All Honourable Men

11

In the service carriage, O’Gilroy was coming to realise he had to hit someone. The train staff had not made him welcome. They hadn’t expected anyone to bring a manservant, and when he took the fifth bunk in the sleeping compartment, it left only one spare for everyone to dump his kit on (their boss, who seemed to be called Herr “Fernrick”, shared another compartment with the chef, and good luck to him. In O’Gilroy’s experience all chefs were mad, bad-tempered, and had access to knives).

Only Albrecht, who tended the boiler and anything else mechanical, spoke English, and O’Gilroy had virtually no German. But this allowed them to make jokes about him in front of his face and that had kept them reasonably sunny for the first twenty-four hours. But in the bustle of preparing lunch while he lay on his bunk and smoked, the insults got plainer and demands to get out of the way less reasonable.

So he was going to have to hit someone. The old manly ritual. Knock one of them down, helpless, to show he was as good as they. Ten years ago, the thought would have cheered him. Or rather, he wouldn’t have had the thought, just lashed out from instinct. Now, at least he’d be working to a plan.

Of course, if they all ganged up on him, he’d be beaten to a pulp. But he didn’t think that would happen. It would mean broken bones and bloody faces and how would that look when serving dinner? The row could go all the way up to the Kaiser.

It wouldn’t be enough to pick on the smallest of them, which let one of the waiters off the hook. Nor Albrecht, partly because of the English, but also because he seemed the butt of jokes himself, being a Bavarian among Prussians. Which left the second waiter or, preferably, the guard. He was beefy enough, and if his face got marked, he wasn’t on public display.

The moment came after lunch. He had volunteered to help with the washing up, and they had seen to it that he got well splashed with greasy water. He was back in the compartment routing out a clean shirt when the guard jostled him and snapped for him to step aside.

“Fuck off,” O’Gilroy said over his shoulder.

That didn’t need translating. He felt everyone in the compartment go still.

The guard’s What-did-you-say? didn’t need translation, either.

“Tell him,” O’Gilroy said to Albrecht, “to learn some manners or bring his mother along to protect him. Tell him!”

Albrecht did, hesitatingly. There was a moment’s pause, then O’Gilroy felt the guard’s hand clamp on his shoulder and spun around, trying for a head-butt, realised he couldn’t make it and followed up with a left-hand punch whacking into the guard’s stomach. As he folded forward, O’Gilroy yanked him up by his lapels and rushed him against the door, slamming it shut and knocking a waiter aside.

“Bugger around wid me and I’ll break every fucking bone in yer body!” he spat. “Verstanden?”

The guard hung there, pop-eyed and gurgling for breath. Then the door tried to open behind him. O’Gilroy pushed him away, a cannon off the waiter and onto a bunk. The door opened and Herr Fernrick stood there, moustache bristling, eyes glaring.

Everyone except the guard snapped to attention, and O’Gilroy realised he had, too. The scene had an old, familiar feel to it.

Fernrick started to speak.

“Tell him,” O’Gilroy instructed Albrecht, “that I started it and I apologise.”

Albrecht began, but Fernrick shut him up. He looked at O’Gilroy. “Thank you, but I understand enough English . . . This place is too small for trouble, too small for trouble-makers. Do you understand? If anything more happens, I will report you to your master.”

He switched back to German to say what must have been much the same except longer and with a mention of the Kaiser. Then he slammed out.

As they relaxed with a collective sigh, O’Gilroy made a vulgar gesture at the closed door. And someone laughed. Then someone handed him his shirt off the floor, another gave him a cigarette.

It’s only in schoolboy stories that the man you’ve beaten shakes your hand and becomes your friend for life. Quite likely the guard had become his enemy for life, but what mattered was that the rest now accepted him. Just like in a new barrack room. Which wasn’t surprising, since he was now certain they were all soldiers.

