We left the scene of the accident at 5.30 P.M. As there was no available carriage on the train my wife and I rode in the guard’s van, sitting on bags on the floor. It was a very dreary journey, for we were destined not to reach Haifa until 2 A.M. on the following morning. The hours seemed to be interminable. I never looked at my watch without being convinced that it had stopped. The night was not only dark but very cold, while the pattering of rain on the roof of the van made for melancholy. To increase the dreariness of the situation there was no light in the van until a candle was obtained from the pilgrims. It was stuck in a bottle and placed on the floor. It gave a sorry illumination to a sorry scene—a bare van with people sitting or lying on the floor in company with a dying man and another who was grievously injured. I am inclined to think that we should have been better without the candle, for there is a negative relief in absolute darkness.
When we were two or three hours distant from Haifa a passenger carriage was attached to the train in which we completed the journey. It was at this point that we met certain prominent officials of the line who were on their way to the scene of the disaster. There were some six of them—all, I believe, Turks. They very courteously came to see me in the guard’s van, and civilities and cards were exchanged through the medium of the dragoman. I was wishing that I could speak direct to these gentlemen, when one of them came towards me, and, holding out his hand, observed with fervour, “Oh, what a bally country!” It was a somewhat unusual introductory remark, but, assuming that the adjective employed had a condemnatory meaning, it was not entirely out of place, for the night was dark and cold, it was pouring with rain, we were without food or the possibility of obtaining any. I was, however, so delighted to meet a person who spoke English that I grasped this gentleman very warmly by the hand and told him how pleased I was to meet some one I could talk to. To this he replied, “Oh, what a bally country!” I agreed with his views as to the immediate country, but, wishing to change the subject, said, “This has been a most unfortunate accident.” To which he answered, “Oh, what a bally country!” I then tried simpler sentences, such as “Good evening,” “Are you not wet?” but on each occasion he replied with the criticism, “Oh, what a bally country!” I then found that, with the exception of this curious sentence, he did not know a single word or syllable of English. I am convinced that he had not the faintest idea of the meaning of his speech. I imagine that he had been at one time associated with an English railway engineer who had given vent to this expression so frequently that this courteous, well-intending Turk had learnt it like a parrot. As he stepped out of the guard’s van into the rain I said, “I am afraid you will have a very trying journey,” to which he answered, with a smile and a polite bow, “Oh, what a bally country!” Thus we parted without further exchange of ideas.
We reached Haifa at 2 A.M. and got to bed at 3 A.M., having been “up” exactly twenty-four hours. The engine-driver was removed to the excellent and admirably equipped German hospital in the town. I went to see him early next morning. He was conscious, but quite free from pain, and was rapidly nearing the end. His wife was with him. He smiled, as an old friend would smile, when we shook hands, for there was this bond between us—that I had been with him on the train. He nodded as I went out of the room. It was to show that he knew that he was really saying good-bye. He died a little while after I left the ward.
SIR FREDERICK TREVES,
The Land That Is Desolate
The Trans-Siberian takes a purler
There is no more luxurious sensation than what may be described as the End of Term Feeling. The traditional scurrilities of
This time to-morrow where shall I be?
Not in this academee
have accompanied delights as keen and unqualified as any that most of us will ever know. As we left Baikal behind and went lurching through the operatic passes of Buriat Mongolia, I felt very content. To-morrow we should reach the frontier. After tomorrow there would be no more of that black bread, in consistency and flavour suggesting rancid peat: no more of that equally alluvial tea: no more of a Trappist’s existence, no more days entirely blank of action. It was true that I did not know what I was going to do, that I had nothing very specific to look forward to. But I knew what I was going to stop doing, and that, for the moment, was enough.
I undressed and got into bed. As I did so, I noticed for the first time that the number of my berth was thirteen.
For a long time I could not go to sleep. I counted sheep, I counted weasels (I find them much more efficacious, as a rule. I don’t know why). I recited in a loud, angry voice soporific passages from Shakespeare. I intoned the names of stations we had passed through since leaving Moscow: Bui, Perm, Omsk, Tomsk, Kansk, Krasnoyarsk. (At one a low-hung rookery in birch trees, at another the chattering of swifts against a pale evening sky, had made me home-sick for a moment.) I thought of all the most boring people I knew, imagining that they were in the compartment with me, and had brought their favourite subjects with them. It was no good. My mind became more and more active. Obviously I was never going to sleep....
It was the Trooping of the Colour, and I was going to be late for it. There, outside, in the street below my window, was my horse; but it was covered with thick yellow fur! This was awful! Why hadn’t it been clipped? What would they think of me, coming on parade like that? Inadequately dressed though I was, I dashed out of my room and down the moving staircase. And then (horror of horrors!) the moving staircase broke. It lurched, twisted, flung me off my feet. There was a frightful jarring, followed by a crash....
I sat up in my berth. From the rack high above me my heaviest suitcase, metal-bound, was cannonaded down, catching me with fearful force on either knee-cap. I was somehow not particularly surprised. This is the end of the world, I thought, and in addition they have broken both my legs. I had a vague sense of injustice.
