The Baghdad Railway Club(52)

Repocketing the letter, I saw that a new shimmering something had appeared by the side of the line, and I had a pretty shrewd idea that this was real, and that it must be Mushahida station. Other, smaller disturbances in the vicinity became by degrees a high water tower, a motor van, soldiers waiting. But my thoughts were on what lay still further ahead: Samarrah and beyond.

What did lie beyond Samarrah? Surely the Turkish lines? After his customary hesitation, Shepherd had said that Brother Turk was most likely out of the picture. One hundred miles north of Samarrah was Tikrit, and he was north of there, building his railway line – a continuation of the one we were currently upon – with the aid of the poor Tommies captured at Kut.

The territory between Samarrah and Tikrit could be regarded as a no man’s land. It was ours really, but a little more doubtfully so than anywhere south of Samarrah. It was unlikely that we’d come across even the smallest Turkish patrol. Arabs, yes. There might be Bedouins, and they might or might not be hostile. They or the Turks might have blocked or otherwise interrupted the line, and it would be useful to know. It was also possible that we’d find rolling stock taken from Baghdad by the Turks in their flight from the city. This happened to be their own rolling stock of course – theirs or the Germans’ – but we would bring back any worth having.

I had asked Shepherd why we weren’t taking more troops with us on our forward patrol. That had been suggested to him, he had admitted, but three men and a single engine might draw Bedouin fire in a way that a whole train-load of Tommies wouldn’t. We’d have a chance of flushing out the troublesome tribes – which seemed another way of saying we were going to make sacrifices of ourselves.

We came to Mushahida station. Amid swirling steam we unhooked our carriage. One of the blokes from inside it passed our kit bags up on to the footplate, and we left him and his fellows in the middle of nothingness while we chuffed our way forwards into more of the same.

Frazzling heat . . . one hundred and thirty pounds of steam pressure . . . the rhythmical rocking of The Elephant . . .

Shepherd stood behind Stevens and me as we worked. Sometimes he consulted a paper from his tunic pocket. When we were about twenty miles beyond Mushahida, I saw that he held a map, but not the one I’d made for him. Why had I been put to making that map? I believed his own map told him the stretches of bad rail, for sometimes he would tap me on the shoulder, saying, ‘We crawl along this section, Jim,’ and these would be the places where The Elephant would start to shake, the rails being loose in their sleepers. We had with us a crate holding plates, bolts and screws for repairs, but these goods were not touched, although we would pull to a stop for long intervals while Shepherd inspected the rails and made notes.

An hour or more after Mushahida, I turned about to collect a rag from the locker, for I could not bear the regulator on my hand. Shepherd was now gazing out of the left side through field glasses. I looked a question at him, and he lowered the glasses, leaning out, pointing forwards and saying, ‘Sumaika’ – and there, small in the distance and shaking in the heat like a fever vision, was the next station on the line . . . Or rather a little shanty of board and galvanised iron, an empty siding, a water tower with a wooden wheel on top – a windmill pump. The station was there because of the well below. The town itself was a low shimmer five hundred yards off – all brown stone, and no building higher than the palm trees that stood in its midst. As we passed the station and the line took us closer to the place, I saw small collections of Arabs, some with goats and donkeys, mostly sitting down, and ringed around the town rather than in it, as if to say, ‘Yes, this is our town but we don’t care for it very much. Feel free to go and live there yourself.’

I watched the simmer of steam over the safety valve. There was no need to watch the white desert. The whiteness just came on and on; we might have been standing still, and it rolling under us. After my Turkish cigarette, I carried on with Woodbines, in an effort to keep the flies off. The back of my regulator hand was thoroughly bitten by them, and they were all over Stevens’s Wolseley hat, so I knew mine would be black with them too.

We’d swung closer to the river now, but it was invisible beyond some ancient-looking earthworks. I turned around, and Shepherd had his field glasses upraised again.

‘Have you made a study of Turkey and the Turks, sir?’ I said.

He lowered the glasses. ‘That puts the case too high,’ he said.

I eyed him until he added, ‘I wandered about there a bit shortly after my university days.’ He raised the field glasses to his eyes again. ‘Irrigation ditches,’ he said.