Scorpion Sunset by Catrin Collier

Author:Catrin Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Accent Press

Chapter Seventeen

Internal Ottoman Empire border between Mesopotamia and Turkey

September 1916

‘You, Private Evans, have the constitution of an ox.’

John took the corners of the blanket beneath Evans’s head and shoulders, Baker the corners below his feet, and they lifted him and his blanket out of the hospital tent and carried him to the cart.

‘I’m not going to die, am I, sir?’ Evans asked when Mitkhal tucked a saddlebag beneath his head.

‘You have my permission to live, Evans, but I can’t answer for the feelings of our colleagues if you continue to makes the kind of jokes you have been inflicting on us of late.’ John had to force a smile. Only ten minutes before he’d read the burial service over five men. One who’d died in their hospital tent and four sun-dried corpses Greening had found in a ditch, recognisable as British troops only by the ID tags that identified them as privates of the Norfolks. The collection of tags he’d accumulated was now so large, he’d emptied a dead man’s kit bag to store them in.

‘Comfortable, Evans?’ Baker asked.

‘No. The bottom of this cart is hard.’

‘Then get out and bloody walk.’

‘Give me your legs, corporal, and I will.’

John ignored the banter and watched the Turkish captain and his men walk out of their makeshift camp to greet a border patrol that was approaching on horseback.

‘Leave the hospital tent until last, and let me know when the Turks return,’ he ordered Jones and Williams who’d harnessed the mules to the second cart and brought it up ready to load the tents.

He ducked inside the hospital tent, Mitkhal followed.

‘You’ll be crossing into Turkey in less than an hour. This is where I and my men leave you.’ Mitkhal lifted John in a bear hug.

‘I’d hug you back if I had any breath left. You’ll remember me to Hasan and Furja. Tell them I’d like to meet them again.’

‘I will tell them. Perhaps when this war is over we’ll all sit in the garden of Ibn Shalan’s house in Basra and drink iced sherbet.’

‘That garden was beautiful. I’ve never forgotten the time I spent there with Maud, Harry, and Furja. Will you go there from here?’

‘No, as all your men want to stay with you I will return to Baghdad. It will be good to see my wife and son and Hasan again. Don’t let the Turks lift the bag from under Private Evans’s head. It’s stuffed with sovereigns. Knowing the Turks you’ll need to buy food and possibly even water.’

‘Thank you, Mitkhal.’ John returned Mitkhal’s embrace.

Jones’s voice echoed in from outside the tent. ‘Captain coming, sir.’

‘Thank you, Jones.’ John picked up his medical bag. Mitkhal gathered together the spare mosquito nets and carried them out. He dropped them into the back of the cart they used to ferry their equipment.

‘Your men will have to work harder from this point on, Major Mason. We are losing our Arab auxiliaries,’ the captain warned.

‘Do we have far to go?’ John asked.

‘A week, maybe two, of hard travelling.

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