Scorpion Sunset

by Catrin Collier

  Baghdad

  May 1916

  The house was no different from any of the others that lined the street opposite the bazaar, except in size. It was treble the width of its neighbours. The outside was plain, with nothing to indicate the inner life lived behind the four-storey walls. The front was studded with massive heavily carved double doors that looked as they would withstand a battering ram. High above them a roof terrace capped the building. Thatched by swathes of palm matting, it afforded some shade from the glare of the sun.

  A tall slim Arab dressed in a gumbaz and abba, his head covered by a kafieh and plain black agal, stood behind the balustrade. Coffee cup in hand, he watched a procession of ragged, sick British troops being whipped and bullied by Turkish soldiers and Arab irregulars as they were driven along the street and through the entrance to the bazaar. A few had tabs on the collars of the remnants of their tunics. Tabs that identified them as British officers, but officer or rank, all were clothed in rags and most were doubled over by the pain of dysentery or cholera.

  The natives lining the streets shouted, screamed, and jeered at the men, spitting in their faces and throwing slops at them whenever they passed within range. But most of the Jews and Christians in the crowd stood back in sombre silence, to the annoyance of the guards who frequently lashed out at them as well as their prisoners.

  A shorter, slighter man wearing an eye patch joined the Arab on the terrace. He stood next to him watching the scene being played out far below for a few minutes before speaking in Arabic.

  ‘They could have marched the British along the river where there wouldn’t have been so many people to throw filth at them. It’s not enough that the bastards forced them to surrender, they have to expose them to insult.’

  He took the coffee a servant handed him. ‘Have you seen anyone you know?’

  ‘Major Crabbe, Lieutenants Grace and Bowditch, and the brigadier.’ Mitkhal continued to watch the stream of men being herded at gun and whip point into the bazaar.

  ‘John Mason?’ Hasan’s pronunciation of the English name sounded odd, as if his command of the language had grown rusty from disuse.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Peter Smythe?’

  ‘No, nor David Knight nor any of the other doctors. I’ve heard the Turks abandoned all the sick who weren’t exchanged for Turkish prisoners. The doctors probably stayed with them.’

  ‘Do you know where they’re taking these prisoners?’

  ‘They’ve fenced off an area on the river bank five miles upstream for the ranks.’

  ‘Some of those men look as though they can’t walk five steps.’ Hasan watched a man collapse. A guard kicked him. An officer behind the fallen man pushed the guard aside and tried to pick up his comrade, only to receive a blow from the guard’s rifle.

  ‘I’m going down there …’

  ‘No, Hasan.’

  An unveiled woman walked out of the door behind them. ‘You and Mitkhal can do nothing against so many. My father has returned. He says the Turks are sending the British into Turkey.’

  ‘You mean the ones that live to see the sun set,’ Hasan muttered.

  ‘My father was told most will have to walk there.’

  ‘They’ll die on the journey.’

  ‘The officers are being billeted in the old transport offices on the other side of town, close to the American Embassy. You and Mitkhal might be able to talk to some of them if you go there.’

  ‘There would be to no point in us speaking to them, Furja.’ Mitkhal moved away from the wall. ‘We can’t help so many and they need more than talk.’

  ‘You can give them money for the journey to buy food from the tribes. You know the Turks …’

  ‘They won’t feed them.’ Hasan shook his head. ‘I can’t stand here and do nothing while …’

  Furja looked anxiously at him. ‘You are Bedawi.’

  ‘A Bedawi who won’t stand back and watch British soldiers being murdered, Furja.’

  ‘Not even to save your own life?’

  ‘Not even that, Furja.’

  Bank of the Tigris

  May 1916

  John officiated at the funeral of his eight patients an hour after sunrise. The two men he’d expected to die of dehydration during the night had died shortly after dawn, the two who’d succumbed to fever, minutes later. It was almost as though the light had drawn what little strength remained from their bodies, taking with it their will to live.

