Doctor Watson’s Casebook
Patrick Mercer
© Patrick Mercer 2013
Patrick Mercer has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Doctor Watson’s War
Doctor Watson’s Bout
Doctor Watson’s Charge
Doctor Watson’s War
Chapter One: 221b Baker Street
It was the smell of the place. The rooms that I'd agreed to take at 221b Baker Street with my new acquaintance, Mr Sherlock Holmes had been agreeable enough, close to the centre of Town, to the libraries and the hospitals where I studied, and the clubs where I could eat adequately. They were clean, warm and we were well looked after by the housekeeper, Mrs Hudson. But they smelt. They smelt incessantly and almost unendurably. They smelt of the damned chemicals that Holmes kept there, the chemicals with which, when he wasn't scraping away on his bloody violin, he tinkered all the time. Now, I can hear you asking, 'what sort of a medical man is it who can't abide the smell of chemicals? Ain't they the tools of his trade, don't he smell them all the time when he's in the laboratory and won't he get so used to them there that he don't notice them?' And I'd answer, 'yes, in the lab they're fine, because that's what you expect to smell'. But it's outside the lab, when they're somewhere you don't have to smell them that they bring back the ghosts.
Particularly ether. That strange, thin, acidic smell that gets into your clothes and your hair and sticks up your nostrils and, whilst it’s meant to deaden pain, tells you that there's a devil of a lot of it that you're just about to impose on someone else or have inflicted upon you. And that's why Baker Street could be unbearable; Holmes kept ether by the gallon and the place reeked of it. And the last time that I'd smelt ether out of its natural habitat held bad memories, bloody bad memories. That chemical smell was combined with the stink of hot canvas, the canvas of the dressing station of the 66th Regiment in a corner of hell. A dressing station is meant to be a place of help, succour and recovery, a pretty rough and ready place of recovery, I'll grant you, but not the blood-soaked charnel house that it became in late July a couple of years ago, just a few days after we'd marched from the banks of the Helmand into that godforsaken desert.
And those couple of years had been difficult. It wasn't the bullet in my shoulder that was the problem; not at all. That came out as good as gold in the hospital in Kandahar leaving me, I know, jerky with my left arm and a little hunched, but none the worse. No, it was the scar on my mind. I know others have seen things just as bad - I can remember those old Crimea and Mutiny boys whom I met when I was a lad, the poor old files who, even if they had all their fingers and toes, jumped a league when something went bang. They couldn't seem to concentrate on much and, so often, could be found flogging matches with their ribbons pinned to their chest and a faraway look in their eyes, not much good for anything else. Indeed, it was their stories and their case studies that got me so interested in medicine in the first place, never expecting I'd become a subject for some other sawbones to whet his appetite upon one day.
But, it wasn't bangs or loud noises that lit my fuse. No, it was odd things, the high-pitched cry of a newspaper seller, the sort of screech that you hear from a certain type of working girl which passes for laughter: unusual human noises. A particular note or timbre could bring all that yelling and shouting back to me as the tribesmen closed in, their steel flashing as bright as their eyes, blades hacking and stabbing till there wasn't a blind thing left alive around me. And even now, even two years later, such noises could still set off a sort of numbed panic or rip me shivering from sleep. So, I withdrew, I know I did. I tried to keep such things from my mind, I tried not to read the newspapers, I shunned my friends from the Regiment, even Private Bowler who's been with me throughout that ghastly time, from Kandahar to Gereshk and back again. Even loyal, decent, brave Bowler who'd slung me across the back of a mule when I was bleeding like a slaughtered sheep and protected that native girl like she was his own sister: even Bowler. I just wanted to rub all those memories out, to screw up the piece of paper upon which the wretched, painful story was written and to throw it in the fire.
