Busy as he was on the home front, Conan Doyle knew that his greatest contribution would be made, as always, with his pen. Within a month of the formal declaration of war he issued a pamphlet called “To Arms!” in which he set out the justice of the British cause for the benefit of neutral readers in Denmark, Holland, and—most important of all—the United States. He mapped out a similar pamphlet for distribution to the German military, but even he had to admit that the idea was impractical.
Perhaps inevitably, he began in 1916 to write what he hoped would be a definitive history of the war. Published in six successive volumes under the title of The British Campaign in France and Flanders, the history drew on his correspondence with at least fifty generals, many of whom gave him access to their personal papers. Conan Doyle boasted of the “wonderfully good inside knowledge” coming from such men as General Douglas Haig, the commander in chief on the western front, and General Edward Bulfin, who had been a classmate at Stonyhurst. “My hand is fairly cramped with writing history,” he told Innes. “I have had great luck.”
More such luck came his way in 1916. Following the highly criticized retreat from Trentino in May, Italian authorities requested that an independent British observer be sent to inspect conditions at the front. Conan Doyle seized the opportunity to gather firsthand information for his history, and managed to expand the mission to include visits to the French and British fronts, on the pretext that it would give him a basis for comparison.
When Lord Newton of the Foreign Office told him that he would need a uniform of some sort, Conan Doyle proudly responded that he was a private in the Crowborough Company of the Sixth Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment. With some delicacy, Lord Newton suggested that the uniform might not appear sufficiently grand, and might in fact draw fire from both armies. Conan Doyle allowed that as Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey, an office conferred on him at the time of his knighthood, he had the right to wear a more exalted uniform when reviewing troops.
“I went straight off to my tailor,” he wrote, “who rigged me up in a wondrous khaki garb which was something between that of a Colonel and a Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crowns upon the shoulder-straps.” The resulting uniform had an unnatural sparkle—rather like Lewis Waller’s pristine costume in Brigadier Gerard—and though Conan Doyle was entitled to wear a Boer War medal, he admitted to feeling like “a mighty imposter” beneath his officer’s peaked cap. As if to underscore the make-believe aspect of the enterprise, he had matching uniforms made up for his sons Denis and Adrian, who were seven and five years old.
Conan Doyle departed for France on a Royal Navy destroyer in the company of General Sir William Robertson, then the British chief of staff. Upon arrival, he was given a gas mask and shrapnel helmet and was told to remove his silly hat. He spent the next weeks dutifully slogging through the muddy trenches, drinking tea with soldiers, signing autographs, and eating the “challenging” army food. In France, he leapt at the chance to interview British commanders on the battlefield, and managed to catch up with both Innes and Kingsley. His uniform, he admitted, made him a “rare specimen,” and attracted notice wherever he went. “A Deputy-Lieutenant may not be much in England,” he reported, “but when translated into French—my French anyhow—it has an awe-inspiring effect.”
Not everyone shared in the awe. At Argonne, a French general fixed Conan Doyle with a hard stare and demanded to know if Sherlock Holmes was serving in the English army. Taken aback, Conan Doyle stammered that the detective had grown too old for active service. The remark drew appreciative laughter from the general’s aides, and Conan Doyle felt he had scrambled out of an embarrassing situation.
In Italy, Conan Doyle wanted to visit Monfalcone, recently captured from the enemy, but came under artillery fire on the way. “As I glanced up I saw three clouds immediately above my head,” he wrote, “two of them white and the other of a rusty red. The air was full of flying metal, and the road, as we were told afterwards by an observer, was all churned up by it. The metal base of one of the shells was found plumb in the middle of the road just where our motor had been. It was our pace that saved us.” Conan Doyle’s hosts were distressed at having placed him in harm’s way, but he waved off their apologies. “As a matter of fact it was I who owed them an apology,” he recalled, “since they had enough risks in the way of business without taking others in order to gratify the whim of a visitor.”
