The Baghdad Railway Club (20 page)

Another driver from Corps HQ took me to Baghdad station, and this time I arrived to find a great sense of stir: Tommies on long ladders repainting the place; the repair of both the tea and coffee salons was being taken in hand. In the railway territory beyond, work gangs were fettling three new locomotives; a vacuum engine was being fitted to the turntable. And once again
The Elephant
stood ready and facing Samarrah.

It was seven in the morning, and I was feeling a little better, but still not right. Major Findlay, swathed in cavalryman’s clobber, was standing beside the tender and speaking to one of the Royal Engineer officers who would be riding with us, together with a couple of their own batmen. Besides the holstered revolver, a .303 short-magazine Lee Enfield rifle was held by a strap over Findlay’s shoulder. About his neck were three bandoliers of ammunition, a haversack and a canvas water bag. He carried a rolled groundsheet, and wore cord riding breeches and long boots. All in all, he could have done with a horse, and indeed he was saying, ‘Strange to be unmounted, though. Do you know, I very nearly brought a bag of oats!’

He
had
brought a dozen saddles for delivery to Samarrah, and these had been loaded into the Turkish veranda carriage that was again coupled up to
The Elephant
. Stacked alongside them were some other Samarrah-bound crates, but our mission was to do with looking over the railway lines rather than provisioning the garrison, which received most of its supplies by river or by motor from Baghdad.

The Royal Engineer now moved away from Findlay, who was left looking handsome but too red-faced on the platform, and above all sad. For one thing, he must now have discovered that Miss Harriet Bailey would not be riding with us. But he himself could not back out of the trip; it would not be honourable.

I tried to imagine his movements after the break-up of the club meeting.

The important photograph had shown the former sweetheart of his own sweetheart (it was all these silly, romantic-story terms that came to mind when I thought of the matter). If Findlay
had
killed his rival in love, namely Boyd, then he would have gone all out to get back the picture. If he had
not
killed Boyd, then he would still – being a gentleman – have gone after it, to save Miss Bailey’s honour and spare her blushes (as the papers read by the mill girls had it). My guess was that he had got it back by finding Jarvis and ordering him to hand it over. Perhaps he’d given him a terrible slanging into the bargain, threatening who knew what punishments for making away with the private property of another person, and a lady at that. On the face of it, Findlay seemed mild enough, but the behaviour of an officer in company with his fellows was no guide to his behaviour with other ranks, and having seen that picture he wouldn’t be in a good mood.

On top of this, Findlay must now suspect that he was being thought the likely killer of Boyd, since he knew that other parties were interested in the photograph that incriminated him. He knew Jarvis had gone after the photograph, but who did he think had sent Jarvis? Or did he think Jarvis was acting alone? It all depended what Jarvis had told him in his last moments. It occurred to me for the first time that Findlay might have thought
I’d
sent Jarvis in after the photograph. Jarvis was my batman, after all.

Findlay looked along the platform and saw me. After a moment’s hesitation on either side we saluted, and he climbed up into the carriage. I would have to confront him before long. As far as I could recall, I had not yet spoken a word to the man. From the other end of the platform, Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd had watched Findlay climb up. He came towards me.

‘Did you speak to him about the picture, sir?’ I said, indicating the carriage and Findlay within it.

Shepherd smiled, shook his head, in his bashful sort of way. ‘But we’ll force the issue one way or another,’ he said. So perhaps Shepherd would do the confronting. He carried his pack, wore his haversack over his shoulder. There didn’t seem to be anything much
in
the haversack, but his Colt revolver was in his holster, and he carried a spare Sam Browne belt with spare ammo pouch.

Shepherd was evidently convinced that Findlay had put Captain Boyd’s lights out. That would be enough to set him against Findlay, but I had fanned the flames by speaking of the ‘rumour’ of Shepherd’s treachery, and raising the possibility that Findlay had known of it. Shepherd climbed up, and I watched through the dusty window as he and Findlay saluted one another. The smiles that followed were somewhat reserved, but cordial relations were being preserved for the moment. I heard a loud chuffing, and was for a moment back in the marshalling yards of York station, where I would wander on quiet days in the police office, just to watch the engines working. As a result of whatever ailed me, I found I was inclined to float in and out of myself.

