by J. R. Trtek
99 “The Wild Birds, yes.”
100 Fratton is an area of Portsmouth, on the south coast of England.
101 “We will see.”
INTERLUDE: BIGGLESWICK
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE OLD GAME AGAIN
Our captive in tow, Holmes and I returned to a London that had been holding its breath as one empire after another ordered mobilisation and then, seeing its actions mirrored in those of its neighbours, proceeded to declare war upon them. We transferred Von Bork into the custody of the British government, which was able to hold him for mere hours before Berlin claimed the spy as one of its official representatives.
At that moment, Britain had not yet joined the conflict, but rather was waiting to see if Germany would respect the neutrality of Belgium. Amid a clamour from some quarters for compromise and reconciliation, Von Bork was released on the grounds of being a foreign diplomat, and he left London hurriedly the next day, though without his huge pile of dossiers, which Westminster refused to surrender.
That night, as the deadline for German withdrawal from Belgium approached, Mycroft Holmes hosted his brother and me in the Stranger’s Room of the Diogenes Club. My friend had since resumed his usual appearance: the goatee had been shorn and his hair colour restored, though I perceived it as more grey than I remembered it being in years past.
Holmes was very subdued, while his elder sibling tried to put a good face on the situation and was reiterating that optimism when chimes tolled the hour.
“Eleven o’clock,” said Mycroft with sudden disappointment, consulting his own timepiece. “Midnight in Berlin. The ultimatum has expired, I am afraid.”
Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his chair as I heard the muffled sound of a great chorus now singing outside in the distance.
Mycroft echoed the faraway voices. “God Save the King,” he uttered. “Well, the war telegram must be going out from the admiralty to the fleet at this very moment: ‘Commence hostilities against Germany.’”
“The east wind has picked up,” said Sherlock Holmes idly, and his brother cast a questioning glance in his direction. I, meanwhile, merely nodded at my friend before staring into the empty glass I held in my hands.
The following two years and more saw me largely separated from the secret band I had joined during the Hannay affair, though my connections to its members were never entirely lost. Mycroft Holmes assumed tight control over all intelligence activities of the British government, while Bullivant maintained the helm of the Secret Service in particular. Inspector Magillivray was promoted to the highest echelon of Scotland Yard and from that vantage point deftly orchestrated police cooperation with Sir Walter’s plans as defined by Mycroft. Sherlock Holmes, meanwhile, agreed to return to London to lend his brilliance to our nation’s coterie of cryptographers, becoming a near-constant inhabitant of the mysterious Office 54.102
I offered to share my residence in Queen Anne Street with the detective turned spy turned codebreaker, an arrangement he readily accepted, though its consummation was not immediately achieved. Holmes’s realisation that his bees could not accompany him caused momentary reconsideration, but eventually he surrendered his apiary to an experienced Sussex couple who pledged to keep good care of his six-legged brood for the duration, and he moved up from Sussex.
By then, however, I had departed London.
Prior to Holmes’s return to the metropolis, I had found myself living in spiritual limbo as Britain’s part in the war commenced. My account of Holmes’s actions in the Birlstone affair began serialisation, but its appearance did little to refresh my mood.103 I found myself constantly reading newspaper reports of the first troop and naval movements in the war, saving those articles and literary efforts that appealed to me for the purpose of beginning a scrapbook of the conflict. In that vein, I followed avidly the initial hostilities in France and Belgium, which resulted in retreat until Germany was held at the Marne and the front assumed a profile that would remain largely unchanged until nearly the end of the war.
In late September, however, I was jolted from this passive routine during a chance visit to Charing Cross Hospital. Turning the corner into Agar Street, I saw a huge banner hanging over the pavement. “Quiet for the Wounded,” it read, and I realised that heavy traffic had been diverted from the avenue in order to minimise noise for the benefit of those convalescing within the hospital’s walls.
