Maggie Davey recalls the tragic “glamour” of war
In the south of Uzbekistan the old Soviet railroad ran alongside the Afghanistan border for a stretch. Since the late 1800s after the Russian conquest of Tashkent and Samarkand, this railroad system, with the Transcaspian system, fed central Asia with both soldiers and the humdrum requirements of at least a couple of conquering bureaucracies.
This area was known as “the crossroads of the world” and from earliest times it has felt the footprints of many conquering armies and their generals: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Stalin.
And where the Silk Road crosses these tracks, sometime in 1980, I happened to be travelling on the same train as a regiment of wounded Soviet soldiers as they returned from an incursion into Afghanistan.
The train was compact with the diversity of the Soviet empire: Georgians, Uzbeks, Russians, Mongolians and it was tempting to see these soldiers as a delegation of conquerors from history. Never having seen war or soldiers before, I was familiar enough with the movies to know that these men were “walking wounded” and the gallery of crutches, slings and bandages sang to every Western or war film I had ever seen.
The trip took us along the Oxus river and through the Zarafshan Valley and lasted for several days. And so I worked up from initial sorties to the soldiers’ carriages, to a more sustained visiting programme. They played cards, smoked and drank tea and vodka, and to an empire with 11 time zones, we added one more: soldier-time, to which, and not by invitation, I slipped in.
Mountains that fed rivers that irrigated valleys and then died in the desert passed us by as we sat in that most comfortable of time warps, the train. Uzbek farmers rode alongside the train on the level ground, trying to get a glimpse of these unlikely looking conquerors. In the dread heat we saw horsemen adjust large cabbage leaves upon their heads to shield themselves from the sun.
I made myself useful, having just entered that useful phase of teenagerdom, haring up and down the corridors and summoning the tea carriers, scooting outside to the platform when the train stopped to buy cigarettes and sweets.
Maybe the heat made me dizzy, maybe it was the smoke or the vodka that I stole, but the soldiers had begun to take on incandescence that not even they noticed.
As we emerged from a tunnel, having left the Afghan countryside and galloping horses behind, the sun seemed to soak into us all in the carriage. Motes of dust were energised, and the bloody bandages, crutches and wounds all spent extra colour, extra light.
Before slumping in the corner of the carriage, I realised that it was neither the heat nor the vodka that had sent me reeling, but the allure and treacherous beauty of an empire at war.