Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘“Poor fool, must have got lost,” he’ll say, puffing on his cigar. “Had an attack of the stomach cramps, if you follow my meaning. Went off into the wadis to relieve himself and just never came back. Poor show really. We were practically on parole not to escape at the time you know. Good man, Johnny Turk. Shown us around Jerusalem – the Holy Sepulchre and all the other sights. They just let him walk right past them.”

  ‘Why don’t you save yourself a lot of trouble and give yourself up to the first Turkish transport that passes? You could tell them that you got lost, fainted, touch-of-the-sun, anything. They’ll probably want to believe it. After all, it’s very embarrassing for them, your just walking off like that. And what if they do say you were on parole?’

  Here Speaker Number Two, who had been doing pretty well up to then, over-stepped the mark. ‘Dammit,’ said Buchan. ‘There was no question of parole.’ He was quite certain in his own mind that he had never made any promise that he would not attempt to escape. How could he? He had hardly exchanged two words with a Turkish officer since he was captured.

  He decided he would not make a decision until he had given the matter some more thought. He might even give both speakers a final say. ‘Damn fool,’ cried Speaker Number Two, who thought he was home and dry. ‘Life isn’t a game of football. You’ll regret it, mark my words.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ muttered Buchan, pushing himself first into a crouch and then a position that was almost upright. He paused for a moment in the hope that he might hear a few words of encouragement, even praise, from Speaker Number One. But none came. Alone, he moved on.

  ***

  About a kilometre further down the road Maeltzer was stopped by another road block, under the command of Major Krag.

  The intelligence officer’s servant had brought him the news of the Englishman’s escape with his morning coffee. The batman, in civilian life an innkeeper from Coblenz, had long since become inured to the eccentricities of officers. In France he had once served at a very jolly little dugout Sunday lunch party which, as soon as they had consumed the last of the cognac, had sprinted across no-man’s-land and returned with an astonished Frenchman. But even he was amazed when Krag at once announced that they would be joining in the hunt for Buchan. A couple of Austrian clerks, who felt that they were above such capers, had been roped in as well and now stood with their unaccustomed rifles and ammunition pouches near a group of scratching Turkish infantry. Krag too had equipped himself with a Mauser ‘98 which he carried crooked under one arm as if he was going on a Black Forest boar shoot.

  Maeltzer was aware that Krag, by nature misanthropic, had developed a certain antipathy towards him. As far as he knew this dislike was not founded on anything tangible. The journalist had concluded that it was probably the result of vague stirrings of irritation caused by his easy familiarity with von Kressenstein, and by Krag’s own inability to feel anything other than self-conscious and awkward in the presence of the aristocracy, becoming quite tongue-tied and even more clipped than usual in his speech. He had studied Krag, and knew he was capable of demonstrating a kind of policeman’s bloody-mindedness. This bothered him, for the German had it within his powers to make things difficult for him, to limit his access, to remind his superiors subtly that there were frontiers of knowledge which neutral journalists, however sympathetic, should not be permitted to cross. In this respect he knew that Krag’s strength was the very thing the German probably loathed most about himself: he was not what the English would call a gentleman. Nor, it seemed, was he capable of sniffing out the breed, recognising the signals and behaving accordingly. Sometimes Maeltzer felt that it was not that he saw through people, but that he didn’t see them at all.

  Now he said: ‘Good morning, Herr Maeltzer. I see that you are about your business early. You may have heard we are looking for an escaped prisoner, an English officer. I don’t suppose you can help us in this matter?’

  ‘Indeed I can,’ said Maeltzer.

  It was not a difficult decision for him to make. After all, since the boy was so obviously done for he was probably doing him another favour – and he did need to keep the right side of Krag.

  ***

  It took Buchan some time to realise that the Turks were closing in.

  His first indication was when he began to notice a series of mirror-like flashes coming from the direction of the main road to his left. It soon became apparent that these flashes came from the long bayonets attached to a line of Turkish rifles that were advancing in extended order.