How I misjudged the man with whom I chose to share those less than fragrant rooms in Baker Street. When Stamford first introduced me to him in the hospital laboratory - all set about by ether-like smells, please note - and Holmes had straight-away observed that I had the mark of Afghanistan upon me, I'd laughed and tried to ignore it. Why would he know, how could he know? It must have been a lucky guess. But I'd no sooner settled into our quarters and the smell had begun to settle on me, than the subject came up again. Holmes had already impressed me with his powers of deduction, his wonderful empathy, what he called his intuition, then, to illustrate the point, he'd volunteered how surprised I'd looked when first we'd met and he'd immediately linked me to Afghanistan. He explained the train of thought went through his mind - I'll remember it always:
"Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the Tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the Tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan."
As if these observations weren't enough, I'd been sharing rooms with Holmes for less than a week when he gave me another demonstration of his powers that utterly staggered me. After lunch he would write at a desk facing out of one of the rear windows. This, I’d noticed, was a daily habit of his, he'd be there for no more than forty-five minutes - I never asked what he wrote - and I would usually take this time to read the paper or just to think, sitting deep in an armchair with Holmes hunched over his papers on the other side of the room.
We'd done this only three or four times and on this occasion I was sunk in melancholy, wondering about the future and trying not to linger on the past when he said, "Please stop that, Watson. It makes an infernal row; can't you just have the damn thing put on your watch-chain like any other man would? Why do you keep playing with it?”
At first I thought that he must be able to see my reflection in the glass of the window, how else could he know? I didn't reply.
"Trophies like that have their place, I agree, but can't you be a bit more discreet with it? Hang it from your watch-chain, like I say, or have a little case made for it and leave it on the mantel piece, but do stop tinkering with it, can't you, it's damned distracting."
It was turning into something of a habit, I agree. Whenever the black dog paid a visit, I'd ferret it out of my waist-coat pocket, pass it from hand to hand and, I suppose annoyingly, roll it along the surface of the table next to my chair under my palm.
"What do you mean by trophy, Holmes?" He couldn't see what I was toying with, how could he know?
"Well, it's obvious what it is, isn't it. Clearly, it's round, but it's not a glass eye or a child's marble, why would you have such things? In fact, it's not quite round as the noise it makes as you roll it is uneven. And it's a low noise, suggesting metal - soft, heavy metal that's slightly misshapen. It's a musket ball, Watson, the one they fished out of your back in Afghanistan after it had hit your shoulder blade and lost its shape," he answered matter-of-factly. "Now be a good fellow and either put it away or give it to me so that I can take it to my jewellers and have it mounted for you."
"But that's astounding, Holmes…how on earth…" He interrupted my surpris
e: "No, it's not astounding, it's elementary my dear Watson."
And there it was, the whole part of my recent life, the part I'd hoped to shroud, to keep from prying eyes, laid bare before me. It wouldn't have surprised me in the least if he'd even mentioned the very place that things had changed for me forever: Maiwand. That shocking, sordid, sun-baked gutter where the best men I've ever known still lay. Their bones, I guessed, were now as white as the walls of the squalid little village where the pick of Victoria's men - both Indian and English - were hacked into carrion. If Holmes thought my face haggard, it had reason to be as his words sent me tumbling back into that butcher's shambles - nothing more than a scratch on the map known as Maiwand.
***
"Bloody fog, sir? 'Ow comes there's bloody fog? It's more like being on the banks o' the damned Thames, not in a goddam' desert," grumbled Private Bowler as we rattled and bumped our way over the gritty, broken ground. And he was good at that Bowler - grumbling. I'd inherited the scruffy little devil when I was posted as Medical Officer to the 66th in Karachi in late '79 and had had a few months to get used to his curious, flat Reading twang before we started the long slog up to Afghanistan whilst the fighting was still raging around Kabul. Shorter than most and wearing spectacles, Bowler had soon been posted to the Medical Section from a duty company because he hardly looked the part on parade, but what he lacked in stature, he made up for in brains.
