Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
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*Childers was also an Irishman who joined Sinn Fein after the brutal suppression of 1916’s Easter Uprising in Dublin—and then wound up on the losing side of the Irish civil war that followed independence; in 1922 he was arrested and executed by the winning side.
*Dr Bryan Charles Waller.
†Who had died at this juncture is unknown, but Mary Doyle was seventy-five years old now, already past the age when one’s friends begin to drop away.
*Jean was now pregnant for the third time.
†Not Ida’s husband Nelson Foley, who had died in January 1909, but his aged father, Nelson Trafalgar Foley.
*Datura is a genus of flowering plants, found mainly in the Americas, which contain alkaloids with hallucinogenic and poisonous effects.
†Greenhough Smith at The Strand questioned the gas as well. ‘The gas was Levogen,’ Conan Doyle retorted, ‘calculated by Prof. T.E.S. Tube, FRS, to be 35,371 times lighter than hydrogen.’ (‘I have never been nervous about details, and one must be masterful sometimes,’ he said in Memories and Adventures. ‘When an alarmed Editor wrote to me once: “There is no second line of rails at that point”, I answered, “I make one.” ’)
*Conan Doyle was an early champion of a Channel tunnel linking England and France.
*‘The Lift’ was reworked as a story in 1922. His one-act Sherlock Holmes play is unknown, unless it was The Crown Diamond first performed in May 1921, and reworked into the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’, which appeared in The Strand in October 1921.
*Published in February 1913’s Fortnightly Review.
*Lizzie was Elizabeth Battle, the Mam’s maid and companion for more than two decades.
*Hever Castle in Kent, Anne Boleyn’s home, was owned by John Jacob Astor, a son of William Waldorf Astor, whom Conan Doyle had known. Lady Sackville (mother of Vita Sackville-West) was chatelaine of Knole House, where the Conan Doyles were invited for a visit in December.
*A production of The Speckled Band opened in Chicago on February 3, 1914, and played for sixty-three performances before closing on March 21st, but no further productions are known.
*In the previously cited May 31, 1914, New York Times interview.
†He found Sing Sing’s warden estimable but the facility atrocious. Even so, he enjoyed his brief incarceration inside a cell: ‘It was the most restful time I have had since I arrived in New York,’ he was quoted as saying in the New York Times, May 31, 1914. ‘[I]t was the only chance I had to get away from the reporters.’
*‘It’s no use saying Cruisers could do the same,’ he told Greenhough Smith. ‘Cruisers would be hunted down very quickly. Submarines cannot be.’
*Conan Doyle did return to Canada in 1922 and 1923, lecturing in various cities on Spiritualism.
12
The World War
(1914-1918)
Here was the crop reaped from those navy bills and army estimates,
those frantic professors and wild journalists, those heavy-necked,
sword-trailing generals, those obsequious, arrogant courtiers, and
the vain, swollen creature whom they courted.
—A. CONAN DOYLE, THE BRITISH CAMPAIGNS IN EUROPE
There had been no great war in Europe for a century, and nobody expected this one to last long. Many saw in it opportunities: Frenchmen, to redress old wrongs festering since the Franco-Prussian War; the British, to create a more stable security system. One who did not, however, was Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, remarking more accurately: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
Looking back in ‘His Last Bow’, Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes remark, on the eve of war: ‘There’s an east wind coming, Watson’, and when Watson, prosaic as ever, replied, ‘I think not, Holmes. It is very warm’, his old comrade exclaimed:
Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, 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 none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.
They were sentiments Conan Doyle had felt at the outset, as he and the rest of the country went to war in resigned determination. On the war’s first night, in fact, Conan Doyle and others in Crowborough created a local volunteer civilian reserve, thinking there should be ‘a universal one where every citizen, young and old, should be trained to arms—a great stockpot into which the nation could dip and draw its needs’, as he put it in Memories and Adventures.* And when he wrote to The Times on August 8th describing their actions, the idea spread.
Two weeks later, however, the civilian reserve was disbanded at War Office command. ‘Kitchener has struck up our Civilian movement,’ Conan Doyle wrote to Innes.
I am convinced he does not appreciate its force or scope or how it would focus his material & put it under his hand for recruiting. I am going up today to see if anything can be done. It is deplorable. We have had 1000 applications for particulars from every corner of England.
I want your advice. Do you think it would be a good thing for me to apply for a Captaincy (very senior) in the New Army. I am quite a good drill, though I say so, being so audible. I would soon master the rest. I thought they will have lots of subalterns from O.T. [Officer Training] but not many senior regimental officers. If I join at 55 it would shame others into doing the same. Personally I should love the work & would try to be subordinate—which is my failing. I have drawn up my application but wont send it in before the weekend. Or can I serve my country better in any other way?