Standing there, contemplating the suffering that lay behind that fluttering message, it dawned upon me that, in concentrating upon the great single tragedy of war, I had remained oblivious to the countless individual ones attending it. Recalling with force the oath I had taken decades before when becoming a physician, and without any second thought, I turned round to set matters right.
In part through the influences of Sir Walter Bullivant and Mycroft Holmes, I was admitted into the Royal Army Medical Corps despite my age, receiving a major’s commission, and by October—shortly before Holmes began his move into Queen Anne Street—I found myself stationed at Aldershot instructing RAMC inductees, one of whom was young Dr. Blanding, for whom I had so often served as replacement.104
I considered my efforts there to be productive and satisfying in their way, but as the First Battle of Ypres raged on into the following month, lecturing trainees seemed a paltry contribution to the cause, and I felt compelled to seek duty in France, a request that was promptly refused in no uncertain terms more than once, and so I threw myself back into the responsibility of teaching the principles of hygiene and disease prevention to those who would be ministering to our men on the Continent.
Being far enough removed from my Queen Anne residence, I set up camp at the Aldershot barracks while Sherlock Holmes transferred his residence to my home. Within days, my housekeeper gave notice, unable to reconcile herself with the singular personal habits my friend had accumulated over the course of a lifetime. Without surprise, I received from him a curt letter suggesting that Martha assume the necessary domestic responsibilities in London, a proposal I readily accepted.
From time to time, I was able to journey to the metropolis, staying one or two nights in my home, which I saw gradually transformed by Holmes into an admixture of its original self, his Sussex cottage, and our former digs in Baker Street. Martha brought a steady hand to the household’s management, however, and she convinced my cook to remain in service for the time being, though an endless succession of frustrated parlour maids would see duty in Queen Anne Street during the course of the war.
Through the following two years, Holmes distracted himself with cryptography while constantly pondering the mystery of the supposed third German spy ring, whose presence was never felt. I, meanwhile, continued to lecture at Aldershot, though in three instances I was assigned to groups of RAMC officers that journeyed to France for the purposes of observation.
Those excursions put my own past military illusions to shame.
The Second Afghan War was as child’s play compared to the apocalypse whose scourges I now glimpsed at first hand. Relatively clean wounds of four decades past were replaced by bone-shattering damage from modern high-powered bullets and shrapnel, and poison gas added a dimension of horror previously unknown. Artillery maintained a near-constant din for those at the front, the sound and terror in themselves sufficient to destroy the minds of any who were fortunate enough to escape physical injury. Far above, aeroplanes criss-crossed the sky, most often to spy upon our lines, but now and then dropping explosives that rattled even more the nerves of those on the ground.
The constant flux of wounded seemed to me like a never-ending stream of refugees from Dante’s hellish circles, and I never became inured to the horror. Indeed, there are even now images trapped in memory which, at the remove of more than a decade, plague my sleep and intrude upon the enjoyment of these, my later days. I can recall rows of bandaged soldiers lying abreast, their vacant eyes oblivious to all going on round them. Casualty clearing stations were often bordered by hedges of amputated limbs, the heaps stacked
to waist height. On more than one occasion, I found I could not shake the hand of a bedridden warrior because there was nothing to grasp, and twice I was forced to communicate in writing with young men who could not speak for absence of a lower jaw.
In one instance, as wounded came steaming into a base hospital, I and my fellow RAMC observers volunteered direct aid when regular staff were overwhelmed. For that brief moment, which nonetheless seemed an eternity, I felt myself truly useful to mankind again as I assisted surgeons, intensifying within me the need to do more than simply lecture.
During these missions, we observers were allowed to visit the front line during what were taken as lulls in combat. The desolation was beyond belief: grim landscapes of earth churning with debris, onto which a harsh geometry had been imposed in the form of zig-zag trenches with their walkways, sandbags, and dugouts drenched in unending moisture. I had seen the barren countryside of Afghanistan decades earlier, of course, but the stark panorama now before me had been shaped entirely by the hand of man rather than that of God, and it terrified me to see what manner of hell our race was capable of forging as I witnessed enemy shells spit up brown rainbows of dirt, stone, and I did not doubt, the grist of human remains.
