Soldiers of the Leicestershire Regiment in the Boer War.
Spectacle of Empire
Tensions were exacerbated by the ill-fated raid led by Dr. Leander Starr Jameson (see “The Three Garridebs,” note 10) in 1895, a deliberate act of aggression that was meant to inspire the Uitlanders to revolt and that received the backing of Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of Cape Colony (see “The Solitary Cyclist,” note 28). As a consequence, the Transvaal sought help from the Orange Free State province, forming a military alliance to protect the independence of both regions. Sir Alfred Milner, appointed British high commissioner for South Africa in 1897, was charged with persuading Kruger to compromise on his Uitlander policy; but talks went nowhere, and the British pushed matters to the brink by sending additional troops to its South African garrison. On October 11, 1899, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State declared war on the British.
Even with some 1,600 volunteers from Germany (remember that Kaiser Wilhelm had sent an infamous letter to Kruger, congratulating him on suppressing Jameson’s raid—see “The Second Stain,” note 10), Ireland, the United States, Scandinavia, France, Holland, and Russia arriving to help the Boers, the conflict seemed a mismatch from the start. Yet Boer forces had the advantage of fighting in familiar terrain and using modern rifles superior to those carried by the British; and in the war’s early stages, they also far outnumbered the British troops. Initially the Boers achieved striking success, invading Northern Natal and Cape Colony; besieging Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking; and, during “Black Week” in December, scoring important victories at Stromberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso. It was this string of losses that prompted London to dismiss the flailing Sir Redvers Buller and install Frederick Sleigh Roberts as the new commander-in- chief (see note 26). As Roberts took charge and substantial British reinforcements touched down on South African shores, the tide of the war began to turn.
With the experienced Baron Kitchener (Herbert Horatio Kitchener, later Viscount Broome, 1850–1916) serving as Roberts’s chief of staff, the British Army began to overwhelm the Boers, relieving Kimberley, Ladysmith, and Mafeking and capturing Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. The Transvaal was officially annexed by Britain in October 1900, and Roberts returned to England, leaving Kitchener to take his place as commander-in-chief at the end of November. But the war was not yet over, and would not be for another eighteen months. The Boers embarked upon a well-coordinated guerrilla campaign in which they successfully harassed British bases, railways, and communication lines, keeping large rural areas out of British hands. In response, Kitchener saw systematic cruelty as his most effective option. He set up corrugated stone-and-iron blockhouses along the railway lines as lookout posts, then cleared the land by burning farms, killing livestock, and herding women and children into “concentration camps” (a technique probably learned from the Spanish, who used the tactic of reconcentrado against Cuban guerrillas in 1895). By the end of 1901, more than 100,000 Boers were living in the inadequately supplied camps; some 20,000 inmates, most of them children, died of disease brought on by unsanitary conditions. Kitchener’s strategy, despite the international outrage it provoked, worked. On May 31, 1902, the Treaty of Vereeniging brought an official end to the conflict. The two Boer provinces, at last broken, formally recognised British sovereignty in exchange for the promise of future self-government and a payment of £3 million to cover the costs of property destruction.
Overall, British losses totalled 5,774 men, while the Boers lost some 4,000. As historian A. N. Wilson writes, “The war was hugely popular. . . . The songs of the war had an infectious music-hall brio. And Britain may be said to have won handsome returns on her expenditure. For her £222 million [the total cost of the war] she had won control of the richest spot on Earth.” Yet the manner in which the Boer War was won casts a pall on this particular episode in British history. Whereas today Kitchener might have stood in front of an international tribunal, in 1902, after being awarded £50,000 by Parliament, he was given the Order of Merit and made a viscount. In later years, Kitchener ruled Egypt and Sudan and served as secretary of state for war at the onset of World War I.
Arthur Conan Doyle volunteered for military service in the Boer War on Christmas Eve 1899. The British Army had no interest in the forty-year-old author, however, and Conan Doyle had to seek his own opportunities to aid the war effort, joining John Langman’s volunteer hospital in February 1900 in South Africa. Upon his return to England in July 1900, he wrote two important works, The Great Boer War, a history, and The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, a response to the public criticism of British treatment of the Boers. It was probably this latter work for which Conan Doyle earned his knighthood in 1902.
