by Colin Smith
The guns were hidden in a hollow in the enemy-held ridge, so that as the English cavalry crossed the flat of the little valley they had ridden into dead ground, where the gunners could no longer fire at them over open sights. Instead, they had relied on air bursts and the covering fire provided by the German machine-gunners and Turkish infantry dug in higher up behind them who could see the Yeomanry coming all the way.
As they got nearer the Austrian battery Meinertzhagen and Ponting saw bundles of khaki huddled together by the dead horses. Great clouds of flies rose off human and animal cadavers alike, settling down again once they were past.
They did not go down to the Skoda guns in the hollow right away but rode to the left of them, up to the crest of the ridge where the nationalities were intertwined. Further down the far slope the dead were exclusively Turkish, for it was here that the English had run them through with their long swords as they ran away.
Close to a Turkish corpse with a gaping back wound was an open, red-covered book, also lying with its spine uppermost. Ponting dismounted and picked it up, half-expecting it to be a Koran, which would have made a nice keepsake. But it turned out to be in English. The Complete Letter-Writer for Ladies and Gentlemen, he read, and he could see by flicking through the chapter headings that it gave advice on how to conduct all kinds of correspondence: business, social, family – even amorous. On the title page was an inscription written in black ink in the large and precise style Ponting always thought of as Working-Class Copperplate: ‘To our dearest son Walter, in the hope that he might learn these lessons well and keep us informed of all his adventures. May God keep you safe and sound until you return to us. Your loving parents, Mr and Mrs Albert Calderwell.’
Ponting wondered what kind of self-improving Tommy Atkins would take such a volume into battle with him? Written in pencil in the inside front cover of the book was ‘Private W. Calderwell, Warwickshire Yeomanry’. Underneath, inscribed in block capitals in a different, darker pencil lead were the letters ‘B Squadron’. Ponting, who had a deductive mind, decided that Calderwell was probably one of a recent draft of reinforcements who had not known which of his regiment’s squadrons he would be joining until he arrived in Egypt. It didn’t look as if the poor boy had lasted long.
‘Interesting?’ asked Meinertzhagen.
‘It’s from one of ours,’ said Ponting, slipping the book into a tunic pocket and remounting.
They turned around and went back to the top of the ridge where, on the English side, the slaughter had only been exceeded by that which had occurred around the Austrian artillery itself. The farriers were busy putting down those horses that could not be persuaded to stand. A single bullet wound, even several, was not always reason enough to kill a horse. Mules were even tougher, but mules didn’t make charges.
A soldier with hair the colour of corn was crouched with his rifle beside a brown horse lying on its side with its neck outstretched on the ground. Every so often the head and neck would come up, the mane shake enough to dislodge the flies, and then shudder down again. Above the horse stood a farrier corporal holding what Ponting at first mistook for some sort of outsize pistol and then realised was one of those captive bolt devices they had started to use in abattoirs shortly before the start of the war.
‘She’ll come round. I know she will,’ the corn-haired boy was saying. Ponting saw that he was one of the very young ones, nineteen at the most.
‘C’mon, son, it don’t always work first time with a rifle,’ said the corporal farrier, who had a blacksmith’s forearms.
‘Fuck off or I might shoot you,’ the youth said quietly, although not quietly enough for Ponting not to overhear him.
He thought for a moment that Meinertzhagen would see the youth as another dreadful example of the callowness of these New Army civilian volunteers, and have him awarded field punishment for insolence to a non-commissioned officer.
But Meinertzhagen did not appear to have heard. He was looking beyond them towards a truck parked on a dirt track about four hundred yards from the Skoda guns. Next to the vehicle, which was of German manufacture, was a horse-drawn British field ambulance. A man was being loaded into the back of the ambulance on a stretcher, watched by a British officer and a woman.
It was, of course, the woman who had attracted Meinertzhagen’s attention. After the war, when he had polished it to one of those anecdotes that neither bored nor gave away too much, Ponting used to say that he would have been less surprised to see a Clapham omnibus than a female at Huj.
