Will “Sherlock Holmes” be this year’s big movie on Afghanistan? Maybe not, based on the trailer—it looks like a Victorian action movie. But Afghanistan has a lot to do with Holmes, or at least with Dr. Watson. “Watson’s just come back from the Afghanistan war where he was awarded a medal of honour and there’s no mention in the stories of him being bumbling or stupid,” Jude Law, who plays Watson, told the Telegraph. “I liked the opportunity of bringing back some of the more accurate and edgy qualities.”

One of the first things Holmes says to Watson, in “A Study in Scarlet,” is “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” That line is often cited to illustrate Holmes’s deductive power and odd manners—to diagnose the detective. But there’s more to it than that. Here’s Watson’s account of his war:

The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy’s country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties. The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery…. Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawar.

Note that he doesn't mention a clear border in the area between “Candahar” and Peshawar, now in Afghanistan and Pakistan respectively—still a problem. Anyway, in Peshawar, Watson was struck by “enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions”:

For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was despatched accordingly, in the troopship Orontes, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined…. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought.

In another time, Watson’s history as an officer of Empire contributed to his image—in derivative works, not in the books—as a blustering, slightly befuddled duffer, and Candahar was a place name Arthur Conan Doyle might as well have made up—about as realistic as the murderous Mormons who also, unfortunately, populate “A Study in Scarlet.” Now one reads it and wonders if Watson had post-traumatic stress disorder. “My nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy,” Watson says, describing his condition to his prospective roommate, Holmes, who proceeds to get him out of the house. Holmes may end up solving murders and resolving diplomatic crises, but his first, and perhaps most important, literary function is a bit like that of Salinger’s Esme—to take a tired soldier, and cheer him up.

There’s some mystery in the death of the Bengals’ Chris Henry, but only in the details. The story is just, plainly, a sad one.