‘Sir Edward Grey to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
BALMORAL CASTLE
August 3, 1906.
‘My dear Holmes, I have discussed with the King in private your latest endeavours on our country’s behalf. You have not only his deepest thanks and those of His Majesty’s Government (even though neither’s gratitude cannot be openly displayed) but those of His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, who professes to be ‘touché jusqu’aux larmes’ by your kindness and concern. Critics may find many mistakes and short-comings in England’s foreign policy of the last hundred years but it is at least a tenable view that in this instance the conduct of those affairs has been suited to the development and needs of our Empire.
‘Last week I gathered my courage and returned to “the tin house”. I could not get away from the Foreign Office until the last train and arrived about midnight, after a moonlight drive from Winchester, thinking all the way about the walk with Dorothy along the same road at the same time of night. The following day was filled with her presence beside me, here and there some place or tree lit, as I looked, by a happy memory, like a gleam of light falling on it.’
I read the next sentence and lowered the page. Tears sprang to my eyes. Grey was expressing exactly how I felt about my own dear, dead wife. He wrote,
‘Her life was like a soft white cloud which came out of nothing into a summery, hazy heaven and as softly disappeared’.
Those words would have been entirely appropriate etched on Mary’s stone in the tiny Brightling cemetery, adjacent to the church where we were married, in whose nearby wooded valleys we spent our honeymoon. In the event the mason carved the exquisite line from The Rubaiyat - ‘The Bird of Time has but a little way/To fly...’
I returned to Grey’s letter.
‘The Saturday after your feet touch England’s soil once more, I hope you and Dr. Watson will accept an invitation to lunch at Chequers Court, the home of the Clutterbucks at the foot of the Chiltern Hills. I plan to be there. The oak-roofed hall is said to date to the time of King John, a remnant of a former house. It has its own ghost, of course. The Clutterbucks will introduce us to more recent, more tangible residents - an eider duck, a tufted duck, a red-headed pochard, two wigeons, and an elderly Shoveler duck. The Shoveler dines at table with the family, on special food.
‘I have heard you are inclined to refuse honours created by Man. I hope you will accept one from the great Deity who commands our fate. We shall plant a tree on the East Lawn, a specimen of Quercus ithaburensis macrolepsis, one of the valonia oaks returning with you from the Dardanelles. For centuries the Sherlock Holmes tree will flourish in the grounds of Chequers in abiding recognition of the many services you have performed for our country.
‘May I count on - and look forward to - your visit?
‘L’un de vos fervents.
A Most Surprising Letter Arrives From Mycroft
At Chequers on the Saturday a further communication arrived, addressed to Sherlock Holmes. It was deeply scored in red ink and marked ‘Most Secret’. We were clustered in the grounds with Sir Edward Grey and the Clutterbucks, having planted the commemorative Valonia on Coombe Hill. The sapling stood next to an ancient clump of chequer trees after which the house was named. Holmes squinted at the pages of foolscap and handed them to me. I excused myself and moved away from our hosts.
The letter was from Mycroft, penned in duck-egg green ink. It was one of the most stupefying documents I have ever read.
‘My dear Sherlock, I must immediately thank you for returning with a good supply of saffron and allspice and am pleased to welcome you back intact. By now you will have deduced that my views on matters Ottoman differ in kind from Edward Grey’s more absolutely than I could ever describe in words. He may be standing next to you as you read this but I do not hold it uncharitable of me to say the Foreign Secretary lacks every skill a diplomat requires, social brilliance, the smiling falsehoods, the cunning to move gracefully among traps and mines, the ruthless outlook.
You solved the riddle of the Sword(s) of Osman in short order. In doing so, I hold you have, single-handedly, made a great war in Europe inevitable. If the British Government should have had the intention to embroil the political situation and lead towards a violent explosion, they could not have chosen a better means than to send you to Constantinople. You and I came up against each other for the first time, and you came out in front.