"Yes, it's a bit of a puzzler, ain't it, Bowler," and it was true, I'd seen nothing like it in my time up country. Mists aplenty, but never as thick as this, for it swirled and wafted about like something from an Irish bog, deadening the noise of the brigade which we knew marched around us. It even muffled our two mules, all the gear they carried and our three native bearers who could be relied upon to hawk and chatter like monkeys even early in the morning.
"Think the General will want a fight, sir, or will he just try to out manoeuvre this Ayoob Khan bloke?" There, that was just it. Bowler looked a sight in his baggy khaki, his just too big sun helmet and with his puttees badly wound. His buff equipment was never tightened properly and his rifle seemed more like an impediment than what the sergeants would term his 'wife an' fuckin' lover', but he had some grey matter. What other private soldier would have remembered the name of the enemy's commander and even appreciate that there might be a way for Burrows - our General - to see the upstart off without a fight at all?
"Course he'll fight! Our General's too much of a gamecock to let this bunch of cheeky savages get away with things. Why, they'll be exhausted after their march all that way from Herat and you saw what fettle they were in at Gereshk the other day, didn't you, Bowler?" I replied, trying to sound more confident that I felt. For sure, Ayoob's mob had marched hundreds of miles from Herat in the west to try to oust the Wali of Kandahar and us, 3,000 or so mixed English and Bombay troops, from the same city and they should all have been tuckered out. It was also no lie that we'd given them a bit of a bloody nose at Gereshk, the ford across the Helmand a few days back, but we'd hardly come to grips with them, had we?
"They looked sound from what I could see, sir! I thought these johnnies was supposed to be all rag-tag an' curly swords, sir, not uniformed with proper guns an' that. I reckon they could be dead nasty if they gets their dander up," and I had to agree with Bowler's gloomy assessment.
I, too, had expected to see a native host more reminiscent of the bible than a regular army when we'd collided with Khan recently. But all I'd observed was troops in trim looking green uniforms who came on well enough and artillery that seemed not only to be well handled, but numerous. And worst of all were the swarms of Ghazis who jigged about screeching. These were the proper jihadis, the vicious clowns who'd sworn to rid their land of the hated feringhee and whom I'd already seen in action. True, we'd only come across one or two of them so far in the streets and alleys of Kandahar where unwary patrols could find a man isolated, filleted with a razor sharp blade, his rifle and ammunition gone and left bleeding to death before you could say 'knife' - if you'll forgive the expression. Now there were thousands of the lethal sods who'd flocked to Ayoob's colours as he'd marched east, the cut of whose jib I didn't like one little bit.
"No, Bowler, my lad (my lad? I was 26 and Bowler was older than me and had learnt more at the university of life than Trinity and medical school would ever teach me), just trust to the Horse Gunners, our Martini-Henrys and a bit of cold English steel to show this lot who's master."
"But the Battery's only got a few nine-pounders, sir. Johnny Af's got dozens o' guns an' it's only the 66th wot's armed with Martinis, the Bombay lads ain't got nothing better than the enemy has, the old Sniders, sir, an' I weren't impressed with either battalion when it came to brass tacks the other day, sir," said Bowler, dismissing my optimism.
And he was right to. E/B Battery was damned good but only had six of the new, steel, guns and we'd pressed a few of the Wali's brass smooth bores into service but at the cost of denuding the already under-strength 66th of yet more men who should have been carrying Martinis. The native regiments - the Bombay Grenadiers and Jacob's Rifles - were, indeed, armed with the old Sniders and hadn't looked too steady under fire at Gereshk - but it wouldn't do to agree with a private soldier, would it?
"You don't need to worry yourself, Bowler. Just listen to any orders that are passed down, get the Dressing Station set up and the awning rigged if we're told to and things will be just grand," I said airily. But that wasn't the case at all.
