The Baghdad Railway Club(16)

The man Dixon took The Wide World and laid it over his face. He had an easy time of it, being batman to an amiable major called Hartley. Both were old for serving men, being somewhere around the early fifties. Hartley hadn’t seen much in the way of action, but he was a brainy sort, who knew all the angles on Mesopotamia.

I would listen to him of an evening, as we all sat holding our drinks and smoking in the cramped and sweltering mess. His main topic was the Arab Revolt. Apparently this was already under way in the Ottoman territories of Syria and the Hejaz, and the War Office was all in favour of it. At least, some parts of it were – the parts allied to the British Intelligence Bureau in Cairo, where the plan for stirring up the Arabs had been hatched by some ‘fiercely clever’ young British agents. (Hartley said ‘fiercely’ in a very fierce way, spraying half his drink over me.) These British agents – the Arabists – were now bent on extending the revolt to Mesopotamia, which Hartley always called ‘Mespot’. Not all the Arabs were keen on it, however. A few were pro-Turk, and some – perhaps the majority – just ‘generally incredibly bloody-minded and indifferent’.

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.