Waterloo

by Arthur Conan Doyle

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Fiction

Library Binding

First published January 1, 1907

About the author

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a Scottish writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.

Doyle was a prolific writer. In addition to the Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the brigantine Mary Celeste, found drifting at sea with no crew member aboard.

Reviews

[Igenlode Wordsmith · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little vignette of an old soldier fallen into senility, the last survivor of the Guards at Hougoumont and hence a local celebrity of a sort.
The author was presumably aiming at the pathos of the old man's decline, with the ongoing metaphor that he is a 'straggler' waiting to be 'called to muster' alongside his now-dead contemporaries, and the final valediction that "the Guards have a full muster now" to announce his demise. The piece apparently appealed greatly to Henry Irving, who bought the rights and subsequently staged the play with himself in the title role, performing it again for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee with great success.

It is hard to imagine what effect it produced from reading it on the page, since there is little there save the Corporal's doddering feebleness and comical remarks on 'the Dook' (of Wellington) and modern developments such as railway trains and breech-loading rifles.