October 1895

Revisiting old friends over the summer had canceled out some of Watson's reluctance to speak about his time in Afghanistan, and stories trickled forth accordingly. Some were brought up from points in our conversation; a few he told at my gentle insistence. One or two seemed to have welled up spontaneously, completely incongruous to the subject at hand, though I never tried to stop him from speaking. There was a near-desperation behind them, a compelling urge to share what he had been burdened with for so long. He required little of me, only a sympathetic ear with an occasional remark. My primary task was to be his sounding-board, a role Watson had often played for me. I found the reversal strange at first, comparable to putting one's boot on the wrong foot. Nevertheless, it was not much to ask of me and I was happy to be of service to my friend in whatever way he required.

Together we had paid Colonel Hayter another visit, and on the journey home Watson finally related the circumstances which were the cause for their first meeting, a few months prior to Maiwand.

"It was acute appendicitis," he said, once again in the position he adopted for storytelling. "I do not know the statistics but I would swear to it that ninety percent of such cases happen between the hours of one and five in the morning. The colonel was no exception. He awoke the first orderly he came across – Harris, I believe was his name – who was just shy of a complete bungler. The man was terrified of Major Preston, so he had Murray wake me instead. Technically speaking, it should have been Preston, as he was my commanding officer. And I was none too pleased at being roused in the middle of the night for immediate surgery." I smiled. Watson gave a Gallic shrug and continued.

"While I prepared my instruments, Harris was supposed to be preparing the colonel for surgery. As you can imagine, Colonel Hayter is not a man to suffer fools any more than the major. He saw Harris's incompetence immediately and made to leave the surgery, despite the pain he was in. Harris, in his attempt to stop the colonel, knocked over the lamp and plunged the room into completely darkness. At this time, I heard the commotion and entered the room. To give the man credit, Harris did have the presence of mind to prepare a cotton pad with chloroform for surgery that he then intended to use to subdue Colonel Hayter. Unfortunately, in the dark, he mistook me for the colonel."

Watson paused and grinned, no doubt to increase the dramatic tension, to very good effect. I straightened up in my seat. "What happened?"

"All I knew at the moment was that someone had veritably attacked me and covered my face with a cotton pad reeking of chloroform. I had no idea why but of course I strove to throw the man off. Naturally, Harris assumed the colonel was trying to fight back so he pinned me down – the fellow was confoundedly strong – and pressed the pad even tighter over my nose and mouth. I didn't dare breathe for fear I'd succumb to the anesthesia entirely but I was desperate to get him off me. As it was, I was already becoming light-headed."

Watson paused again but this time I resisted urging him on, realizing he was deliberately teasing me.

"I had the presence of mind to realize he would release me if he though I were unconscious so I went as limp as I could, given the circumstances. Fortunately, it worked and Harris let me up, leaving the pad over my face. I waited a moment longer, until my lungs burned for oxygen. Then I sat up, tore the cloth from my face, and shouted at Harris to get the lamp lit again. In point of fact, it was Colonel Hayter who uprighted and relit the lamp. At that moment, in stormed Major Preston, who had been awakened by the noise. I daresay we made quite the tableau: the orderly looking aghast and guilty, the doctor half-chloroformed on the ground, and the patient towering over both, scowling fearsomely."

I laughed outright at the picture he described, and Watson joined in, ruefully. "I wonder that Colonel Hayter allowed anyone to operate on him after that," I remarked.

"Well, he had little choice in the matter. Preston had taken over the surgery and he was just as commanding as Hayter. At any rate, Hayter was in too much pain by then to argue with anyone. I was light-headed and ill from the chloroform so I simply staggered back to bed and Harris was left in disgrace. Fellow was transferred to a different unit soon afterwards." (3)

"I trust both you and the colonel made full recoveries?" I asked between chuckles.

Watson hesitated, which surprised me out of my mirth. "Apart from a headache, I was quite well the next morning. However, Hayter was in an abnormal amount of pain. At first I was puzzled, since there was no infection or other cause for his discomfort. He had been given the regular dose of morphine but it didn't seem to be taking effect. I had my suspicions but I didn't wish to act upon them until the man himself told me."

I lacked the medical training to make a deduction with any degree of confidence and I was unwilling to guess. "What was wrong?"

Watson sighed faintly. "The morphine had had no effect on his pain because the colonel had been taking the same amount of morphine on a daily basis for quite some time. He had become too tolerant of the drug for it to be effective."

"He was a morphine addict?" I asked, half-incredulous. "I should never have pictured the colonel in such a state."

"I would not have either," admitted Watson. "He was remarkably adept at hiding it, and I had not seen him regularly enough to notice."

We sat in silence for a bit until Watson spoke again. "It not a pleasant process, breaking his addiction, especially with the war around us and his pain from surgery. In the end, though, he was glad to be free of it. He told me once he had not been able to look himself square in the mirror until the last vestiges of the cravings were gone."

I recalled my own small battles with morphine and cocaine. My usage had been infrequent and the doses small enough that I had found the process somewhat irksome but not debilitating. I knew how lucky I was to escape that misery, and that Watson had been so doggedly persistent in that cause. Of course, my hiatus after Reichenbach had not been conducive to chemical dependencies. Nevertheless, I had not truly recognized how great a debt I owed to Watson. Without his influence, I might have progressed further into the grip of those twin fiends instead of casting them off entirely.

Nor had I realized his crusade was so long in its running. "No wonder your opinion of narcotics is so contrary to those of your colleagues (4)," I commented, striving for flippancy.

To my dismay, Watson muttering something to the affirmative and attempted to engross himself with the scenery, which was dull and dismal at best. I realized we stood on the brink of facing another ghost from my friend's past, one whose presence I had not been entirely ignorant of but had never really noted. There was more to this issue than Hayter or myself; I was sure of it.

"Watson."

He turned to look in my direction without looking directly at me.

"There was someone else you saw struggle with the drug," I said gently, willing him to understand he need not bear the burden alone. Instead, Watson turned back to that blasted window. The silence between us stretched on. Then . . .

"Yes," he whispered.

(3) I must confess to "borrowing" a story Doyle mentions in passing in (I think) Round the Red Lamp but I have a happier ending for the surgeon in this version than Doyle had in his.

(4) Thank you, rabidsamfan, for finding the article "Sherlock Holmes's Cocaine Habit" online, with its comment about Watson being ahead of his time concerning the dangers of drugs.