  The sun burned mercilessly overhead when he read the burial service. Afterwards, when he stared down at the blanket-wrapped corpses and sprinkled the parched sandy earth over the bodies, he found himself actually envying the dead. Their agony was over; his, never-ending. He wondered how many more mass graves like this lay ahead, waiting for him to preside over them.

  Dira, Sergeant Greening, Corporal Baker, and the three privates joined him in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Their Turkish guards remained at a distance, smoking cigarettes, talking and laughing amongst themselves. If they had intended insult they’d succeeded, but John couldn’t help thinking their behaviour was simply down to indifference as to whether their captives lived or died.

  The orderlies filled in the grave. John was careful to note the exact position and coordinates against a future when it might be possible to retrieve the bodies and give them the burial they deserved, before ordering the carts brought up. He commanded Corporal Baker to drive them over the spot until the surface was indistinguishable from the rest of the desert, lest the Bedouin dig up the bodies in search of clothes or blankets.

  Leaving the corporal to his task he joined Dira and Sergeant Greening and helped them dismantle and pack up the tent. It was hot, heavy work and John was exhausted by the time Baker brought the carts back for loading.

  Their Turkish guards mounted their donkeys. Baker climbed on to the seat of one cart, Greening the other, and the rest, John and Dira included, walked behind. They’d been travelling for what seemed like days to John when Greening shouted.

  ‘Men ahead, sir!’

  John quickened his pace. Greening jumped down from his cart and handed the reins to Dira. He walked alongside John.

  ‘They looked close, sir.’

  ‘It’s the mirage.’ Breathless, John struggled to keep pace with the sergeant.

  ‘They are men?’ Greening asked doubtfully.

  ‘We’ll soon see.’

  John walked until he was within a few feet of a row of a dozen naked men stretched on the ground. ‘They were men, Greening. But not any longer.’

  ‘Their throats have been slit and they’ve been stripped,’ Greening said angrily. ‘Abandoned by the Turks for the Bedouin to finish.’

  John knew he should be shocked, or at the very least feel anger at the sight of so much carnage, but he was too numb to feel anything.

  ‘Shall I order the men to start digging, sir?’ Greening asked.

  John straightened his back. Greening’s prompt had reminded him that he was the senior officer.

  ‘Please, Greening, and unharness the carts to rest the mules, but hold off from erecting the tents. There’s no point when we have no patients.’

  Canal running from the Shatt al-Arab into Basra

  June 1916

  Sister Kitty Jones sat back on the cushions the boatman had arranged to cover the planking in the stern of the boat and leaned close to Charles Reid.

  ‘This has been a lovely afternoon, thank you for inviting me to spend it with you.’

  Charles wrapped his arm around Kitty’s shoulders. ‘And we have the entire evening ahead of us. You haven’t forgotten Tom and Clary’s wedding breakfast in the Basra Club with Georgie, David, Michael, Peter, and Angela?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘You have an elegant gown to wear?’

  ‘As elegant as Angela Smythe’s Jewish dressmaker could patch together. Haven’t you heard, Major Reid, there’s a war on, and as Matron keeps telling all us poor nurses, we have to sacrifice fripperies.’


  ‘Surely women’s gowns can’t be classed as “fripperies”.’

  ‘Exactly that.’

  ‘Seems to me that that some people are expected to sacrifice more than others in this war. Women’s gowns should never be counted among the casualties.’ He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her fingertips. ‘When is your next afternoon off?’

  ‘Monday.’

  ‘Can you ride?’

  ‘Ride what?’ she asked in her Welsh lilt.

  ‘A horse.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, where would I learn to ride a horse? The only ones I saw when I was growing up in the Rhondda were pulling milk, brewery, or coal carts.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think. That was crass of me.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise, Charles. We’re from very different worlds, you and I. As my mother would say, “there’s more of a difference between a lump of coal and a diamond than a layer of dirt”.’

  ‘I take it you’re describing yourself as the diamond.’

