Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘What about this Kerensky fellow? He’s promised the English and the French that he’ll fight on.’

  ‘He may have promised, but has he asked the Russian soldiers? Taking away the Czar is like taking away their church. They’ll be running around like headless chickens. And all the time the workers’ militias will be getting stronger and the real lunatics, the Bolsheviks, will be gnawing away at their innards.’

  ‘Aren’t some of these Bolsheviks of your religion?’ asked Weidinger.

  ‘I believe they might be,’ said Rosenblum and he gave a tight little self-satisfied smile, as if to indicate that this was all part of a grand conspiracy in which he himself was a leading player.

  Then, rather in the manner of a man who has no more time for tittle-tattle, he bade them good-day and walked over to Sarah Aaronsohn, who was now sitting alone with her monocled companion. They did not look all that pleased to see him.

  ‘Do you think many Jews feel like he does?’ asked Weidinger, staring thoughtfully at Rosenblum’s departing back. ‘Do they really think the English are their enemy?’

  ‘I think some of them do,’ said Maeltzer, ‘for the simple reason that their enemy’s enemy is their friend. And as far as the Jews are concerned the Russians are their enemy. You know that thousands of them starved to death when they expelled the Jews from that part of the Pale along the frontier in ‘14. It was almost as bad as the Turks with the Armenians. They did it for the same reason too. Said they were a security risk.’

  ‘That was after Tannenburg,’ said Weidinger. ‘We thrashed them. What was his name – their general who killed himself?’

  ‘Samsanov.’

  ‘That’s right. Samsanov.’

  ‘Nowhere in the world is there as much hatred against the Jews as there is in Russia,’ Maeltzer went on. ‘From what I’ve heard of the pogroms that happened there in the Eighties and the Nineties they were probably the worst the race had faced anywhere. And then when it comes to the Rosenblums of this world you have to remember that German Jews are very assimilated – far more than the French since Dreyfus. They do tend to feel very German, that’s my experience anyway.’

  ‘You’re right enough there,’ agreed Weidinger. ‘More German than the Kaiser. It’s embarrassing at times. Nature didn’t intend them to be Germans and they never will be. They’re not very popular at home, especially among the working people. They’re respected sometimes, but not popular. Especially the kind who try and hide their Jewishness.’

  Weidinger started gnawing at his remaining wrist. Strangers found it an alarming habit, but he was merely using his teeth to pull the stud that held down the leather flap on the face of his wristwatch – a device popular among infantry officers, which prevented a sun-flash off the glass from heliographing their position to a sniper.

  Maeltzer had once asked him why, now that he was in a staff job in Palestine, he didn’t remove the cover and Weidinger had replied, rather curtly, that apart from the fact that he frequently visited the front lines it helped keep the dust out. The journalist realised then that, for Weidinger, the watch cover was the next best thing to the Iron Cross, an award that was almost de rigueur for an officer so grievously mutilated for the Fatherland yet was strangely absent from Weidinger’s chest. In the six months he had known the young cavalry officer Maeltzer had often wanted to ask him how he got his wound but somehow, even when they got a bit drunk together, it was never the right moment.

  Weidinger nuzzled the leather flap back with his chin and squinted down at the face of the watch. ‘I think we’d better go if you want to see those prisoners,’ he said.

  On their way out they both paused to acknowledge briefly various acquaintances. An apple-cheeked Austrian artillery lieutenant called Pichler gave Weidinger a mock salute.

  ‘Greetings, Oh Master of the Cannon,’ said Weidinger. ‘I hear you’ve slain the iron tortoise.’

  Pichler’s battery had knocked out one of the British tanks at Gaza.

  ‘I’ve known harder shooting,’ said Pichler. ‘Ducks, for instance. Does the esteemed Horse Soldier know what the staff have in store for us next? Elephants perhaps.’

  ‘We were wondering if you would like a trip around the Pyramids,’ announced Weidinger grandly.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ sighed Pichler. ‘It’s been done. What’s his name? Little short-arsed fellow. Corsican. When he found the old Sphinx looking a bit down in the mouth he gave him a cannon ball on the nose to get a smile on his face.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ snorted Weidinger. ‘You’ll be telling me next he was too short to get on a horse.’