1 “The Blanched Soldier” was published in the Strand Magazine in November 1926. Its first American publication was in Liberty on October 16, 1926. The manuscript is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
2 Critics have found reason to doubt that Holmes really wrote “The Blanched Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane.” Joseph J. Eckrich sees a basic discrepancy between Holmes’s character and the accessibility of this tale, writing, “What bothers me is my belief that had Holmes taken up [Watson’s] dare, he would have written a cold, unemotional narrative, and would have published it in some specialized journal . . .”
Gavin Brend, in My Dear Holmes, agrees with Eckrich that the writing style of “The Blanched Soldier” does not reflect what might be expected of Holmes and points out that in “The Abbey Grange,” Holmes decried Watson’s degrading of “what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstration” into mere stories. Brend, who also thinks it unlikely that Holmes would start recording his own tales at this late stage in his career, discards the possibility of a third-party author, especially an author pretending to be Holmes.
D. Martin Dakin finds Holmes’s excuses for attempting to write a popular story “singularly unconvincing. Would he not rather have reserved his analytical comments on his own cases for that monumental work on The Whole Art of Detection which his admirers are still eagerly awaiting?” Furthermore, Dakin argues, if Holmes were to take up a narrative pen, he would have chosen more distinguished stories than “The Blanched Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane.” That Holmes could construct a powerful story, Dakin points out, is demonstrated in “The ‘Gloria Scott’ ” and “The Musgrave Ritual,” both of which are told primarily by Holmes.
So who wrote this story? Brend concludes that Watson is the likely author of both “The Blanched Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane,” as well as the “The Mazarin Stone,” which is told in the third person. O. F. Grazebrook constructs an ingenious theory that the entire Case-Book was from the pen of Dr. Verner, Holmes’s distant cousin. B. Dean Wortman points to two distinctive writing styles in “The Blanched Soldier” and concludes that part was written by Holmes and part by Arthur Conan Doyle. But Richard M. Caplan, M.D., in “The Curious Circumstance of the Missing Brother,” takes the “fundamentalist” viewpoint that at least “The Blanched Soldier” was written by Holmes. Dr. Caplan argues that Holmes selected this story to “try his hand” precisely because Watson would have had to “make himself seem grossly inadequate as a diagnostician” to tell the story.
3 Certainly a backhanded compliment! Contrast this statement with Holmes’s critical remarks in cases such as “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” (“ ‘Well, Watson . . . a very pretty hash you have made of it!’ ”) and “The Retired Colourman” (“in your mission you have missed everything of importance”).
4 For a brief history of the Boer War, see the appendix on page 1507.
5 The identity of the woman to whom Holmes’s report refers is not recorded. Watson himself makes no reference to her at all, and the reader’s awareness of her existence depends entirely on Holmes’s remark. Most commentators take this reference to indicate a second marriage, post-Mary Morstan, since Watson has already suffered through the “sad bereavement” of, p
resumably, Mary’s death (mentioned in “The Empty House” as occurring between 1891 and 1894). Others have postulated more than two marriages. For example, H. W. Bell, in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Chronology of Their Adventures, reasons that in February 1896, Watson had taken up separate quarters (“The Veiled Lodger”) but had not resumed medical practice. Hence a second marriage must have taken place. Thus the remark here implies a third marriage. Trevor H. Hall, in “Dr. Watson’s Marriages,” concludes that Watson was married five times, and that the wife referred to in “The Blanched Soldier” is the fifth. Cameron Hollyer, in “Murk IV Meets Watson the Benedict,” computes—with tongue planted firmly in cheek—that Watson had over eighty wives.
Watson’s silence about the details of his second marriage leads some commentators to doubt if it ever took place. Mary Morstan did not die, they propose. Instead, Watson’s “sad bereavement” referred either to the death of a child or to a serious breakdown in Mrs. Watson’s health. These commentators go on to suggest that, after 1894, Mary was confined to a sanatorium, where Watson visited her regularly. This reference, then, to Watson’s desertion refers to her release from the sanatorium and return to the Watson household.
