India . . . now India was not at all keen. Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India, was at loggerheads with his governors in London. He had supplied most of the troops by which Maude had taken Baghdad, and what he wanted in return was the Arabian Peninsula as a sub-colony of India. He argued further that a Mohammedan revolt so close to home might inflame those of that persuasion under Indian rule. The loyalty of Indian troops might come into question. Yet it had to be admitted these were mostly Hindu, whereas fully one-quarter of the Turkish army was Arab.
The Turks tried to play the Moslem card as a means of keeping their Arabs on side. Well, the Turks were Moslem after all – they had that going for them. But an Arab revolt would trump that card, and spell the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was just about possible, Hartley suggested, over what might easily have been his fifth whisky, and his third cigar, and in response to a question from me, to imagine how a fellow might feel some sympathy for Brother Turk, as for an acquaintance down on his luck, his picturesque empire crumbling daily, practically forced, by fear of the horrible Russians, to get into bed with the even more horrible Germans. In fact, he’d heard there were a good many in the British government who were pro-Turk, and they argued the strategic benefits of suing for peace with the Turks, but mainly they were romantic types, who appreciated the exotic East. Turcophiles – that was the word for those fellows.
*
It was a five-day cruise from Basrah to Baghdad, I had been told by the first mate, and our present slow rate of progress meant I would arrive there on the 24th, the very day of my night-time rendezvous with Captain Boyd. We were against the current, and only making eight knots or so.
From the aft deck, I watched strange-coloured small birds skimming over the fields, fluttering their wings quickly, then ceasing to flutter and swooping low, as though in a faint from the heat, but they would always recover, and ascend again. One bird swerved off its course and came out over the river, making directly towards me, and I saw that it was not a bird but some giant species of dragonfly – and dragonflies could bite, especially Mesopotamian ones.
I went back under the tarpaulin, but the thing did not stop me baking, and there was the oil smell into the bargain, so I turned in at a hatchway, and retreated to my cabin, where an overhead electrical fan revolved at what I had been told – but which I did not believe – was three hundred revolutions per minute. It was not enough, anyhow.
I lay on my bunk in my undershirt, and lit a cigarette, watching what happened to the smoke when it tangled with the blades of the fan. On the table beside my bunk lay an envelope containing a cash advance of twenty pounds, a quantity of Indian rupees and Turkish lira (all or any of which could apparently be tried on the merchants of Baghdad with some hope of success), together with two copies of my letter of engagement as Assistant to Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, who was designated a Political Officer (Railways) at the Corps HQ in Baghdad. The letter was not from Shepherd himself even though my recruitment was all his doing, but from the assistant to a Brigadier General Barnes, on behalf of Sir Percy Cox, who was the Chief Political Officer. There was a telegram on the table as well. It had been handed to me at Port Said, and came from the Deputy Chief of Staff at Corps HQ in Baghdad. It informed me that a Private Stanley Jarvis of the North Yorkshire Regiment (one of the British units of the Anglo-Indian force) had been seconded to me as batman. I would be sharing him, so to speak, for he was also one of the motor-car drivers attached to the Corps HQ. He would meet me on the quayside in Baghdad, and escort me to the HQ, which was evidently located in the Hotel Grande Bretagne, which I rather liked the sound of. All of the foregoing was, so to speak, the official side of things.
But there was a second envelope on the table, and this one bothered me. It had been brought into Manners’s room at the War Office by the boy scout and its contents struck me as nonsensical, and dangerously so. I considered looking them over again, but in the end decided it was just too bloody hot.
I put out my cigarette, tried to sleep, and gave it up after five minutes. The fan had started to rattle and shake. I stared at it, wondering . . . is it actually unscrewing itself? I could not imagine Baghdad railway station. I could not imagine myself slinking into it at close on midnight, and I could conjure no mental image of the man Boyd, witness to the treachery of Shepherd.