Returning to Windlesham at the end of his tour, Conan Doyle wrote up his experiences in a small book entitled A Visit to Three Fronts. Intended as a morale booster, the book was an unabashed tribute to the jaunty and courageous British fighting man. “I confess that as I looked at those brave English lads,” he wrote, “and thought of what we owed to them and to their like who have passed on, I felt more emotional than befits a Briton in foreign parts.” The experience inspired him to offer yet another suggestion to the War Office. The French troops, he noticed, wore badges to indicate a wound in battle. This, Conan Doyle felt, “gave a man some credit and therefore some consolation for his sufferings.” He broached the subject with General Robertson, and shortly thereafter British soldiers began to receive wound stripes.
Conan Doyle got a second, more brutal taste of the war when the Australian High Command invited him to visit their position at Péronne, on the river Somme. Here he witnessed the most ferocious fighting he had ever seen at the Battle of St. Quentin, coming within a few hundred yards of the front line. Conan Doyle’s cool under fire greatly impressed the Australian troops, but he was profoundly disturbed by the horrors he witnessed. “None of us will forget what we saw,” he declared. “There was a tangle of mutilated horses, their necks rising and sinking. Beside them a man with his hand blown off was staggering away, the blood gushing from his upturned sleeve. He was moving round and holding the arm raised and hanging, as a dog holds an injured foot. Beside the horses lay a shattered man, drenched crimson from head to foot, with two great glazed eyes looking upwards through a mask of blood.” The image, he said, would haunt him for the rest of his days.
Back in England, Conan Doyle returned to his ongoing history of the war, which he had come to regard as his magnum opus. He would allow no distractions. At one stage the government sounded him out about becoming director of the official propaganda department, but he preferred to remain a free agent. When David Lloyd George became prime minister at the end of 1916, Conan Doyle was approached by his confidential secretary and longtime mistress, Frances Stevenson, about writing an official biography. “It is much needed,” Miss Stevenson noted in her diary, “specially in the States, whence we have repeated inquiries.” Conan Doyle admired Lloyd George greatly, but he must have considered the task a trivial one in the circumstances. He gave a polite refusal on the grounds that he had never written a biography before and was “full up” with his wartime chronicle. Miss Stevenson regretted the decision, and believed privately that Conan Doyle had become a pawn of the War Office. He was “a nice old gentleman,” she noted, but he had a “childlike idea” of the infallibility of Britain’s military strategists. “I could see, moreover, that they are only giving him what they want him to know.”
It was a criticism that would be repeated often in the coming years, though Conan Doyle now had access to the inner circle of power. In April of 1917, he had a private breakfast with the new prime minister at 10 Downing Street. Conan Doyle found the new leader to be entirely free of pretension; Lloyd George poured the tea while his guest piled bacon and eggs onto a pair of plates at the sideboard. Lloyd George had been following Conan Doyle’s history with interest and pumped him for his views on various field commanders. Never one to miss an opportunity, Conan Doyle once again expounded his thoughts on body armor and was pleased to find the prime minister “very keen” on the idea. “I came away reassured,” he wrote, “and feeling that a vigorous virile hand was at the helm.”
Conan Doyle expected greater cooperation from the War Office under the new prime minister, but his frustratio
ns continued. By the end of 1917, his history became “bowdlerized and blue-pencilled” by military censors. When at length he could publish freely, the public response left him deeply disappointed. One newspaper dismissed the enterprise as “History While You Wait,” admitting only that Conan Doyle’s writings would be useful “when real histories come to be written.” Others decried his excessive fascination with troop movements and technical detail.
As with his chronicle of the Boer War, Conan Doyle had sacrificed historical perspective for contemporary reporting, though he no longer held any illusions about the romance of war. He described the ordeal of combat in blunt, unadorned language, and regretted bitterly that the entire conflict had been so “evidently preventable.”
