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“I can imagine the hilarity,” said Sherlock Holmes, without smiling. He rose again from the bench, beckoning me to join him whilst he strode towards the cab-rank at the southern edge of Madison Square. “Watson, come! We still have time to see Maude Adams give her evening performance at the Empire.” Turning back, my friend doffed his hat to the pair of erstwhile Phillimores. “Adieu, gentlemen,” said Sherlock Holmes. “I suggest that James Phillimore’s latest vanishing-act should be his farewell performance. Since Doctor Watson and I are on our way to San Francisco – where the list of recent deaths is a prodigious one – I can easily arrange for James Phillimore’s name to be inserted among the rolls of the dead. Let us keep him that way. Farewell!”

The Case of the Last Battle

L. B. Greenwood

After the last case and that of “The Lion’s Mane” Holmes kept himself to himself for several years until the ominous rumblings of war brought him into government service in the episode recorded by Watson in “His Last Bow”. That was the last published case of Sherlock Holmes, set in 1914. There have been many who have written apocryphal cases of Holmes’s wartime adventures and continuing cases into the 1920s, but I believe almost all of these are apocryphal. But there was one last case, the details of which remained hidden in the archives of the War Office until Canadian author and Sherlockian, Beth Greenwood, unearthed them. Here, at last, is the very final case of Sherlock Holmes.

“He’s dead, sir.”

“I know that, Jackson,” I snapped.

Quite unpardonably, but I was still wet with the boy’s blood, and his death was only the last of so many. For this was early November of 1918, I was the sole doctor in the field dressing station, and if any few acres in all history had been as tortured as those around Ypres, I have never heard of it.

A mug of something hot and brewed – front-line coffee could seldom be told from tea – was poked into my hand. “Thanks, Jackson. Sorry about the temper.”

“ ‘S all right, sir. Wot ‘bout them in the corner? They’re quiet enough now, but …”

Stiff-legged with exhaustion, I staggered over to the five mounds of blankets. No cots could be spared for the merely sick, no matter how desperate their condition, nor could we hope that any ambulance would have room for several days. Not after such an attack as had all too recently once again blasted this segment.

Of course we had dealt with illness from the earliest days of the war. (In fact, my first medical task for the army had been to inform a furious major that he had contracted measles.) The present sickness, however, was one that I hadn’t seen until a month or so ago, since when an increasing number of cases from both sides had been brought to my station.

The cause seemed to be some kind of respiratory infection, with a high fever, furiously aching limbs, and all too often an agitated delirium. For a small dressing station over-run by wounded, attended by one elderly doctor whose only assistant had until a year ago been a butcher’s apprentice at Smithfield, the sufferers made very disruptive patients, poor fellows.

So, sometime during the previous night, I had injected the present five victims with morphine. One I now found had died, two were still deeply unconscious, three were beginning to stir, with amazingly cool skin and regular breathing. This was far better than I had expected: mortality of fifty per cent or more had been common. I told Jackson to soften some hardtack in boiled water – we had nothing better to offer – and to start sponging them off, with now at least some hope of their remaining clean.

I was leaning wearily against a tent pole, sipping the cooling concoction in my mug, when from behind me seemed to come that never forgotten voice, in words as few and peremptory as always. “Watson, I need you.”

I’m hallucinating, I thought, not much surprised: I couldn’t remember when I had either slept or eaten. I knew that since the early days