'Memoirs and Recollections of An Officer of the Indian Political Service' [‎31r] (61/156)

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baggage into one of the surviving vehicles, and so on. All I remember of Mosul was
the old British Club on the banks of the Euphrates overlooking the ruins of Niniveh, now
deserted and decaying. The British Community engineers and administrators, who had
previously been based in Mosul, had all been withdrawn two or three years earlier
when there had been serious anti-white rioting during which the British Consul had
been murdered on the steps of his Consulate. There were still ancient copies of the
Tatler, The Field, The Illustrated London News and Blackwoods lying on the tables in
the ante room of the Club. But the worst of our overland journey still lay ahead of
us. All next day it poured with rain: traces of the road or track were obliterated
in the mud and breakdowns became more frequent. We were travelling across the plateau
of the Assyrian Highlands, where history had been made in Alexandran and Roman times.
Late in the evening, when the light was fading, we saw in the distance - across an
almost featureless plain - an incredible sight. It was a passenger train, drawn up
on a siding at the back of beyond. This terminus was a place called Tel Kotchek, just
inside the Turkish frontier. There was no station or other buildings - just a few
huts and a water tower. Years earlier, when Kaiser Wilhem II was the ruler of Germany,
he had conceived the grandiose project of a Berlin to Bagdad Railway. But the Great
War intervened. Turkey had been defeated and Mesopotamia, then a part of the Ottoman
Empire, had become the British Mandated Territory of Iraq. The Kaiser’s dream had
faded, and the 350 mile gap between the terminus on the Turkish border and Mosul had
never been completed.
Anyway, we were delighted to have reached civilisation again. The Taurus Express,
which was in fact the mystery train we had espied from afar, was all that we had
been told of it. Attached to it were half a dozen of the luxurious Blue Sleeping Cars
of the International Wagon Lits Pullman Company. The train left that night, and next
day we reached Aleppo, where the line turned northwards and climbed to the high central
plateau of Turkey, by way of Adana on the Mediterranean, and the Cilician Gates, a
defile of astounding and awe-inspiring scenic beauty. We passed through Ankara, and
late one evening the Taurus Express deposited us at its northerly terminus of Scutari.
We crossed the Bosphorus by ferry boat to /Stamboul and Europe in the usual packed
ferry boat. It was the middle of April and Istamboul was bitterly cold. Neither
Mary nor I had ever been there before, and with the friends we had made on the journey
from Bagdad, we visited the sights - the Mosques, the Museums, the Ramparts, and the
covered Bazaars, where the jewellery of the rich Russian emigres, who had fled from
the Bolsheviks after 1917, was still to be purchased at a price.
The rest of our journey was not nearly so eventful. After three or four days we boarded
the Orient Express which, in those days, gave one the choice of one of three routes to