* * *

With the party complete and now hooked up to a proper train – and one of the fastest in the world – the journey took on a new sense of purpose. Indeed, they let most of their own purposes drift into limbo and the journey take over. As they were bustled across the last of Bavaria and through Salzburg into Austria, they picked their favourite chairs and invented their own time-spending routines – just as a visitor to a strange city will quickly adopt a certain table at a certain cafe as his own. They were all used to long passive journeys by train and ship; it was what most travel was about.

And the longer they travelled, the more the view from the train windows became unreal, just exquisitely-painted stage scenery of snowy peaks, the onion domes of Orthodox churches, wayside shrines. It needed no caring, no interpretation; turn one’s eyes to a book or magazine and it was gone. A stop became like the end of a balloon journey, an unwelcome bump back into reality.

They were due into Vienna soon after eight in the evening and Dahlmann announced that dinner would begin immediately they left. So they had to dress first, and Ranklin summoned O’Gilroy to “help” by sitting and smoking a cigarette.

O’Gilroy mentioned that the staff were all soldiers – “Except the chef, probly. He’s just barmy like them all.”

Ranklin considered. “I suppose it’s not surprising. I believe a lot of the Kaiser’s staff are soldiers; he likes having them around him. What have they been doing? Close-order drill in the corridor?”

O’Gilroy told briefly about the fight and Herr Fernrick’s intervention-

“Who?”

“The chief butler, Swiss Admiral, that’s his name.”

“I think you mean Fahnrich. It means senior n.c.o. Colour sergeant.”

O’Gilroy nodded slowly, letting smoke trickle from his nose. “Ah. Then I wasn’t so clever as I thought. They’re not hiding it, jest not saying it neither . . . Give me some money: I’ll rate better with cigarettes and a bottle of me own to share round.”

Ranklin gave him a sovereign. “Where do they hide the bottles?”

“In the coal for the boiler. Herr Fernrick don’t inspect that.”

In so many things, armies are all the same.

For many Orient Express travellers, Vienna was the end of the line; from here, it was downhill socially to Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia, and a month too early for visiting Constantinople. So the train loitered while baggage was unloaded and most of the remaining passengers got out to buy cigarettes and newspapers, smoke, chatter, try to peek into the Kaiser’s carriages, and generally get in the way.

Ranklin saw O’Gilroy scurrying off to shop as he stepped down. Dahlmann and a group of bankers or Embassy officials were already in conference in one patch of lamplight. Their chef was doing a deal in chicken and fish with the Express’s kitchen. A young man in evening dress accosted him.

“Patrick Snaipe? I’m Redpath, from the Embassy. Just popped along to see how things were going with you and Lady Kelso.”

“Very civil of you. Come aboard and meet her.”

They eased past the guard, who had deserted the baggage compartment to protect the main carriage from riff-raff, and Ranklin introduced Redpath to Lady Kelso. She gave the lad five minutes of undiluted charm while Ranklin stood by and had philosophic thoughts. Such as: small men tend to be temperamentally quite different from big, tall men, but small women are femininity more concentrated. How about that for a theory? Perhaps there was something in the Viennese air; there was a Dr Freud here who was having some pretty daft ideas about people, so he’d read.

Then he thought of something more important and interrupted: “I say, can you send a cable for me?”

“Of course, just the sort of thing I’m here for.” So Ranklin wrote out a cryptic message to “Uncle Charles” at a London club address. If the Commander read it properly, he would know that Gunther’s firm was responsible for Ranklin’s untimely end, if he met one. There was some small satisfaction in arranging revenge ahead of one’s death.

The dull, and doubtless soggy, Hungarian plain of the Danube slipped past in the night. Even the stop at Budapest barely rumpled Ranklin’s sleep and they clattered across the iron bridge into Serbia and Belgrade while still at breakfast.

Now they had not only left Europe’s drawing-rooms, but gone through its back door and into the ramshackle outhouses of the Balkans. Dahlmann collected their passports, warned them to stay put, and hurried off. Ranklin saw him ally himself to one of the train staff and start haggling with Serb officials. Alongside the severe well-fitting Orient Express uniform they looked scruffy down-and-outs.