On two of these journeys to France, I was able to meet with Cecil Harper while he was on leave from his RFC squadron. In the second instance, I could not fail to see a nervous quality to his behaviour, reflected in shaky hands and a tic under his right eye.
“Oh, I’ve the wind-up,105 that is for certain,” he admitted as we sat outside a café near the Quai d’Orsay. “But it’s only exhaustion, Major Watson,” he claimed. “Only exhaustion."
Harper lifted his glass and smiled as he caught the eye of a passing young woman.
“I’ll return to the hut rested and refreshed, I assure you. And then we’ll be making the breakthrough and this thing will be over. Don’t you think so, sir?” he asked of Sir Harry Christey, whom I had brought with me that day.
Sir Harry was now a major like myself but assigned to the army general staff. When I had crossed paths with him the day before, I had barely recognised the man: his manner was far more abrupt and uncompromising than I had remembered it before the war in Galloway. Moreover, his political views appeared to have changed dramatically.
“Yes, we’ll push back the Hun this year, I do not doubt,” he said in reply to Cecil Harper. “And we’ll be in Berlin by autumn. Then we’ll teach them to mind, as we should have done all these years past.”
Staring at Major Christey, I could only hope that would be the case.
“Perhaps I’ll live to see that,” said Captain Harper with a sardonic air. “And maybe not.”
I knew that the prevailing attitude among the flyers was one of “no empty chair”: as each member of a squadron was lost, another came to take his place, and an ominous sense of fate hung over the men of the Flying Corps, paralleling and yet differing in nature from the futile despair I saw in those inhabiting the trenches, the ones Harper and his fellow pilots referred to as the PBI—the poor bloody infantry.
The breakthrough Captain Harper longed for and Major Christey predicted did not materialise in 1915 nor in the following year, and as the months ground on, I continued my dogged instruction to trainees at Aldershot, punctuated by occasional leave to spend time in London with Sherlock Holmes.
During those two years, I was also able to follow, albeit indirectly, the further exploits of Richard Hannay, for in an effort to bolster public morale at the end of the first year of the war, Bullivant had arranged for a member of the War Information Office to pen a fictionalised account of the Black Stone affair, a narrative that altered events somewhat and completely omitted the participation of Holmes and myself in the matter, on the detective’s recommendation.106
Hannay himself had joined the New Army107 as a captain. Sent home to recuperate after being wounded at Loos,108 he was persuaded by Sir Walter Bullivant to undertake an important secret mission in the company of John Blenkiron and Sandy Arbuthnot. 109 The plucky South African then returned to military service and distinguished himself in France on into 1917, rising eventually to the rank of brigadier-general.
It was in February of that same year that I was suddenly relieved of my teaching duties at Aldershot and ordered to return to London for reassignment. I did not believe my performance as an instructor had been substandard, and I began to hold out hope that I might see duty of a more active nature, perhaps in Millbank. 110 However, I soon learnt otherwise.
I arrived home once more, this time hoping I would not soon be returning to Crookham Camp111 and feeling encouraged about my immediate prospects. Stepping foot in Queen Anne Street, I was greeted by Sherlock Holmes, Martha at his side.
“She has provided a much-needed stability for the household these past many months,” my friend said later, when found ourselves alone in the sitting room. “It was a much appreciated reversal of fortune after your original housekeeper gave notice within two weeks of my arrival,” he added primly, repeating a comment he had never failed to voice during each of my previous visits.
“Yes,” I said, once more not mentioning the angry letter I had received from my former servant more than two years earlier. “So I have been given to understand. At least the cook has stayed.”
“If only the maid’s position were as stable,” Holmes complained. “It seems as if a different girl comes in each week.”