***
"Now, Watson, any chance you could lend me your bhistis for a while?" This was Lynch, a sometime pal of mine from the Regiment, but the trouble with him was that he blew hot and cold. One minute we'd take your dogs out ratting down to the stables and he'd be the best of companions, the next he'd turn on you when the bucks in the Mess decided that the style of your coat wasn't de rigeur. We'd only been on the march for about three hours, the fog had burnt off and the sun started its normal, burning caper, when we'd been ordered to stop on the lip of an old, muddy water course - or wadis as we liked to call them out east - that was about twenty foot deep and prepare for action. Bowler and my natives had got the canvas awning up and were just starting to off-load the mules when past us doubled Letter C Company with Lynch, the commander, at their head, every man dusty on top and mud-smeared below and puffing like grampuses. And they wanted to use my boys as bhistis - as water carriers - as if they didn't have natives of their own for that very purpose!
"Well, dammit, no, Lynch! My fellows are highly trained medicine wallahs…" and they were, all three had qualified at the central hospital and earned three annas a day extra, not beasts of burden. “What's wrong with your own people? And what news is there anyway?"
"There's nothing wrong with my bhistis at all," Lynch positively snapped back at me, "it's just that we've used every drop of water charging about whilst the brass decide where to put us."
"Well, I've told you not to let the men guzzle water when they're hot, it'll twist the gut, see'f it don't!" I fired back, deliberately embarrassing the man in front of his colour-sarn't. "Be a good fellow and tell me what's ado, we base wallahs hear nothing, you know, " and this pacified him a bit.
"Aye, you're right about the water, Doctor. But, I don't know much more than you do. Galbraith…" Lynch was talking about our Colonel, he was one of those fierce Ulstermen whom I'd rated as soon as I saw him; I'd just watched him go trotting past on his big grey with the Adjutant not ten minutes past. He'd waved cheerily but told me damn-all, "has sent my people…" he pointed at the sixty or so sweaty, beefy lads who were panting all about him, "to guard you lot, the Quartermaster's gang and the baggage train whilst he forms a firing line on the right of the whole Brigade up yonder," Lynch pointed over the lip of the wadi, leaving me not one jot better informed. "The cavalry's being kept back and the Bombay battalions have just gone running forward, but I don't know much more than that, I fear."
"Any sight of the enemy?" I asked, rather hoping to hear news of some gr
oup that had come forward to parley with our Political Officer, Colonel St John. Now don't get the wrong impression. If it came to a fight I wouldn't swerve, but I was a doctor first, not a soldier and my job was to mend holes in folk, not to make them. My career depended on being deft with needle and poultice, not powder and shot. Frankly, the handful of bones I'd set, the wounds I'd staunched and the few rough blankets I'd pulled up over dead, pale faces, had done me fine. I had no desire to see any more.
I reckoned that we might just as easily let St John and the clever-buggers talk us out of this one.
"No, not really. I saw what looked like quite a mob of 'em barrelling along the road towards Kandahar - I think that's what made us deploy so damn quick - but I got the impression that no-one knew quite what was going on before I got sent back here. But I don't suppose much will happen…" this piece of wisdom, though, was cut short by two, quick, snarling bangs in the distance. They were our, rifled nine pounders for sure, "ha, well…damn, that'll cool Johnny's ardour for him!" and in the normal course of things, I'd have agreed with Lynch. Our guns could always be relied upon and if we had to fight at all, I was glad they'd got their punch in first. The problem was, that as I looked at Lynch and he looked at me, both of our faces just beginning to crease into little, confident smiles at the thought of our foes getting the worst of it from the off, a great ripple of gunfire came hammering back - thirty guns at least judging by the row.
We were safe enough tucked into the wadi, but one of the enemy's rounds came skipping over our heads, shrieking along and showering the top of the awning with grit and sand and causing Shilman Ali to drop a big bottle of ether. The damn thing smashed, dosing my trousers and puttees in the process and making me stink like a three-farthing chemists. That smell, combined with that of the hot canvas - which always made me think of cricket marquees during an English summer - was something I'd never forget.
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