Death on a Pale Horse
Page 8
I was stooping over poor Major Vandeleur of the 7th Fusiliers, whose chest wound extended into his lung. Before I could do more for him, I felt as if someone had punched me hard enough in the back of the right shoulder to knock me off balance. I was about to twist round and give the offender a piece of my mind when I saw splashes of blood on my overall and collecting on the ground. What I had felt was a bullet that pierced the green canvas of the tent, smashed my shoulder bone, and grazed the sub-clavial artery.
With my right arm done for, all hope of treating my patients was gone. There were three casualties in the dressing station at the time. Two were walking wounded, and the major was stretched before me. I made arrangements for one stretcher and two pairs of sticks. Then I allowed the orderly to dress my own wound as well as time allowed. To my great sorrow, Vandeleur died of his wounds soon afterwards.
My memory of what followed is intermittent, thanks to the administration of morphine to dull the grating of fractured bone. Without the use of it, the jolting progress of forty miles to Kandahar would have been too excruciating to bear. A bugle call sounded. I recognised it as a command for the baggage train to withdraw from the field of battle while the infantry remained to cover a general retreat. In my growing confusion, I felt two bearers pick up my stretcher and begin to run with it. They were shouting that the “ghazis” were upon us. Less fortunate invalids lay about on the ground, abandoned to the hands of our murderous enemy.
Armies in retreat are seldom disciplined or resolute. In the emergency of this evacuation, supplies and equipment were abandoned everywhere. The baggage animals were being unloaded and pressed into service to carry the injured. The ground was littered with their abandoned stores, unopened boxes of ammunition, mess supplies, cases of wine, kitchen utensils, and linen sheets. I saw wounded soldiers in rags and bandages sitting astride donkeys, mules, ponies, and in one case a camel. Ammunition wagons had become makeshift ambulances. A party of officers’ servants was drunk from stolen liquor. Yet there was valour among all this. On the escarpments, the Grenadiers and the riflemen covered our retreat, sometimes forming squares and fighting to the end with their bayonets. They paid with their lives for a shilling a day.
In the camp, it seemed to be every man for himself. I should have been left to my fate had it not been for Murray, my orderly. A pack horse had just been unloaded for use as a mount. This dear brave fellow heaved me across it. Then, with my revolver in his hand to deter looters or marauders, he led me through the confusion and joined the long, miserable column of refugees to Kandahar.
I shall not soon forget the vicissitudes of that night. Stories of prisoners in the bloody hands of Ayub Khan sufficed to keep us moving. My friend Lieutenant Maclaine of the Royal Horse Artillery was less fortunate. His remains were found close to the site of Ayub’s tent, where he had been butchered as the so-called Amir looked on.
We covered the remaining miles and arrived at Kandahar in safety during the evening of the next day. Fortunately, Ayub’s men had been dazzled and delayed by the abandoned treasures of our camp. Had our enemies put their minds to it, all of us in the retreat would have been dead.
For more than a month, the white walls of Kandahar were surrounded by Ayub’s men and it was impossible to evacuate the wounded to the Indian frontier. There was a curious lack of morale among our leaders, who acted as if our present position was lost. We might indeed have been overrun, but for Lord Roberts, winner of the Victoria Cross at Lucknow. Major-General Roberts, as he still was, formed up a column of ten thousand men, plus artillery. This column marched 313 miles in three weeks, over hostile terrain, to save us. Lord Roberts routed Ayub Khan in short order, secured the high passes, and opened the route to India.
So I took my place in an ambulance convoy which made its way south through the pass and at last to Peshawar. I really believed I was doing well at the base hospital, walking about the wards and reclining on the invalids’ veranda. I should be back with my regiment before the year was out. Yet my weakness from a bullet wound put a stop to all that.
