MCMXV
January 1, 1915:
Western Front: French take a wood near Champagne's Mesnil-les-Hurlus.
Eastern Front; Asiatic Theatre: Russians advance on the Uzsok Pass and the Bukovina, while Russian Armenia saw heavy fighting.
Naval and Overseas Operations: HMS Formidable sunk off Lyme Regis by U-24.
Loss of Life: 35 Officers; 512 men out of 780. Captain Loxley went down with his ship accompanied by his dog.
Of that terrible day, there were only two notes of which Sherlock Holmes made later note in his copious journals of the Great War:
The first was that Bruce, Captain Loxley's dog, had been found washed ashore and was given burials as a war dog in Abbotsbury Gardens. The second was the announcement of the Military Cross (first mentioned all the way back in the previous year's mid-December).
He remembered the first because the matter of a dog's burial as a war companion would appeal to Watson. The good fellow's natural egalitarianism made no distinction between the efforts of man and his best friend. The second incident was the fervent hope that Watson (his closest friend) would have no need to ever face the prospect of a Military Cross.
The New Year had announced itself, so to speak, on a flat note. He celebrated it appropriately—alone in his house with a small glass against the chill while the rising winds whistled. He had not expected much in the way of the post, but the day had fallen upon a Friday and he was somewhat taken aback at the size of the bound-up packets hand-delivered to his doorstep.
Lestrade's return card among the letters and gossip had surprised him for its expediency; the man must be finding time on his hands. Holmes made a brief game of analysis, but his concentration was called to other shores and he went no further than the initial, shallow observations: that Lestrade was still unhappy with his promotion, his wife's health was still in question, and of course the little matter of having two marriageable daughters in the household while his youngest son approached that allegedly happy state. The signs of wartime paranoia were almost unworthy of note; everyone appeared to possess it in some degree—even those who had cheerfully shelved their plans of having their loved ones home by next Christmas…
He tucked his mail away and made tea. There were three newspapers, and they needed to be gleaned over for anything useful.
January 2:
Eastern Front: Russian success on the Bzura and Ravka; hard, one might say desperate fighting near Gorlitse; Russian progress near the Uzsok and Rostoka Passes. Over at the Asiatic-Egyptian Theatre the Battle of Sarikamish was still going on.
Naval and Overseas Operations: HMSs. Fox and Goliath bombard Dar-es-Salaam.
On Friday the 1st he took the post.
On Saturday the 2nd he sat and finished reading out the mail.
On the third day, the day of rest, he lounged in his battered-up library table and wrote his responses. A note to Mycroft with the appropriately unemotional acknowledgement of his holiday gift (Mycroft operated on one mistaken belief, which was that his brother could not function without half a gallon of coffee a day). The bag of green coffee beans would keep for a future occasion…
It was easier to think of coffee beans than the news by wire and by newspapers…he thought of Watson on the Western Front. His French friends (And admittedly Holmes' extended kinsmen) had failed their attack on Boureuilles, but Alsace was a better story…at least they'd carried the height.
He stopped in his letter to Mycroft and reluctantly allowed his hungry eye to return to the evening print. The Russians now occupied Suczava—or Bukovina; however one called it. The Austrians still kept their occupancy of Ada Tsiganlia (Holmes had actually been forced to find that island on a map. It was somewhere near Belgrade and the reason for the capture was still ephemeral to his reason).
My Dear Watson…how are you? Do you know the fighting at Sarikamish and Transcauc is as heavy as they believe it can get? Do you have time, between your bandaging of wounds and surgical prowress, to learn Germany has arrested Cardinal Mercier for his Letter against their deportation of native Belgians to Germany?
Mycroft believes Germany will not incarcerate him for long; he is too visible. Yet it is a poor thing when but one man stands up and speaks against Germany's use of Belgian slave labour…
…Where are you now, Watson? Rumour has it the war is shifting to St. Georges…
His mind composed one letter while his hand composed the other; two communications to two very different men.
