Free The Baghdad Railway Club by Andrew Martin

to keep it off. I’ll fix you up with a keffiyah – that’s a sort of headscarf.’
    ‘I’m going out tonight,’ I said.
    ‘You crossing the river‚ sir?’
    I eyed him.
    ‘Why do you ask?’
    ‘It’s not patrolled‚ sir, or not so much as over here. Patrols are to be stepped up over the next few days. But you’ll be carrying your piece, I take it, sir?’ He nodded towards the holster of my Sam Browne belt, together with the Webley .455 that it held. I nodded back; I would be carrying the Webley.
    ‘What’s over there?’ I said.
    ‘You’ve got the ranges – the artillery spend a good deal of time over there in the daylight hours.’
    ‘ Machine-gun ranges?’
    ‘Some, I think. And you’ve got the railway station – and the south gate of the wall.’
    ‘How’s the feeling in the town – towards the British, I mean?’
    ‘They prefer us to the Germans and the Turks, sir.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘But that’s not saying much. See, they’re trying to figure us out. It’s all in the balance between us and them. That’s why I’ve taken a bit of trouble to learn a few words of the language, sir. That’s why I go in the water place – hoping to build a few bridges, so to speak.’
    I noticed that he’d stopped calling it fresh water. How did I feel? All right, considering, but when Jarvis offered to fetch me a glass of cold beer before departing, I turned him down. I couldn’t face beer.
    ‘I’ll just take a sluice-down,’ I said, which was Jarvis’s cue to quit the room.
    Ten minutes later, feeling better in some ways but worse in others, I looked into the officers’ mess on my way out of the Hotel.
    It was a luxurious room of many sofas and many carpets, but not enough electrical fans – only two of them doing their strange bowing dance. All the men in there were staff officers or political officers. The individual battalions and regiments that made up the corps would have their own quarters and their own messes around Baghdad. I couldn’t see Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd in the room. I heard one man saying, ‘Ought we to retribute?’ as though he wasn’t much bothered either way. Another was saying, ‘Well, it’s a kind of an opera.’ I knew I was out of my league, and was about to quit the room when a man came up and introduced himself.
    I told him I had come out to work for the Political Officer (Railways). ‘That’s Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd,’ I added, and the fellow looked blank for a minute before leading me over to a notice-board, where he indicated, next to something about a smoking concert, and beneath something about a cricket match, a paper headed: TALKS ON RAILWAY TOPICS.
    The fellow returned to the conversation from which he’d broken off a minute before, leaving me to read:
    The Baghdad Railway Club. Meetings every Saturday, 7.30 p.m. prompt at The Restaurant, Quiet Square (behind The Church of the Saviour’s Mother). Good food and drink supplied. For further particulars contact Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, Room 226 Corps HQ.
    As I quit the mess, I heard a voice saying, ‘We have more railway people than would seem to be justified.’

Chapter Four
    I went down to the river by a different crowded lane. A new boat was on the quay where the Mantis had lately been: a cranky-looking old packet, laden with boxes marked ‘Bully Beef’, and quite unattended. It bumped and scraped against the quay, and I saw a man in a much smaller boat – a blue wooden canoe of sorts, but with decorative mouldings – who floated just beyond the stern of the bigger one, bumping and swaying in rhythm with it, occasionally extending an arm to keep himself from clashing against it. He was grinning up at me.
    ‘You sail!’ he said.
    I was looking along to my right – towards the pontoon bridge at about a quarter of a mile’s distance. I counted the number of black barges that made it up: twenty exactly.
    ‘Ingilhiz!’ he shouted, and it wasn’t a question. ‘Ingilhiz, go over. Cross