Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  He walked past the sentry in charge of guarding the officers in search of some dark corner. If the Turk – who was not a Turk at all, but a Syrian conscript from Aleppo – saw him passing, the effendi’s reasons were so obvious it would have seemed an impertinence to intervene. Besides, the Ottoman rank-and-file were just as bemused by their superiors’ behaviour towards these captives as the British were themselves. Were they guests or were they prisoners?

  Buchan’s stumbling gait took him down into a wadi carpeted with tin cans, sheep bones and other refuse, where even when walking upright, or nearly upright, he was hidden from the view of the rest.

  He squatted there for some time. When at last he rose he saw, to his alarm at first, that people were in the process of leaving. All the prisoners were on their feet, and he could hear one of the English sergeants making parade-ground noises. ‘All right, lads, let’s ‘ave you. Bags of swank now. Show ‘em we’re not beaten.’

  The officers were standing in a knot at the head of the men, listening to a Turkish officer in a fez who appeared to be explaining something to them. The guards were forming up either side of the column with rifles slung.

  My God! they’re leaving without me, thought Buchan. He began to clamber hastily out of the wadi, his boots clattering the abandoned cans aside. Then, for the first time, it occurred to him that the Turks had not noticed his absence. An almost sensual shiver that came from both excitement and fear ran through him, and he dropped out of sight to consider his options.

  The other officers, he assumed, must by now have concluded that his stomach cramps were no more than a ruse to slip by the guards. The way they were grouped so attentively around that Turkish officer might indicate a wish to distract. For the moment, anyway, he had escaped. Being a very serious young man, Buchan began to wonder if this was the right thing to do. He was not much given to shows of initiative, and on the rare occasions he had displayed this quality in the past it had often led to disaster.

  It was, he knew, a soldier’s duty to escape, but he was an officer and it was also his duty to look after his men. There were, it was true, four other officers, and in any case they would soon be separated from the men in a different prison camps. But what if his escape caused trouble for the others? What if there were reprisals? Perhaps he should have asked the Yeomanry captain for permission? No, that was absurd. A chance had occurred and he had taken it. After all, there had never been any question of their being on parole. The memory of the Yeomanry officer’s joke at his expense still rankled too. Who was he anyway? Some fox-fixated squire. No doubt his peacetime motives for enlisting had something to do with fattening up his hunters for the season on free War Office oats at summer camp.

  Buchan decided to stay where he was. He unbuckled his belt again and dropped his shorts. If the Turks came he would not be an escaper but simply a man suffering a prolonged attack of diarrhoea. If they did not come . . . well, he would see what happened.

  After a few minutes, this fatalism evaporated. The more Buchan realised that he might succeed in escaping, the more he wanted to. It occurred to him how ghastly captivity would be if he spent years looking back on these moments thinking how differently he should have done it.

  He pulled up his shorts and set off along the wadi in a shambling crouch, painful because he had to bend his bandaged knees. The wadi still had a thin trickle of water from the winter rains running down its centre. After about twenty yards he came to a hole in the bank. He squeezed into this niche and waited for the commotion that would ensue once they realised he was missing.

  Buchan tried to remember when the Turks had last counted them. They had been counted before they were put aboard some freight wagons at Deir Sineid, the railhead a few miles north of Gaza, and then again when they emerged at Jerusalem, when they were handed over to a new set of guards. The officers were always mixed in with the men, so there was a good chance that, at NCO level at least, the Turks might not be aware how many officer prisoners they had. They had all been struck by how slack the Turks were away from the scene of battle.

  Buchan’s luck might have run out if the prisoners had not started singing. The English started it with ‘Pack all your Troubles’, and the Australians joined in with ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’. By the time they had got into the second verse the Turks were furious. Perhaps they were tired of German and Austrian contingents strutting about the countryside bellowing out songs about comrades and the Fatherland, but they were determined that this particular lot of Christian visitors should behave with a little decorum.