I have read your little book, Watson. I agree it is a modern fable couched for children…the appearance of Pan can hardly be less anomalous. But I sense you have left another clue beneath the pages. You are inordinately fond of your little chalk-streams and trout. Do you claim your origins upon the banks of the River Pangbourne? I say Pangbourne because to call it the River Pang is nothing more than a back-formation (did you think I never paid heed to the literary struggles and gasps for victory among your etymological circles?)…yes, Pang is a lexeme, but a poorer one than its parent-word…
…but I digress. I have, I believe, found your country of origin in this small piece of Berkshire. Your post was only my first clue. Even I am aware that one's military location is based upon where one recruits! In all respects you have betrayed yourself through the years with the smallest of traces; a man raised within Edinburgh would hardly think to compare a woman's freckles to a plover's egg, nor would he be so comfortable with the sweeps of Sir Henry's lonely lands.
You have inadvertently marked certain portions of the book, my dear fellow; pages are thinned and stamped with many frequent re-readings. They coincide with the imagery of the river, and of punting in particular. Hardly co-incidence…
-
On January the 4th, he posted his letters (deciding at the last minute that Lestrade's holiday card had been only a courteous return of his own, and therefore immune to the tiresome obligation of eternal letter-trading).
By the time he finished walking to the small post office, the French were on their advance to St. Georges (the local newspaper was at war with the others in calling it Flanders), and Alsace was finally captured after half a week intense fighting (or resisting, considering where the allegiances were on that troublesome borderland where in peacetime, the Germans and French blended and made their own unique world).
Sherlock Holmes submitted his arm-load of neatly printed letters and small packages. Again he was surprised at the amount of mail coming his way. His membership in a music-collection club, a sheet-music club, a travel log (thanks to his previous identity as Sigerson), and not a few subscriptions to book clubs, periodicals, foreign newspapers and the National Geographic Magazine ensured he would never be lonely within his brain; still, these were posts of a personal slant.
His eyebrows lifted at a most familiar name. Why would Mrs. Watson feel the urge to send him a holiday greeting?
Perhaps the woman was merely apprehensive with the potential fate of her husband. Holmes existed strictly on a day-to-day approach of the situation, and never allowed himself to dwell in the morass of what-ifs. Watson had passed on his last will and testament to him, and he would ensure the words followed to the letter if he must.
Holmes placed the plain, unadorned envelope in a safe place well within the stack. He liked Watson's wife, and rather admired her for being so skilled in her ability to circumnavigate the pitfalls of society by building up a mysterious world of much speculation and very few admitted facts. A woman of means must think creatively in order to survive without a male protector; before her marriage she had done that ably. Watson was no shirker in this skill himself; the two had found much common ground and he was still bewildered that it had taken two reasonably intelligent yet openly romantic human beings such a ridiculously long time to stop dancing about the subject and deal with matrimony. The romantics were usually the first to leap headlong to the altar, were they not?
Well, it was not the first time Watson had left him puzzled! Not only was the fair sex not his department, he tried to avoid any mention of the related departments as well!
He returned to the soothing world of his innermost thoughts as he placed his steps back across the mileage to home. Here and there an automobile rattled past, and he absently refused their offers to drive him home.
Russian victories at Sarikamish and Ardahan; Turkish army corps destroyed at the former.
Asquith's position was growing narrow; his Liberal views were good for the manufacturer, but the inherent flaws in supporting private industry for the War Efforts were growing unfeasible. Recruitment was still steady and impressive—not that Holmes had doubted the Englishman would refuse to rise to the challenge when it threatened his own soil. More than 225,000 young men had signed up within the first month of the War's decree. He no longer knew the latest total; it was still high even though human effort was far brighter than the duller and less-equipped matters of military organisation.
The wind was rising slowly, smelling of the ocean by turns before a swirl of the yellow fog returned. His eyes were still sharp, but he could not see the sulphurous mists until the sun passed through a rare break in the cloud-cover. Sea-birds took up their flights and sailed past with a complaining air; he resisted anthromorphising the animal kingdom, but seagulls were self-absorbed creatures and he often watched their activity for clues on the morrow's weather.
The morrow would Twelfth Night. Tuesday.
He huddled slightly within the confines of his large coat, feeling how a sudden burst of wind pushed salt air against his throat. He shuddered slightly. Watson was doubtless out in much worse; he would never complain unless he felt the discomfort was due to someone's negligence. And then what?