From that distance she appeared to be European. She was quite tall and was wearing a grubby white dress and a large straw hat. They rode towards her. As they got closer they could see that most of the grubbiness on the dress was blood – and fresh blood at that, because the heat soon dried it brown. Ponting wondered why nobody was assisting her. Then he realised that the blood was probably not her own.
PART 1
Even In Our Time
1
Caesarea: March 1917
A prisoner was sobbing softly in one of the deeper cells.
The Moudir, the head of the Turkish gendarmerie in Caesarea, was on the way out of the building with a little sack of grain in his hands when he heard it. He paused for a moment to listen, but could not make out whether the weeping came from the Christian Syrian boy whom he suspected of being a deserter from one of the regiments on the Gaza front, or the wasted and, to his mind, obviously syphilitic Armenian woman caught picking the pockets of soldiers who had declined her services. He shrugged. It could wait. He had his friends to attend to.
Years of convict labour had refurbished the dungeons and built the pigeon loft for him amidst the overgrown ruins of King Louis IX’s coastal fortress at Caesarea. It should have been a pleasant enough place, its palms fanned by sea breezes and in summer full of the restful cool that only large stone blocks and marble-tiled floors can bring. Yet, on the whole, men had never been happy there for long.
Even by Crusader standards it had had an anguished history. Before Louis there had been King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, Gautier of Avense and Jean de Brieme. Sometimes the knights barely held it a year before it was back in Muslim hands. Louis had lasted for fifteen, which was longer than any of them.
His luck ran out in 1265, when it was successfully stormed by Sultan Baybars. Perhaps Baybars sensed that the fortress was cursed, because he had it pulled asunder in a manner that foreshadowed high explosive and decreed that it should never be inhabited again. For this reason the Moudir avoided spending a night there, though he was dismissive of the tales of wailing djinns and spirits he heard from his Kurdish guards. As a young man he had chased Kurdish bandits and he sometimes suspected that these mountain people clung to beliefs that predated Islam, tales that both scared and comforted them when the snow blocked their high passes and wolf packs roamed the ridge lines.
He was a fat man, this Moudir, and he moved slowly towards the jetty, the jellabea he always wore for his siesta flapping at his ankles, his podgy feet squeezed into sandals which slapped along the flagged path. The Crusaders had built the jetty too and, though it might have made a handy beachhead for a Frankish sortie from Acre or Cyprus Baybars had not destroyed it. Perhaps he sensed the Christians had had enough.
The Moudir scattered his grain, as he always did, at the jetty's seaward end. On the horizon the sun was going down in a blaze of copper-coloured clouds. Before it he could make out the dark silhouette of a steamship sailing north and guessed it was one of the British or French warships that were enforcing the Entente’s blockade of the Levantine coast all the way from Latakia to Khan Yunis. A few gulls cried and wheeled, but there was as yet no sign of his birds.
This was always an anxious moment. He had never lost his sense of wonder at their navigation. One day, he was convinced, the magic would fail. Something would go wrong with that compass in their heads and the poor little dears would be unable to find their way home to him. The very idea made his throat dry and his eyes warm with t
ears.
He looked along the narrow silver highway the setting sun had laid from the jetty to the Mediterranean horizon, shutting his left eye completely and blinkering his other with his right hand. For a guilty moment he wondered whether he should get some of those darkened spectacles the Germans sometimes wore, as if Allah had not given them eyes strong enough to face the day. But then, being infidels, perhaps He had not.
There was a shadow in the sun, and what was at first barely a smudge, not much harder in outline than the puffs of smoke from the passing ship, slowly became his flapping flock. As usual, they circled high above him, the white ones in the lead, as if they needed to fix various landmarks before committing themselves – in much the same way as the German airmen flew around the country. After a couple of circuits they began to descend in slow spirals which took them out over the sea again until the white-feathered leaders dropped down onto the jetty and began bobbing away at their feed.