  The Yeomanry captain heard the Turkish major scream something, but assumed he was addressing his own troops. It was not until the Turk drew his revolver and fired a shot in the air that he realised what was amiss. By then the guards were pointing fixed bayonets at them and the situation looked very ugly indeed. The singing did not come to a ragged halt but stopped like a gramophone going off. He managed to defuse the situation further by bellowing a quite unnecessary order at the men to keep quiet, but not until the major had wagged a finger at him and said in the only language he had in common with the British officers: ‘Vous êtes prisonniers maintenant! Vous êtes prisonniers!’ It was definitely the end of the Cook’s tour.

  Crouched in his niche in the wadi Buchan heard all and saw nothing. For the first time since his capture he knew real fear. He could only imagine that someone had been shot while trying to escape, perhaps thinking that the singing had put the Turks off their guard; that a roll call would be made; that it would be discovered that another prisoner was missing; that a search would be mounted.

  The captain knew, of course, that Buchan was missing and had decided that it was better to assume he had escaped rather than that his stomach cramps had turned out to be a burst appendix and that he was lying near to death not far away. He had to admit that the lanky young subaltern would have probably been the last on his list of potential escapers, but now he took his hat off to him. The whole charade had been brilliantly done. Like Buchan, his main concern now was that the Turks would take it into their heads to count them.

  But the Turkish major was much too angry to think straight. Shepherded by their sullen-looking guards, the prisoners were marched off towards the Citadel where they were to be kept until transport could be arranged to take them north.

  After they had gone Buchan was so overwhelmed by the loneliness of his situation that he almost wished he had been caught. He was desperately ill-equipped for an escape attempt. He had no food or water, map or compass. The infection in his knees was becoming worse and walking would become an increasingly painful business. Running was almost out of the question. And he was immediately identifiable as a British soldier because he was wearing shorts, a garment the enemy considered unbecoming on grown men.

  Buchan decided to stay put until dark. It seemed like an interminable wait, lightened only by the fact that he discovered in a shirt pocket an almost full packet of cigarettes. He transferred all but one to his case and then lit up, cupping the lighted end like an old sweat on sentry go.

  The cramps returned and he gripped his stomach with both hands as if he had been shot. A couple of times he heard movements of some kind but whether they were made by man or beast he could not tell. When this happened he shrunk into his niche and held his breath, his body tense for a yell of triumph and the probing bayonet.

  The dusk slid slowly in. Buchan looked over the rim of his wadi, and the nearest living thing he could see beyond some stunted olive trees was a bullock cart creaking towards the Jaffa Gate. He decided he would try to make his way towards the right flank of the British line which, the last he heard, was somewhere south of Beersheba. This was about fifty miles away as the crow flies, but it was closer than Gaza, and as his route lay mostly over scrubland and desert it was the least populated part of the front. He imagined he might encounter some Bedouin, and persuade them to escort him to safety in exchange for a large reward. There was a risk, of course, that they would hand him over to the Turks. No
doubt it depended on whose gold they most believed in.

  Once he had a plan, however nebulous, his spirits rose. He tried to recall the big Palestine Exploration Fund maps he used to study from time to time. Bethlehem was shown south-east of Jerusalem; then Hebron; and then, a long way below it, Beersheba. He remembered seeing a wooden signpost near the Jaffa Gate pointing towards Bethlehem, and finding it oddly blasphemous to see the familiar name used in a strictly functional way, as if the place was as secular as Colchester or Hornchurch.

  He climbed out of the wadi and began to walk towards the road. When he got to where they had had their meal his feet caught on something. He looked down, and saw that someone had forgotten a blanket. He picked it up. It was good quality, Australian he guessed. A lot of their equipment, especially when it came to comforts, was better than theirs. So was their pay and tobacco allowance. The men were always grumbling about it.