  ‘Not true. He just knew they were going out of fashion.’

  ‘He was wrong. Tanks are already out of fashion.’

  Maeltzer smiled. Some cavalrymen he had met had managed to come to terms with the fact that their main role nowadays, indeed some people argued their only role, was that of mounted infantrymen. The machine-gun had relegated charges to the story books. Dismount and use your rifle was the order of the day. That was something the Boers had taught the world.

  Weidinger would have none of it. Around headquarters he was well known for his unshakeable belief that opportunities could still be created for mounted men armed with sabres and lances to wreak havoc. Even in the kind of Uhlan lancer regiment he came from, this view was diminishing after three years bogged down in Flanders and never being sent to places like Palestine where they might do some good. Officer talent was drifting to the air force.

  Yet it was still less than fifty years since the greatest cavalry battle Europe had ever seen had been fought on the plateau of Mars-La-Tour. There, on a sweltering August afternoon, the Prussians had blocked the retreat to Paris of a French army five times their size.

  As a boy Weidinger had often ridden with von Bredow’s brigade in Der Todtenritt, the terrible ‘Death Ride’ which bought the breathing space that spelt the French defeat. Sometimes he was an Altmark Uhlan thrusting with his lance until a cowardly bullet from a Chassepot rifle delivered him to glory; on other occasions a Magdeburg cuirassier, bruised and bleeding, hacking his way through the French with a berserker’s fury. In the space of forty minutes less than five hundred German horsemen had changed the course of history!

  Now the field of honour had been turned into an insane competition in open mining – which was why Weidinger was delighted to get to Palestine, where both sides made some use of cavalry. He relished every example he discovered of malfunctioning machinery. He could be almost as jubilant about his own side’s disasters in this sphere as he was about the vulnerability of such awful science fiction as the crawling blockhouses Pichler had dealt with.

  ***

  Outside, the glare of the spring sunshine against the stones made them screw up their eyes until they got used to it again. Magnus had apparently tired of taunting the guards. He was now sitting cross-legged on the ground, his cross planted in the earth like a lance, and engrossed in cleaning his toenails with a matchstick. He still wore his crown of thorns, which had nicked his forehead, so that a trickle of blood flowed into his left eyebrow.

  Maeltzer thought that Magnus had not noticed them until the Swede suddenly looked up from his pedicure and yelled in English, ‘Now go and smite the Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not!’

  ‘He wants us to destroy the Amalek,’ explained Maeltzer who had first acquired some English during his incarceration in Ceylon, and then polished it by working in London and New York.

  ‘Where shall we find them – the Amalek?’ asked Weidinger.

  ‘Somewhere around the Book of Samuel. I think they’re enemies of the Children of Israel.’

  ‘I see. Why doesn’t that fellow have the courtesy to rave in German? It would be so much more convenient.’

  ‘He does sometimes. And Swedish. And the many languages of God.’

  ‘I don’t know why the Turks tolerate these headcases, why they don’t just send them home.’

  ‘He wa
s in a bit of trouble once, during one of those Turkish roundups of miscreants. They threw them into some dungeon in the Citadel and hauled them out one at a time for a public flogging with a kourbash. I think it was one of Djemal Pasha’s whims. Krag got to hear that a European was involved and got him out.’

  ‘Well, I’m not suggesting he should be at the wrong end of a kourbash’ – Weidinger gave an involuntary shudder at the very thought of the hippopotamus-hide whip, which was said to open backs up like shrapnel – ‘but half the country is starving, and he’s another mouth to feed.’

  ‘He doesn’t do any harm.’

  ‘I disagree, Herr Maeltzer. He eats and by eating he harms as much as any other locust. Come to think of it, how does he eat? The man doesn’t look as if he starves.’

  ‘No doubt those Swedes of Mrs Vester’s at the American Colony give him something. And, of course, he begs.’

