First publication. In spring 1900 Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) sailed to South Africa to serve as a physician in the Langman Hospital (a field hospital funded privately and staffed by volunteers to treat the British casualties of the Boer War), and he arrived at Cape Town on 21 March 1900. He then travelled to the recently captured Bloemfontein, where the Langman Hospital had to deal with a typhoid epidemic, caused by the Boers cutting off the water supply to the town – thus causing the population to rely upon contaminated river water and other unsanitary sources. ‘Figures are hard to pin down, but by the end of the month some 10,000 to 12,000 men had contracted the disease. At its height the death toll reached forty a day’ (A. Lycett, Conan Doyle: The Man who Created Sherlock Holmes (London, 2007), p. 254). After an intensive and exhausting period of practice at the hospital, Conan Doyle took a brief break of five days, during which he joined Lord Roberts’s forces which were advancing on Pretoria and travelled with them as far as Brandfort and the Vet river. ‘A Glimpse of the Army’ is a record of impressions gained during those five days with Roberts’s troops, and gives a sense of optimism as the British army learned lessons from its early defeats: ‘[w]ho can stop an army on the open veldt, now that it has weeded out some of its incompetence and had time to learn in war a few of those lessons which should have been taught in peace? It makes one’s heart bleed to think of the deaths and the mutilations and (worse than either) the humiliations that come from our rotten military system, which has devoted years to teaching men to walk in step, and hours teaching them to use their weapons’ (p. [345]).

The article is illustrated with ten photographs, which include images of ‘Dr Conan Doyle at Bloemfontein’ and engineers repairing a shelled railway line. The Boer War was the first occasion on which the British army used significant numbers balloons in action for the purposes of reconnaissance and directing artillery fire, and Conan Doyle writes of witnessing at first light ‘a strange sight. A monstrous blister was rising slowly from the veldt. It was the balloon being inflated – our answer to the lurking guns [of the Boers]. We would throw away no chances now, but play every card in our hand – another lesson which the war has driven into our proud hearts. The army moved on, with the absurd windbag flapping over the heads of the column’ (p. 352), and it is illustrated in a photograph of ‘The War-Balloon near Brandfort’. The article closes with the author’s return to the Langman Hospital: ‘[a] day at Brandfort, a night in an open truck, and we were back at the Café Enterique, Boulevard des Microbes, which is our town address’ (p. 354).

Green and Gibson, A. Conan Doyle, pp. 424.