My little world was tilted drunkenly. The window showed me nothing except a few square yards of goodish grazing, of which it offered an oblique bird’s eye view. Larks were singing somewhere. It was six o’clock. I began to dress. I now felt very much annoyed.
But I climbed out of the carriage into a refreshingly spectacular world, and the annoyance passed. The Trans-Siberian Express sprawled foolishly down the embankment. The mail van and the dining-car, which had been in front, lay on their sides at the bottom. Behind them the five sleeping-cars, headed by my own, were disposed in attitudes which became less and less grotesque until you got to the last, which had remained, primly, on the rails. Fifty yards down the line the engine, which had parted company with the train, was dug in, snorting, on top of the embankment. It had a truculent and naughty look; it was defiantly conscious of indiscretion.
It would be difficult to imagine a nicer sort of railway accident. The weather was ideal. No one was badly hurt. And the whole thing was done in just the right Drury Lane manner, with lots of twisted steel and splintered woodwork and turf scarred deeply with demoniac force. For once the Russians had carried something off.
The air was full of agonizing groans and the sound of breaking glass, the first supplied by two attendants who had been winded, the second by passengers escaping from a coach in which both the doors had jammed. The sun shone brightly. I began to take photographs as fast as I could. This is strictly forbidden on Soviet territory, but the officials had their hands full and were too upset to notice.
The staff of the train were scattered about the wreckage, writing contradictory reports with trembling hands. A charming German consul and his family—the only other foreigners on the train—had been in the last coach and were unscathed. Their small daughter, aged six, was delighted with the whole affair, which she regarded as having been arranged specially for her entertainment; I am afraid she will grow up to expect too much from trains.
Gradually I discovered what had happened, or at least what was thought to have happened. As a rule the Trans-Siberian Expresses have no great turn of speed, but ours, at the time when disaster overt
ook her, had been on top of her form. She had a long, steep hill behind her, and also a following wind; she was giving of her best. But, alas, at the bottom of that long, steep hill the signals were against her, a fact which the driver noticed in the course of time. He put on his brakes. Nothing happened. He put on his emergency brakes. Still nothing happened. Slightly less rapidly than before, but still at a very creditable speed, the train went charging down the long, steep hill.
The line at this point is single track, but at the foot of the hill there is a little halt, where a train may stand and let another pass. Our train, however was in no mood for stopping: it looked as if she was going to ignore the signals and try conclusions with a west-bound train, head on. In this she was thwarted by a pointsman at the little halt, who summed up the situation and switched the runaway neatly into a siding. It was a long, curved siding, and to my layman’s eye appeared to have been designed for the sole purpose of receiving trains which got out of control on the hill above it. But for whatever purpose it was designed, it was designed a very long time ago. Its permanent way had a more precarious claim to that epithet than is usual even in Russia. We were altogether too much for the siding. We made matchwood of its rotten sleepers and flung ourselves dramatically down the embankment.
But it had been great fun: a comical and violent climax to an interlude in which comedy and violence had been altogether too lacking for my tastes. It was good to lie back in the long grass on a little knoll and meditate upon that sprawling scrap-heap, that study in perdition. There she lay, in the middle of a wide green plain: the crack train, the Trans-Siberian Luxury Express. For more than a week she had bullied us. She had knocked us about when we tried to clean our teeth, she had jogged our elbows when we wrote, and when we read she had made the print dance tiresomely before our eyes. Her whistle had arbitrarily curtailed our frenzied excursions on the wayside platforms. Her windows we might not open on account of the dust, and when closed they had proved a perpetual attraction to small, sabotaging boys with stones. She had annoyed us in a hundred little ways: by spilling tea in our laps, by running out of butter, by regulating her life in accordance with Moscow time, now six hours behind the sun. She had been our prison, our Little Ease. We had not liked her.
Now she was down and out. We left her lying there, a broken buckled toy, a thick black worm without a head, awkwardly twisted: a thing of no use, above which larks sang in an empty plain.
If I know Russia, she is lying there still.
PETER FLEMING,
One’s Company
The Tay Bridge disaster
The train moved on and, at thirteen minutes past seven, it reached the beginning of the bridge. At this point, before entering upon the single line of rails over the bridge, it slowed down opposite the signal cabin, to allow the baton to be passed. Without this exchange it was not permitted to proceed, and, still filled by a sense of misgiving, Denis again lowered his window and looked out, to observe that everything was correct. The force of the gale almost decapitated him but, in the red glare cast by the engine, he discerned, stretching dimly into the distance, the massive girders of the bridge, like the colossal skeleton of an enormous reptile, but of steel, strong and adamantine. Then, all at once, he saw the signalman descend the steps from his box with consummate care, clutching the rail tightly with one hand. He surrendered the baton to the stoker, and, when he had accomplished this, he climbed back into his cabin with the utmost difficulty, fighting the wind and being assisted up the last few steps by the hand of a friend held out to him from within.
And now the train moved off again, and entered the bridge. Denis raised his window and sank back in his seat composedly, but, as he was carried past the signal-box, he received the fleeting impression of two pale, terrified faces looking at him from out of it, like ghostly countenances brushing past him in the blackness.
