to him his novel The Tragedy of the Korosko, he began what he called 'that wretched little Napoleonic book' Uncle Bernac, in which a subsidiary character who is a French hussar masquerades under the name of Etienne Gérard. By then Touie's health had so much improved that the family was able to return to England, where they settled in a house at Hindhead in Surrey. She died there in 1906, the year in which Sir Nigel, the prelude to The White Company, was published.
The next story featuring the true Gerard, 'The Crime of the Brigadier' about the infamous fox-chase, appeared in the January 1900 number of the Strand shortly before Conan Doyle sailed for South Africa to serve as a doctor in the Boer War. The rest of the second series of Gerard stories followed next year, and the canon was rounded off with 'The Marriage of the Brigadier' in 1910. Even then Conan Doyle's creative days were by no means over, for in Professor Challenger and his three companions who made their début in The Lost World in 1912 he was to invent characters which can well stand comparison with any of their illustrious predecessors.
For sixty years the critical standing of the Brigadier Gerard stories has suffered from the fact that, when the Crowborough Edition of Conan Doyle's collected works was being prepared for publication in the year of his death, he was too ill to supervise their arrangement in proper chronological sequence. Instead, The Exploits and The Tragedy of the Korosko were issued together as volume three, and the Adventures and The Last Galley (including 'The Marriage') as volume four. Since then, omitting 'The Marriage', they have continued to lose their separate identity in volume two of the Historical Romances, and later in The Complete Napoleonic Stories, never on their own in a single volume.
Their proper sequence can for the most part be determined with some confidence, the odd man out being 'How the Brigadier Lost his Ear'. The problem arises because Gerard is supposed at the time to be acting as aide-de-camp to Suchet in Venice, which would place the action at the beginning of 1801 at the very latest, when he would have been a seventeen-year-old junior lieutenant; whereas he is several times in the story addressed as colonel, a rank he did not achieve until 1811. As a matter of convenience the Venetian story has been inserted between his Spanish and Russian adventures [in The Collected Brigadier Gerard Stories by A Conan Doyle, ed. John Whitehead; Hearthstone Publications, 1995], which, if not historically feasible, seems as appropriate a placing as any. If Conan Doyle were ever challenged on the point, he could plausibly excuse the anomaly by citing the circumstances under which Gerard gave his reminiscences to the world.
Narrated at random to a circle of cronies in a humble café between dinner and a game of dominoes over a period of at least ten years, from his sixtieth year until he was seventy or more, the last quality to be expected of the stories is complete consistency. Although he had kept his youthful figure, the old brigadier's hair had by then gone grey and his moustaches were turning snowy. Of all his wounds the one that still gave him trouble was the brad-awl thrust in the eye, which had loosened a portion of the inner bone of his head; and at times he felt a twinge or two of his old Lithuanian ague. He never remarried and used to envy his old comrades their tall children. In Paris during the Crimean War, as he sat and watched a military review on the Champ de Mars, displaying his medal ribbon on the lapel of his coat, the spectacle brought back to him old Russian memories; but his thoughts kept returning to the town of his boyhood in Gascony where, looked after by Madame Titaux and with his old hound for company, he lived quietly in a little whitewashed cottage in a field beside the blue Garonne winding its way among vineyards towards the ocean.
- ↑ Translated from French : "So much souvenirs ! So much regrets !"
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
