The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories. Arthur Conan Doyle

       EDITOR'S NOTE

      The text of this volume has been established as follows. ‘A Foreign Office Romance’ after US syndication and London publication in Young Man and Young Woman (Christmas number 1894), was published in The Green Flag (1900) whose text is used here. All other stories appeared in the Strand whose text is in the main that used here, since Conan Doyle made some cuts for the book texts of two stories to ensure a chronological sequence for the Exploits (the Adventures were vaguely but not accurately chronological). Original publication in the Strand was: ‘Medal’, December 1804, ‘Brigadier−King’, April 1895, ‘King−Brigadier’, May 1895, ‘Ajaccio’, June 1895, ‘Gloom’, July 1895, ‘Millefleurs’, August 1895, ‘Devil’, September 1895, ‘Kingdom’, December 1895, ‘Crime’, January 1900, ‘Ear’, August 1902, ‘Army’, November 1902, ‘Minsk’, December 1902, ‘Forest’, January 1903, ‘Horsemen’, February 1903, ‘England’, March 1903, ‘Hussars’, April 1903, ‘Good-Bye’, May 1903, ‘Marriage ’, September 1910.

      The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard was first published by George Newnes, publisher of the Strand, on 15 February 1896, and Adventures of Gerard (Strand title The Adventures of Etienne Gerard) September 1903: the word ‘Brigadier’ was dropped as it meant a member, not the leader, of a brigade in France. ‘Crime’, while included in Adventures, first appeared in The Green Flag. ‘Marriage’ first appeared in The Last Galley (1911). Several titles were altered in later publication, sometimes over-revelatorily.

      I have added head-notes to each of the stories to supply the chronology of the stories and add an additional whiff of historical context. (In ‘Minsk’, a misprint, ‘between Wilna and Smolensk’ for ‘between Wyasma and Smolensk’, present in all previous printings, has been corrected here.)

      The Exploits appeared in Canongate Classics 38 in 1991, with a different introduction. Gerard evidently narrates ‘Medal’ during Napoleon’s lifetime, probably before Waterloo or even before Elba. The rest of the Exploits are supposedly told at a much later date, probably in the 1840s and before 1848 (see conclusion of ‘Devil’). The events of Adventures are recounted in Paris after Napoleon III has returned to power. ‘Minsk’ was inspired by a review in the Crimean War (1854) in which Gerard indicates some degree of official recognition, but since Napoleon III means so little to him in comparison to his uncle, we know no more than this. ‘Marriage’ seems to be narrated after Gerard has returned to his native Gascony. ‘Crime’ is the only story with a detailed third-person introduction (‘Ear’ getting a mere line), and it records his death of old age. Gerard’s biography has slightly conflicting elements in it, but he seems to have been born in the early 1780s, which suggests death at some point in the 1860s. The marriage to the daughter of Uncle Bernac recorded at the close of Conan Doyle’s novel Uncle Bernac is inconsistent with everything in the Gerard stories, but so is the Boulogne court life the novel assigns to Gerard. Our hero is not to be conflated with the real-life Maurice-Etienne de Gerard (1773–1852) who died a Marshal of France, and who is mentioned in ‘Devil’. Conan Doyle may initially have unconsciously registered the name (de Gerard was not a Marshal of Napoleon’s and receives relatively little mention in Napoleonic literature), and then, some time after the Strand publication of ‘Medal’, he rediscovered the historical Gerard and extricated himself by the assertion of kinship.

      Owen Dudley Edwards

       Introduction

      I

      Historical fiction is far older than Homer, and the bardic and folk traditions of Scotland (where Arthur Conan Doyle was born) and of Ireland (whence his mother and paternal grandparents came) still bring us a version of that oldest of forms. The force of historical fictions in the building of national myth and the provision of political parables is abundantly clear in Virgil’s Aeneid, in the Chanson de Roland, and in the varieties of Arthurian legend (Welsh, Breton, Norman, English, American), just as it is in the English (and Scots) historical plays of Shakespeare. In its primary evolution there was probably no clear distinction between history and fiction, and even today the two are much closer than historians like to admit.

      But the writing of historical prose fiction is comparatively recent, and it’s appropriate in introducing a book of Napoleonic stories to recall the opening of the seminal modern study, The Historical Novel (1937) by György Lukacz:

      The historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century at about the time of Napoleon’s collapse … It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon which for the first time made history a mass experience, and moreover on a European scale.

      It seems logical then, that the prime candidates for the titles of greatest historical novel (War and Peace by Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy), and greatest historical short story series (the Brigadier Gerard stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), should in each case be dominated by Napoleon− about whom Tolstoy asserted that all writers were wrong, and Conan Doyle said he did not know who was right.

      Apart from his beloved The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), the romance on the parents of Erasmus by Charles Reade (1814–84), ACD found War and Peace ‘impressed’ him more than any other novels:

      They seem to me to stand at the very top of the century’s fiction. There is a certain resemblance in the two−the sense of space, the number of figures, the way in which characters drop in and drop out. The Englishman is the more romantic. The Russian is the more real and earnest. But they are both great. ( Through the Magic Door (1907) p.129.)

      Tolstoy may have been a daunting inspiration. Many of the memoirs of Napoleonic soldiers on whom our conscientious author drew for background and stimulus devoted their most memorable pages to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, and some of them wrote only on that. But Conan Doyle did not tackle it until his twelfth Gerard story, eight years after the Brigadier’s first appearance. Indeed in the early stories