Malcolm is in Belgium & I fear in a post of great danger. Wood at Dover.
The country’s pressing task was to transform its small professional army—much of it scattered across the outposts of empire—into a force capable of fighting alongside France’s mass army on the Continent. Innes Doyle and Lottie’s husband, Leslie Oldham, were both majors in the Army. Conan Doyle’s secretary, Alfred Wood, a reserve officer, was called up. Malcolm Leckie, Jean’s younger brother, was an army doctor. Kingsley Conan Doyle had volunteered for the Army Medical Corps. Others in the family and household would serve as well. A week into the war Conan Doyle’s nineteen-year-old nephew and godson appealed to him for help getting a commission:
from Oscar Hornung AUGUST 12, 1914
Dear Uncle Arthur
I know you are very busy now, but I have entered my name for a commission in the Essex 7th Regiment (quartered near here at Brentwood) and they have sent my name up for the ‘2000 Officers for Lord Kitchener’. I must await the answer from the War Office, but meanwhile I wish you could use any influence you have to get me accepted for Active Service. That is what I am aiming for, to get to the front, if possible, and with a little luck I may get a commission for Active Service abroad, however far in the future.
Your affec. nephew
Oscar
Conan Doyle himself was far beyond military age but felt he knew something about the business, and that he had valuable experience through the civilian rifle clubs he had helped create after the Boer War.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, AUGUST 1914
It is surely too bad that your later years should be clouded by such a trouble as this. And yet there is a good deal of nobility in it too and it will give Europe a chastening for which she will be the better. I dont think that it can be a very long war. A year should see it through. And it had to come—as we look back we can see that clearly. I hope it will make an end of Kaisers & Militarism.
I chafe at not having anything definite to do, and I live only for the newspapers. Dear Malcolm is in the firing line. Innes is doing good work at home. I expect they will want Kingsley soon. I have had thoughts of trying for a commission in the New Army but Innes & others are against it. But it is very hard to do nothing.
to Innes Doyle WINDLESHAM, AUGUST 25, 1914
Woo
d takes the same view that you do about my volunteering. And yet I am not convinced. From a coldly reasonable point of view I am sure you are both right. But I have only one life to live and here is this grand chance of a wonderful experience which might at the same time have a good effect upon some others. I am sorely tempted. If disaster should come to us it will be still more difficult to keep still. Of course they may & probably would turn me down which would solve it. Meanwhile I have been drawing up small leaflets which (in German) are to be scattered about wherever we can go to show the Germans that it is really their own tyrants, this damned Prussian autocracy that we are fighting.
He did apply for service, saying, ‘Though I am 55 years old, I am very strong and hardy, and can make my voice audible at great distances which is useful at drill.’ The Army turned him down.
For a time, Conan Doyle wielded his pen instead, in a confidential undertaking directed by Liberal politician Charles Masterman, appointed head of the War Propaganda Board. On September 2nd, with the opening of the war going badly for the Allies (not to mention neutral Belgium, invaded and badly mauled by the Germans), Masterman met secretly with a large number of prominent writers, including Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Ford, Thomas Hardy, G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and others. Many agreed to help, including Conan Doyle, though his pamphlet To Arms!, published before the month was out and taken to be a product of Masterman’s programme, was done before the September 2nd meeting took place. It was distributed widely not only in Britain, but in neutral countries like the United States.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, AUGUST 30, 1914
I think dawn is coming for our army, and that the turn of the tide is due. It may seem early to say so but I feel it. Surely these five days of fighting three to one against the best troops in Europe, always retreating and never broken is the finest of all the fine acts of our Army. I fear the casualties will be very heavy. If they are less than 15000 I shall be relieved. And no doubt in such a retreat guns have been lost. But honour has not been lost but very greatly gained.
The burning of Louvain is such a deed as has not been done, so far as I know, since the Thirty Years War. I am sorry not for Louvain but for Germany as I can already see how bitter will be the spirit in which the allies will invade her. I hope none of her old treasures will be destroyed. But the idea of giving some of her works of art to Belgium as a compensation is admirable. But we have to kill our lion first before we arrange where the skin is to be hung up.
I dont think it will be long. I send you an article upon it which please let me have back. I have just done a pamphlet which is a statement of our case at a penny. I will send it this coming week.
Goodbye, dear, and God bless you. We are all working very hard. I address the Hove people today to get recruits.