“I hate fine writing about the war,” he once declared, “it needs no gloss.” Be that as it may, the author’s compassion for the soldiers could be felt in every line, giving the prose a heat seldom matched in his other works: “The sky had clouded, the days were mirk, the hanging Madonna had fallen from the cathedral of Albert, the troops were worn to shadow. The twilight of the gods seemed to have come.”
For the rest of his life, Conan Doyle held out the hope that his history would eventually receive its due. “I would reckon it the greatest and most undeserved literary disappointment of my life,” he wrote in his memoirs, “if I did not know that the end is not yet and that it may mirror those great times to those who are to come.”
Modern historians have, in fact, been more kind, praising Conan Doyle’s exhaustive research and painstaking accuracy. Most admit, however, that the author’s patriotism gave him a narrow, uncritical viewpoint. As Frances Stevenson noted, Conan Doyle accepted what the British commanders told him with few qualms or criticisms, and was too loyal to assign blame for British defeats. He performed a valuable service for wartime Britain, but the finished product—all six volumes of it—suffered for his good intentions.
It would not be his only literary disappointment of the war. Toward the end of 1913, Conan Doyle had begun work on a surprising project—a second full-length Sherlock Holmes novel. “With luck,” he told Greenhough Smith at the beginning of 1914, “I should finish before the end of March.”
The editor would have been overjoyed. The Hound of the Baskervilles had been hugely profitable in 1901, and the first installments of the new novel, The Valley of Fear, gave every reason for optimism. Sherlock Holmes appeared to be at the top of his form as he investigated the puzzling murder of John Douglas, late of Birlstone Manor House. For the second half of the novel, however, Conan Doyle moved his detective offstage in favor of a lengthy flashback, just as he had done so many years earlier in A Study in Scarlet. The action now centered on a Pinkerton detective named Birdy Edwards, and his efforts to infiltrate a group of American labor agitators known as the Scowrers.
As with The Hound of the Baskervilles, Conan Doyle had found an intriguing story and decided it might be suitable for Sherlock Holmes. This time, he drew his inspiration from the saga of the Molly Maguires, the Irish-American secret society that had operated in the mining communities of Pennsylvania from the mid-1860s to the late 1870s. Conan Doyle gathered the details from an account by the legendary Allan J. Pinkerton, called The Molly Maguires and the Detectives. The detective William J. Burns probably furnished additional background and plot suggestions.
Conan Doyle completed the manuscript in April 1914. By September, as his attention shifted to the war, he regretted the “bad luck” of saddling Greenhough Smith with so trivial a manuscript at a time of national crisis. Actually, the editor was glad to be able to offer such a plum to his readers, who were getting more than enough war coverage in the newspapers. As always, the issues containing the latest Sherlock Holmes adventure sold briskly.
Though The Valley of Fear is as gripping as any of Conan Doyle’s adventure tales, readers were nonplussed when the setting transferred to Pennsylvania. “But of course,” the author had told Greenhough Smith, “in this long stretch we abandon Holmes. That is necessary.” The detective’s fans didn’t see it that way. With Sherlock Holmes absent for more than half the book, the novel came off as two novellas that had not been properly introduced. The Valley of Fear remains one of the detective’s least popular outings.
Holmes would soon redeem himself. Conan Doyle had spent the entire war offering reassurance to the public and praise for the British government and fighting forces. In 1917, with morale sinking in the face of heavy losses, Conan Doyle gave his beleaguered readers what they most wanted from him. In September, the words “Sherlock Holmes outwits a German spy” appeared on the cover of The Strand. Inside was a story called “His Last Bow,” subtitled “The War Service of Sherlock Holmes.”
Set in 1914, shortly before the start of the war, the story opens in an English coastal village. A German spymaster named von Bork is reviewing his operations for the benefit of an appreciative German official. “They are not very hard to deceive, these Englanders,” von Bork declares. “A more docile, simple folk could not be imagined.” After more commentary on Britain’s failings, the German spy is left alone to await the arrival of an American agent named Altamont, who has promised to bring the key to Britain’s naval codes. Presently Altamont arrives and hands over the prized signals. When von Bork unwraps the parcel, however, he barely has time to register its strange contents—The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen—before a chloroformed sponge is clamped over his face.