  They looked about half a mile away. For a few minutes Buchan continued towards the station, convinced that if he could only get beyond the end of the line quickly enough the sweep of their search would miss him. For the space of two hundred yards he even achieved something like normal walking pace until the pain in his knees became unbearable and he had to stop and hang onto a friendly carob tree.

  While he tried to recover himself another line of troops seemed to grow from the very ground in front of him as they emerged from the dip or wadi that had hidden them. They were about four hundred yards away, close enough to see the serrated edges on their terrible saw bayonets.

  He looked towards the Turks coming from the road and could now discern among them a couple of pith-helmeted figures in the field-grey uniform of the Germany army. As they got closer, he saw that one of them was carrying his weapon in the crook of his arm the way a gamekeeper would carry a shotgun.

  Even if he could run there was nowhere left to run to. He had lost. Buchan stood rock still and for the first time realised how thirsty he was.

  Then there was a shot. The bullet was close enough to the lieutenant’s head for him to catch the zizz of it. ‘Swine,’ he said out loud. ‘Quite unnecessary.’ Despite his indignation, Buchan raised his hands as far as he could stretch them. The shot seemed to have come from the line advancing from the road. He saw the gamekeeper figure was waving his free hand about in an agitated manner.

  Buchan looked at the other line, for these were the Turks that would be the first to reach him. He was astonished to see that half of them had disappeared again. Then, even as he watched, the missing men got to their feet, and he realised that the shot must have been fired at an angle that had taken it as close to their heads as his own. Buchan found this very amusing and the only reason he did not laugh out loud was that he no longer had the strength to do so.

  Krag was finding it heavy going across the scrubland in his high cavalry boots. Even if he hadn’t been, he was reluctant to get ahead of the line in case another of the boneheads became over excited. Apart from the Austrian and German clerks he had donated, most of his group were Syrian conscripts. The Kurdish sergeant who had stopped Maeltzer earlier was with the other line. He was well into the lead, despite the fact that he had been among those who went to ground when the shot was fired – an event which had stoked the fury started by Maeltzer’s jibe to the point where he was very angry indeed. The Kurd promised himself that when he found the idiot responsible for that shot – and he would wager a week’s pay it was one of those Christians from the Galilee they had started conscripting – he would have very warm feet indeed. Meanwhile, there was this Englishman to deal with. He could see him quite clearly now standing with his hands up and a stupid grin on his face, as if he was playing some silly child’s game.

  Buchan was near to collapse again. It was as if the shot had drained away his last reserves of strength. Slowly, his arms came down to shoulder level. The morning sun was getting high, and the way it flashed off the bayonet of the nearest Turk reminded him of a heliograph. Buchan had always been fascinated by heliographs, ever since he first saw them in action on a combined public schools Officers’ Training Corps exercise on Salisbury Plain in the summer of 1914, his last at school.

  Then there had been days when there was not enough sun, and the instruments would not transmit properly. Of course, this climate was ideal for them, it was marvellous to watch them working. Flash – flash – flash. Jus
t before they went in at Gaza they were going all the time. Send reinforcements we’re going to advance. No, send three-and-fourpence we’re going to a dance. Flash – flash – flash. Marvellous stuff. All done by mirrors. Much better than semaphore.

  During the course of this reverie Buchan had, without really being aware of it, sunk to the ground. He sat there with his right arm raised while his left hand caressed the filthy bandage round his swollen left knee, which he now felt to be disgustingly luscious.

  After all he had been through that morning, the sight of the Englishman sitting there greatly offended the Kurd. Who was he to sit, this Christian? He placed the tip of his awful bayonet firmly above the third button of Buchan’s tunic, the area of the diaphragm, and yelled at him in Arabic to get to his feet.

  Buchan looked up, hardly comprehending. Then it dawned. The fellow wanted him to get up. Well, I’ll need a little assistance there, old chum. He stretched out his left hand.