I fell prey to enteric fever, which accounts for more British lives than all the jezail bullets. It came closer to killing me than the Afghans had ever done. No one who has endured this illness and survived will need to be reminded of the ordeal. My temperature rose to 107 and I was delirious. At that point, most of the fever victims die. The lucky patient’s temperature, on the other hand, drops a degree or so, and then a slow recovery begins. My temperature remained stubbornly where it was for several days, and I lived a half-life of sleeping and waking.
I have indistinct memories of being scalded in hot baths, my limbs being rubbed as the water cooled. I was taken out only to be lowered into another bath of heat that scorched the skin. Then the process was repeated. Peritonitis was spoken of, though not in my hearing, and death within twenty-four hours.
I came through the crisis without explanation but at a heavy cost. For a month, I was weak as a rabbit. I could scarcely stand, let alone walk. Every medical officer who examined me hinted that my days of soldiering were certainly done. In the end, my case was put to me bluntly. I should not recover as long as I remained in India. Indeed, there was a strong possibility of a recurrence in such a climate and, without doubt, it would carry me off.
A medical board of three officers came to examine me. One of them kindly suggested that if I went home, perhaps in time I might recover sufficiently to soldier in England. The looks of the other two said not if they knew it. It was agreed that I should be sent home and kept on the Army List for another nine months in England to see how I did. I was certain that they would then discharge me.
So I was invalided in uniform to Bombay, and my passage on the troopship Orontes was arranged. During the long sea-miles, I reflected how different this was from my mood of expectancy on the voyage out. There was precious little to look forward to. If only I had heard of Sherlock Holmes and guessed the adventures that might lie ahead!
During those months of convalescence in the hospital at Peshawar, I had been given ample time to think of all that had happened since I left Portsmouth with the cheers of the crowd in my ears. I was at first too weak to do much more than lie in the warmth of the blankets, sometimes dozing and sometimes half-awake. I had grown up at a time when children and their teachers still lived in the long glory of Waterloo. The British Army had proved invincible, and the Empire which it garrisoned now stretched across the globe. Yet as I lay in that hospital bed, my own misfortune was small compared to the calamities of empire at that time. In restless days and long nights, I had ample time to go over and over the extraordinary sequence of reverses which had overtaken our troops in Africa and Asia in the months since I left England.
Between the hot compresses and sips of water that the orderlies administered, the spoonfuls of kaolin and opium mixture, I continued to dream and think.
Soon after the terrible news of Isandhlwana there was a further tragedy. I read in the press how the Prince Imperial, claimant to the throne of France, had been entrusted to Lord Chelmsford on a visit to South Africa, only to be cut to pieces on patrol in Zululand. That was not all. To be sure, I had escaped with my life at Maiwand. Yet the British envoy and all his staff had been assassinated at the Afghan capital of Kabul. Even at Kandahar, we had had every prospect of sharing their fate, cut off and surrounded by the brigands of Ayub Khan. But for the energy and audacity of General Roberts in his dash for the city, that is just what would have happened. Lying there immobilised in my hospital bed, my throat would have been slit along with the rest.
When I had first been ordered to Afghanistan, I imagined my comrades and myself riding confidently as benevolent imperial rulers over this ill-favoured territory. There would be respect for us and our empire. In the case of a doctor, there would be particular gratitude. I did not envisage my hurried and undignified exit from military glory, slung over a pack horse by my orderly, my shoulder smashed and bleeding, the knives of the pursuing jezailchees glinting not far beh
ind us.
I was not the only one who thought of such setbacks with incredulity. I read a report from a Court correspondent on how the news of Isandhlwana had reached Queen Victoria at Osborne, during breakfast on 11 February 1879. “How this could happen we cannot imagine,” the poor old lady wrote, describing this “great and unnatural disaster” in her journal. Among the list of the slain were several officers who had been her guests at court. More tragic still was the assassination of the Prince Imperial and the Queen’s terrible task of consoling his distraught mother, the widowed Empress Eugenie of France.
And Afghanistan? Without Lord Roberts of Kandahar, we would easily have lost our only base there. Indeed, part of India itself, including the city where I now lay, would have followed. As the Queen said of these events, “The more one thinks about it, the worse it gets.”