  Buchan draped the blanket around his shoulders. It almost reached his boots. The important thing was that it covered his shorts. From a distance, in silhouette, he might pass as a Syrian peasant – though this might not afford any protection if the Turks imposed a night curfew outside the city limits.

  He walked in the scrubland alongside the Bethlehem road, trying to keep at least one hundred yards away from it. Three times he dived for cover in case he was seen from passing vehicles. The first was a lorry with blazing headlights and a crowd of Austrians or Germans in the back belting out a drinking song, the second a donkey cart with a couple of Turkish soldiers on the front seat, while the third was what Buchan had been brought up to call a governess cart, the kind of thing he had gone to nursery school in, and was pulled by a horse so emaciated it took an eternity to pass.

  Not that he minded too much. His knees made walking difficult, and each step sent pains shooting up his thighs. In order to move his infected joints as little as possible he began to develop a peculiar, stiff-legged, sliding gait, almost as if he was wearing snow-shoes. After a while, this became very painful too, and he found himself sitting on his blanket without being aware that he had decided to rest.

  He was leaning against a large rock. It had become quite cold and he was shivering slightly. He thought this might be because he was becoming feverish.

  At first the darkness held no sound, but then a symphony orchestra started to tune up. From behind blades of grass and in the overhang of pebbles the cicadas began to vibrate their abdominal organs until they produced their famous high-pitched drone; the movement was taken up by a whole castanet chorus line of grasshoppers; a larger species moving among the tufts of grass between the rocks made a sound akin to the shuffle of brushes on a drum skin, and Buchan drew his feet inside his blanket as he added snakes to his list of woes. There was the low whistle of night birds, and then the whistle of a steam locomotive.

  Buchan wondered if he was dreaming at first. Then he distinctly made out the rattle of slow-moving rolling-stock and realised that he could not be far from Jerusalem railway station. It was there that his rail journey from Gaza had ended, and it was from there that Turkish soldiers set off to the western sector of their line against the British.

  It had now become quite obvious to Buchan that he was in no fit state to walk as far as Bethlehem, let alone Hebron. But if he could somehow smuggle himself onto a train, he could get down at Deir Sineid railhead, only a few miles from his own front line.

  He remembered seeing dozens of ragged-arsed civilians hanging about Jerusalem station. Surely as long as he kept his shorts covered and hid his boots – perhaps he could tie them to the back of his belt – he would not stand out?

  The more he thought about his plan, the more feasible it became, and in his mercurial state of mind Buchan’s spirits suddenly soared again. He put his head against the rock and drew the blanket closer about him. He didn’t feel so cold now. Nearby there was a brief flurry of agitated rustling and then quiet again. He ignored it. A night bird whistled. He closed his eyes. The bird sounded quite tuneful. The grasshoppers and cicadas continued their counterpoint. Buchan did not hear them. He was asleep.

  9

  It was a splendid looking locomotive. It had been made in America to a design that had the Great Plains in mind, the cow-catcher on the front useful for nudging stray camels and sheep off the track. Like most steam engines, it was intended to run on coal. But thanks to the Entente’s blockade, coal was at a premium in the Levant, so it was run on a cocktail of olive branches, cotton seed, liquorice, vines and camel dung instead. In the circumstances, it worked quite well.

  Its main drawback was that a considerable amount of this fuel was needed to build up a decent head of steam, so the locomotive had two tenders instead of one to carry it all. It also meant that nowadays the morning train, the one that ran from Jerusalem station down the western escarpment of the Judaean hills to Junction Station and then on to Ramleh, Lod, and other points north, was invariably late in starting. Very often the olive wood had not been cut to the right length, and the Syrian stoker had to set to work with a bow saw and hachet before he could throw it into the firebox.

  At the rear of the train were some Turkish soldiers travelling in freight cars, which would be unhitched at Junction Station and attached to another train heading south to Gaza. They crowded around the open sliding doors of their transport, reluctant to step back into its gloomy interior where only a few cracks and holes in the wooden sides allowed weak shafts of light to illuminate a jumble of kitbags and rifles.