And that, really, was the whole story: the Express travelled across Europe in a private metaphorical tunnel lined and protected by sheer wealth. Only if you got off might you become fair prey; as long as you stayed aboard you were untouchable. The argument, obviously, was about whether the private carriages belonged in the same tunnel – although these certainly weren’t the first such to be attached to the Express.

Ranklin reckoned himself and O’Gilroy to be fireproof behind the diplomatic passport; anyway, Britain wasn’t a player on this bit of the chessboard. But Zurga . . . He realised the Turk was keeping to his sleeper.

The discussion outside ended and Dahlmann came back on board to announce: “We may proceed, but a Serbian officer must ride with us through Serbia to Nis.” He tossed the passports onto a table and hurried through, presumably to warn Zurga.

Moving unhastily but smoothly, Ranklin scooped up the passports, handed Lady Kelso hers, Streibl his, took his own and was left with a handful of solely German ones for Dahlmann, the staff and one must be for Zurga. So they were smuggling him through the Balkans as a German citizen. Which was sensible, but placed Zurga even further in the Baghdad Railway camp.

A Serb officer in a high-crowned peakless cap and a worn great-coat down to the ankles of his semi-polished boots came in, saluted with a slight bow, said a few inscrutable words of Serbo-Croat and sat in a corner. Dahlmann came back and picked up the passports, looked at them, at Ranklin – who was deep in a book – and finally said nothing.

With Belgrade, they had seen the last of the Danube and the wide plains. Soon they had turned up the valley of the Morava, winding gently but tighter into the hills that would become mountains and last the next twenty-four hours. Gradually the sodden fields beside the river were left behind and drifts of snow, worn like the land itself, appeared on the hillsides. Both landscape and snow got fresher as they climbed away from cultivation. Early March is no time to admire what mankind does to the land.

They stretched an untalkative luncheon until they slowed into Nis, a market town with buffalo-carts and peasants in baggy white trousers trudging the muddy streets. The Serb saluted, bowed, said another something and got off – and it was as if an aged and disapproving grand-parent had gone to bed. Streibl made a weak joke about the Serb commandeering a buffalo for his return to Belgrade and they roared with laughter. Ranklin decided he would have a cognac, and Streibl joined him.

“What about poor Zurga Bey?” Lady Kelso said suddenly. “He hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. Have them bring him something as soon as we’re moving.”

Dahlmann protested that it would upset the kitchen, the servants-

“Fiddlesticks,” said Lady Kelso. “If they won’t do it, I’ll cook him something myself.” And Ranklin and Streibl backed her up.

Perhaps Dahlmann was trapped between the correctness of not wanting to offend the Kaiser’s staff, and seeing his group united for the first time by an irresistible party spirit. In any event, while Ranklin fetched Zurga from his sleeper Dahlmann said God-knows-what to Herr Fernrick, and a meal of soup and warmed-up chicken was produced. Fernrick’s revenge came in insisting his own men were off duty and making O’Gilroy serve the damned foreigners.

Lady Kelso stayed in the dining-saloon with Zurga, and Ranklin found himself next door talking to Streibl. With that atmosphere and the cognac, the railwayman talked happily – breaking off to point out interesting or faulty construction details beside the line – but always railways, railways, railways.

“Ships discovered the world, but only railways can make it tame, civilised. When a ship passes, in a few minutes there is no sign. The sea is not changed. But the railway changes the land forever. Think of America, when it was a land of savages and wild animals, if I could have worked on those great railways. . .” His eyes glowed behind his thick glasses.

In fact he had worked on the German Mittel-Afrika scheme, making a railway of the old slave route inland from Dar-es-Salaam. They laid the first rails directly into the surf from lighters, dumped a locomotive atop them – and they had a few metres of a railway that would build itself across 700 miles to Lake Tanganyika. Through jungle and swamp and rock, beriberi, malaria and sleeping-sickness. Through drought where they needed one water-carrier for every workman, and then more to lubricate the rock-drills. Or water that was plentiful, but so full of minerals that it encrusted and jammed the works of the engines. And all, apparently, on a diet of dried mud barbel. Ranklin hadn’t a notion of what dried mud barbel was, but the mere sound of it . . .

