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The Baghdad Railway Club(56)

By:Andrew Martin.txt


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.’