Well, I’d look a bloody idiot saying that. Looking again at the walls‚ I saw that the station name was indicated, in that the word ‘BAGHDAD’ had been written on the right-hand wall in tall, shaky letters of red paint. There was a nightmare quality to the work, the long thin letters seeming to be formed of dripping blood. I began to make out through the gloom other scrawlings on the walls, in a different shade of red. I first thought these were all in a foreign language, but I made out the word ‘Tommy’. I looked harder . . .
I heard a footfall coming from beyond the far end of the station. Through the soft, green gloom, a man approached. I believed he had stepped out of one of the blockhouses set amid the broken tracks. He wore a long black coat, and it became clear that the small hat he wore was red – a fez. I had thought all Arabs would wear a fez, but here was the first. He held a lamp, and as he came under the station roof, the swinging white light illuminated the scrawl on the walls: ‘One Tommy – 100 Askari’, I read, and ‘Tommy, where is your Lon . . .’ and then, some way off, ‘. . . don.’
I tried my ‘Salaam alaikum’ on the man as he approached. The collar of his coat was braided with gold.
‘Hello‚ my dear,’ he said, which knocked me rather. He was a thin, handsome chap with a deeply lined face – but then most of the Arabs were. His coat made him look priest-like, but I thought I knew what the braid signified.
‘Are you the station master?’ I said.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course.’
‘When is the next train?’ I said, since that was the kind of thing you asked a station master.
‘Next train?’ he said. ‘Next day.’
‘Who wrote this?’ I said, indicating the scrawl on the walls.
‘Turk, my dear,’ he said, and he grinned; then his grin faded rather rapidly. ‘Next train, next day,’ he repeated, ‘God willing.’
This next train was getting less likely by the minute.
‘I help you?’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘No thanks,’ I said, and he turned on his heel. I watched him walk along the platform, then step down into the territory of the sidings. He was a station master at arm’s length from his station. He seemed to be heading back towards a certain blockhouse when the darkness enclosed him; perhaps he lived there; or perhaps he would walk beyond it and go to some other place entirely. I was glad he was gone, not so much because he would get in the way of my meeting Boyd as because I was about to be sick. I did not want to be sick in the station, however.
I was halfway back towards the engine shed when the stuff came out in a yellow fountain. Well, it missed my boots; and I immediately felt better, getting – for the first time since my arrival in Baghdad – a hint of coolness about me. I sat on the ground savouring the feeling for a while; I then pursued my way back into the engine shed and found a lamp there. I lit it, and turned up the wick. I looked at my watch – ten to eleven.
‘Next train, next day . . . God willing’: I revolved the words. Why would God will it, given that it could only be a British Army train, an organisation not over-full of Mohammedans? Or had the station master meant that God might favour the return by rail of the Turks? Was he one of the pro-Turkish Arabs? Which side, in fact, was the fellow really on?
I turned back towards the station, going by the blockhouse from which the station master seemed to have emerged. By the light of the lamp, it appeared locked and shuttered. There was no window in it. If I’d come across this sort of brick bunker in the railway lands of York, I’d have said it held lamps, lamp oil, track shoes, not a person, and certainly not a station master. The deputy station master at York had a chandelier in his office.
I was under the station roof again at dead on eleven, and there was unquestionably no sign of any Captain Boyd on the platforms. In the light of my lamp, the ‘B’ of ‘Baghdad’ danced as I closed on the glass and iron booths. The door of the first was ajar. I pushed, and saw a jumble of rubbish, iron chairs and tables, photographs with scenes of Baghdad on the walls. I held up my lamp and it revealed a counter bearing two kettles, assorted kitchen clutter, and the dusty remains of what might have been a spirit stove. A dead palm also lay on the counter, and the soil that had come out of the pot was scattered everywhere. There was a kind of sideboard against the wall. No – a shallow display cabinet of sorts, with broken glass doors. My lamp showed – pinned to cork board – photographs of engines near buildings that looked more like castles than stations, but which I knew to be stations. Above the photographs was pinned a blue tin strip with white lettering: ‘Die grosse Berlin–Baghdad Eisenbahn’. On a shelf lay a whistle with a green and red tassel, and two copper medallions, also with tassels. I picked one up, moved it near the lamp. On one side was an engraving of a locomotive surrounded by a circle of laurel leaves; on the other was an inscription in Arabic, perhaps Turkish Arabic. The whole display was a celebration of the Berlin–Baghdad railway, but whoever had put it up had jumped the gun, for the line, as I had discovered, was incomplete north of Baghdad.