Holmes and Watson (5 page)

There were two courses a year at Netley, each lasting five months, the first beginning in April, the second in October. It is not known exactly when Watson entered but in the light of subsequent events, he was probably accepted for the October course in 1879, after having served as a house surgeon at Bart’s for a year.
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The course, which was divided into two parts, covered such subjects as hygiene, including the burial of the dead, as well as military surgery and pathology. Field exercises were also organised during which the candidates were expected to choose suitable sites for latrines, kitchens and dressing-stations. The training, however, was limited. Tropical medicine was not taught and there was no training in emergency surgery on the battlefield nor into the trauma of transporting the wounded.

During their time at Netley, the candidates were expected
to obey army discipline, which included the wearing of uniform and attendance at parades. Their duties also entailed caring for patients in the wards. Special emphasis was laid on military red tape such as the correct procedures for filling in forms, requisitions and chitties.

A final examination was held and these marks were added to those already gained at the entrance examination and at practical tests in chemistry and pathology. These combined marks decided the order in which the candidates’ names appeared in the Army Gazette and consequently their place in the list of Lieutenants. From Watson’s previous record both at school and at Bart’s, he probably came somewhere in the middle.

But he passed and in February 1880, if the suggested chronology is correct, he became Lieutenant John H. Watson, a rank he never referred to after he returned to civilian life. His memories of his military career were too bitter for him to wish to be reminded of it, although he did keep two mementoes: his service revolver, a Webley No. 2, and a tin despatch-box, possibly army issue, with John H. Watson MD and the words ‘Late Indian Army’ painted on the lid.
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International events now overtook him which, in the short term, were to prove disastrous.

The Second Afghan War had broken out in 1878, not for economic reasons, for Afghanistan had no commercial
interest for the British. It was a wild and desolate region of high mountains and barren plains, inhabited by fiercely independent Muslim tribes who were skilled in guerilla warfare as the Russians found to their cost when they invaded the country in 1979.

Strategically, however, the area was of immense importance, for it acted as a buffer state between tsarist Russia to the north and imperial India to the south. Anyone who controlled Afghanistan also controlled the mountain passes across the north-west frontier. It was fear of Russian influence which had led to the First Afghan War of 1839–42 and to Britain’s subsequent and humiliating defeat at the hands of the Afghan tribesmen.

In 1869 the Russians, under Tsar Alexander II, again began to show an interest in Central Asia, invading first Samarkand and then Khokund. Afraid they might move on to take Baluchistan and then Afghanistan, the British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India, decided to invade Afghanistan for the second time and, by seizing the passes, secure the frontier. Kabul, the Afghan capital, was captured and occupied in May 1879 but the tribesmen soon struck back and overran the city, killing the garrison and the British Resident. It was reoccupied by the British four months later after a pitched battle.

This was the situation in October 1879, the same month in which Watson entered the Army Medical School at Netley.

It is impossible to establish an exact chronology of the
events which followed. Watson hasn’t given us enough facts. But it would seem that soon after qualifying as an assistant army surgeon, he was posted to India to join his regiment, the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, which was already serving there. Assuming he embarked in March 1880, he arrived in Bombay in April, after a sea voyage lasting a month. Here he received his first setback.

Watson states that he was ‘removed’ from his brigade. It is a strange word to use, the more usual term being ‘transferred’ or ‘seconded’ and it suggests that the decision was taken against his wishes. However, Dr Zeisler’s theory that it was made because Watson was suffering from gonorrhea seems improbable. A more likely explanation is that the Berkshire regiment to which he was attached was short of medical staff and Watson was selected to make up the numbers. Although Watson fails to make this clear, the transfer must have happened soon after his arrival in India. He was then sent to Kandahar (Watson spells it Candahar) to join his new regiment along with other recently-arrived officers.