I do not absolve myself from a charge of deviousness. I knew the Sword of Osman had been shanghaied before your arrival. I hoped the Sultan would awaken from his torpor and eradicate his most dangerous enemy, the Young Turks and their Committee of Union and Progress, root and branch. A badly weakened CUP could ensure the sultanate would fall instead to their rival, Prince Sabahedrinne. It was my calculation and those of other members of the Diogenes Club (several of whom sit in the Cabinet alongside Grey) that precisely because the Prince fully intends to implement reforms and espouses liberal principles the edifice of a fractious Empire would collapse - on the proven principle of give an inch and an invigorated populace will take a mile. Within months, like Russia’s reformist Tsar Alexander, Sabahedrinne would in turn be assassinated.’
‘So that’s what they really get up to at the Diogenes,’ I breathed.
Mycroft continued,
‘As with Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg last year, economic paralysis and disorder would incite large-scale political demonstrations. The Ottoman Empire would shatter. The chaos would open up access to untold quantities of oil and once-in-a-half-millennium pickings in the Near East for the Empires of Europe. Germans, Arabs, Kurds, Russians, Armenians, French, Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians, Italians and Israelites would fight for the scraps. There would be rich spoils for the French in Lebanon and Syria, for the Italians in Libya and the Dodecanese islands. Britain would take effective control of the lower Red Sea littoral and the island of Tiran, the only good anchorage in the Gulf of Akaba. The last vulnerabilities on our routes to the Far East would thus be closed, and with Abd-ul-Hamid’s departure his fiddling among the Mussulmen of British India too.
‘The Prussian mischief-makers will allow Grey to keep the peace only as long as it suits them. They hunger for a full share of the mastery of the world. Far from intimidating Germany, Dreadnought has rather backfired on us. Telegraphs went immediately from Constantinople to Prince Henry, the Kaiser’s younger brother, commander of the High Seas Fleet. He has ordered the Wilhelmshaven Imperial Shipyard to construct half a dozen identical battleships for the Kaiserliche Marine. Henceforth we must converse upon how we should conduct ourselves in a European war, no longer how a war can be avoided. It will bring in the whole of our Empire and shake it like a terrier shakes a rat in a wheat-field. The much-feared East Wind has begun to blow. I doubt if England will spring out from it the wiser and better.’
I turned to the final page.
‘Inadvertently, Sherlock, you have put me to work. I am to piece together a plan, a War Book, at the instance of Haldane, the Secretary of State for War. This War Book will be a first in our Island nation’s long history. As yet no-one has the slightest idea what happens if a major European war breaks out. Which branch of the Royal Navy will, within minutes of the Declaration, slice through the German undersea cables and cripple their communications to the outside world? Can we blockade Germany in the face of the gathering might of the Kaiserliche Marine? What if the Sauerkraut eaters use their Zeppelins as bombers and scouts? What if they drop poison gas on French and English cities - do we retaliate in kind? I don’t believe Lloyd George or Winston Churchill will hesitate a moment. When do we start cutting down iron railings to melt down for our munitions factories? When do we introduce rationing? Should we prepare an evacuation plan for coastal towns? How do we coordinate our railways so that cram-full trains carrying troops south from Scotland and the North to the coasts of Kent and Sussex don’t collide with trains hurrying our imports of food west to east, from the docks at Bristol and Liverpool to London? How do we raise a million men in short order - equip them, supply them, transport them to the Continent? How soon should we think the unthinkable - get the fairer sex out of their kitchens into the factories to replace men lost fighting for King and Country? Where do we find tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of horses? What if the harvest season approaches when the guns begin to fire? It takes three good horses to pull a single harvester. We can hardly remove every horse from every small-holding and still bring in the size of crop we need to feed a country of forty-five million human-beings, surrounded as we shall be by German mines floating on our seas and German boats like grey sharks beneath them, and German airships above. The loss of a horse will become of greater tactical concern than the loss of a human soldier.