June Thomson is not a follower of this school of thought. “Quite apart from the lack of evidence to support these theories and their failure to explain satisfactorily Watson’s silence over the matter,” she argues, “both Watson’s and Holmes’s choice of words alone would tend to refute them.” A serious illness would not be described as a “sad bereavement.” Neither does it seem likely that Holmes, who knew Mary, would describe her as “a wife.”
Then who is she? Speculation abounds, with little evidence other than a chance remark of approbation by Holmes or Dr. Watson. S. C. Roberts, for example, proposes Violet de Merville (of “The Illustrious Client”), whom Holmes describes as an “ethereal other-world beauty.” Watson did not meet her in the course of the tale, but Roberts imagines that the chivalrous Watson would have called on her to inquire after her recovery and, perhaps abetted by her military father, courted her. David L. Hammer favours Violet Hunter, whom Watson appears to have seen as a candidate for Holmes’s affections at the time. Two different scholars propose Lady Frances Carfax (who bore the “statuesque face of a handsome and spiritual woman of middle age”) as likely to appeal to the middle-aged Watson, while June Thomson offers Grace Dunbar (of “Thor Bridge”), described by Watson as “tall, with a noble figure and commanding presence,” as her candidate. J. N. Williamson audaciously suggests that Watson had an affair with Irene Adler prior to his marriage to Mary Morstan, that Mary divorced him in 1901, and that Watson then married Adler.
There is no real evidence of the identity of this mysterious “wife,” nor is it even certain that it is Watson’s wife—a point made by C. Alan Bradley and William A. S. Serjeant, who contend that it is Mrs. Neville St. Clair (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”), someone else’s wife. D. Martin Dakin evades the entire topic, pointing out that if “The Blanched Soldier” was not written by Holmes—that is, is fictitious—then “with it goes the whole evidence for the much discussed second marriage of Watson. . . .”
6 A technique learned from Professor Moriarty? See The Valley of Fear, Chapter Two, in which Moriarty sat with the lamp shining in the face of Inspector Macdonald during their interview. In any event, Holmes found himself on the receiving end of this method of observation when Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope, in “The Second Stain,” seated herself in the “one chair” that put her out of the light (“She swept across the room and seated herself with her back to the window”).
7 The voluntary mounted units once known as the Yeomanry Calvary were organised in 1794 to put down riots. After providing crucial service in the Boer War—some three thousand officers and men were involved—the cavalry’s name was changed to the Imperial Yeomanry in 1901.
8 Holmes used similar deductive reasoning to identify Dr. Watson as a military man in A Study in Scarlet, where Watson’s “military air” and tan gave away his visit to Afghanistan.
9 The “Middlesex Corps” was properly the Middlesex (Duke of Cambridge’s Hussars) Yeomanry Cavalry, which changed its name in 1901 to Middlesex Imperial Yeomanry (Duke of Cambridge’s Hussars) and in 1908 became 1st County of London Yeomanry (Middlesex, Duke of Cambridge’s Hussars). Prince George, Duke of Cambridge (the commander-in-chief of the British Army from 1856 to 1895 and cousin to Queen Victoria) became its colonel-in-chief in 1898, assuring its “tony” status (to which Holmes here alludes).
10 Originally “Gerald Emsworth” in the manuscript.
11 That is, Colonel Emsworth had won the Victoria Cross, England’s highest military honour for gallantry in the face of the enemy, in the Crimean War.
12 The battle of Diamond Hill occurred on June 11–12, 1900, when British forces, having just captured Pretoria, attacked the Boers entrenched along the ridges outside the city. The Boers were forced to withdraw, but few lives were lost, and both sides ended up claiming victory.
13 Objected to; took exception to.
14 An argument, a quarrel.
15 “It was some little time before I could open it” in the Strand Magazine text.
16 Probably a concealed reference to the “Duke of Holdernesse,” with whom Holmes was involved in “The Priory School.”
17 Abdul-Hamid II (1842–1918) assumed the throne in 1876 after his brother, Murad V, suffered a mental breakdown. A cruel despot who relied upon his secret police and censorship to keep the populace in line, Abdul-Hamid dismissed Parliament and suspended the constitution, ruling in seclusion from his palace and adopting a pan-Islamic stance for Turkey. He was deposed in 1909 by the revolutionary Young Turks movement, which was agitating for a constitutional government. In 1901 and 1902, Turkish encroachments on Aden had created dangerously high tensions between England and Turkey, and perhaps Mycroft and his cronies asked Sherlock to assist the sultan in smoothing the diplomatic waters by looking into the early stirrings of the revolution.