There was even more to come in southern Africa. The army that had won glory at Waterloo and Sebastopol met defeat in war against the Dutch settlers. At the treaty table, we surrendered to the Boers our Transvaal with all its mineral wealth of gold and diamonds. It seemed to be the last in a series of terrible coincidences. What of our African colonies now? Indeed, what of India itself?
If only I had met Sherlock Holmes at that moment! In such matters, he was not a believer in coincidences. Reason was everything to him, causes and effects. The fine steel point of his logic probed behind the excuses of coincidence and chance until it found such causes—and, behind the causes, the perpetrators.
4
So much for my days of soldiering. And what of Holmes? Though I was not to meet him until my return from India, it is not strictly true to say that I had never heard of him before I left for home. Let me explain.
While I was convalescing at Peshawar our attendants used to wheel us out in our beds every morning on to the balconies of the wards. The clear air from the Khyber hills and the mild breezes from the fertile plains of the Punjab were supposed to invigorate our constitutions. There was little to do but lie propped on the pillows, talking or reading.
One morning my neighbour, a captain from the Somerset Light Infantry, was sitting on the edge of his bed in his dressing-gown and cap reading a copy of London Life. This was an illustrated periodical full of the gossip and humour of the day at home. Its features relied much on news or pictures of the West End stage and the London season. It was sent out monthly to the mess-rooms and clubs of the British Army in India, no doubt to boost our morale in what was now being called “The Second Afghan War.” Captain Coombes handed his copy to me, his finger indicating a small paragraph at the foot of the page.
I read what followed.
W. S. Scott Holmes is an English Shakespearean actor now entertaining the best society in New York. He sends us a puzzle. His grandfather, William Sigismund Holmes, lived a hundred years ago. It was a world before steam engines or telegraphs. In 1786 the good Sigismund bet one of his creditors a hundred guineas that he could send a letter fifty miles in an hour. At this time, a carriage horse would only cover six miles in an hour, while at twenty miles an hour the fastest racehorse would be exhausted in a few minutes. A ship under full sail in a strong wind would not even equal that. How did Sigismund Holmes do it? See the answer on page fifty-four.
I leafed my way through the magazine and came to the solution.
Sigismund employed the twenty-two young men who had represented the varsity teams of Oxford and Cambridge at their first game of cricket. They appeared dressed in white flannels and shirts, with caps and padded gloves, on the Old Steine at Brighton. Here they formed a line, twenty yards apart from one another, a quarter of a mile in all. All this was done under the eyes of the Prince Regent himself—a sportsman if ever there was one! The letter was enclosed in a cricket ball. It flew with great speed and accuracy from one expert fielder to the next, along the line and back, over and over. At the end of the hour the letter had travelled fifty-one and a half miles. The ingenious Sigismund Holmes was a hundred guineas less in debt. Any doubters may find this feat confirmed by the celebrated sporting writer C. J. Apperley, popularly known as “Nimrod.”
NB: For every curiosity of this kind printed, the proprietors of the London Life will be pleased to pay the correspondent two and a half guineas.
I was amused by Sigismund’s trick but gave not a second thought to his grandson. As his admirers will know, in those early days W. S. Scott Holmes was the stage name of William Sherlock Scott Holmes. He returned to the chemical laboratory of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and resumed his career as a criminal investigator after a year on the boards in America with the Sassanoff Shakespeare Touring Company. Thereafter, as a consulting detective, he chose to be known more simply as “Sherlock Holmes.”
Those who have read my narrative of the Brixton Road murder, given to the public under the somewhat sensational title of A Study in Scarlet, may recall something of the events which led to my first meeting with this future friend. When I had disembarked from the Orontes at Portsmouth, I was classified as a military invalid with little or no prospect of a further career in my chosen profession. Until their final decision was communicated, the Army medical board left me to lead a comfortless London existence at a private hotel in the Strand. The place was no better than a boarding-house for impoverished widows and widowers in their last years. My princely income was an allowance of four pounds and six pence a week.