Kandahar was a strategically important Afghan town situated 155 miles inside the frontier. It had been taken by the British earlier in the war and was defended by a garrison of both British regular soldiers and Indian sepoys, drawn from several regiments, including the 1st Bombay Native Infantry, Jacob’s Horse and Watson’s own regiment, the 66th Berkshire Regiment of Foot, later renamed the Royal Berkshire Regiment.

Professor Richard D. Lesh has traced the probable
route Watson took on his journey to Kandahar. After travelling from Bombay to Karachi by steamer, he then went by rail to Sibi and from there by horse and camel caravan across the mountains to Kandahar, encamping at night. Although Watson does not refer to this part of his Indian experiences, it was probably during this journey that an incident occurred which he was later to recall. A tiger cub looked into his tent one night and he fired a musket at it. He may also at this time have made the acquaintance of Colonel Hayter, to whom he gave medical treatment and who became a close friend. The going was hard and it was common for men to collapse with sunstroke in temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Colonel Hayter may have been one of the victims. Watson and Hayter were to keep in touch after both had left the army and the Colonel was later to feature in an episode in Watson’s life as a civilian.

Up to this point, Watson appears to have enjoyed his army experience. Later he was to refer to his ‘adventures in Afghanistan’ and speak of himself as an ‘old campaigner’, a slight exaggeration as at most he served only nine months in India. And he was evidently hoping for ‘honours and promotion’ which, in the event, were denied him. But, had all gone well, he might have remained in the army and made it his career.

In the meantime, the war had been gathering momentum. Despite their defeat at Kabul, the Afghans were by no means beaten. To the south, a large army of tribesmen, led by Ayub Khan, the son of the former
emir, was advancing towards Kandahar. Their numbers, estimated between 9,000 and 25,000, consisted of horsemen and foot soldiers, some armed with British Enfield rifles. They were also equipped with artillery, which included modern 14-pounder Armstrong guns, far heavier than anything the British garrison, numbering only 2,500 men, possessed.

Although outgunned and outnumbered, the British troops, led by Brigadier General George Burrows, moved forward to the attack, among them the 66th Berkshire Regiment of Foot, accompanied by its medical team, which included Watson and his orderly, Murray. The two forces met at the village of Maiwand, fifty miles to the north-west of Kandahar, in the early morning of 27th July 1880 on a hot, dusty plain dissected by dry water courses. For the Afghans, it was a jihad or holy war against the infidels.

Taking advantage of the terrain, they moved their artillery forward and pounded the British rear, where casualties were as heavy as those in the front lines. Altogether, the British lost 934 men killed and 175 wounded or missing, nearly half the total force. The fighting was so fierce that at times the stretcher bearers dared not break cover to collect the wounded.

Watson was later to speak of seeing his comrades hacked to death in battle, a possible reference to the gallant rearguard action which was fought by the survivors of two companies of the 66th who stood back to back, fighting off the advancing tribesmen until all were killed.

Two men were later to receive Victoria Crosses for their bravery in the battle. Even a dog, a small mongrel named Bobbie belonging to Sergeant Kelly of the 66th, was later awarded the Afghan Medal by Queen Victoria herself. Although his master was killed and Bobbie was wounded, he managed to escape safely back to the British lines.
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All Watson received was a bullet in his left shoulder fired from a jezail rifle, one of the Afghan long-barrelled guns, which shattered the bone, presumably his collar-bone, and grazed the subclavian artery. He was also struck in the leg although at the time the wound seemed less serious. The bullet may have passed through the fleshy part of the calf, missing the bone but injuring the nerves or the muscles. Although Watson himself is not specific, Holmes later refers to his damaged Achilles tendon. This leg wound was to have more long-lasting effects than the injury to his shoulder.

Watson’s life was undoubtedly saved by the prompt action of Murray, his orderly, when, in mid-afternoon, Ayub Khan decided to mount an all-out attack. Led by white-robed ghazis, fanatical warriors armed with long knives, the Afghans over-ran the British lines. In the face of the fierce onslaught, the defences broke and what remained of the British forces turned and fled, including
the medical staff of a field hospital who abandoned their patients, leaving them lying on stretchers.