  ‘Begs – a European?’ A mild antipathy on Weidinger’s part was beginning to turn to full-blown contempt. ‘Do you ever give him anything?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘My God, you’re a strange one, Maeltzer.’

  The journalist laughed. ‘I do it for luck,’ he said.

  3

  Second Lieutenant Anthony Buchan had, quite unconsciously, adopted that languid position sometimes assumed by opening bats in the school first eleven’s annual team photograph.

  In fact, poor co-ordination and a secret terror of fast bowlers had left Buchan with miserable memories of schoolboy cricket; he had never made the first eleven, let alone opening bat. Nevertheless, now he lay bareheaded on a dusty patch of grass with his long legs crossed at the ankles, his long shorts flapping about his bandaged knees, his left elbow on his discarded pith helmet and his chin cupped in his left hand. If anybody had told Buchan that he was, even now, aping those exalted beings he had so envied in adolescence he would have become quite indignant.

  How did one act when His Majesty’s enemies, having just given you a Cook’s tour of the local antiquities, wished to take your photograph? Under the circumstances, glaring defiance seemed churlish. Nevertheless, a chap could hardly sit there saying ‘cheese’ as if he was at the end of some seaside pier. It certainly wouldn’t do to look as if one really was on a Cook’s tour. Unless, like the people at Kut, you were ordered to surrender, a certain stigma did attach itself to unwounded prisoners, especially officers.

  Not that Buchan was without pain. His knees hurt abominably. They had become infected from the cuts he had received when obliged to dive into one of those ghastly cactus hedges around Gaza after the Turkish machine-guns had opened up. And hundreds of the shrub’s little yellow thorns were bristling from his face and hands. The more he extracted the more he found, and the puffier the flesh around them became. But although these poisonous darts hurt like hell they hardly counted as an honourable wound.

  He envied the captain, who had taken up a rather similar bookend position at the other side of the officers’ group – there were five of them altogether, with most of the other ranks clustered in a semicircle behind them. Somehow it was quite obvious that the bandage around this officer’s head could not possibly be connected with an unfriendly bush.

  Choosing the right pose was not easy. It had to be made quite clear that one had had a hard time of it without looking like a whipped cur. At the same time Buchan felt it would be rank bad manners to offend captors who had turned out to be so remarkably sporting. It was all quite amazing, especially after the stories about the fate of some of the Kut garrison that were buzzing around Cairo.

  The photographer was a wiry man with reddish hair, who had been introduced to the officers as a Mr Eric Matson of Sweden. It seemed that Mr Matson had been living in Jerusalem for some years and before the war had done some work on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Matson had a Syrian assistant who wore an old-fashioned black frock-coat and a fez, the flowerpot Ottoman headdress that British troops tended to associate with organ grinders’ monkeys. The assistant was taking an interminable time to prepare the equipment, which stood on a tripod before them – including a black hood, which he occasionally draped over his head and shoulders to make some arcane adjustment.

  ‘Why are we waiting?’ sang one of the non-commissioned ranks softly. Buchan thought it sounded like an Australian. Some of the others began to join in. ‘Why are we way-tin? Oh why eye are we wait –’

  ‘Steady, lads,’ commanded the captain with the head wound, without looking round or in any way altering his position.

  The singing subsided far more quickly than under normal circumstances. They’re unsure of themselves as well, thought Buchan. He turned and smiled at them and was relieved to see that some of them smiled back.

  He felt desperately sorry for the men, especially those of his own platoon. Sorry and not a little ashamed. He was destined for an officers’ camp where he would not be required to work. Other ranks were employed as slave labour. In Cairo it was common knowledge that British prisoners were digging the debris away from the tunnels being blasted through the Taurus and Amanus mountains for the new wide-gauge railway that German engineers were laying to Mesopotamia and Palestine.

