The Baghdad Railway Club (13 page)

Turning away from the fire, I checked the injectors. Stevens wasn’t shovelling, but holding his arms out from his body and repeatedly bracing them – here were more of his funny ‘exercises’. ‘Steam pressure,’ I said, ‘it’s low.’ He nodded, and set to with the shovel. He could pitch the coal to the back of the box – he could
swing the shovel
, I mean – but he was a very lackadaisical fireman. For one thing, he hadn’t thought to break up any coal. He was putting lumps on that were as big as his own head. Trying to give a hint, I booted one of the bigger specimens, but Stevens just caught it up with its shovel, and put it in.

I looked at Shepherd, and he gave a grin. Then he grabbed the pick from the tool locker, scrambled up on to the tender and started hacking up the lumps. Stevens, shovelling like an automaton, seemed hardly to notice that here was a lieutenant colonel doing hard labour on his behalf. Our joint efforts brought the needle on the pressure gauge to a hundred pounds per square inch.

‘We all set, then?’ I said.

For form’s sake, I looked back along the platform, half expecting to see the station master holding a green flag, but he was long gone. I yanked too hard on the regulator, and made the wheels slip as we started away. That was embarrassing, with all those engineers riding up behind. We came out of the station room, and into the white glare, which was like steaming into our own fire. Baghdad was to the side of us, then it was behind. When we’d got clear of the town, I saw some of our boys digging earthworks near the river. The sun would stop that game before long. A mile or so later, and civilisation had evidently run out of ideas. We moved steadily on over white rubble, through white dust. If I put my head out of the side, there was no wind at all, just a different sort of heat.

Our steam pressure kept slacking off, and I had to keep telling Stevens to put more on. Shepherd stuck up for Stevens, saying, ‘I believe our fireman’s trying to keep the smoke down, Jim.’

‘Why?’ I shouted over the engine roar.

‘Arabs!’ Shepherd said, and he gave a boyish grin. ‘Insurgents!’

He leant closer to me, saying, ‘I ought to tell you what we’re about.’

Very decent of you, I’m sure
, I thought.

And he held out his packet of Turkish cigarettes towards me.

The plan was that we were to run our carriage full of Royal Engineers up to Mushahida, where Bedouin Arabs had twice shot the water tank there full of holes, and had cut the telegraph wires fore and aft. We were to drop the blokes there, and they would form a garrison.

We were meant to control the line from Baghdad to Samarrah, and if we were to move troops north when the fighting season restarted, we must make our presence felt. Shepherd, Stevens and I were then to make for Samarrah itself, and beyond. It was not what I wanted to hear.

When Shepherd had finished his briefing, I took the cork out of my second bottle of soda water and drank it down. I was having to fight the desert, which is to say that I’d twice seen engines steaming towards us from the opposite direction. It would have been a serious matter if they’d been real, since they came on fast, and this was single-line working. But they were altogether too rubbery; blended in too well with the wavering air.

As we rattled along at a steady twenty miles an hour, I took the wife’s letter from my pocket. It was typewritten.

The wife had always rather fancied Tom Sutherland, and as for the typist, Miss Lawson, the Co-Operative movement was well known for employing crocks of one sort or another.

Repocketing the letter, I saw that a new shimmering something had appeared by the side of the line, and I had a pretty shrewd idea that this was real, and that it must be Mushahida station. Other, smaller disturbances in the vicinity became by degrees a high water tower, a motor van, soldiers waiting. But my thoughts were on what lay still further ahead: Samarrah and beyond.

What
did
lie beyond Samarrah? Surely the Turkish lines? After his customary hesitation, Shepherd had said that Brother Turk was most likely out of the picture. One hundred miles north of Samarrah was Tikrit, and he was north of
there
, building his railway line – a continuation of the one we were currently upon – with the aid of the poor Tommies captured at Kut.