*
On the Mantis, I was out from under the tarpaulin, for the sun was now setting, slowly crashing down into the desert that came and went between the orange trees to which the wheat had given way. The air was hot and soft – not unbearable. We had passed Kut, the scene of Townshend’s reversal of the year before, and Maude’s recent victory. It looked the place for a reversal all right – a desert compound of blockhouses with no colour in it, but plenty of mangy dogs wandering about.
At this point, with Baghdad approaching, both banks of the river seemed to be used as pleasure grounds. An Arab, fishing with a trident spear, frowned as we went past. The wake from our boat was not helping his cause. Arab men, holding hands (I’d been warned they would do that), wandered between the trees, or lay against them and smoked. Sometimes the smokers called out to the Arabs on our boat, of which there were a dozen or so, most employed to help with the horses we were taking up. They all stuck together, and were now standing at the midships, repeatedly shouting one word that I understood:
‘Ingilhiz!’
And the Arabs on the bank and the Arabs on the boat would have a good laugh about that. They seemed very easy-going about having their country taken over by foreigners, and just as well too. I supposed they were used to it.
Reed huts were coming into view, and mud houses – long low buildings, bunker-like. I saw a mule tied to a windlass and drawing up a skin of water. A small boy, crouched on the river bank, waited for the water, but the moment he saw me, he stood, and addressed me in Arabic. He appeared to be asking a question, and one that required a quick response. I waved to him, and called out, ‘Salaam alaikum!’ which meant ‘Peace be upon you’, and at which he called out something else I didn’t understand. It was impossible to say whether he was being friendly or not. As far as he was concerned, he’d asked me a perfectly normal question that required a perfectly normal answer . . . Or was the machine gun three feet away from me a consideration in the matter? As he retreated from my vision, the kid fell to talking to his mule. He didn’t seem to appreciate that he lived in a strange world that was almost entirely orangey-brown, what with the oranges on the trees, the faded orange of the long shirt he wore, and the great sunset going on behind him.
. . . But now, on a kind of river-beach, stood a group of Arab women in faded blue. I had been told the name of the outfit that covered almost the entire face as well as the body, but couldn’t recall it. Did they wear that rig all the time, being extreme in their faith? Or had they put it on especially, knowing that a boat-load of infidels would be coming along? From what I’d seen so far, most Arab women settled for headscarves, and lots of them. I waved at the party to see whether anything would happen. Nothing did, except that three of the women sat down on the sandy bank, and started what looked like a happy conversation.
Baghdad began to come and go, according to the curves of the river: palm trees with high domes and the pointed towers – minarets – above. The bunkers began to grow into proper brick buildings, and the river became dirty. I saw a floating plank, broken off a crate and stamped with the word ‘Leeds’. We had seemed to be approaching the one bridge that traversed the wide river – a bridge of boats, with tethered black barges supporting a walkway – but now we were turning into the bank. All about me on the Mantis, a great bustle was starting up – a clattering of boots going up and down gangways, shouted orders, and the blare of the whistle by which our captain was making our presence felt in the great city. These blasts echoed off the high buildings on the right or eastern bank. They were like so many music halls – albeit somewhat run-down-looking – with domes, arches, or castellated tops, and strange-shaped windows with b
alconies and verandas overhanging the river. On the western bank, the buildings were lower, and seemed overwhelmed by palm trees.
I read the words on the warehouses on the eastern side: ‘Lynch, Import Export’; a giant signboard built up over a warehouse read ‘Hanbury’s’, and then, stacked still higher above it, a kind of pyramid of smaller boards reading ‘Oranges’, ‘Onions’, ‘Coffee’, ‘Cigarettes’. Another sign read ‘British and Foreign Bible Society’, and I thought: Well, this is definitely the foreign end of the operation. I wondered whether these signs had been kept in place throughout the war (the British in Baghdad had been allowed safe passage out of the city by the Turks at the start of the show) or whether they’d recently been refixed.
