The Baghdad Railway Club

by Andrew Martin

  ‘Why would they leave them in the middle of the desert?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘Abandoned on the way north?’ he’d replied. ‘Or I suppose they’re handily placed to be picked up and taken back to Baghdad. If they hadn’t been wrecked.’

  The sun continued his descent, but too slowly for my liking, since the palms gave only about as much shade as an umbrella with the silk off. Stevens had started a campfire using a paraffined rag, our good Cardiff coal and the dead branches of a thornbush – he was better at making a fire out of a locomotive than in – and we had a meal of rusks, rice and roast sand grouse (bagged by Shepherd in lieu of gazelle).

  Shepherd then passed out Turkish cigarettes. As I took one, a mosquito landed on my left wrist. It bit it. I then began picking away bits of what I believed to be cigarette paper from my lip, but which turned out to be bits of skin. Shepherd stood and went off to his canvas bags, returning with a jar of petroleum jelly. I thanked him and applied it, watched by Stevens. At length, he said, ‘Chuck it over, will you?’ He caught the jar, asking Shepherd, ‘Mind if I take it off over there?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ said Shepherd, with a half smile.

  When Stevens had disappeared from view over what was not so much a dune – a dune I imagined to be beautiful – as a ridge of sand and stone, I asked Shepherd, ‘What’s he up to?’

  ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said Shepherd. ‘How did you like his talk at the Club?’

  ‘I thought he came up trumps after a shaky start.’

  Shepherd nodded, smiling. ‘Next week we have the lady speaking on “The Railway at Babylon”.’

  ‘Knows a lot about it, does she?’

  Shepherd shook his head. ‘I fancy there’ll be more about Nebuchadnezzar’s palace than there will about six-coupled side tanks. She’s bringing a man who’ll be showing a film.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of the railway at Babylon. And her, of course.’

  ‘Hold on‚ sir . . . Do you mean Wallace King?’

  ‘Correct – the King of the Bioscope, as I believe he’s known.’

  It seemed the right moment to ask, ‘You were talking to my man, Jarvis, sir?’

  No emotion was betrayed as he said, ‘He was telling me about the discovery of the body at the station. You heard about it, I suppose – Captain Boyd. He and I had been in a forward patrol on the night the city fell.’

  Was he too modest to give the details? Or too guilty?

  Stevens was descending from the dune, but instead of returning to our camp, he crossed to The Elephant, and heaved himself up on to the footplate. A moment later, I saw him illuminated there. He had the fire door open and was contemplating the flames. I couldn’t see why we hadn’t dropped the fire. Surely it couldn’t be the plan to keep the engine in steam all night? But Stevens was now shovelling, and black clouds rolled upwards from the chimney into the violet night. Turning towards Shepherd, I heard the juddering noise that told me Stevens was working the injector – and being very clumsy about it.

  ‘Are we taking off somewhere, sir?’ I asked Shepherd.

  He shook his head, blowing smoke.

  ‘I want to keep steam up.’

  I eyed him.

  ‘Precautionary measure,’ he said.

  Stevens returned to his seat. After a while, he fell to clasping and unclasping the arms of it, in an agitated way. I pitched away the end of my cigarette. If the engine were to be kept in steam somebody would have to be at the fire and water every forty minutes or so.

  Stevens tipped his head violently back, and contemplated the stars. ‘Bloody hundreds of them,’ he complained.

  Shepherd said, ‘You want to take the first sleep, Jim?’ I half nodded back, thinking: Not likely – not so that you and Stevens can see me off with a bullet, then reverse The Elephant to Samarrah.

  Silence for a space, then Shepherd caught up his rifle and commenced walking towards the railway line. When he’d fallen in with it, he kept going – heading north across the desert, which had been turned grey by the moonlight, like a great carpet of dust.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ I asked Stevens, who shrugged, saying, ‘A little five-mile scamper.’

  ‘Has a lot of pep, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He has the right idea,’ said Stevens. ‘You get mouldy from lack of exercise.’

  ‘But he’s been on the go since six – in this killing heat . . .’

  Stevens contemplated me with more attention, and more intelligence, than usual.

  ‘First rule of boxing,’ he said. ‘Keep your chin down.’

  My visit to number 11 Clean Street: he’d finally got round to mentioning it.