18 Is this Holmes’s “case-book,” mentioned in “The Speckled Band”? There is no other mention in the Canon of Holmes’s keeping a diary, although Holmes undoubtedly kept notes on his cases and uses the word here in the sense of a pocket journal.
19 But Holmes does engage in this trick, by concealing the identity of his taciturn “old friend” until the end of the tale.
20 Note that a telephone is available even in the countryside at this point, twenty-four years after the establishment of London’s first telephone exchange in 1879. In 1902, the National Telephone Company had 25,000 lines in London and the Post Office 5,500 (still a small number for a population of about 4.5 million). According to Norman Lucas, author of a fine history of Scotland Yard entitled The CID, discussed in Gar Donnelson’s “‘Please give the Yard a call, Watson,’ ” a telephone was not installed at New Scotland Yard until 1903, and not all of the Metropolitan Police Stations had a telephone until 1906. However, every major provincial police force had had telephones for years.
21 Pretoria, formerly the capital of the South African Transvaal, was founded in 1855 and named after the Boer leader Andries Pretorius. During the Boer War, Winston Churchill, then a correspondent for the Morning Post, was captured and imprisoned in Pretoria. He managed to escape, hiding himself in a coal wagon and travelling hundreds of miles on foot until he reached safety. Enthralled audiences devoured Churchill’s accounts of his Pretoria experience and flocked to his lectures (which he delivered accompanied by slides), elevating him to the level of respected journalist and war hero. Riding the wave of his newfound popularity, Churchill soon embarked upon what would be a brilliant political career.
22 This would have been the Delagoa Bay and East African Railway, which was backed by the British and lasted only from 1887 to 1889.
23 In South African Dutch, a raised verandah running along the front or sides of a house.
24 Although lepers were considered unclean and were confined to colonies to lessen their
contact with the outside world, leprosy itself is not a highly contagious disease: At highest risk of infection are the children of those already afflicted, not their adult neighbours. Thus, the doctor’s horrified claims to the contrary, Godfrey Emsworth’s merely sleeping on a “leper’s bed” would not have been enough to have infected him with the disease.
In addition to skin lesions, leprosy (from the Greek word lepros, or “scaly”) may cause nerve damage, which leads to a loss of sensation. As even minor injuries—a cut, a mild burn—often go unnoticed and untreated, the damage becomes far more severe, leading to the “twisted or swollen or disfigured” figures that greeted Master Emsworth. By the seventeenth century, rates of leprosy in northern Europe had decreased; but Africa still suffered greatly from the disease, as it continues to do today. See “The Illustrious Client,” note 26, for more on leprosy.
25 An “educated medical man,” even a surgeon like Mr. Kent, should have noted the absence of common symptoms of leprosy, erythema (reddening of the skin), admittedly not always present, and anaesthesia (loss of feeling), which is invariably present.
26 Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts of Kandahar (1832–1914), was a celebrated British field marshal who earned the Victoria Cross for his service in the Indian Mutiny. He rose to the level of national hero during the Second Afghan War, winning a decisive battle against Afghan forces just outside Kandahar, and served as commander-in-chief of all forces in India from 1885 to 1893. In 1899, at the age of sixty-seven, Roberts replaced Sir Redvers Buller (whom A. N. Wilson labels “a stupid man”) as commander-in-chief in the Boer War after Buller’s missteps led to heavy losses, including the death of Roberts’s only son. Under Roberts, British forces were brought back from the verge of defeat, and Roberts stepped down in 1900 and returned to England. As her last official engagement, an ailing Queen Victoria bestowed an earldom upon Lord Roberts on January 14, 1901, granting him the privilege of passing the title down to his daughter in the absence of a remaining male heir. Roberts was named commander-in-chief of the British Army and served until 1904, when the office was abolished.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 85