He sucked on his pipe, nodded, and let himself be swept along with Streibl’s rambling odyssey. The man was a visionary, but his visions were of steel, his dreams held together with greasy nuts and bolts.

“Beyond there -” he gestured towards the front of the train “- is half the world. From Constantinople, one day we can go by train to Arabia, Persia, India, China. From Berlin to Peking – can you think of that? To join the West to the East, to trade with the people of half the world.” Then he suddenly grew sombre and his gaze turned fierce. “And one old man with some rifles is in our way. Can he stop such an idea? Can he be permitted to stop it?”

“Oh, no,” Ranklin agreed, since some answer seemed called for. “And, of course, the engineers themselves, their families. . .”

“Yes, of course,” Streibl said, as if he’d forgotten and were trying to catch up.

“And how long have you worked on the Baghdad Railway?”

“I do the first survey on some sections – ach! they are always changing the line so as not to go too near the frontier and offend the Russians or too near the coast so battleships could bombard it – then I go to Africa again, then to work at head office . . . Politik,” he muttered. “It is good to be out again.”

“And are you coming along because you know Miskal Bey?”

“No, I never hear of him before . . . I am just to help if. . . if there are problems . . .”

The sudden vagueness warned Ranklin to veer the conversation back to the view from the window. But he felt he was beginning to understand something of Streibl. Like many good regimental officers, he loved the day-to-day detail of his work – but his visions were unreal because they were just enlargements of that. He lacked a political dimension and, like those officers, would never make a good general.

Which, if the Army was anything to go by, wouldn’t stop him actually becoming a general at all.

* * *

In the service carriage, O’Gilroy was welcomed back from his table-waiting with friendly banter. He accepted a swig from somebody’s bottle of schnappes and, translated via Albrecht, assured them that he hadn’t been raped by Lady Kelso or buggered by “That Turk” – but pleased them by suggesting that both had been close escapes. Like all soldiers, they saw the outside world in simple, unsubtle colours – exactly as outsiders saw soldiering.

It seemed that Herr Fernrick (O’Gilroy still thought of him as that) had given them a talk whilst he had been acting waiter, on the Dreadful Dangers of Constantinople if they didn’t stick together, on never accosting a woman, assuming all Turks were cheats, sticking to beer – and the address of a reasonable Austrian-run brothel. It was the lecture all sergeants gave on a troopship or a posting to a new town, but O’Gilroy listened with an expression of gratefulness as Albrecht passed it on.

It was now openly admitted that they were soldiers, and it suddenly occurred to someone to ask why O’Gilroy hadn’t done any service.

“I did,” he told Albrecht. “Ten years.”

Immediate interest; had he been in action?

“Surely. In the South African War.”

That brought growls, and he remembered that Germany had backed the Boers, had supplied them with Mauser rifles and Krupp artillery. But now he was started, he plodded on . . .

. . . towards God-knows-where for God-knows-why, in the heat of the sun and the dust of the column, and saw the growly expressions fade because he was talking about any soldiering anywhere . . . But then the sound they hadn’t heard yet, of bullets going past, first as a whuffle and soon as a crack with the range shortening. Until the one that made no sound at all because it stopped in his thigh.

He told of being left by the column to wait for the medical cart, of being picked up instead by an artillery battery, dumped atop an ammunition wagon, and so found himself shut up in the siege of Ladysmith while his own battalion was shot to pieces outside. And then, mostly recovered, being conscripted by the artillery lieutenant to fill a gap in a gun crew-

“What number?” Albrecht asked.

“Five, handling the ammunition. Later, sometimes four, loading,” O’Gilroy said calmly. He routed in the biscuit-tin lid of cigarette ends saved from the saloon ashtrays, and found one of Ranklin’s English ones with a few puffs left in it. He lit it and went on . . .