The Moudir threw some more grain into their midst and then crouched among them, holding it in his hands, so that they pecked at his palm and then grew bolder and flew up onto his forearms where he could feel the strength of their talons as they sought a grip. ‘Come on my pretties,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
The lead pigeons had flown to the loft and then swooped almost immediately back again, just as they always did. There were names for the favourites. ‘Come on, Nur, come on, Fatima, you greedy little thing.’
The birds fluttered around him until all the grain was gone. Once night began to close in, they retreated into their loft from which emerged the sound of contented cooing.
Back in the ruins of the old keep, where the dungeons were, the prisoner was still weeping. If it was the Armenian, he thought, it was unnecessary because they would not have touched her yet. His Kurds did not like beating women who were not related to them, not even whores. It offended their dignity as men. He had had trouble before trying to get them to soften up some female suspect with a touch of the bastinado. Perhaps she was not crying for herself, but for others. He had heard reports that thousands of Armenians had perished when they were driven out of the border areas with Russia along the Caucasian front. And quite right too. They were a menace these Christians, always willing to start trouble if the price was right.
The Jews were no better either, at least not the Zionists, who even offended their religious brethren with their strange notions of settling and farming the land as if it was some virgin wilderness for the taking. On the surface they were grateful and loyal citizens of the Ottoman Empire. But when you visited their settlements, took a little bakshish from them in order to make some minor matter to their liking, you could sense the superiority, even contempt, behind the smiles and effusive thanks. Didn’t they consider themselves the Chosen Race? And wasn’t this Palestine their promised land? They even had their own flag. He had seen it. It was blue with a star of David, and below that a Hebrew word meaning ‘Zion’. There were plenty of arms in those settlements too: Martini-Henrys, Winchesters, even the odd Mauser which they should have given up at the start of the war but which they claimed they needed to protect them from Arab brigands.
They were not without a certain influence, these Zionists, there was no doubt about that. They had the ear of the Germans for a start – of the Kaiser himself, some said. So many came from the German-speaking countries that it had become the first language of the race. The Moudir had witnessed the riots between the Jews in Haifa just before the war when some of them wanted to open a school in which instruction would be in German, while others thought it should be in French or even Hebrew – the dead tongue of their faith, which some of the more fanatical were trying to bring back to life. The Jews would use the Germans to grab as much as they could in Palestine, he was sure of that.
And yet there were reports that some of the Zionists were dealing with the English, because the English held Egypt and were the greatest Christian power in the area. And the English would promise them anything because they needed Jewish gold to feed their war machine. There was supposed to be a lot of Jewish gold in the United States and those foolish Americans had just declared war against Germany. Well let them! And let the English continue to hammer on the gates of Palestine, and the Turks to pull them back by their ears and slaughter them like sheep.
A month ago he would not have been so sure. Baghdad had fallen at last to the English general Maude, and although he had never been there the Moudir felt its loss badly. After Mecca and Jerusalem it was the third great city of the Empire, and thanks to that unspeakable traitor Hussein, who had been appointed Sheriff of Mecca by the Sultan himself, they had lost the Holy City the summer before.
Now things were looking up. Twice they had thrown the English back at Gaza even though the enemy had given the land its first taste of poison gas and sent those landships they called tanks crawling at them like some monstrous bug from your worst nightmare. Nor were many of their best troops in Palestine, though Jemal Pasha was doing his best to get Arab conscripts replaced by proper Turkish soldiers. At the moment most of the iron regiments were fighting the Russians in the Caucasus – fighting the Germans’ battles for them, if the truth be known.
The Moudir felt uneasy about the Germans. In fact, he would have been hard pressed to find any of his compatriots who had much liking for them. Respect, yes. For Christians they were brave enough, and there was no doubt that they were clever. Their equipment was probably the best in the world, unless you believed these stories that every American soldier had a machine-gun as well as a horsehair mattress and a gramophone.