The chuffing came from the tank engine that did duty as the Baghdad shunter, and it was bringing up a flat-bed wagon on which sat two radio cars held down by strong ropes. Captain Bob Ferry walked along the platform with his pack on his back, keeping pace with the wagon in a proprietorial sort of way, for they were
his
radio cars that sat upon it. My understanding was that he would be taking them to Samarrah and staying there a while with them, demonstrating their use to the men of the garrison – that he would not be entering the no man’s land, in other words. Ferry wore shorts, and they had recently been ironed. His whole
person
had been ironed, it seemed to me, and he’d polished his Sam Browne belt. You were supposed to polish the belt, but nobody did. His revolver was a Webley, like my own. It too was highly polished, and looked deadlier as a result. We watched as the wagon was coupled up.

Ferry said, ‘When’s the . . . off?’

‘Five minutes,’ I said.

The radio cars looked like grocers’ delivery vans with the rear sliced away, and wooden boxes covered with switches and dials stuffed in. Long wires stuck up from them, but the wonder of it was that these wires weren’t connected to anything. It was all wire
less
. I said, ‘It’s the latest thing in field communications, I believe.’

‘In their present state of development,’ said Ferry, ‘machines such as these are less efficient than . . .’

I waited. On the opposite platform, an Arab in a fez was staring at me: the bloody Baghdad station master. I had to get out of his line of sight, which meant I had to get away from Ferry. I would have to hurry him. ‘Less efficient than the telegraph?’

‘Than the . . .’

‘Telephone?’

‘. . . carrier pigeon.’

I moved along the platform, so as to put the carriage between me and the station master. Ferry came with me. He climbed up, and I watched through the window as he took his seat at the opposite end of the saloon to Shepherd and Findlay. There was a small plaque fixed to the window where he sat. It might have read whatever was Turkish-Arabic for ‘No Smoking’, or it might have read ‘Smoking’. Either way, Ferry took from his pack the leathern wallet that held his pipes.

I walked forwards to the engine, and climbed on to the footplate where my fireman, a Royal Engineer, was fettling the fire. He was a pleasant sort; he’d said he was ‘rotten at firing’ but he knew his way around an engine all right.

I was about to start oiling round when I heard a voice from along the platform. ‘Where can I put Mr King’s champagne?’

I jumped down, and the whole station reeled. I shouldn’t have done that. Wallace King’s assistant was on the platform with the cine camera over his shoulder, a pack on his back, and a canvas bag in his hand. He was addressing an R.E., who leant from the carriage window. King himself was bringing up the rear, and carrying nothing. He overtook his assistant and came up to me, saying, ‘Can’t seem to get any sense from anyone about how to keep the champagne chilled in the desert.’

‘No?’ I said. I had still not stabilised after my leap.

‘I mean, I take it there
is
ice?’

‘In the restaurant car,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Fine. And where’s that?’

Silence for a space. He eyed the one carriage and the flat-bed wagon.

‘Are you taking the mickey?’ he said.

I regained the footplate a moment later. A Royal Engineer who was acting as platform guard came up and said, ‘You can take it I’ve blown my whistle.’

As I pulled the regulator,
The Elephant
seemed to go down as well as forwards. I watched my fireman breaking up the coal; I watched him
shovelling
coal. I could not have done that, and I found that I was clinging on to the regulator for support. As we cleared Baghdad, I looked to the right: more activity at the earthworks by the Tigris. Steam cranes and steam shovels were now in view, but still the scene looked Biblical.

And then we were into the desert proper.

The regulator was too hot for my hand already. I turned about to fetch a rag from the locker, and my fireman said, ‘Are you all right there?’

I nodded.

‘She’s a good steamer,’ said my fireman.

I nodded again.

Our black smoke seemed an affront to the desert. We ought not to be
bringing
smoke into a place like this. I leant out. Presently, the flame-like shimmer that would turn into Mushahida station was ignited on the horizon. It was a bigger shimmer than before, since the population had swelled: same number of Arabs but more Tommies. On our previous run I hadn’t needed the regulator rag until after Mushahida, but we were now in June, the hottest month in Mesopotamia, as I had learnt from someone or other. I drank down half a bottle of tonic water, pitched the bottle into the desert. It annoyed me that it did not smash; I turned back to look at it as we raced away, thinking it might smash
later
. I took out my Woodbines. My colleague didn’t smoke, and once I’d lit my own, I couldn’t face it, so I pitched that away as well. Then I recommenced shivering. As I peered forward through the spectacle glass, it was important for me not to see the swoop and rise of the telegraph wires, for they made me sick, just as though
I’d
been swooping and rising.

