The Great Boer War: A Sir Arthur Conan Doyle War Trilogy

• TRILOGY - Three of Conan Doyle's books detailing war and their causes are in this eBook to provide a comprehensive analysis from the early 1900s

The Great Boer War (1902, the Final Edition)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an army doctor during the South African (Boer) War and wrote "The Great Boer War" in 1900, updating it in 1902. In the Preface to the First Edition, he said: "This book was begun in England and continued on board a steamer, but the greater part was written in a hospital tent in the intervals during the epidemic at Bloemfontein."
In the Preface to the Final Edition, Conan Doyle says that the early text has been carefully revised and all fresh available knowledge has been added within the limits of a single volume narrative. of the various episodes: "I have done my best to give an intelligible and accurate account of the matter. The treatment may occasionally seem too brief but some proportion must be observed between the battles of 1899-1900 and the skirmishes of 1901-1902."

The War in South Africa; its cause and conduct (1902)
In the preface to Doyle's "The War in South Africa" he writes: "There was never a war in history in which the right was absolutely on one side, or in which no incidents of the campaign were open to criticism. I do not pretend that it was so here. But I do not think that any unprejudiced man can read the facts without acknowledging that the British Government has done its best to avoid war, and the British Army to wage it with humanity."

The Crime of the Congo (1909)
Doyle sets forth his view of the Congo as follows in the opening preface: "There are many of us in England who consider the crime which has been wrought in the Congo lands by King Leopold of Belgium and his followers to be the greatest which has ever been known in human annals. Personally I am strongly of that opinion. There have been great expropriations like that of the Normans in England or of the English in Ireland. There have been massacres of populations like that of the South Americans by the Spaniards or of subject nations by the Turks. But never before has there been such a mixture of wholesale expropriation and wholesale massacre all done under an odious guise of philanthropy and with the lowest commercial motives as a reason. It is this sordid cause and the unctious hypocrisy which makes this crime unparalleled in its horror."

About the Author
Prolific novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland) was known for his Sherlock Holmes series but he was also a doctor and historian. His thorough accounts of war often involved the doctor consulting the soldiers under his care. "The Great Boer War," a 500-page account, was considered by some to be a masterpiece of military scholarship. It was also a well-informed and documented commentary about the shortcomings of the British forces.
At the start of WWI, Conan Doyle organised a civilian battalion of more than 100 volunteers. Winston Churchill wrote to thank him for his ideas. While writing about the British Campaign in France and Flanders, he visited the British and French fronts in 1916.