. . . about the siege which saw them eating horsemeat soup and rat but somehow left the senior officers with enough to welcome the final relieving force with a banquet (his listeners understood that, all right). But mostly about the young Gunner lieutenant who had spotted his love of mechanical things and explained just how everything on a gun worked and why, preaching what the beautiful weapons could do, properly handled. He described all that, but not the officer himself. They might have recognised the young Ranklin.

* * *

Changing for dinner gave time for the party spirit to evaporate somewhat, and the uncertainties they would face in Constantinople and beyond to loom. But it was still their last dinner as a group and – apart from a fear that Dahlmann would make a speech – they all set out to enjoy it.

Moreover, Lady Kelso and Zurga had reached at least the pretence of mutual respect. Both knew life in the Turkish Empire far better than the rest ever would – but that, of course, was the problem. They shared knowledge but their experiences were poles apart.

Ranklin was glad Lady Kelso had waited until the coffee stage before saying: “I expect I shall find many changes in Turkey after all these years . . .”

There was a moment of held breath as they waited to see how Zurga exploited this opening. But he nodded and said: “I think – I hope – the Railway is a symbol of such change. The Empire cannot last unless it becomes modern. Without it, the Powers of Europe and particularly – forgive me, Mr Snaipe – Britain and France, will pick the bones of Turkey bare.”

Ranklin privately agreed, but felt Snaipe should protest mildly. “Oh, I say . . .”

“But we should deserve it. Sultan Ahmed did deserve it. The Empire was corrupt, shameful, with the sultans. Just jewels, women, palaces – and the reports of spies; when they took his palace they found rooms full of such reports. And of course the valis and kaimakams were also little sultans in their districts.

“It was the Army that saved Turkey. Even the Sultan – he let the Navy rot – could see that he must strengthen the Army or our enemies would eat us away, bite by bite. So he went to our German friends – and brought his own doom on himself. He forgot that to clean one wall of a palace makes the rest look more dirty. It was the Army that saw the dirt. So it was the Army that overthrew him, that brought back the Constitution to the people of Turkey.”

“Yes, I’m sure the Sultan had to go,” Lady Kelso said. “But, under the Committee, is it Turkey for the Turks or for everybody in the Empire? – Arab, Armenian, Kurd . . .”

This was another moment when the rest of them held their breath. But Zurga just smiled. “It is an Empire – perhaps like your British Empire. Is that for Britons or does every peasant in India and Africa have also your wonderful Parliament?”

She shook her head and smiled ruefully. Zurga pressed on gently: “And would they understand a Parliament if they had it? Would your Arab friends know?”

“Oh, they’d understand the House of Lords, all right. Miskal could walk straight in there now and not be noticed bar his clothing.”

And once again the fuse flared up close to the gunpowder barrel. And once again Zurga snuffed it out by chuckling with the rest. “So you have still your sultans, I think. But yes, you will find many changes, I hope. But not all: we have had only a few years. There are still corrupt valis and kaimakams. There is inefficiency and waste and justice is often for sale. After a century of sleeping, it takes time to awake.”

“And when you do wake up, Turkey will be in Europe, will it?”

“Not all. We must have the Railway, the telephone, the motor-car. And money also. We need these things. But we must also say ‘Enough, beyond this, you must not meddle.’ Because we must also remain Turkey, a nation of Islam. Without God, Turkey does not exist.”

Was Dahlmann trying to hide his affront? And was Lady Kelso staring past them, past the walls of the carriage and perhaps of time and seeing her old romantic Turkey fading in a harsh new dawn?

Zurga smiled again and said politely: “But of course, you were not concerned with the politics, with the hope of change.”

She came back to the here-and-now with a thump. “I’m a woman, Zurga Bey. Who cared what I thought?”

He had no answer to that. Yet, as he tried to straddle two worlds and perhaps found himself torn between them, here was a European who had submitted easily to the East and then, seemingly as easily, stepped back again. Zurga could believe he understood European women and, separately, the few respectable Turkish ones he could respectably meet. But not Lady Kelso. However much, in his mind, he labelled her a whore of Arabs and an infidel (and Ranklin was sure he did both) he’d know that wasn’t understanding. And hate both his need to understand a woman and inability to do it.