The Baghdad Railway Club(9)

‘They fall over,’ I said.

I told him how I’d got crocked, but not about the bad business I’d struck in my own unit – the matter of the bad lads within it. He listened, it seemed to me, carefully, and not just out of politeness.

His knowledge of railways might have put him in the Royal Engineers. But they were in the thick of the railway construction, and he’d asked his questions as an outsider. He held back, anyhow, which was his right as the senior man. But he again tried to make up for any lapse in manners by returning to the question of the cigarettes, which he had seen had interested me. Indicating the packet on the table before us, he said, ‘By the way, if you’re a regular here, you’d know that it used to be “Turkish cigarettes” and “Turkish coffee”.’

I nodded.

We were at war with Turkey. You might as well try and sell ‘German sausages’ as ‘Turkish cigarettes’, and this accounted for ‘Smokes from the Holy Land’ or whatever the phrase had been.

‘I’m surprised the fellow can still lay his hands on them,’ I said.

‘Oh, he can’t of course,’ said Shepherd. ‘His stock’s running very low . . . And they’re becoming rather dried out. With the fires and the steam heating,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘it’s very hot in here, whereas a cigarette wants moisture in the atmosphere.’

I nodded, thinking: Well of course it’s very hot in Turkey as well. But perhaps it was the humid kind of heat.

A long interval of silence. Then Shepherd suddenly asked another railway question: ‘How portable are the two-foot tracks?’

‘It takes four men to lift a length,’ I said.

‘Not portable enough.’

I said, ‘You could get away with lighter specifications if the engines were more stable.’ And then I tried a bit of philosophy: ‘Railways are called “The Permanent Way”, but in France just now, we don’t want them permanent. We ought to be able to pick them up and move them in just the same way a boy takes up his model railway when it’s time for bed.’

He nodded slowly, saying, ‘Well it’s time for my bed,’ but I fancied he’d liked that answer I’d given him.

He stood up; we shook hands again, and he walked off.

By now, the Mahogany Room was quiet – only half a dozen men left in it. A footman was clearing out the fire, which was a way of getting stragglers to get off to bed. But I wondered about another drink. I turned and saw, standing at the bar, Bartlett, the fellow who chalked up the scores at billiards. He was talking to the barkeeper, with a glass of something on the go.

As I approached the bar, he said, ‘Evening sir. Very fine gentleman, the lieutenant colonel.’

‘What is he?’ I said. ‘Guards?’

‘Grenadier Guards,’ said Bartlett. ‘Been involved in some marvellous forward moves, has Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd.’

Well, he would know, being the man who pinned up the war news. I looked across at the green notice-board, and saw in the headlines over and over again the wrong-looking word ‘Kut’.

‘He was decorated,’ Bartlett was saying. ‘D.S.O.’

‘Any chance of a drink?’ I asked the barkeeper.

‘The Mahogany Room closes at two, sir,’ he replied. ‘It’s ten after now.’

‘War regulations, sir,’ said Bartlett; but the barkeeper set another brandy before me. ‘Anyhow,’ Bartlett added, ‘that’s what we say to those chaps not in the war.’

‘I’m obliged to you,’ I said to the barkeeper, and put a half crown on the bar, which he pushed back my way.

‘What’s the name of the chap who sells the cigarettes?’ I said, pushing the half crown back.

‘Mr Ali,’ said Bartlett. ‘Coffee and cigarettes, it is.’

‘What is he?’ I said. ‘I mean . . .’

‘I would say he was foreign,’ said Bartlett, ‘but friendly.’

‘But where’s he from?’

‘Well now I don’t think you’d be far wrong if you said he was an Arab.’

‘Or something of the sort,’ put in the barkeeper.

The fire had quite gone out, and the steam heating had evidently been turned off in the public rooms.

‘It’s rather cold in here,’ I said.





Chapter Two


In the police office on platform four of York station, I was sitting ‘in state’, so to speak, observing the work of my old office with my bad leg up on the desk. This was to remind everyone that I was an officer on convalescent leave, as yet with no news of when I would return to my unit, and not to be troubled by the question of what was or was not in the Occurrence Book, or by the fact that the witness statements relating to an unlawful wounding at the Dringhouses Marshalling Yard had just gone missing for the second time.