But they were Christians and their allies – which made the Sultan’s declaration that this was a Jihad, a holy war against the infidel English and the French, rather confusing. Here, after all, was the world’s most powerful Muslim nation, led by a sultan who was also the Caliph, the spiritual leader of all Muslims, not only allied to Christians but at war with other Muslims, such as some of the Indian mercenaries the English employed – and even the traitor Hussein’s goat-fucking Bedu, the so-called Hejaz army, the very people of the Prophet, blessed be His name. The Moudir sometimes found himself wondering what Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate, made of it all.
When it was all over they would probably have to deal with the Bedu in the same way they dealt with the white kaffirs. There was no room in the Empire for kaffir riff-raff. They were there on tolerance, especially those wretched Christian priests in Jerusalem always squabbling over which bit of stone the Blessed Jesus had been born or died on. A Muslim family even had to keep the keys of the Holy Sepulchre – otherwise the Christians would have long since pulled the place to pieces with their feuds. He tried to imagine what it would be like if Christians guarded the holy places in Mecca, and found such blasphemy unimaginable. Better that the traitor Hussein should have temporary control than the English army. Which was only further proof, if any were needed, of the rightness of the true religion. Here were all these Christian nations with their new learning and free thinking and Jewish gold and none of them, not even the Germans, would dare to take the keys of the Holy Sepulchre from a Muslim.
No, there should be none of this equal rights nonsense for Christians and Jews and madmen like those Bahai devil-worshippers from Persia who had their so-called temple up on Mount Carmel. It might be different if you could rely on their loyalty, but you could not. When they got out of hand they had to be dealt with firmly – the way, by all accounts, they had dealt with the Armenians.
Thinking these stern, dutiful thoughts, the Moudir went to the small room above the cells that he liked to call his office and picked up a riding-crop that was lying across the desk next to a field telephone handset. He was still uncertain which prisoner was sobbing. Perhaps he would give them both something to cry about, have them singing through the soles of their feet. He called for a couple of Kurdish jailers and went down to the cells. As he approached the prisoners could hear the slap of his sandals on the stairs.
*
His Maj
esty’s Ship Monegam, the monitor the Moudir had watched steaming north, was now a mile or so off the coast and almost stationary. They were opposite the little fishing port of Athlit, just south of Haifa.
Once the engines had been set to slow the swell caught the ship’s shallow draught, and it began to rock gently from side to side as well as up and down. The sailors were hardly aware of it, but on the bridge Major Ponting found it harder to ignore the first queasy prelude to his seasickness.
‘It’s all clear,’ said the captain of the vessel. A lieutenant-commander, he stood alongside Ponting and peered through binoculars at a shoreline that was darkening fast with dusk. ‘They’re coming out.’
‘Where’s the signal?’ asked the major.
‘You see the tower on the end of the promontory?’
Ponting nodded. He would have had to be blind not to see it. It was more like a miniature castle than a tower. There were several of these Crusader fortifications dotted up and down the coast. In some of them the Turks had placed permanent garrisons. Others were simply visited by passing patrols, who might stay a night or two. The tower of Athlit was one of these.
‘Go to about ten o’clock behind it and you’ll see a small wooden house. Looks like it might be a farm house. It’s got wooden stairs leading to a balcony that stretches along the entire length of its first floor. If you look closely at that balcony you’ll see a white sheet has been draped over it.’
Ponting reluctantly raised his own field glasses and tried to focus. Aboard ship he rated trying to use binoculars as one better than attempting to read fine print while eating a bacon sandwich. The bridge refused to keep still. One moment he was thrust against the squat roundness of the Crusader tower and the next he was peering into the white top of a breaker. He felt his stomach rise to his throat and swallowed hard. He was tempted to take the naval officer’s word for it, or even pretend that he had seen the signal; but he kept searching, although his insides had begun to churn.