From Istanbul to London on the Orient Express

Abstract

Max Peter Reinhardt was born on the Grande Rue de Pera in Constantinople on 30 November 1915, a few weeks short of the evacuation of British and Dominion troops from the Gallipoli peninsula. He told Euan Cameron, head of publicity at The Bodley Head for many years and one of his obituarists, that as a young child he had glimpsed decapitated heads impaled on spikes as he was wheeled through the streets by his nanny.¹ But Max more usually recalled the First World War with a less traumatic story set in the city’s main railway station built in the late 1880s to receive the luxurious Orient Express in which he would cross Europe many times. In 1918 Max’s father, Ernest Reinhardt, was the Austrian captain in charge of the station. He had grown up in Trieste, trained as an architect in Vienna and Prague, and been sent by his firm to Turkey before the war. On duty one day he spotted two of his wife’s brothers, both ordinary privates in Italian uniform, arriving as prisoners. He marched them out of the station, then took them home to lunch. ‘That was the kind of humane thing that could happen then,’ his son was later to say. ‘That was the way things were done.’²