That summer, however, one of Sher Ali’s sons, a man named Ayub, erupted out of Herat with eight thousand soldiers. On July 27, 1880, he met the British at Maiwand, a plain just west of Kandahar, and eviscerated their army of twenty thousand. In Britain, Maiwand became a synonym for Afghan savagery. In the West more generally, it is known as the battle in which the fictional Dr. Watson was wounded, just before he started rooming with a detective named Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street.
