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 . . .”