  Buchan had always suspected that he was quite unworthy of his men. Apart from some regular NCOs they were all volunteers who had answered Kitchener’s call, a mixture of East Anglian ploughboys and bored clerks and shop assistants from the new dormitory towns that were springing up in Essex. More often than not, their patriotism had been spurred by an understandable desire to break the monotony of their lives before they were trapped by marriage. It was a well-known fact that French girls were fast, and few of them had dreamed that they would campaign outside Europe. In the villages around Ipswich people sometimes thought they could hear the rumble of Flanders’ artillery just a hundred miles across the North Sea.

  To Buchan it had always seemed quite unfair to both parties that a mere accident of birth should put him in charge of them. He remembered how at school he had derived almost exactly the same satisfaction from their Officer Training Corps parades and field exercises as from the drama lessons he so enjoyed. All that dressing up, choreographed movement and bellowing your lungs out. Now he felt he was once again playing a part, made no more or less a real leader of men by the addition of a Sam Browne belt over his khaki than a bed sheet and a pretend laurel wreath had made him Augustus Caesar.

  A Turkish officer with a waxed moustache and a furled umbrella over one arm appeared. Buchan assumed the umbrella must be against the sun, for there would be no more rain in Jerusalem before next November.

  ‘Strewth! It’s Charlie Chaplin.’ This time the voice was unmistakably Australian. The Turk took up position with some other Turkish and German officers who were standing to the right of Buchan.

  ‘Oh the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin,’ a sotto voce chorus from the other ranks’ lines began. ‘His boots need blackin’, his kit needs packin’, And his old baggy trousis they wants mendin’.’

  The voices had grown stronger now. ‘Pipe down,’ said the captain with the head bandage. Buchan noticed that he wore the broken spur insignia of the 74th Division, the dismounted Yeomanry.

  The song became a barely audible whisper: ‘Before they send ‘im. To the Dardanelles.’

  The Turkish officer showed no sign of having heard any of this. His only reaction was to nod politely to the British officers and run an affectionate finger under his moustache. Matson decided that the picture was now complete. He slipped under the hood and worked the shutter, while the assistant held up a smoking flash.

  Buchan fished in his top-left tunic pocket for his silver cigarette case, a recent twenty-first birthday present from his parents. His mother had instructed him to wear it over his heart because she had read of lives being saved this way. The small armour-plated New Testaments popular among the ranks were regarded as a bit vulgar by the officer class. Buchan counted himself lucky to be still in possession of his birthday present. It had been about t
o disappear into the pockets of the first Turkish private who searched him when an officer had given the man a tremendous backhander along the side of his head and ordered its return.

  The subaltern lit his cigarette, and was about to return the case to his pocket when he saw the blurred reflection of his stubbled chin. It had now been four days since he last shaved and he was fascinated by this. It was, after all, the nearest thing he had had to a beard. He shined the case with his sleeve and looked again, running the fingers of his right hand over the bristles as he did so.

  He was engaged in this minor narcissism when the reflection suddenly darkened and he was aware that somebody was standing over him. He looked up and found a pair of coal-black eyes boring into him.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Maeltzer in English, touching the brim of his panama in a kind of salute. It had in fact only just turned noon but the journalist liked to be punctilious about these things. ‘My name is Karl Maeltzer. I’m the correspondent here for the Zürcher Zeitung’ He held out his hand.

  Buchan got to his feet, not without difficulty. It was extremely painful to bend his knees. He returned the handshake and rather reluctantly introduced himself. First a photograph and now the neutral press; it was all a bit much. Behind the journalist stood a smug-looking German officer of about his own age with the left sleeve pinned neatly to the front of his tunic; he was wearing the flat mortarboard hat, the Polish schapska, of one of the Uhlan lancer regiments. Buchan glanced around to see if any of the other officers might come to his rescue – preferably the incisive captain with the head wound. It seemed that none of them had noticed this latest turn in events. This was hardly surprising; the entire morning had been so bizarre that he did not suppose that any of them would have batted an eyelid if the Sultan himself had turned up complete with his harem.

  ‘Are you a Swiss citizen?’ he asked, for it had occurred to him that a correspondent for a neutral publication was not necessarily himself a neutral.