The river was packed with Arabs in circular boats in a range of sizes. They would stand up in these craft, which had no bow, keel or rudder, and were paddled by a man holding a long oar. They made a fantastical sight – as though the entire town had taken to the water in so many upturned pork-pie hats – and I knew, looking at them, that all bets were off in this place. It was too weird; anything could happen at any moment.
We were now lurching and turning in the river, causing the Arabs in their smaller boats to paddle faster to get clear of us, shouting out – not angrily, but as though to encourage our steersman into the dock.
I pushed along the gangway, against the general flow of men, and collected my pack from my cabin. The gangplanks were coming down. The quay was between two of the music-hall palaces, one of which might have been the Hotel Grande Bretagne, Corps HQ. Waiting on the quay were half a dozen mules, two motor lorries throbbing, a couple of dozen Indian soldiers (tiny fellows – sepoys, they were called), some Arab stevedores in long blue shirts. Another vessel was being unloaded alongside us. Under circling gulls, a derrick was taking bales off it while the Arab dockers chanted, ‘Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah’.
On the quay, an English private blocked my path.
‘Are you Jarvis?’
‘Sah!’ he said, and he snapped to attention, which was quite the right thing for him to do, but he also eyed me curiously, which was not.
‘I’m Captain Stringer,’ I said.
‘Sah!’ he said again. He then became normal, and it was good to hear a Northern accent. He said, ‘The base is this way, sir. We’re in the Hotel Grande Bretagne – Hotel Great Britain that is, sir.’
‘I know,’ I said.
He held out his two arms for my pack, and I gave it him.
The dockers were still chanting the name of their God as Jarvis said something about ‘. . . I hope this place will be a home-from-home for you, sir.’
We joined a flow of soldiers walking up a kind of dirty sluice that rose up from one side of the quay, and this took us into a packed narrow street, the road not much wider than a footpath, where we came up against the doorway of a very compressed mosque with green lanterns burning on either side of the entrance. A loud singing rose up from somewhere, and made me start.
‘Time for prayer, sir, time for prayer,’ said Jarvis, ‘always at it, they are. Five times a day, starting at dawn. If you should go in there‚ sir . . . take your shoes off. Don’t put your hands in your pockets, and don’t put your hands behind your back either, sir.’
We pushed through a crowd of beggars. Jarvis was saying something to them in their own language – sounded friendly enough. Well, he was a friendly-looking chap: small, round-faced, and dead keen. ‘Chirpy’, that was the word. As we pushed on past the beggars, he said, ‘It goes without saying, sir, that you don’t go into a mosque in shorts. One of the officers did that yesterday, sir, and there was a bit of . . . well, there was a bit of a riot really.’ (In khaki drill, which was the cotton version of service dress, short or long trousers might equally be worn.) ‘See any lions on your way up, sir?’ Jarvis enquired.
‘No – dogs. Plenty of dogs.’
‘This place is full of dogs too,’ said Jarvis. ‘Yellow, they are. And starving.’
I said, ‘Is it quite the thing to wear shorts?’
Jarvis did not, and his trouser legs looked even more sweat-soaked than mine.
‘Frowned on in the officers’ mess,’ he said.
‘But a good deal cooler,’ I said.
‘I’ve been thinking much the same myself, sir. Nearly put my pair on this morning. I will if you will, sir, how about that?’
I wasn’t sure that was quite the sort of thing a batman should be saying to his officer. He seemed a smart customer, Jarvis, and that could be good or bad.
‘Is it a long walk to the Hotel?’
‘It’s not a long walk to anywhere, strictly speaking. Town’s about a mile and a half by a mile, sir. Three-quarters of it on this side of the river, one-quarter on the other.’ He paused, before adding, ‘It’s a walled city, sir, so you know when you’ve come to the end of it.’
I’d read something about that: Baghdad was the first fortified city of the Turks against the Persians.
‘What’s beyond the walls?’
‘To be quite honest with you, sir,’ said Jarvis, ‘. . . graves. Then the desert.’
‘How far away is Johnny Turk?’
