Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
Page 59
‘I wished and felt convinced myself that the war was going to be a short one,’ Kingsley admitted to Conan Doyle on New Year’s Day 1915, explaining why he had decided to seek a commission in the Army. But ‘according to the rate of progress at present, and the chances of a decisive battle, the war, it seems to me, might last several years’, he now felt.
Conan Doyle had begun to fear the same as he worked on his history. As he wrote (with ‘no help but only hindrance from the War Office’), and as Innes prepared to go to the front, he turned his work on the war’s opening months into a morale-building lecture, ‘The Great Battles of the War’, and took it on the road.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, FEBRUARY 1915
I start presently on my lecture tour and hope it wont involve missing you in the South. I shall be at Bournemouth March 5. Scotland from March 10 to 13. Middlesboro & Sunderland 15, 16. Cheltenham 18. London 20. (Sat). Harrogate 22nd, Torquay Exeter 15, 16 and so on. I tried the lecture here at Tun Wells and it went very well.
I am going up now to meet old Innes & shall see him off tomorrow.
to Mary Doyle MIDLAND HOTEL, BRADFORD, MARCH 1915
Here I am—not so very far away. I have done Edinburgh, Glasgow, Middlesboro’, Sunderland tonight Bradford. Saturday is my London ordeal. Monday Harrogate where I shall be putting up with Dr Bertram Watson. Tuesday Shrewsbury, Thursday Cheltenham. Fri. Exeter. Sat. Torquay. Mon. Plymouth. Good going. Jean joins me at Cheltenham. Tired but not too much so. You realise that it was Innes’ Corps (4th) which won the battle of Neuve Chapelle.
Neuve Chapelle, fought March 10th to 13th, was less a victory than a stalemate, with the British advance called off after a German counterattack. ‘It is astounding to see the two lines of trenches opposing each other, so close together,’ Innes told Conan Doyle. ‘The very big shells make such an upheaval that numbers of men get buried and are never seen again.’ But it was an alleged shortage of shells that Field Marshal Sir John French blamed for the disappointing outcome, leading to a political crisis at home and the appointment of Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, on his way to Downing Street.
to Mary Doyle 2, RIPON ROAD. HARROGATE, MARCH 1915
It seems hard to be so near you & not to see you. I remember that when we motored it did not seem very far. My lecture went very well to a huge house. So it did in London. Altogether the venture has been a successful and pleasing one, and not too exhausting. So long as I can keep nonalcoholic the easier I do my work. The more I live the more I realise that alcohol shortens life & spoils it. However the human race is slowly learning that lesson. I would be a prohibitionist if it became practical politics.*
Today I speak at Shrewsbury. Wednesday I reach Cheltenham, but dont speak till Thursday when Jean joins me. Exeter Friday. Torquay Saturday. Plymouth Monday. Then home for Easter. From home I will work Folkestone, Brighton &c. Then April 13, 14 Liverpool & Chester. All the time I write my history. I may get a preliminary volume out in June. It will amaze people for I am the only man who knows the facts & I know them down to the small details. It will fairly sweep the country, I think. By the way as a Volunteer I have volunteered for any or every service so I dont know what change may occur after May 1. I still have hopes that we may get across in some humble capacity.
He would be disappointed on that score. Conan Doyle continued to drill at home with the volunteers, write his history while contending with the censors, devise ideas to improve Britain’s performance while contending with bureaucrats, cope like everyone else with wartime privations, and mourn the fallen. ‘Our household suffered terribly in the war,’ Conan Doyle said in Memories and Adventures. That July alone saw ‘two brave nephews, Alex Forbes and Oscar Hornung, down with bullets through the brain,’ and his ‘gallant brother-in-law, Major Oldham’, Lottie’s husband, ‘killed by a sniper during his first days in the trenches’.*
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MAY 22, 1915
We look forward to seeing you and all will be in order. I returned from Camp on Monday night, having lost 7 pounds weight in 4 days. I am now 14 stone 11, the lowest I have ever been. I feel very well & am very busy. I will of course meet you on Friday. Give me the hour early as cabs are few.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, JULY 1915
I am so grieved about Oscar on your account as well as on account of W and Connie. Dear boy, he died a hero’s death. This is just to say how much my thoughts are with you. Innes looks bonny. I have not seen him better. He goes to Ida tomorrow.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, JULY 20, 1915
Very many happy returns, my dear Mam. They are belated but none the less from the heart. I enclose a wee cheque. Innes went back much refreshed to his labours. We have not heard of his arrival but a letter should come today. I have never seen him look better. I took him down in the motor to see Ida. I only wish you had been in the south when he came but I think he will soon be back for I still believe that the war may collapse.
Goodbye, my dear Mammie. Stiller has gone & I am gasman, chauffeur, historian, Volunteer &c.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, AUGUST 1915
It is sad that in your latter years you should have such blows as the death of Oscar and of dear old Leslie. Gods will be done but I grieve for you. Tomorrow we go to Eastbourne where we shall have a month or so. I will really try and slack it but I find it very hard. I keep my history almost up to date as well as I can and it keeps me from brooding too much. I wish I could do more.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, AUGUST 30, 1915
I am here for a day or two for drills but return to E tomorrow.