It was an overwhelming defeat,
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saved only from turning into a total massacre by the failure of the Afghans to follow up their advantage. Instead, they remained behind to loot the baggage and dismember all those found on the battlefield, both the living and the dead, assisted by their womenfolk.

Rudyard Kipling has this chilling advice for a young British soldier who found himself in this situation:

Murray threw Watson over the back of a pack-horse and joined the retreat to Kandahar. It was itself an ordeal. Exhausted men and horses, suffering from heat and thirst and sniped at by Afghans as they passed their villages, straggled back along the fifty-mile desert tract to Kandahar, the gun-carriages loaded with those dead and wounded they had managed to save from the ghazis’ knives.

Kandahar was a walled town and Lieutenant-General James Primrose, in charge of the garrison, decided to defend the whole perimeter. Breaches in the walls were
repaired, gun emplacements set up and every Afghan man of fighting age, 13,000 in all, was expelled from the town as the British prepared for the coming siege. Food was not short and there were fresh-water wells. But morale was low and the garrison too small to hold off the Afghan forces whose casualties, compared to the British losses, had been light.

Watson says nothing about the siege, merely stating that he was taken safely to the British lines. For this reason, some commentators have assumed he was not at Kandahar. But there was nowhere else Murray could have taken him. Watson’s intention was to give only an abbreviated account of this period in his life, not a full autobiography, and anyway he was too seriously wounded to take much notice of what was happening around him at the time. He must have received medical treatment, however, during which it is possible not enough attention was paid to the wound in his leg.

On 5th August an advance guard of Ayub Khan’s army arrived at Kandahar, to be joined two days later by the main Afghan force, which set up camp outside the town. The siege had begun. It lasted for twenty-four days and was lifted on 31st August when Major General Frederick ‘Bobs’ Roberts, after a march of 320 miles across the mountains from Kabul, arrived with a relieving army of 10,000 and attacked Ayub Khan’s camp, killing thousands of his men and putting the rest to flight. British losses were 58 men killed and 192 wounded.

These casualties, together with those from the battle of
Maiwand, Watson among them, were transferred to the base hospital at Peshawar, the capital of the British north-west Indian possessions. Here Watson began to recover from his wounds and was eventually fit enough to walk about the wards and sunbathe on the verandah. It was then, when he was convalescent, that he received a further setback. He was struck down by enteric, or typhoid fever, an infectious disease which causes a high temperature and debility and can, in its more serious form, lead to pneumonia and thrombosis.

There is no doubt Watson was gravely ill, but his statement that ‘for months my life was despaired of’ is again a little exaggerated. Typhoid fever usually lasts about five weeks and the time scale will not allow for a protracted illness. No doubt the weeks he suffered seemed like months to him. In fact, he was in the Peshawar hospital for less than two months, for by the end of October he was back in Bombay, having in the meantime been examined by a medical board, which decided that in view of his ‘weak and emaciated condition’ he should be repatriated to England straightaway. In addition, he had to make the 1,600 mile journey south by train and boat in time to embark on the troopship SS
Orontes
which sailed from Bombay on 31st October 1880.

Thanks to the researches of Mr Metcalfe, the ship’s movements have been exactly established. Having left Bombay, she called at Malta on 16th November and finally arrived at Portsmouth on the afternoon of Friday 26th November, ‘bringing home the first troops from Afghanistan, including eighteen invalids.’ All of them
were transferred to the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, Watson presumably among them.

We are given a few clues to Watson’s state of mind on returning to the place from which, less than a year before, he had set out with such high hopes of a successful future in the army. He was certainly bitter. His health, as he himself states, was ‘irretrievably ruined’ and the prospects of beginning a new career in civilian life seemed bleak. Even his rugby-playing days were over. From the symptoms of which he was later to complain, including sleeplessness, depression, irritability and nervous tension, he was probably suffering from the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition for which today he would receive treatment.