  The Kurd, incensed by this insolence, barked something and jabbed at him with his bayonet. It drew a little blood. Buchan was not exactly aware of this but he did feel the prick, like squeezing a holly leaf. It had the desired effect. It concentrated his mind. He began to lever himself to his feet while the Kurd brought his rifle up like an angler raising his catch.

  Buchan’s legs were almost straight when his knees collapsed on him for the last time. He fell forward and slightly to the left, gutting himself on the bayonet on the way down before the Kurd had a chance to get it out of his way.

  Anthony Buchan did not cry out immediately. He gave a kind of deep gasp, and shortly afterwards he began to haemorrhage from the mouth. He managed a little scream when the bayonet was extracted but by then there was blood in his lungs as well as his mouth. Face down in the dirt, Buchan started coughing and spitting away the blood in his mouth, which filled almost as soon as he got rid of it. At the same time his hands searched his tunic until they found the warm, sticky places.

  The Kurd was almost in a state of shock. Despite his rank and background, this was the first time in his life that he had done serious harm to anyone with cold steel, and it was an accident. At the same time he was surprised how easy it had been, how the sound and feel of it was so similar to that first butcher’s incision into the belly of a sheep.

  He did not know what to do next. Had it been in battle he might have finished the Englishman off with a bullet or another thrust. But these were entirely different circumstances, so he just stood there, holding his rifle with its bloody bayonet with both hands and watching Buchan coughing and drawing his legs up and gently squeezing his scrotum in an effort to make the pain go away.

  This was how Krag found them. At first he thought Buchan had merely fainted and asked one of the Austrian clerks to pass him a water-bottle. But as he unscrewed the top he noticed the blood on the ground for the first time and the awful gore on the Kurd’s bayonet. Krag grew angry then and pushed the Kurd aside.

  Once his servant had helped him to turn the Englishman over, Krag saw immediately that he was dying. Buchan had gone a terrible grey colour. His hands were on his stomach trying to push his insides back in and every few seconds he would make a little choked scream which brought bubbles of blood to his lips. It occurred to Krag that the proper thing to do was to put the boy out of his misery. He got as far as undoing the flap on his holster and then hesitated. Was it proper to hasten the end of a mortally wounded officer escapee in front of witnesses? It might be misinterpreted. He could imagine Kress taking a very dim view of it. While Krag pondered the pros and cons of the matter Buchan had another fit of coughing, and then neatly solved Krag’s dilemma by drowning in his own blood.

  Next to his body lay the silver cigarette case, which had fallen out of his top pocket when they turned him over. Krag picked it up. A corner of it was sticky to the touch.

  11

  Maeltzer had drawn the shutters of his room in the Grand New Hotel and was asleep fully clothed on his bed. The room smelt of vomit.

  Outside, the shadows around the old stones of the Jaffa Gate began to lengthen. Syrians and Jews, often listless with hunger, watched the ammunition limbers clatter by and then ox-carts bearing parts of aeroplanes, creaking wagons that had already taken almost the entire morning to come up from Jerusalem station. The parts were bound for the aerodromes around Beersheba where the Luftstreitkrafte had based its forward reconnaissance squadrons, on the left flank of the Turkish line.

  In the commandeered English school, now a Turkish army barracks, the afternoon session of corporal punishment was taking place. An abject line of soldiers and conscript labour, some of the younger ones already finding it hard to fight back their tears, were waiting their turn. Each man was already bare-footed, clutching his boots or sandals, toes flexing nervously in the dust. At the head of the line was the conscript who had fired at Buchan. As the Kurd had suspected, he was a Christian Arab from Nazareth, an excitable youth who shot out of sheer exuberance for the chase. Now he was promising himself he would desert at the first opportunity.

  Two sergeants, both built like wrestlers, threw the Nazarene to the ground and tied around his ankles a rope attached to a stick which ended up tight against his insteps. Each Turk held one end of this stick, then lifted his feet to about the height of their waists, and began to beat his soles with short, springy lengths of bamboo.