The Besson could pay no dividend. They have not done badly but they dare not part with money in these times.
I send you £10. I need not say that they are days for economy. I have myself cut off my chauffeur and do with the minimum. But I am sure you appreciate that.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 3, 1915
I am so sorry to write so seldom but indeed I have much to do. Is it not good that dear old Innes is a colonel. It is wonderful. You must be proud. Goodbye, dear one, I have to be off for Sunday Volunteer Parade. I think the war will go better now.
Oscar Hornung had been Connie’s only child, and the Mam’s first grandchild to die in the war, and age and sorrow were taking their toll on her. On October 15th, Dodo reported that their mother was ‘full of courage, and the fact that she retains so many interests is a help to her, at the same time I find her greatly aged and pulled down by our losses’. The Mam got along with the help of ‘faithful devoted Lizzie’ but, said Dodo, ‘of course she is 78, and as she now sees so little she thinks the more. These are very hard times for the aged, who can do so little.’
‘She cried very much when your letter and cheque came during my visit,’ Dodo told her brother, ‘but kept saying “God bless him.”’
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 18, 1915
I quite agree about dear Oscar and Leslie. Death could come in no sweeter shape and soon we shall be united once again. If Kingsley also was fated to fall for his country I should feel the same. But I wish some of us older men who have had our lives could take the places of the boys. You must not mourn, dear. It comes to all and how can it possibly come so well or so easily as to them.
I hold my own, I think, in the Times debate. It is dirty work but let ‘Messieurs les Assassins commencent’ if we are to stop. We are too good.
I think the end will come sooner than we think. This new Balkan front is simply opening another vein for a man who is slowly bleeding to death.
[P.S.] I spend three days in camp next week.
The new Times debate was whether Britain should retaliate for air raids against French and British cities. Zeppelin raids against civilians, and the use of poison gas, were examples of German Schrecklichkeit (terror tactics) in warfare, and on the 15th Conan Doyle said that ‘surely it is time that these German murders by Zeppelin should be dealt with more firmly’. To objections that raids on German cities would be murder, he said on the 1
8th that calling reprisal raids murder was ‘an abuse of words, when it is in answer to murder in the past, and a preventive to murder in the future’, for ‘there are times when clean-handedness becomes a vicarious virtue by which other people suffer’.
The war grew more terrible, and so did the strain, to the point that by Christmas, he had to protect Innes’s ability to recuperate from their own mother.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, DECEMBER 1915
You must remember that Innes is in great need of rest after unceasing strain. He should spend his whole time on a sofa by a window with his wife & child. I am sure you will realise this, and not only not try to take him away north but also make Ida & Lottie understand. It would be really better that he stayed in France than that he should have such a week as has been suggested. His health and nerves must be our first thought.
‘Everyone found themselves doing strange things,’ Conan Doyle wrote of the war years. ‘I was not only a private in the Volunteers, but I was a signaler and for a time number one of a machine gun. My wife started a home for Belgian refugees in Crowborough. My son was a soldier, first, last, and all the time. My daughter Mary gave herself up altogether to public work, making shells at Vickers’ and afterwards serving in a canteen… Truly it had become a national war.’
Private Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was eager to do his bit, marching several miles at a time in full gear and, on one occasion, standing in the rain eight hours guarding a labour detail of German prisoners as they loaded carts with manure. ‘They were excellent workers,’ he recalled, ‘and they seemed civil, tractable fellows as well.’
He continued working on what he hoped would be a definitive history of the war, drawing on correspondence with at least fifty generals who gave him ‘wonderfully good inside knowledge’, though he would be criticized later for giving their information more credence than he should have. ‘My hand is fairly cramped with writing history,’ he told Innes. The effort left less time for correspondence, and no taste for writing fiction.
‘I can’t attune my mind to fiction,’ he told Greenhough Smith at the Strand. ‘I’ve tried but I can’t. I wish those fools would let me begin my History in your Xmas number. It is a year old now.’ The main exception he made was his 1917 story ‘His Last Bow’, subtitled ‘The War Service of Sherlock Holmes’, in which he brought Holmes out of retirement for prewar counterespionage work. (‘About Sherlock it is very important not to give away the story, as is so constantly done, by the illustrations,’ Conan Doyle warned Greenhough Smith on May 31, 1917. ‘A picture of the American throttling the German would be ruinous.’)
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MARCH 24, 1916
Yes, I must plead guilty to having been a bad correspondent to you—and also to forgetting birthdays, including as you say my own. My life is a drive but still these family things should be kept up. If ever you give me a list of family birthdays I will pin it on the wall & try to remember it. Lottie would draw it up.
Tomorrow I lecture on Loos at Brighton. On Sunday I have 16 miles route march with rifle & equipment. Monday I have several important engagements in London. I am pretty busy. But I am abreast of the army so far as the history goes. Since Loos nothing of any importance has occurred. But I have worked for months upon that one battle.