The territory between Samarrah and Tikrit could be regarded as a no man’s land. It was ours really, but a little more doubtfully so than anywhere south of Samarrah. It was unlikely that we’d come across even the smallest Turkish patrol. Arabs, yes. There might be Bedouins, and they might or might not be hostile. They or the Turks might have blocked or otherwise interrupted the line, and it would be useful to
know
. It was also possible that we’d find rolling stock taken from Baghdad by the Turks in their flight from the city. This happened to be their own rolling stock of course – theirs or the Germans’ – but we would bring back any worth having.

I had asked Shepherd why we weren’t taking more troops with us on our forward patrol. That
had
been suggested to him, he had admitted, but three men and a single engine might draw Bedouin fire in a way that a whole train-load of Tommies wouldn’t. We’d have a chance of flushing out the troublesome tribes – which seemed another way of saying we were going to make sacrifices of ourselves.

We came to Mushahida station. Amid swirling steam we unhooked our carriage. One of the blokes from inside it passed our kit bags up on to the footplate, and we left him and his fellows in the middle of nothingness while we chuffed our way forwards into more of the same.

Frazzling heat . . . one hundred and thirty pounds of steam pressure . . . the rhythmical rocking of
The Elephant
. . .

Shepherd stood behind Stevens and me as we worked. Sometimes he consulted a paper from his tunic pocket. When we were about twenty miles beyond Mushahida, I saw that he held a map, but not the one I’d made for him. Why had I been put to making that map? I believed his own map told him the stretches of bad rail, for sometimes he would tap me on the shoulder, saying, ‘We crawl along this section, Jim,’ and these would be the places where
The Elephant
would start to shake, the rails being loose in their sleepers. We had with us a crate holding plates, bolts and screws for repairs, but these goods were not touched, although we would pull to a stop for long intervals while Shepherd inspected the rails and made notes.

An hour or more after Mushahida, I turned about to collect a rag from the locker, for I could not bear the regulator on my hand. Shepherd was now gazing out of the left side through field glasses. I looked a question at him, and he lowered the glasses, leaning out, pointing forwards and saying, ‘Sumaika’ – and there, small in the distance and shaking in the heat like a fever vision, was the next station on the line . . . Or rather a little shanty of board and galvanised iron, an empty siding, a water tower with a wooden wheel on top – a windmill pump. The station was there because of the well below. The town itself was a low shimmer five hundred yards off – all brown stone, and no building higher than the palm trees that stood in its midst. As we passed the station and the line took us closer to the place, I saw small collections of Arabs, some with goats and donkeys, mostly sitting down, and ringed around the town rather than in it, as if to say, ‘Yes, this is our town but we don’t care for it very much. Feel free to go and live there yourself.’

I watched the simmer of steam over the safety valve. There was no need to watch the white desert. The whiteness just came on and on; we might have been standing still, and it rolling under us. After my Turkish cigarette, I carried on with Woodbines, in an effort to keep the flies off. The back of my regulator hand was thoroughly bitten by them, and they were all over Stevens’s Wolseley hat, so I knew mine would be black with them too.

We’d swung closer to the river now, but it was invisible beyond some ancient-looking earthworks. I turned around, and Shepherd had his field glasses upraised again.

‘Have you made a study of Turkey and the Turks, sir?’ I said.

He lowered the glasses. ‘That puts the case too high,’ he said.

I eyed him until he added, ‘I wandered about there a bit shortly after my university days.’ He raised the field glasses to his eyes again. ‘Irrigation ditches,’ he said.

Stevens, closing the fire door, did something unusual for him. He asked a question of his own:

‘Why does the river flood, sir?’

‘The ice melts,’ said Shepherd.

‘Oh,’ said Stevens. But after a while, he was forced to ask another question: ‘What ice?’

‘In the Anatolian Mountains.’

Stevens made do with that, and I knew that I would have to make do with what Shepherd had told me of his Turkish interest.

