All Honourable Men (15 page)

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?”