I have ordered the Strand to be sent to you. I have put all that I have of work and judgment and occasionally of fire into that history. Never have I done such difficult & honest work. I shall be very much interested to see how the public take it. But of course in slabs of 10,000 words it is hardly a fair test. But I think I have got historical perspective & proportion into the thing—which has not yet been done.
Snowing steadily & a dismal day but I must get out for only so can I keep fit.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MAY 7, 1916 (‘LUSITANIA DAY’)
I enclose a picture of Admiral John Hay who died last week. Is he not Innes’ godfather?* If so send him the picture. I never understood why he was his godfather.
Kingsley is very happy in a trench of his own in front of the first line. He evidently enjoys it but it is considerable danger. However he is in God’s hands. I hope He will keep his fingers closed and not slip him through.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, JUNE 1916
K is in this battle. I hope all will be well. He is in God’s hands. It is not in Innes’ direction. All seems to go well so far.
On July 1st, during the horrendous Battle of the Somme, Kingsley was seriously wounded and sent back to England to convalesce. ‘His progress is well maintained—skin cool, brain alert and every favourable symptom,’ James Ryan reported after being able to visit him in the hospital: ‘A wound so close to the vital centres will require subsequent watching; as you know, nervous degeneration of the cord may set in long after the bone, muscle, artery, sinew even nerve have healed.’
Conan Doyle found a way to get himself into the thick of the action, accepting an invitation from the Italian authorities to inspect their front. On being told that he needed a uniform of some kind, he remembered his status as Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Surrey. ‘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 or Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crowns upon the shoulder-straps.’
Though he admitted to feeling like a ‘mighty impostor’, he managed to visit the British and French fronts as well, an experience he wrote up in a pamphlet called A Visit to Three Fronts. ‘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.’
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, JULY 1916
I should have written sooner for your birthday but have had a rather rushing time which gave me no time to sit down quietly. I now send you £5 which I hope you will spend in such a way as will give you most bodily comfort. The visit of [Dr and Mrs Malcolm] Morris was a great success. We liked her much, and him I have always liked, but the liking is now deepened by respect for he is really a very good & fine man, working unselfishly for humanity.
I am now off to screw up the motor to take Innes to Tunbridge Wells. It is sad to say goodbye, but ‘Joy cometh with the morning’. Their ranks seem to me to split and ours to close.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM
I am not clear from your letter whether Percy [Foley, Ida’s older son, not yet 18] is to go out. I hope not. We have paid our full share in our family & Ida has anxiety enough.
I send a French cutting. The outsider as usual sees most of the game.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, AUGUST 22, 1916
I was very glad to have the Stonyhurst letter. I will read it to Clara when I see her.
I have to go to London tomorrow to see the Minister of Munitions. I dont know what he wants. Something about Shields, I fancy, since I have been agitating on that question.
We thought Percy a charming boy & were sorry he could not come again. We had him, Wood, Kingsley, Mary & Miss Pocock simultaneously. By the way we all found the latter very sympathetic this time—Jean changed her opinion altogether which had not been very cordial.
We have had a loss in Alec Forbes, a very noble lad, Pat Forbes’ younger (& bigger) son. He was killed by a bullet last week. It is really extraordinary our casualties. What must it be in Germany!
Conan Doyle had been ‘agitating’ for body armour for the troops for months. To The Times the previous year he had written: ‘It has always seemed to me extraordinary that the innumerable cases where a Bible, a cigarette case, a watch, or some other chance article has saved a man’s life have not set us scheming so as to do systematically what has so often been the result of a happy chance.’
By mid-1916, though, he was agitating on a far more controversial subject. Sir Roger Casement, the Irish-born British diplomat who had been Conan Doyle’s ally in the Congo controversy, had been arrested landing in Ireland from a German U-boat that had brought him there
to raise an insurrection in Great. Britain’s backyard. He was tried for treason, found guilty, and sentenced to hang after a stirring court-room speech about the Irish cause.
Conan Doyle argued fiercely against a death sentence, believing Casement’s passionate nationalism had driven him mad. ‘He was a man of fine character,’ Conan Doyle wrote to the Daily Chronicle. ‘I have no doubt that he is not in a normal state of mind.’ He petitioned the prime minister for clemency, and wrote passionately about it to Attorney General F. E. Smith. ‘No man with any heart or perception could read your description of Roger Casement’s death sentence without shame and disgust,’ said one of his letters: ‘Such words in an English paper are likely to do more enduring political harm than ever poor misguided Casement achieved. They will certainly be exploited by every enemy of England from Dublin to San Francisco.’
Many others also supported clemency because of Casement’s long service to the Crown. In response, the Home Office gave to the press Casement’s so-called Black Diaries, demonstrating that he had been a secret but promiscuous homosexual keeping a detailed record of pickups and one-night stands. Some abandoned Casement’s cause at this point, but not Conan Doyle.