  ‘Hardly,’ she laughed, a soft low chuckle he had come to love, ‘I’m coal, and definitely from the wrong side of town, even in the Rhondda. You’re …’

  ‘A common soldier.’

  ‘An officer, a gentleman, and, I’m guessing, one who will inherit a house with more rooms than the entire street I grew up in.’

  ‘Officer, I agree, gentleman would be disputed, and not just by me.’ He frowned as a memory he desperately wanted to forget surfaced. ‘House? There is a house, but it’s the sort of solid square house a retired general buys because he lacks the imagination to look for anything different. It also happens to be on the edge of Clyneswood, the estate owned by Michael Downe’s family. His father is a close friend of my father’s.’

  ‘Which explains your friendship with Michael.’

  ‘I was closer to his older brother, Harry, just as I was with Tom Mason’s older brother John. The Masons own Stouthall, the estate next to Clyneswood.’

  ‘Two landowners among your close friends! We would certainly never have met if it wasn’t for the war.’

  ‘Of course we would have,’ he countered.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible I could have entered the servants’ entrance of one of your friends’ houses as a nurse, but if that were the case I would never have been allowed to speak to you.’

  ‘You have a peculiar idea of life on estates. Of course everyone speaks to everyone else, servants, family … we live together, why would we not speak to one another?’

  ‘Your father employs a parlour maid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a cook and a butler?’

  ‘And a footman, and a valet who used to be my father’s orderly before he retired from the army.’

  ‘Their names?’

  ‘The maid’s Florrie, the cook, Alice, the butler is Stevens, the valet Esher, and the footman is, or rather was, so young when I left home he was known as Billy. Does that make me Fabian enough for you?’

  ‘Fabian is too posh for the Valleys. My father is a Marxist.’

  ‘I don’t blame him. If I had to hew coal underground for a living, I’d be campaigning for equal shares for all. But I don’t know why we’re having this discussion.’

  ‘We’re having it because you and I are ridiculous together.’

  ‘Now you’re being silly.’

  ‘Am I?’ she questioned. ‘Be honest, Charles. How would your fine friends react if you took me to dinner?’

  ‘We’re going to dinner tonight. In the Basra Club.’

  ‘I mean in one of their houses back in England.’

  ‘They’d be delighted to see you.’

  ‘They’d say they were delighted, because I’d be with you and they’re polite. But they’d have trouble understanding my accent and I’d have problems sorting what cutlery to use with each course.’

  ‘Like a lot of other things, class, cutlery, and dinner parties with endless courses won’t be a problem after this war. We’ll have more than we can cope with just trying to survive.’

  ‘Things won’t change that much.’

  ‘They already have. Kitty …’ He hesitated. They had only known one another a few weeks but he knew he was in love with her. He knew because he’d been in love two years before, with a married woman who’d sent him away and told him to forget her. Emily Perry, Maud’s mother, had died the day he’d left her. Apparently from a scorpion bite, but he’d been haunted by her death until something even more traumatic had happened to disturb the equanimity of his life.

  ‘If you’re trying to tell me that you have another girl in England, that’s fine, Charles. I have no right to expect …’

  He laid a finger across her lips. ‘You have every right to expect me to behave honourably towards you, Kitty.’

  She laughed. ‘You sound like a character in a melodramatic romance novel, Charles. What on earth does,’ she mimicked his accent with uncanny accuracy, ‘“behave honourably” mean?’

  ‘There is no other woman, at least not one I love, but I have a past.’

  ‘I would be very concerned if a man of your age didn’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m probably not making much sense …’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘I need a little time to sort out my responsibilities. And when I have …’ There was so much he wanted to say but it wasn’t the right time. ‘We’ll talk again.’

  ‘We’re coming into the wharf.’ She picked up her shawl.

  Charles glanced at the boatman as he reached for the stick that had become indispensable since he suffered a leg wound. The man was too concerned with avoiding the other boats in the dock to watch what his passengers were doing. Taking advantage of his preoccupation, Charles bent his head to Kitty’s and kissed her.