My fireman said, ‘Are you
quite
sure you’re all right?’ and this time he answered his own question, saying, ‘I don’t think you’re in any fit condition to drive.’

So he sat me down on the sandbox, and applied the brakes, bringing the engine to a perfect stop, right in the middle of nowhere. He held my arm as I climbed down, just as though I’d been about a hundred years old. Some of our party had climbed out of the carriage. Others leant out of the windows. They wanted to know why we’d stopped. My fireman provided the explanation.

In the carriage were a series of couches and armchairs. The armchairs at one end (where Ferry sat alone) were arranged in regular train-carriage formation, but at the other end of the carriage, the seats were jumbled anyhow. I was told to lie down on a dusty couch. A pillow was made of a groundsheet. Shepherd sat before me. He was reaching into his pack. He passed me a bottle of water and a biggish tablet.

‘Take this,’ he said. ‘Just bite it once before swallowing.’

I did so, and he gave a half smile.

‘It’s bitter,’ he said.

It was
so
bitter that I couldn’t untwist my face after swallowing.

‘Quinine,’ said Shepherd. ‘Only a precaution.’

Quinine meant I had malaria. Of the dozens of mosquitoes that must have bitten me since my arrival, I had a fixed idea of the culprit: the one that had done me on the wrist while I was sitting before the campfire on the previous run. I indicated the mark to Shepherd, and we exchanged weak smiles. There were faces all around him. Bob Ferry looked on, calmly smoking. I thought: you should put that fucking thing out in the presence of an invalid. Major Findlay was saying, ‘Quinine . . . that’s the ticket.’ Wallace King’s assistant frowned alongside Findlay, with arms folded. He seemed on the point of speech when his master called to him from the opposite end of the carriage, saying, ‘We might as well take advantage of this delay.’ He already had the camera pointed through the window. He said, ‘I thought I saw something on the horizon just now. If they turn out to be Bedouins, we might try and get them to wave or something.’

I slept. But I was somehow aware that Shepherd had gone forward to fire
The Elephant
while the Royal Engineer who’d been my mate was promoted to driver. I heard Major Findlay saying to one of the Royal Engineers, ‘Care for a barley sugar?’ I couldn’t make out the reply. Findlay said, ‘I like to see the telegraph poles. They’re reassuring, somehow. But we don’t have any signals, do we?’ Again, I couldn’t hear the answer. A little while later, I heard a sigh from Major Findlay. Was that the sigh of a killer? It was the sigh of a man in love, at any rate.

Later again, I heard the voice of Wallace King’s assistant. ‘Mr King wants to start making features.’

A voice I didn’t recognise said, ‘How do you mean?’

‘Feature
films
,’ said the assistant, ‘
story
films. He wants to make a film of the Battle of Trafalgar.’

‘Wouldn’t that require a lot of . . .’

It was Ferry who had spoken.

‘Money?’ said the assistant, at length.

‘. . . ships?’ said Ferry.

‘You’d need
one
,’ said the assistant.

‘There were a lot more ships at the Battle of Trafalgar than . . . one,’ said Ferry.

‘The rest would be models,’ said the assistant. ‘He thinks he can bring it in for less than five hundred pounds. History, that’s what people want to see in the picture halls. Just look at Tyrone Gould. He really hit the jackpot with
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, and it wasn’t up to all that much.’

‘It was quite
shocking
, Wilson,’ said the voice of Wallace King, ‘and don’t you forget it.’

So I had finally learnt the name of the assistant. He might lead a dog’s life at the hands of King, but I was jealous of him since he did not have malaria.

I was aware that we were making short stops – the Royal Engineers inspecting the line. When I awoke properly, we seemed to have been stopped for a longer time. I sat up. I was soaked in sweat, but felt better for my sleep. In the carriage, dazzle and gloom did battle. Every window was open. I heard voices from beyond. We were at Samarrah station, and I was the only man left in the carriage; the saddles were gone too. Shepherd was speaking to the clever, bespectacled major who was the head of the Samarrah garrison. I believed that Shepherd was saying something about me, for the major said, ‘Do you want to leave him here? Collect him on your way back? The devil of it is that our doctor’s flat on his back with something.’ He then said, ‘Nothing for it but quinine. It usually works.’