  ‘I daresay,’ I said. ‘Why bring it up now?’

  ‘. . . But I suppose if you’re going to put the gloves on to have a conversation,’ he continued, ‘then that goes by the board.’

  ‘I went up for a bit of a spar . . . Turned out I had a friend in common with the chap. Know him yourself, do you? The southpaw?’

  Stevens – looking sidelong, perhaps scanning the horizon for Shepherd – made no answer at all.

  ‘He’s a machine-gunner,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I hope he’s better with the Emma Gee than he is with his fists,’ said Stevens, and that somehow blocked any further enquiry.

  I made a show of getting ready for bed – by going over to the engine, pissing behind it, and having a sluice-down with the water from the slacker pipe. I picked up a bottle of water and carried it and my revolver over to the tent-without-sides. I lay down – and that was my mistake, for I was immediately asleep.

  I awoke in a panic to see Shepherd moving about at the limit of my vision. Stevens’s boots were about three feet from my head. How could these two men be acting in concert when one was five hundred yards off? Then Shepherd was running pell-mell along the tracks, and Stevens was rapidly kicking over the fire. I came out from under the tent, and Shepherd had made the footplate of the engine. He held a small handgun – a gun made of gold; no of course not, it must be brass. He was slowly raising the thing, thinking hard about what he was doing, and it was for a moment pointed in my direction, but he continued raising it so that it ended high over his head, like the pistol of the man who starts a running race. He fired, and the whole desert jolted, so that I saw it for a second seemingly tilted and illuminated by a green light. Shepherd had fired a flare – it showed on the horizon three advancing parties of men with guns. As the light of the flare burnt out, their black robes became grey in the moonlight, but still they came on. Arab raiders.

  Shepherd was roaring at me from the engine, and it seemed he’d been doing so for a while. Stevens was racing for the engine. I began to follow; Stevens made his leap, and was up and on the engine, but I was checked by a droning noise, and a puff of sand six inches from my boot – a perfect little dandelion rising and falling in a second. I lay down flat. I was about fifty yards from The Elephant. That drone had meant a Martini bullet, and there now came two fizzes – Mausers. Another drone came, then a deep booming – a fucking blunderbuss, by the sound of it. The Arab shootists were like a choir, each with his own voice, but any one of those guns could do for me. I tried to press myself into the sand, and another dandelion rose and fell two feet from my head. On the engine, Shepherd had the reverser right back. I could see Stevens behind him, shovelling coal in a half crouch. But then Stevens flung down the shovel, and took up his rifle. He leant out and fired towards the Arabs. I turned my head, imagining I could see the bullet as it flew . . . and one of the Arabs was down. I refixed my gaze on the engine, where Shepherd had now replaced Stevens – he was the one leaning out, I mean, and he was loosing off revolver bullets at the rag-tag Arab army. I now had one of them in my own sights; I fired, and . . . nothing. I stood and raced for the engine. A drone, then two fizzes as I leapt – and I was on to the footplate.

  Stevens said, at the moment of my arrival, ‘I got one of the filthy devils,’ and Shepherd, still hanging out shooting, said,
‘Don’t crow, Stevens. He’s a man just like you are.’ He turned to me: ‘Regulator’s yours, Jim,’ he said.

  Well, he was having a grand time of it, and I fancied this was exactly what he’d come for. Shepherd had already set back the reverser, so I gave a pull on the regulator – too hard again, and we shook on the spot, but did not move an inch. Fucking wheelslip. I pulled the lever to release sand from the sandbox . . . I was putting sand into the desert – a crazy notion – but it gave us the friction we needed. Shepherd held the flare pistol once again, and again he turned night into a garish, green sort of day. The number of oncoming Arabs had about tripled, and a chant or battle cry rose up from them. Some were on horseback, but the riders kept pace with the walkers, and every man was firing in a steady, calm sort of way. Stevens was at the whistle. He pulled and held, producing a constant, deafening scream, but I could still hear the bullets clanging against the side.

  ‘Leave off!’ I roared at Stevens. ‘We’ll lose pressure!’

  He shouted back at me – something more about ‘The devils!’

  Shepherd, swinging back in, yelled, ‘He’s trying to spook them. He thinks they’re scared of railway engines!’