  Unlike the common soldiery, officers and civilian passengers travelling in the three carriages behind the tender were not required to stay on board by bad-tempered NCOs tired of counting heads. Most of them, their luggage safely stowed, were chatting on the platform, determined not to take their seats until the very last moment. Nobody faced a journey of less than three hours.

  Among this crowd was Sarah Aaronsohn, whose journey back to Haifa and from there to the Zionist settlement of Zichron Jacob would take the best part of twenty-four hours. She was clearly agitated. Her eyes kept darting from the iron gate through which prospective travellers emerged onto the platform and then back to the locomotive, which had begun to send a promising amount of exhaust steam hissing down its blast pipe.

  She was wondering what had delayed Joseph Lishansky, the young man with the monocle who had been sitting with her at Fast’s Hotel. She wished he would hurry up: she was the only unaccompanied woman on the platform, and a group of young Turkish cavalry officers were becoming increasingly bold in their stares.

  Maeltzer was there too, saying goodbye to a gaunt Austrian artillery officer who was off to Vienna on convalescent leave. In the same envelope as his despatch was a note to Mr and Mrs Horatio Buchan informing them that their son was a prisoner-of-war and in good health. Maeltzer had hesitated before adding the last bit, recalling those awful cactus thorns in the boy’s knees, and then decided that the young mend fast and there was no need to cause undue distress. If he had been asked why a man who displayed such a Gott Strafe England mentality was going to this trouble, he would probably have murmured something about the pleasure of moral superiority. Those who refused to be fooled by this would insist that Maeltzer was the kind who liked to keep his word.

  Like his despatch, the letter would be sent by his newspaper’s Vienna bureau to his editors in Zürich. Maeltzer had asked them to forward it to the British embassy in Geneva. He would have been hard put to find a faster way of getting information to England from an enemy-held city.

  One of the Lancer officers took another hard look in Sarah Aaronsohn’s direction and then turned away and said something to his fellows, who let out great guffaws of laughter, slapping their thighs and fiddling around with cigarettes and holders. She walked a little away from them towards Maeltzer, conscious of the tapping noise her heels made on the wooden platform and that the officers were almost certainly watching the way her body moved under her clothes. She was beginning to feel angry as well as anxious. Having nothing better to do, she
retied the knot of the chiffon scarf she wore over her straw hat in the manner motor-car slipstreams had made fashionable.

  Lishansky had gone to pray at the Wailing Wall. This would have amazed most of his acquaintances for he scarcely seemed to observe his religion in any other way; yet he always did this on his last day in Jerusalem. Sarah never went with him, but she hoped he might pray for them both.

  The hissing from the blast pipe grew louder and a cloud of steam temporarily obscured the people standing at one end of the platform. A guard wearing a fez, with a green flag in one hand a whistle on a string around his neck walked up to the cab of the locomotive and started chatting with the driver and his fireman. Some of the passengers began to open the doors of their carriages. The guard left the engine crew and walked towards the rear of the train, taking his time, aware of his central role.

  Sarah was wondering whether she should go without Joseph or wait for the next train. She partly blamed herself for his absence. She should have insisted on his coming to the station directly from the Zion Gate, the nearest exit from the Wailing Wall. Joseph had almost certainly decided to hire a dog-cart from the Jaffa Gate so that he could browse through what remained of the souk. He was such a country boy. Jerusalem, half starved and in rags though it might be, was still the bright lights. He had come to Palestine with his parents when he was very young, and had rarely left their Galilee settlement. He had grown into manhood with the youth of the local Druse village, who had taught him how to ride and shoot and be prickly about slights to his honour. Sarah had shown him how to wear a suit, knot a cravat and open doors for ladies. The monocle had been his own idea.

  By now she was one of the few passengers still on the platform. Maeltzer was standing next to her saying goodbye to his Austrian friend, who was leaning out of the window.