The spot called Istabulat came up – a tiny, perfect fort – and finally Samarrah station and its small garrison of Tommies and sepoys. I saw a radio car in a ring of palms, horses under a canopy, and proper sidings with a quantity of rolling stock, mostly of English breed (half of it marked ‘Gloucester Carriage and Wagon Co.’); also one tank engine – an 0-6-0 goods loco of the London and South Western Railway, but its brown paint was covered in thousands of tiny scratches, as though someone had tried to scribble it out. Perhaps it wasn’t fit to be sent north, and that’s why
we
were going. It did seem that working engines were at a premium hereabouts. As I looked on, a corporal passed me up a bottle of something that turned out to be lime cordial. He said, ‘If summer has its delights, it also has its dangers, right sir?’ It was a slogan for some kind of skin cream, remembered from Blighty. I must have looked a fright. I pointed to the engine.

‘Does she go?’ I asked, and the corporal shook his head. ‘Not on your life, sir. Sand in the motions.’ His accent – Birmingham sort of way – clashed with the brownness of his skin.

Shepherd stood on what would have been the platform of Samarrah station, if it had had a platform. He was handing some papers over to a captain of the Royal Engineers – details of our run. There was a good deal of official toing and froing, and we were stopped for over an hour. Eventually, we took on water for the engine, and a parcel of hard biscuits and bully beef. The grub was to be consumed immediately, wouldn’t last a minute in the sun. As we pulled away from the station, we had a view of the town beyond. It was the usual low brick boxes, but with two features out of the common: the first was a structure resembling a giant wedding cake. I had heard of this: the Great Mosque. Another had a golden dome. ‘The Al-Askari Mosque,’ said Shepherd. ‘Ninth-century.’ It looked like the sun, fallen from the sky.

Three-quarters of an hour later, I noticed Stevens pulling faces. He was standing foursquare in front of the fire door and twisting his head in all directions, which involved a fearful rolling of the eyes. When he saw me watching him, he left off, only to commence with another sort of ‘exercise’ involving a violent bulging of his socks. Then he stopped doing
that
, and began looking left, towards the bare and barren plain.

‘Boats,’ he said, in a toneless and uninterested sort of voice.

I scrambled over to his side and looked forwards, and there were boats – six of them, upside down on flat wagons parked in a siding a hundred yards off.

Shepherd was laughing. ‘I’ve been looking out on the other side,’ he said. ‘Pull up will you, Jim?’

I applied the brakes. Jumping down, Shepherd said, ‘It might be a trap,’ and set off eagerly towards the boats.

He’s like a jockey, I thought: small, trim, somewhat bow-legged. He carried his rifle and haversack, and wore no hat. But he had a length of white cloth around his neck, which he now caught up, and wound about his head while walking. A keffiyah. I worked the injector, since the water was low in the gauge, not that Stevens had mentioned the fact. He was sitting on the sandbox and eyeing me, with his back to his master.

When I next looked towards Shepherd, he was small in the distance, climbing on to the last of the flat-bed wagons, inspecting the launch tethered on to it, then the bogies beneath. The giant sun hovered about three feet over his head. It was finally taking its bow after another spectacular performance. I could vaguely make out white lettering painted on the side of the launches. It was Turkish Arabic, but the characters looked like a series of numbers, and I thought of the pleasure boats on the River Nidd at Knaresborough. When your number was called out from the boathouse, you had to return your boat – a shaming moment somehow, tantamount to an accusation of theft. I could almost hear the swishing of the river as it ran fast between the pillars of the railway bridge; I thought of the penny licks that Harry and Sylvia would always insist on having when we returned the boat – compensation for giving it up. I was going far away, levitating out of the desert. I brought myself back to reality by running my finger over my cracked lips. I licked them, and they were dry again in an instant. It seemed to me in fact that they’d been dry before I’d finished licking them. I glanced towards Shepherd, just as he was leaping down from the wagon. I believed he’d given up on the launches; their motors would be clogged with sand, just as the tank engine at Samarrah had been. In other words, there’d be no point us reversing along the siding, hooking up to them, and taking them back. I hoped not anyhow, for I lacked the energy to do anything but keep
The Elephant
rolling forwards on its present track.