  The Nazarene’s offence was regarded as serious enough for sixty strokes. The Kurdish sergeant who had killed Buchan could hear the screams from the nearby cells where, at Krag’s insistence, he had been placed awaiting court martial. Nobody believed that the Englishman had fallen onto his bayonet, not even his own officer who had given him cigarettes and told him that he would soon have him out.

  A bucket of water was available to revive those who fainted whilst undergoing the bastinado, but the Nazarene was too young and fit for his body to grant him even that brief respite. Each stroke was like the touch of a red-hot poker, and every nerve in his body seemed to be jangling like a thousand toothaches.

  His screams were such that even old sweats waiting for their ten or fifteen strokes began to look nervous. A young Turkish officer stepped out of the school building to draw deeply on a cigarette and wonder at the majesty of Ottoman justice. The Nazarene’s cries were truly awe-inspiring, exciting his floggers to greater effort. They seemed almost loud enough to be heard at the Grand New Hotel, where Maeltzer’s large, troubled head occasionally jerked from side to side as he slept. A glass and an empty bottle of schnapps lay on the floor beside him.

  Maeltzer was having a nightmare. He was back in Zürich talking to an editor across his desk. There was something strange about the man, something peculiar, even grotesque. For some time his face was a blur, as if it was lying under water. Then he came sharply into focus, and to his horror Maeltzer saw what was troubling him. The man had two heads. One was normally formed, although flat and round; the other was a parody of the live head, a bloodless dead-looking thing that existed alongside it, with the same nose but half-formed eyes and mouth. It reminded him of an aborted foetus a doctor friend used to keep pickled in a jar.

  It was revolting. Nonetheless, common courtesy dictated he disguise his revulsion. After all, the poor fellow must be accustomed to stares and whispers and people pulling faces. Yet even as they spoke the other head came alive with eyes and teeth, and then detached itself from its partner. It grew an identically clothed body but had abnormally large hands which it waved in Maeltzer’s face, as if to demonstrate their power, before slipping behind the chair on which he was sitting and out of sight. The editor was now grinning at him, a malevolent, hateful grin, and Maeltzer realised too late that this was a truly evil hydra, that something terrible was about to happen to him. Even as he became aware of his danger he heard the heavy breathing of the man’s ghastly doppelganger behind him. He was paralysed, quite incapable of turning round in his chair and confronting the monster. Maeltzer distinctly felt those huge, remorseless strangler’s hands brush his
throat but lay there – somehow he was no longer sitting – helpless as a school-girl as he began to choke.

  The journalist awoke with the sound of his own tormented breathing still in his ears, pulled his collar and tie loose and then groped his way towards the window, knocking over the empty schnapps bottle in the process. He tugged at the shutters like a drowning man, screwing up his eyes against the daylight and gulping down the clean air. He could still feel those hands about his throat: gentle, almost a caress, a taste of dying.

  Maeltzer wondered by what convoluted chemistry his brain should have conjured up a silly two-headed monster instead of the clean young Englishman for whose death he held himself to be at least partly culpable. Though God knows why he should torment himself about the fate of one Englishman. He recalled the tales the Boer prisoners had told him in Ceylon about the camps in which Kitchener had concentrated their wives and children so that the commandos would find it harder to live off the land, and the lack of sanitation and proper medical care when the inevitable typhus and cholera came.

  After he had told Krag what he had seen, Maeltzer had lingered by the road block instead of going on into the city. He had no pressing business, and was curious to find out whether he was right in thinking his weary goatherd was Buchan. He had watched Krag lead a file of men off without the least foreboding.

  He had watched the soldiers return, and when they got closer he saw that they were carrying a makeshift stretcher made out of rifles and blankets. At three hundred metres Maeltzer began to have doubts; at one hundred and fifty he could see that Buchan’s face was covered.

  ‘What happened?’ Krag had snapped back when he asked. ‘What happened? The scum bayoneted him, that’s what happened.’

  ‘Why?’ said Maeltzer, aware even as he mouthed the word that the question was ridiculous as well as redundant. At the same time he was quite taken aback by the vehemence of Krag’s own response.