  Well, they didn’t seem to be, for they came on still, and I could now hear their chanting over the whistle-scream – something like ‘Allah illulah! Allah illulah!’ It put me in mind of a Salvation Army meeting.

  The grey desert went forwards as we went backwards, but not fast enough; I notched up the reverser, and still the whistle screamed, with Shepherd roaring at Stevens, ‘Look here . . . it’s aeroplanes they’re afraid of.’

  Stevens, finally letting go of the whistle, said, ‘What?’

  ‘Aeroplanes,’ said Shepherd. ‘They take flight at the sight of an—’

  A fizz and a drone came together.

  ‘. . . aeroplane.’

  Stevens was down.

  ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ said Shepherd, and, pulling the keffiyah from around his neck, he knelt in the coal dust of the footplate, and applied it to the spurting blood of Stevens’s chest.

  ‘Head,’ I said, pulling the reverser back to its fullest extent, ‘he’s hit in the head as well.’

  So Shepherd put the cloth to the spurting blood of Stevens’s head, and I believe that I heard Stevens muttering faintly. The keffiyah went back again to the chest, then once more to the head, until the thing was saturated in blood, at which Shepherd sat back and gave it up.

  We were flying backwards at full speed, and shaking like buggery, but we were clear of the Arabs. I told Shepherd so, and still squatting in the coal dust, he looked sidelong, nodding to himself. ‘The Shammar tribe,’ he said presently, ‘Rashidi . . .’

  ‘You mean Ibn Rashid?’

  Harriet Bailey had told me he was one of the pro-Turkish Arabs.

  ‘They’re a bit out of their way if so, but I think it was them.’

  ‘What was Stevens saying, sir?’

  ‘He was saying he’d be bloody glad to be out of this heap of sand.’

  *

  I drove and Shepherd fired (he was a better hand at it than Stevens), the controls illuminated by the thin ray of our footplate lantern. Stevens we wrapped in a tarpaulin and put on the coal in the tender. I had swabbed the blood off the footplate with the slacker pipe. The Elephant was a difficult engine to run tender-first, the tender being so big. But we kept rolling through the soft black darkness, with coal dust now flying into faces as well as sand. Shepherd and I hardly spoke, but worked well together – in harmony. He always knew when the injector was needed, or where the fire was thin. After we’d put Stevens on the tender, Shepherd said, ‘I’ll write to his people.’ A little while later, he said, ‘The worst of it is they thought he’d be safe out here – away from the real war.’

  The real war was in France, Mespot being a sideshow; but if you were killed in a sideshow, you were still dead. After a further long interval, I said, ‘When you put the flare up, sir, it reminded me of the Somme district. In that sort of unreal light, you know anything can happen – anything bad, that is. It’s like a theatre.’

  ‘I wanted to get a clear sight of the enemy. I knew there were too many for us to take on, but . . . I suppose it was a morbid fascination.’

  ‘To my way of thinking‚ we were trespassers rather than, you know . . . combatants. The real enemy’s Brother Turk, isn’t he, sir?’

  ‘Tell that to Stevens,’ he said.

  Having brought up the subject of France, I decided to try on Shepherd what I’d heard of his reputation.

  ‘When you were in the trenches, sir, you had a taste for going on raids, I believe.’

  Shovelling coal, he seemed to give a half smile. ‘It seemed a good way of getting a Blighty.’

  He meant a wound that would take him home. It was not the truth.

  On the left, the dark, sleeping town of Samarrah came up. Three dim lights signalled the station, where we took on more water, and the commander of the garrison – a clever-looking major in thin wire spectacles – was roused from his bed to talk to Shepherd. By way of breaking the bad news, Shepherd showed the fellow Stevens’s body. It was agreed above all that he couldn’t be left lying on coal, so two privates were summoned to carry him down, and set him on the platform. The head of the garrison explained that one of his men had died the week before of malaria, and Stevens might as well be put to rest next to him, so Shepherd took Stevens’s papers out of his pockets. The major offered us a bed for the night, and Shepherd ran this offer past me. I did not believe that the quarters at Samarrah would be very comfortable, and I did not want the fag of relighting the fire in The Elephant. I indicated accordingly. ‘Then hot coffee and biscuits might be more the thing,’ said Shepherd, and these were brought before we pulled away from the garrison and the still-sleeping town.