When the German spy awakes, bound hand and foot, he finds Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson sharing a dusty bottle of Imperial Tokay on his veranda. For two years, the detective explains, he has posed as Altamont to infiltrate the German spy network, passing along bad intelligence to von Bork while informing on genuine agents. Fittingly, Dr. Watson has joined him for the coup de grâce, posing as a chauffeur to assist in springing the trap. “I feel twenty years younger, Holmes,” says Watson, delighted that the game is afoot once more.
“His Last Bow” occupies a unique place in the Sherlock Holmes canon. It remains one of the best of all the stories, but it was also Conan Doyle’s finest hour as Britain’s unofficial minister of propaganda, lifting the country’s spirits in a time of universal gloom. In “Danger!” Conan Doyle had warned that the country was ill-prepared for the coming conflict. Now, he offered comfort: Sherlock Holmes, he assured the public, was on the case.
The story’s title made it clear that this would be the detective’s last bow, and the elegiac tone suggested that Conan Doyle really meant it this time. “Stand with me here upon the terrace,” Holmes tells the loyal Dr. Watson, “for it may be the last quiet talk that we shall ever have.”
Conan Doyle chose to tell this story in the third person, something he had never done with a Holmes tale. It is significant, therefore, that as the final curtain rang down, Sherlock Holmes spoke as never before. “There’s an east wind coming, Watson,” Holmes declared, gazing out toward the sea, “such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”
Never had the voice of Conan Doyle been so audible. This was what he had wanted to say all along; not only to the British public, but also to those members of his own family who had gone out to fight—his brother, his son, his brothers-in-law, and his two nephews.
It is well that he said it when he did. Not one of his loved ones would return.
23
The Flail of the Lord
I sought by love alone to go
Where God had writ an awful no
—SIR ROGER CASEMENT
On the evening of Thursday, April 20, 1916, a German U-boat surfaced in Tralee Bay off the west coast of Ireland. A pale, gaunt man made his way up through the manhole to the conning tower and peered out at the darkened coastline. His name was Sir Roger Casement, and within hours th
is Irish-born diplomat would be known throughout England as the “foulest traitor who ever drew breath.”
It had been an agonizing voyage, fraught with delays and miscommunication. Casement, who suffered from seasickness, couldn’t stomach the shipboard rations of canned ham and salmon and spent most of the journey in his bunk. Now, aided by two companions, he gingerly made his way into a cockleshell dingy. As the tiny boat pushed away from the submarine, the German captain gave a curt salute. Casement, he later testified, was “a truly noble man.”
Thirteen months earlier, Casement had left for Berlin on an extraordinary and audacious mission. Hoping to turn the war with Germany to Ireland’s advantage, Casement set out to gain German support—and military backing—for the Irish independence movement. Toward that end, he sought to raise a brigade of Irish soldiers from Germany’s prisoner-of-war camps, with the idea that the captured men would cheerfully switch allegiances to fight the English on Irish soil.
German authorities had initially welcomed Casement’s proposals, but the mission ended in confusion and failure. Worse, Casement believed that leaders of the insurgent Irish Republican Brotherhood were counting on German support for their planned Easter Rising—just three days away. A message had been sent through the German embassy in Washington asking for a large shipment of German arms. To emphasize the Kaiser’s loyalties, the Irish insurrectionists also requested that a U-boat be sent to Dublin’s harbor.
Though Germany tentatively agreed to send twenty thousand rifles—which subsequently went astray—Casement knew that this consignment was too small, and that no other support would be forthcoming. He returned to Ireland to warn the volunteers and—if possible—to postpone the insurrection. “I am quite sure it is the most desperate piece of folly ever committed,” he wrote of his decision to return, “but I go gladly … if those poor lads at home are to be in the fire, then my place is with them.”
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 36