The Tay Bridge Disaster, 1880. On a wild and stormy night at the end of 1879 a train started to cross Scotland’s newly completed Tay Bridge—then the longest bridge in the world—from the southern shore. When it was halfway across, the girders were unable to withstand the pressure of the wind. They collapsed; and the train and its engine fell headlong into the waters of the Firth of Tay, a hundred feet below. Seventy-five people died.
The violence of the gale was now unbounded. The wind hurled the rain against the sides of the train with the noise of a thousand anvils, and the wet snow again came slobbering upon the window panes, blotting out all vision. The train rocked upon the rails with a drunken, swaying oscillation, and although it proceeded slowly, cautiously, it seemed, from the fury and rush of the storm, to dash headlong upon its course. Thus, as it advanced, with the blackness, the noise of the wheels, the tearing rush of the wind, and the crashing of the waves upon the pier of the bridge below, there was developed the sensation of reckless, headlong acceleration.
As Denis sat alone, in the silent, cabined space of his compartment, tossed this way and that by the jactation, he felt suddenly that the grinding wheels of the train spoke to him. As they raced upon the line he heard them rasp out, with a heavy, despairing refrain: “God help us! God help us! God help us!”
Amidst the blare of the storm this slow, melancholy dirge beat itself into Denis’ brain. The certain sense of some terrible disaster began to oppress him. Strangely, he feared, not for himself, but for Mary. Frightful visions flashed through the dark field of his imagination. He saw her, in a white shroud, with sad, imploring eyes, with dank, streaming hair, with bleeding feet and hands. Fantastic shapes oppressed her which made her shrink into the obliterating darkness. Again he saw her grimacing, simpering palely like a sorry statue of the Madonna and holding by the hand the weazened figure of a child. He shouted in horror. In a panic of distress he jumped to his feet. He desired to get to her. He wanted to open the door, to jump out of this confining box which enclosed him like a sepulchre. He would have given, instantly, everything he possessed to get out of the train. But he could not.
He was imprisoned in the train, which advanced inexorably, winding in its own glare like a dark, red serpent twisting sinuously forward. It had traversed one mile of the bridge and had now reached the middle span, where a mesh of steel girders formed a hollow tube through which it must pass. The train entered this tunnel. It entered slowly, fearfully, reluctantly, juddering in every bolt and rivet of its frame as the hurricane assaulted, and sought to destroy, the greater resistance now offered to it. The wheels clanked with the ceaseless insistence of the tolling of a passing-bell, still protesting, endlessly: “God help us! God help us! God help us!”
Then, abruptly, when the whole train lay enwrapped within the iron lamellae of the middle link of the bridge, the wind elevated itself with a culminating, exultant roar to the orgasm of its power and passion.
The bridge broke. Steel girders snapped like twigs, cement crumbled like sand, iron pillars bent like willow wands. The middle span melted like wax. Its wreckage clung around the tortured train, which gyrated madly for an instant in space. Immediately, a shattering rush of broken glass and wood descended upon Denis, cutting and bruising him with mangling violence. He felt the wrenching torsion of metal, and the grating of falling masonry. The inexpressible desolation of a hundred human voices, united in a sudden, short anguished cry of mingled agony and terror, fell upon his ears hideously, with the deathly fatality of a coronach. The walls of his compartment whirled about him and upon him, like a winding-sheet, the floor rushed over his head. As he spun round, with a loud cry he, too, shouted: “God help us!” then, faintly, the name: “Mary!”
Then the train with incredible speed, curving like a rocket, arched the darkness in a glittering parabola of light, and plunged soundlessly into the black hell of water below, where, like a rocket, it was instantly extinguished—for ever obliterated! For the infinity of a second, as he hurtled through the air, Denis knew what had happened. He knew everything, then instantly he ceased to know. At the same instant as the first faint cry of his child ascended
feebly in the byre at Levenford, his mutilated body hit the dark, raging water and lay dead, deep down upon the bed of the firth.
A. J. CRONIN,
Hatter’s Castle
FICTION
A cargo of cheeses
I remember a friend of mine buying a couple of cheeses at Liverpool. Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards. I was in Liverpool at the time, and my friend said that if I didn’t mind he would get me to take them back with me to London, as he should not be coming up for a day or two himself, and he did not think the cheeses ought to be kept much longer.
“Oh, with pleasure, dear boy,” I replied, “with pleasure.”
I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest steam-roller ever built, and all went merry as a funeral bell, until we turned the corner. There, the wind carried a whiff from the cheeses full on to our steed. It woke him up, and, with a snort of terror, he dashed off at three miles an hour. The wind still blew in his direction, and before we reached the end of the street he was laying himself out at the rate of nearly four miles an hour, leaving the cripples and stout old ladies simply nowhere.
It took two porters as well as the driver to hold him in at the station; and I do not think they would have done it, even then, had not one of the men had the presence of mind to put a handkerchief over his nose, and to light a bit of brown paper.
A Book of Railway Journeys Page 27