  At Baghdad station (and Shepherd had kept silence for almost the whole of the way there), a team of Royal Engineers waited to stable The Elephant. They’d been alerted by telegram from Samarrah, as had Jarvis, who was on the dark platform, looking through the window of the Salon de Thé, with hurricane lamp upraised.

  ‘I thought you meant to avoid that place,’ I said as, a few moments later, he, Shepherd and I walked towards the van. He made no audible reply – evidently in one of his glooms again.

  ‘Locked, was it?’ said Shepherd, sounding not very interested. Well, it was five o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t slept for nearly twenty-four hours.

  ‘It was, sir,’ said Jarvis.

  ‘Preserve the evidence, I suppose,’ said Shepherd.

  Jarvis indicated the Ford van, waiting on the rubble beyond the station mouth with the dawn breaking strangely all around it, which is to say that the sky was attempting unnatural colours, leaving the van looking as though badly hand-tinted, like the film of Ali Baba. Jarvis started the engine – making a good deal of black smoke – and after we’d been going a minute, he said, ‘Did you put the other fellow off on the way, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Shepherd grimly.

  Well, Jarvis didn’t know Stevens as far as I was aware, and this wasn’t going to be one of his jolly days anyway, so I just said, ‘We came under fire from Arabs – he’s dead.’

  Jarvis made no reaction, but as we crossed the bridge of boats, he said, ‘Two sepoys were killed here last night. We’re all warned off the bazaar – that’s where it happened. Stabbed in the back they were – only young lads.’

  I thought: Jarvis is breaking down under the climate; he ought to be on sick leave. The light was rising fast over Baghdad; the call to prayer was going up at the same time, so that a newcomer might have taken this for a city of sun-worshippers.

  As we came off the bridge, Jarvis swung down an unfamiliar street near the park. ‘I’m opposite to the cavalry barracks,’ Shepherd said. But it seemed to me that Jarvis did not need to be told where Shepherd lived. Well, perhaps he had given him a lift before. Shepherd’s place was in a garden compound much like my own, except that his had tw
o storeys and a veranda.

  ‘You’ll forget about the office, Jim,’ he said, climbing down. ‘A good sleep is the order of the day.’

  But at Rose Court, my room was filled with sunlight and flies – looked as though it had been abandoned this past hundred years.

  Jarvis said, ‘The flytrap has stopped working, sir.’

  ‘Evidently. Where’s Ahmad?’

  ‘He’s gone—’

  ‘To join the insurgency?’

  ‘To the bazaar. I’ve asked him to get a new one.’

  The marketing at the bazaar started a little after the dawn call to prayer – for those allowed to go there. I slung my pack on to the bed. As I moved, my boots grated on the floor. Everything was coated in a fine covering of sand.

  ‘A wind got up yesterday, sir,’ said Jarvis. ‘The whole city was covered in this sort of golden cloud. I walked to the hotel and back, and it was like the streets were full of bandits.’

  ‘Well, they are,’ I said, ‘we know that.’

  ‘I mean they looked like bandits. Every man had a keffiyah round his face: sepoys, Tommies, Arabs all alike. The worst of it is I think I’ve got some of it on my chest.’

  I was rather tiring of Jarvis. I asked him, fairly shortly, to prepare some sweet tea, and this he went off to do. Whilst he was in the scullery, I opened the connecting door and looked into his quarters. Two ranks of beer bottles now stood by the bed. This room too fizzed with flies, and these, I saw, were concentrated on an earthenware bowl near the end of the bed. I walked towards it, and it was full of scraps of greyish meat. Was this some kind of makeshift flytrap? He had told me that milk and formaldehyde could be used, but not poisoned meat. I picked up a scrap of the meat, so making myself a focus for all the flies. I sniffed. There was no particular smell – it was not yet on the turn.

  I retreated back into my own quarters, where the light seemed to have redoubled. I sank down on my bed, and contemplated the flies in wonderment. It was their room now, not mine. I lay on the bed watching them, too tired to strip off. A moment later, I heard fast footsteps on the gravel beyond. The door was thrown open, and Ahmad entered. He carried a string bag with food in it, and a brown paper parcel. He stared at me challengingly.