‘Beaten back to about a hundred miles on all sides, sir. He’s mainly to the north, sir, beyond Samarrah. Their central point is a spot called Aleppo.’
‘Any danger of ’em coming back?’
‘Certain to try, sir, but it’s a question of when. Both sides are in their summer quarters, as you might say. Our boys were chasing the old Turkey cock out at Ramadi last month, sir, and it was too hot for campaigning even then.’
We were now into what I first thought of as an alleyway, but which was in reality – I would soon realise – a typical street of Baghdad. The ‘roadway’ was half broken cobbles, half mud dust. There were arches at intervals overhead, and three of these in succession boasted great storks standing one-legged upon them. Some of the walls were blank stone, with faded posters and barred windows, so that it looked like we were passing a succession of small prisons, but some held shops or places of business, and I had glimpses of Arab life in dark, hot, oil-lit rooms – grey stone relieved by colourful carpets and cushions. We came to a building enclosed in scaffolding.
‘Reconstruction,’ said Jarvis. ‘That’s the order of the day out here. Well, that and fatigues and parades and waiting, sir.’
Gas lights, yet unlit and of ancient design, stuck out from the walls. We passed a man in a doorway rolling cigarettes and setting them neatly on a table top; then some sort of shop or store with what looked like beautiful but battered biscuit tins containing pastries. Next came a shop that evidently sold water – in bottles or leather skins. Jarvis turned to me, saying, ‘Excuse me one second‚ sir, if you don’t mind,’ and I watched from the doorway as he stepped into the shop and spoke a few words of Arabic to the blokes inside, who seemed to know him of old, and grinned quite enthusiastically at him.
‘Like a bloody mental ward in there, it is, sir,’ he said, stepping back into the street.
‘What were you saying?’
‘Taze su, you see‚ sir – means fresh water.’
So he’d been telling them what was in their shop.
Jarvis said, ‘Your first camel, sir.’
I looked forwards, and there it was – seemingly bowing to both sides of the street as it walked. It carried a great wooden crate on top of a saddle that looked to be made of a collection of carpets. It was being led, so to speak, from behind, by a fellow constantly flicking its rump with a stick, like a man playing the drums. From this you’d have thought the camel meant nothing to him, and yet he’d decorated the saddle with little silver bells.
Jarvis said, ‘Looks like it’s got two left feet, doesn’t it, sir? But then it’s not at home in the town. Ship of the desert, sir – and it’s said you do feel a little seasick when you’re up on board.’
The camel stalked past.
‘. . . Until you get the rhythm that is. Gemel or jemel, it is, sir,’ Jarvis ran on
, ‘so it’s an easy one to remember.’
‘You’ve a pretty good grasp on the language, Jarvis.’
‘Made a bit of an effort, sir, bit of an effort. When we first came here, I was thinking: Right, where’s the blinking pyramids?, if you’ll pardon the expression, sir. Ignorant, I was, but I’ve decided to make a study of the place. Mesopotamia, sir. The land between two rivers – that’s what that means. There’s an Arab saying: “When the devil created hell, he saw it wasn’t bad enough, so he created Mesopotamia, and added flies.”’
‘I should say that’s about right.’
‘But I like it, sir. I have a guide-book: City of the Khalifs. This was quite the place to be, sir – about a thousand years ago.’
‘Were you in the scrap when we took the town?’
‘No‚ sir, but I was in the show at Kut – the first time we went in there; before the siege. September 1915 – worst month of my life, sir. Then I was at Basrah, having a fairly easy time of it. I came up here on the steamer four weeks ago.’
‘What were you up to in Basrah, Corporal?’
‘Motor-car driver. Then I was batman to another gentleman, sir. Then I went back to driving.’
There was a tap on my shoulder, I turned around, and an Arab was there, holding out a bottle of water. It was one of the blokes from the water shop. Behind him, a rather irritated voice called out, ‘Can you smile? He’s giving you a present.’
The Baghdad Railway Club Page 5