Expectations of a short war were soon dashed. Germany’s Schlieffen Plan for France’s rapid defeat fell short of its goal, though it came close before its offensive was halted. The war settled now into long lines of entrenched positions separated by several hundred yards of no-man’s-land strongly defended by barbed wire, mines, artillery, and machineguns. Attempts to advance by either side were repelled with heavy losses, in a war shattering an entire generation before it was done. And it had hardly begun before Malcolm Leckie was reported missing, at the first big battle at Mons.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, LATE AUGUST OR EARLY SEPTEMBER 1914
Only a line of love, dear, to show that I think of you. I cant find P.B’s letter but when I do I will send it. It is always a mistake to send me letters. I have so many papers that they get lost. I get more strong every day. I am going to do the history of this war.*
We much fear poor Malcolm is dead—such a dear fellow.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, SEPTEMBER 1914
You will be glad to hear that the government are circulating my statement about the war all over the world. It is very pleasing. I have had an official letter of thanks.
All well. None the worse for camp.
[P.S.] Entre nous if I want a baronetcy after this I could get it, I fancy.
Soon schemes similar to Conan Doyle’s civilian reserve received official sanction after all, as the government began to realize the immensity of the challenge it faced. Conan Doyle was elected to the organizing committee of the new volunteer force in the making, and he also enlisted in the 6th Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment. This time the training was arduous for men his age. They were more ‘of the police-constable than the purely military type’, he allowed, but he ‘found the life of a private soldier a delightful one’, relishing the sense of doing something useful, and the camaraderie.
He brimmed over with ideas for the war effort, ranging from ways to make sea mines harmless to lifebelts for sailors and body armour for soldiers. But the home front was marked by fierce anti-German feeling, and when some people wanted the naturalized Germans who were waiters in London restaurants and hotels rounded up, he defended them—and in response was attacked for his pre-war story ‘Danger!’ (which amounted to being condemned for having correctly warned about the U-boat threat).
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, SEPTEMBER 1914
So glad to hear from you dear, and all about Innes. I do hope they will give him good guns if they send him out.
The letter in the Daily Mail was a malicious attack which did me good not harm. I had incurred the wrath of some ultra-patriots by taking the part of some of the old naturalised waiters who have been undeservedly ruined by the war. An epistle then appeared to say I had written a story about submarines which would hurt the feelings of Britons abroad. I of course wrote next day to show that the said story was written & published before the war and that it was to warn the country against the danger. Smith wrote a eulogistic letter about me & it all ended well. It was a stupid business.
[P.S.] We fear there is no hope for Malcolm. Miss Loder-Symond’s elder brother was killed yesterday.*
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 1914
I grow stronger but it is a little slow. Jean & the children go to Eastbourne tomorrow and I follow in a day or two when I have cleaned up arrears. It will be good to see Ida. Have no fear for me. I speak at a recruiting meeting on Monday at St Leonards.
K was last heard of near Gibraltar, bound for Malta with his medical unit, and a brigade of territorials who relieve the Malta Garrison.
What times we live in. Jeans Belgian refugees flourish. 12 of them.†
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, DECEMBER 12, 1914
Am I not a very bad correspondent? But I write all day at my history. It promises to be my magnum opus. I have had great good fortune for I have had private information, including the diary of two general officers. So I hope I shall fashion a little wreath for these brave men.
There is no more reason, and alas no less, to think Malcolm dead than there was before. When the Germans leave Mons I shall run across and see what I can do. The government admit that the only list they got was a faulty one. So I have hopes. But the others are resigned to it.
Lottie must let us know when & where we can see her and Leslie. I am more busy than I have ever been but I would set everything aside for that. Wood is back with us, recovering from influenza. I am on the London Committee of old crock volunteer corps—indeed the inception of the movement was mine. We now have government sanction and we are going ahead & hope to drill & train half a million of men. I have to bundle out every night after dinner for drill. Soon I shall be entitled to wear a big red armlet which makes me a legal combatant. It is given after 40 drills. I am like the officer’s servant in Lever’s book who avoided his duties all his life but had to go back to the ranks when his master died. ‘Behold me, a veteran, doing the goose step.’
Much love to Lottie & Claire. Kingsley is anxious to return from Malta and take a commission in Kitchener’s army. I dont think there will be any fighting in Egypt.
[P.S.] Too bad that your quiet years should be disturbed by a mad German.
His hopes for
Malcolm Leckie were dashed the following week. A surgeon attached to the Northumberland Fusiliers at Mons, he had been wounded in the chest on August 24th. He had continued to treat other wounded, there and at the field hospital to which he was taken, but he died on August 28th, thirty-four years old. In the obituary Conan Doyle wrote for the January 2, 1915, Guy’s Hospital Gazette, where Leckie had trained as a doctor, he stressed Leckie’s ‘personal amiability, professional capacity, and devotion to duty’, and his ‘fearless and reckless devotion in attending the wounded’. Leckie was awarded the Distinguished Service Order posthumously. ‘Those who recall that eager and sensitive face, quick sympathetic smile, and gentle modesty of bearing will see in them,’ Conan Doyle concluded, ‘the expression of something more permanent than death—the true inner man of which matter is but the shell.’