Inside he set the fire under the tea and arranged a tray of sandwiches. A hot meal was best saved for the worst of the day. Against the tightly-battened windows the trimmed twigs off his fruit trees disentangled and tossed against the shutters. He would have to re-gather them all up and return them to the pile. The gardener had joined the War; his two sons as well. Holmes had never claimed to understand women, but he could not imagine the selfishness of all three of Mrs. Dorrit's menfolk, that they would all risk their lives with the added risk of leaving her alone in the world.
Too common a story. My gardener wishes to make amends for missing the Second Boer War and so he joins for the sake of his pride. His oldest joins because he is within age and does not want to be seen as cowardly; the youngest joins to prove he is a man to both. And they leave her alone with their platitudes and her knitting and make promises to destiny when it is completely out of their hands.
With something approaching his old temper, Holmes pulled the cold spread out of his icebox and sought out some of the cold-weather greens as a garnish. It was not the first time he had been aware of the male callousness to the one woman of the house; Holmes respected his gardener as a man who knew his work but little else.
He ate quietly, listening to one of his newer records—an assortment of Mozart pieces with a glass armonica. The ethereal instrument added to his mood, supporting the romantic notion that sounds could be emotionally charged when it was all just the brain struggling with the audial physics. It finished with a slow, descending note and he rose upon it, snuffed out the solitary candle by the table, and went to bed by the firelight.
-
Tuesday, January 5 (Twelfth Night):
Western Front: French blow up a half-mile of German trenches in the Argonne.
Naval and Overseas Operations: Union forces occupy Schuit Drift on the Orange River.
A man must rely on the post for an outside lens to the world. For this reason, Sherlock Holmes paid the postal employees well for their time, paid extra for hand-deliveries, and made a point to add a gratuity to any and all holidays that came along (Christmas of course gaining the most attention).
Twelfth Night was nigh; he remembered it as a particularly good day to avoid whilst in London; if Mrs. Hudson or Watson hadn't their own plans for his celebration, there was simply no genius by which he could avoid the effusive holiday terrors of the Yard, too. Christmas Day itself wasn't as stressful…
He thought of London in these moments—and with better reason than most. In the winter months the yellow London fog spread as far as four miles from the city itself, and when storms threatened, one could catch a warning whiff with the nose. He had it now; more snow was in his personal forecast, and he was hardly surprised. Even in this modern era, London was marked in its atmosphere by the metallic tang of coal smoke and the underlying dust of horse dung. It was a good reason to walk down to the edge of the waters and stare at the cool waves of the Channel as they flowed between the larger seas. It was a frozen expedition, but he felt better for doing it and walked slowly back up the winding path to his house, thinking of his bees the whole time. Several times a single snowflake fluttered down. He was not surprised.
Since August of the previous year, the weather had been wet with only brief forays into a more pleasant, drier field. The snows had collected and shown surprising presence. Each succeeding month was cooler than the previous; Sherlock had weighed his memory, doubted it in the light of his infamous three year absence, and finally wrote to Brother Mycroft.
Mycroft had not directly scolded him for disturbing his usual schedule, but he had found the time to point out (acerbically) that with thousands of ships churning up the cold oceans, and countless depth-charges pulling cold water to the surface and stirring up the currents, he was astonished his younger brother was so inobservant as to ask him, pray tell, was there a link between the stirred-up cold water of the ocean and the frosty winter they were now enjoying.
In other words: "Sherlock the conclusion is so painfully obvious I can only conclude you are spending too much time with those bees."1
Mycroft's final Parthian shot had been in the nature of an ominous foreshadow:
"I shall be collected a coal budget next year, Brother. I suggest you think ahead."
Sherlock shuddered at the thought of his manically neat brother contemplating warmth from anything but clean and quiet gas, but if Mycroft was willing to revert to coal, there was reason and he doubted it had a thing to do with being a patriot supporting the endless coal seams of Great Britain, and more to do with the fact that oil and gas was about to be hard-pressed. Mycroft was too lazy not to have a reason for any of his actions…and he usually had three or four of them.