  To his amazement, even after the conversation they’d had, she kissed him back.

  Open prison for British Ranks, Baghdad

  June 1916

  Mitkhal rode his horse slowly out of the city towards the fenced off area the Turks had set aside to house the British ranks. The air grew putrid with the stench of raw sewage, men’s sweat, and rotting flesh long before he reached the high metal wire that enclosed the camp. He dismounted at the gate, turned his horse’s reins over to Ibn Shalan’s servant, Farik, who’d accompanied him, and lifted a bundle from his saddle.

  He approached the guard and handed him a fistful of silver. The guard counted it before unlocking the high wooden doors that had been reinforced with barbed wire. Mitkhal held the bundle close as he walked into the compound. As on all his visits, the ground around the single pump, the sole source of water for over four thousand men, was crowded with men patiently queuing to fill the motley collection of containers they’d scavenged to hold drinking water.

  He looked for Warren Crabbe. He’d told him he would return at midday, but apart from the sun, the major had no way of knowing when midday was. Pocket and wrist watches, like everything of value – right down to the men’s boots and underclothes – had been stripped and stolen from the British POWs by their Turkish and Arab guards.

  He spotted Crabbe in the north-east corner of the fenced off area, shifted the bundle he was holding under his arm to protect it, and, stepping carefully, headed towards him. A few platoons were sitting in closed circles from force of habit. There were no camp fires because anything that could be used as fuel had long been burned, and the only food in evidence was the dreaded, thick black Turkish ‘biscuit’.

  The handful of senior officers who’d been allowed to stay with the men and their sergeants had ordered latrine trenches to be dug, siting them at the furthest possible point from the entrance, but they had proved pitifully inadequate to cater for the needs of so many, especially as dysentery and cholera were endemic. As a result the ground around the northern half of the camp was damp, and slimed with human waste and excrement.

  ‘I meant to meet you at the gate so you wouldn’t have to smell the aroma.’ Crabbe pointed to the ‘facilities’
behind him. ‘Am I late or are you early?’

  ‘Does it matter when both of us have time to spare?’ Mitkhal handed the bundle he carried to the major. ‘Bread, cigarettes, dates, a couple of flasks of brandy.’

  ‘Thank you. I and some of the other men here wouldn’t have survived this hellhole if it wasn’t for you.’

  Mitkhal lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘You won’t have to survive it much longer.’

  ‘We’re leaving?’

  ‘I spoke to an officer in Turkish HQ. They’re clearing the camp in stages. The Dorsets will be marched out first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Marched – no transport?’ Crabbe paled.

  ‘The American consul, Mr Brissel, is negotiating with the Turks. He’s offered to supply carts to accommodate the sick and haul supplies. He’s doing all he can as are some of the locals.’

  ‘Will Mr Brissel succeed in getting the Turks to accept the carts?’

  ‘He’s hopeful.’

  ‘We need more than hope.’

  Mitkhal slipped his hand inside his abba and unclipped his belt. He glanced around to make sure they weren’t being watched, but most of the men around them were lying on the ground, their eyes closed.

  Mitkhal rolled up the belt and handed it over. ‘Keep this hidden. There’s a hundred gold sovereigns stitched into the lining.’

  ‘That’s too much.’

  ‘Not for the number of men who’ll be marching with you. You’ll come across tribes along the way, Kurds, Bedouin, Yazidi … Armenian, if there are any of them left alive. The Turks are killing them faster than they’re wiping out the British. Some of the tribes will hate the British, all will hate the Turks, but all love money and most will be prepared to sell you food if you offer them gold.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll take care to see you’re repaid when the war is over.’

  ‘No need. As Harry would say, it’s only money.’

  ‘As Harry would have said,’ Crabbe corrected. ‘I pay my debts, Mitkhal.’

  Mitkhal looked across to the gate where sappers’ bodies were being piled on a cart. ‘The best way you can repay me is by surviving until the end of the war. How many have died here?’