Prompt: the Season for Giving Thanks, from YoughaltheJust
A/N: This is a companion piece to yesterday's response
Our friends across the ocean have a holiday devoted solely to giving thanks for what they possess; we in Britain have no such thing. This year, it struck me that there was little to be thankful for in any event, lest it be that those same friends have finally deemed to join the war.
I was once a patriotic man, in my way. Watson has made light of my wall decorations, the bullet holes in the letters V.R., letters which I had chosen more for their shapes offering the best practice than a great deal of love for Her Majesty. But I had done my part for Great Britain, keeping the country safe from crime and even assisting with the preemptive war effort. I had no wish for the German occupation of France to repeat itself here.
But five years into the war, with no end that anyone could see, I defy anyone to find anything to be thankful for, or to find any patriotism to justify such slaughter. I do not claim much understanding of warfare, save what Watson had told me of the Battle of Maiwand, which had seemed horrible enough at the time.
His letters from France serve to make Maiwand look like child's play. I have not even the comfort of imagining that he is exaggerating (not that Watson deliberately would do so, but the habits of a fiction writer, you understand), for I knew from Mycroft that, if anything, Watson did not even see the worst of it.
Perhaps that is something to be grateful for, that Watson was serving in a hospital rather than at the front. Though from what I knew, one often could not tell what was the front and what was not. Bombs, tanks, mustard gas, airplanes…these tools of modern warfare meant the carnage was indiscriminate and spread across battlefields and towns equally.
I am not easily horrified. Yes the tales from the Continent, the reports of the men invalided home (to say nothing of the state of them) were enough to chill anyone to the bone. I confess I wondered at the point of it all long before such a thought could be spoken aloud without risking a white feather*, but as of late I believe more and more people simply wished the war over, victory or no.
Mycroft and Watson may know more of the soldiers' plight, or indeed of the plans and politics involved, but I am as observant as ever, and from what I could see when I ventured into town to send Watson his letters and packages, to each person left at home, the war ceased to matter long ago. It had become, to them, only about the person in their lives fighting it. For the women in the towns, their sons and husbands, for the children, their fathers and brothers.
For me, from the moment I heard Watson intended to resume his service, the war ceased to have any larger meaning than that. In this, perhaps, I am more honest than those who maintained that they would give their loved ones for Britain's glory. I was never willing to do such, and it is the utmost folly that it took so much slaughter for everyone else to realize that there is no glory in war.
Five years on, however, there was no sign that the politicians and generals in charge of this horror realized that, and so we remained trapped in this quagmire, thousands of soldiers dying by the day to advance an inch, if even that much. Mycroft had told me he saw no point at which the conflict would cease naturally, even with the entry of the Americans into the war.
Such a thing would be a horror beyond imagining. Eternal warfare would surely destroy every one of us eventually. Before that, it would certainly mean Watson would never return home again. I have spent these five years dreading a telegram, each knock at the door nerve-wracking until it turns out to be only Stackhurst.
Poor Stackhurst, he has seen five years of boys go off to the fighting, most never to return. There is someone who knows the true horror of telegrams.
Perhaps that is also something to be grateful for - that I still receive only letters, each answered faithfully in the knowledge that a little bit of home might be a comfort on a cold night at the front.
Watson's readers might be surprised to hear me talk in such a manner. They should not be. I remember well my own nights away from home, those three years on the run from Moriarty, and my two years undercover in America. Any contact from home would have been a comfort, as alone as I was. I knew then, of course, that I could not risk such a thing, but Watson has no such constraints and so I can at least provide him what I could not allow myself.
It was toward the beginning of November when I was at last given something to be thankful for.
I had, at Watson's insistence, installed a telephone so we might talk more easily and quickly than letters allowed (I shall remind him that we hardly got to make use of it before letters became the only form of communication the army allowed, when he returns home). Since then, it had sat gathering dust until it, to my utter surprise, rang.
"Sherlock?"
When I recognized my brother's voice I must confess I finally understood the meaning of the phrase "my blood ran cold." Mycroft hated telephones with more passion than I had seen him respond to anything, and insisted that the telephone wires be placed in Whitehall to bypass his office entirely.
Understandable, perhaps, for someone as unsociable as he is. It did, however, have the unfortunate effect of scaring me completely, for surely he would only phone in a dire emergency.
In fact, I could think of only one reason why he would, and I cursed myself for thinking the news would come by telegram when I should have realized it would always have come directly from Mycroft. "Say what you must, Mycroft," I said. "I would not have this dragged out."
"What? Oh - no, I am dreadfully sorry," Mycroft said. "I should have realized what you would assume. My news is entirely opposite, in fact."
"Watson is being discharged?" I asked.
A pause. "The war is over, Sherlock," Mycroft said. "Or, rather, it will be. I have it from my man at the front that the armistice will be signed tomorrow morning, with hostilities to end several hours after, at 11:00 AM."
I was, for once, speechless.
"Sherlock?"
"You are positive? Nothing will happen to change it?" I asked.
"The political situation in Germany is unstable, to say the least," Mycroft said. "The Kaiser has abdicated - as he should, certainly we would have accepted no cease-fire without that assurance - and the unrest in the cities-"
"Mycroft, your assurance is all I require," I said. I care little for politics (and am right to do so, see how the plans of politicians put us all in this mess!), but I trusted Mycroft's opinions on the matter. I have never yet known him to be wrong.
"You have it," Mycroft said. "In a day, the war will be over."
"But until then…?"
"Until then hostilities continue as normal," Mycroft said clinically, as if those few hours would not mean the difference for countless men at the front.
"What purpose is that?" I burst out. "If we all agree the war is to be ended, can we not simply end it now? What purpose is there, for more men to die pointlessly when the end is at hand?"
"We did have to give time to disseminate the orders, Sherlock," Mycroft said. "For your other question, there is no purpose, as there has been no purpose to any of this. Did the death of a soldier in 1914 have more or less meaning, or gain us anything more than the death of a soldier today? No. The only meaning is in its end, and that enough of those in charge finally agreed that it needed to end before mutual destruction was assured."
He was right, of course. But I could not help but think that if Watson were killed in these next few hours, how much more bitter it would be knowing it was all but over.
The last few hours of the war moved slowly. A watched pot never boils, so they say, and the clock seemed equally unwilling to turn to 11:00 AM. Yet, slowly, the hands moved, and I remained rooted by the telephone, staring at the clock, until I was certain I would not receive another telephone call.
11:00 AM.
The end, when it came, was quiet. Perhaps in London there were throngs of people in the streets celebrating, perhaps even in the small town a few miles down the road people were gathering, but the moment before and the moment after seemed no different to me. My sitting room remained the same, the weather outside was unchanged, and the only difference was my knowing that a moment ago we had been at war, and now we were not.
We were no longer at war.
I did not know emotions had weight until it was suddenly lifted. I no longer needed to worry about receiving a telegram. The blackout curtains were no longer necessary. The constant background of war news would stop.
The Americans may keep their day of giving thanks. I can think of no day more deserving of the title than the day of the Armistice.
A/N: *the white feather, in WWI era Britain, was mockingly given to men who did not fight as a symbol of cowardice