“Perhaps one might find some satisfaction in variety,” I suggested, noting yet again how Holmes had subtly made the place his own during my absence. “I observe that you still have the painting of a mountain by that Frenchman, whatever his name is,” I remarked while surveying the walls.
“We can certainly remove if you like, old fellow. After all, you will be living here now, and this is your house.”
“It need not be taken down,” I said, lifting a hand. “In truth, I became rather used to the work when it hung in Baker Street during my final stays with you there. I notice, however, that you appear to have banished that horrible painting of the blue beggar that once adorned the other wall. It is not like you to leave such a gaping, blank space, but I thank you for it.”
Holmes smiled.
“Your eye remains sharp,” said he. “Yes, I knew you found that work especially offensive. It will not please, but I have recently acquired another by that same Spaniard. It is a study of three women that would make you believe the beggar was by Rembrandt. I very much fancy it, however, and so I hung it in my room, where it now resides beside the picture of the beggar, both of them safe from your view.”
“I will never see it?” I asked puckishly.
“It would be best if you did not. However, I have also acquired a painting by a fellow named Dégousse, whose technique intrigues me. I doubt you will care much for it, but I do believe it is something you can tolerate, should you permit me to hang it in this room. On the other hand, perhaps you would wish instead to put up your old portrait of General Gordon to fill that empty space upon the wall—I came across the picture up in the lumber room but last week.”
“It is no matter,” I replied. “And perhaps my artistic horizons need broadening. Hang your new painting there on the wall by all means, Holmes.”
“Thank you,” said my friend. “But let us change the subject to a more practical one: should Martha prepare a homecoming meal for you, Doctor? Or, rather,” he said, glancing at my uniform, “Major?”
“By whatever title I am addressed, I remain just as famished. Yes, by all means ring Martha, if you will. And I do hope it is to be a meal for two.”
After a small shared repast, my friend informed me of his intention to go out. “I realise I impose, for you may be tired from your journey, Watson, but might you accompany me nonetheless?”
“You have a purpose hidden behind your request?”
“I do.”
“Then please allow me a half hour, and I will be pleased to join you. I am merely waiting to receive reassignment from the medic
al corps, and in the meanwhile, my time is my own.”
Holmes quietly nodded, and I left to reclaim my old room, which had been kept intact. There I changed into civilian clothes, and within an hour found myself strolling down Haymarket Street beside my friend in much the same manner as we had ambled through London when our monarch had been the grandmother of the present king.
It was hardly the metropolis we had known thirty years before, however. Horses were in even fewer numbers than just before the war, and electric lighting had replaced gas in many quarters. To my eye, however, it was the change in the female populace that was most striking. By this, the third year of conflict, women had supplanted men in the workforce on a grand scale, and both their manner and style of dress were far removed from what had been deemed fashionable during the previous decade.
“I do not believe we have walked this portion together since, perhaps, that unpleasant Amberley business,” Holmes remarked.
“Amberley?”
“Do you not recall Joseph Amberley, the art dealer whose wife was murdered, along with her presumed lover?”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “The unsold ticket to the Theatre Royal. I had quite forgotten the matter. When the war is over and I have opportunity to write again, perhaps I should train my pen upon that affair.”112
“No matter where you aim your nib,” Holmes taunted, “the ink will no doubt miss the essence of the case.”
“But I shall still chuckle all the way to Cox and Co.”113
“No doubt, you will. Ah, here we are,” Holmes said as we approached the next storefront. “I wish to go book hunting,” he declared with a sly smile, “and I believe the waters here to be promising.”
“Traill’s Bookshop,” I said. “This is the establishment owned by Blenkiron, the American, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Holmes. “Shall we see what crosses our path inside?”
Minutes later, we were in the natural sciences section, where Holmes pulled a green volume from the bins. “Ah, I have found it,” he said with joy. “The second edition of my work on bees. What?” he added when he saw my look of surprise. “You cannot imagine such a speedy revision?”