The Guards Came Through, and Other Poems

The creator of Sherlock Holmes turns from deduction to devastation in this collection of war poems written during and immediately after the Great War. Published in 1919, these verses capture what Conan Doyle witnessed firsthand as a physician and war correspondent, the mud of the Somme, the elite Guards regiments going over the top, and the profound silence that followed the guns. This isn't the romanticized heroism of earlier conflicts; it's something rawer, more bewildered. Here are poems about comradeship forged in terror, about the strange peace that settles over a battlefield after the killing stops, about the dead who 'came through' and those who didn't. The title poem itself is a stark tribute: not a celebration of victory but an acknowledgment of what it cost. These are poems written by a man who saw too much and couldn't look away. For readers drawn to the personal voices of wartime, from Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, this offers Conan Doyle's own unflinching account of the war that shattered a generation.