In the meantime, his younger brother dealt with life by keeping his country cottage thick and firm against the elements. As the mid-winter winds whistled about his ears and attempted to shove the books off the walls, he thought of his patient bees and fretted. They needed at least one calm day for their ablutions. They were clean insects, preferring to die before they fouled their colony; he liked their supreme attention to hygiene and neatness.
The bathing pool was rimed with ice. It rested away from the salt sea at low tide. Watson often took to this pool in his search for fishing-bait or some mollusk he felt would be "the very thing" on the dining-table on his rare visits. Holmes never saw this part of the beach without remembering McPherson's death beneath the Lion's Mane, and their initial quest of futility in searching the caves and ledges for clues. Under the January winds the pool was bereft and sad. The science teacher had been a discreet, decent man and to Holmes' knowledge the anniversary of his death was faithfully observed by his former rival in love, Murdoch and their mutual object of attention, Maud Bellamy (now Maud Murdoch nee' Bellamy).
Eight years had passed, and most of the students shared by the two teachers were now in the trenches. Because of this, Headmaster Stackhurst sometimes came to his house without prior warning and troubled him for his company at tea. They two would chat of nothing in particular mixed with world events, and at the end, the Headmaster would nerve up his courage, pull out a folded clutch of paper, and smooth it out, adjusting his bifocals as he did so. Aloud he read the recent casualty list, and Holmes would listen in silence as the tea steamed between their hands, bearing silent witness to any—if there were any—known names.
The Murdochs were united in a single grief; he and Stackhurst were united by many.
Holmes entered through the back-kitchen door, which allowed him the time to clean his soles from grit and shell. Chafing his cheeks against the warmth he removed his walking-gloves and hat while hanging his coat closer to the fire for warmth. In his comfortable little parlour the usual scene had taken place: The ape's skull (uneven from a deformity while alive) had fallen off the shelf again; a flour-paste restored the dome to its original smooth shape and it was with satisfaction he dusted his hands free and sought his re-warmed coat. The post would be by soon and he may as well examine the walk for any patches of ice.
He was surprised to open the inner door to find a folded-over sheet of paper wedged neatly within the grasp of the storm-door and the outer frame.
With a gleam of interest in his grey eyes, the aging detective plucked the paper from its prison and smoothed it before his face.
The image shocked his attention for the barest moment; he recognised "his" Chichester Cathedral, or rather what the artist had left of it. Before his eyes the inking was of disaster and flame; a bomb burst a hole through the roof; flames licked out the windows and smoke created an apocalyptic gloom upon the world. It was a Sussex in tatters. Over it all was the greater horror: two large German planes and two zeppelins dropped death from their cargoes.
As if the picture wasn't a thousand words of description and explanation, there was type below:
CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL as it would be under GERMAN BOMBARDMENT
Holmes squinted to read the block-print letters beneath the headline:
SAVE SUSSEX FROM THIS.
THE MIGHTY GERMAN FORCES
ARE ALMOST AS NEAR SUSSEX
AS LONDON IS TO BRIGHTON
JOIN THE SOUTHDOWNS
(Kitchener's Army)
AND SHIELD SUSSEX FROM WHAT
THE GERMANS ARE DOING TO
BELGIUM AND FRANCE
Sherlock Holmes sighed.
No one could hear him; no one, save poor Watson, would have believed it of him. Three years of effort; three of an exile that he had no choice in, and in many ways far worse than that of his first "death" and he was facing the return of the very demons he had striven to defeat.
In moments like this Altamont's voice returned, whispering in his ear.
"Do you think you failed to make a difference? You tricked Germany as well as you did the fools that would cripple England."
He studied the paper without truly seeing it. Someone had walked up the path in his absence, knocked, found him absent and placed his propaganda between the doors and went on his way. A mindless cog in the machine of War.
His lips tightened. If England would not hurry up, this paper would move across the line between alarmist and prophetic. He did not want that to happen.
"The wind is here, Your Majesty." He said aloud and quite softly to his house. "When will you finally do what you must?"
_______
1 WWI and WWII were unusually cold, snowy, and full of Arctic weather, but ONLY during the active years of both wars. The constant churning of cold water from the depths of the ocean (thanks to military activity) has been deemed the leading factor.