During convalescence in hospital, I had managed to put aside most of my pay and my invalid supplement. There had been little opportunity to spend it. Even the comfort of a pipe and tobacco was forbidden me. Yet as the weeks of 1881 passed in London, this little stock of capital ran lower and lower. I had no family in England, except a few distant cousins down in Devonshire. I had no expectations of a legacy and no one to whom I could turn for immediate assistance.
A city with as many attractions as London is not an easy place in which to do nothing. Week after week, I seemed to spend more money than I had meant to. My state of mind may easily be imagined, as I contemplated the loss of both health and independence. As for marriage and a settled existence, what woman of any sense would have a man with my prospects?
In this frame of mind I walked down Piccadilly one January morning, wondering what I should do. That famous avenue was busy with people who all seemed to look far richer than I should ever be. Swans-neck pilentum carriages passed me, drawn by glossy bay geldings. A coach with armorial bearings upon its door rumbled by. Even the hansom cabs were almost beyond my means to hire.
At that moment, the course of my future life was decided by a single stroke of coincidence. As I returned from the trees and carriages of Hyde Park Corner, the clocks struck twelve. I resolved that my first economy must be to leave the private hotel for cheaper accommodation. What could be cheaper? Goodness knows whether I should find anything short of a common lodging-house. All the same, I would celebrate my decision to live more cheaply by allowing myself a final luxury. I pushed open the door of the old Criterion Bar in Coventry Street, off Piccadilly Circus.
The stroke of coincidence was a tap on my shoulder and the friendly voice of young Stamford, who had been a surgical dresser under me at Barts Hospital before my days in the Army.
We exchanged all the formalities of friends long parted and then began to talk. I described my military experiences in Afghanistan and the situation in which I now found myself. I knew him well enough to mention that I must move from my present hotel to another abode—I knew not where. At once he told me of his acquaintance, a certain Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had informed him that very morning that he was in search of lodgings. More to the point, he had found a very nice set of rooms, in Baker Street, but must have someone to go halves with him in the cost. Stamford rather thought that Holmes was inviting him to share the rooms; but Stamford was already suited, as they say.
I recall, as if it were only a week ago, my excitement at this chance of solving my own problem so easily. If I could chum with someone, it would halve the cost straight away.
That afternoon, in the chemical laboratory of Barts, I came face to face with a studious-looking individual, a little over six feet in height. He was so lean that it made him look, if anything, taller still. The eyes were sharp and penetrating, the nose thin and hawk-like. His features made him appear at once alert and decisive. His jaw was firmly set, as if resolute and determined. In the matter of his physical strength, the moment of our first handshake convinced me of that!
I was not in the least surprised that he later proved to be an expert swordsman, boxer, and singlestick player. As for the power of his hands, I shall never forget our visit from a bullying strongman, Dr. Grimesby Roylott. This bully emphasised his threats to us by taking the poker from our fireplace and bending it into a curve with his huge brown hands, his arteries swelling and face purpled. After his stormy departure, Holmes ruefully picked up the distorted metal from the grate and with a careful effort bent it straight again.
From the start, I knew that Holmes was a man who never admitted failure or defeat. I have sometimes been asked to describe his appearance and manner by those who had not known him. I have suggested that they should imagine the stance and manner of Sir Edward Carson, QC, that most vigorous and astute of cross-examiners, combined with the combative and self-assured manner of Lord Birkenhead, the former Mr. F. E. Smith. There was also a dash of the late Lord Curzon with his taste for what he called effortless superiority. But even all that does not do him sufficient credit for his nobler character. Holmes would put away ambition in order to work tirelessly and without reward on behalf of the poorest and humblest client. Indeed, it was “poor persons’ defences” which gave him the greatest satisfaction and which he undertook, without reward, for pure love of justice.