Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Meinertzhagen had emerged from his campaign with a great respect for the enemy and an abiding contempt for almost everybody on his own side except for the askaris of the King’s African Rifles and white Rhodesians. He was particularly fond of the Africans, whose martial ferocity apparently twanged some atavistic Viking chord. Otherwise he considered Kitchener’s volunteer battalions to be no more than a collection of callow, undisciplined youths and Smuts’s South Africans a bunch of badly officered snipers reluctant to press home an attack. But his real contempt was reserved for Indian troops. Apart from the Kashmiris and Gurkhas, he thought them awful cowards and had put it about that he shot one dead for refusing to obey his orders.

  Since his arrival in Cairo he had begun to transfer his Indian phobia to the Arabs despite the assurances of some of his colleagues that one simply could not compare the Cairenes with Faisal’s Bedu. Ponting remained neutral. He had often found the fierce paternalism of officers serving with native troops amusing; forever arguing the merits of their Punjabis or their Gurkhas. Ponting had been brought up to believe that in most cases soldiers were as good as their officers, and that was the end of the matter.

  The messenger had gone upstairs bearing Aaronsohn’s solution to the water problem and Ponting went back to his in-tray. He had one more matter to clear up before he called it a day and that concerned a report from their agent Daniel in Jerusalem.

  It was a good message. Nothing sensational but a lot of juicy tit-bits. There was confirmation of the RFC’s claim of several kills following their first dogfight with the Hun in their new Bristol Fighters and some suggested targets for future raids. There was the tantalising information that the German in charge of the Gaza garrison, one Major Tiller, was so convinced that he was beaten during the April offensive that he had blown up his wireless station while waiting to surrender. That would be enough for GHQ to restart the post-mortems into the April offensive.

  There was a suggestion that Mustafa Kemal was becoming increasingly unco-operative with the German Military Mission, particularly now that Falkenhayn had more or less taken over the show and elbowed aside poor old Liman von Sanders who remained in Damascus. Apparently Kemal had been particularly tricky during some official dinner held at Fast’s Hotel – which was one of the suggested targets for the RFC, along with the Turks’ civil administration headquarters at the Augusta Victoria Stiftung on the Mount of Olives. There was some more stuff on the Kut prisoners that was so horrible it really made Ponting’s blood boil.

  Daniel was undoubtedly their best, most sensitively placed spy in Jerusalem, yet it had taken over a month for his report to get back to Cairo. Meinertzhagen wanted to know why.

  Ponting explained the reasons for the delay in a slightly less legible hand than the one he had previously used. In theory the clerks were cleared to handle all grades of classified material, but this would not be going through them. The gist of what he had to say was this:

  Urgent messages were sometimes entrusted to Bedouin couriers, who knew their way through the Turkish frontline. But this was an extremely risky business. Even if the courier was not intercepted there was always a good chance that he was a double agent bearing a despatch that had been skilfully laced with disinformation.

  An agent who had a contact in a neutral country might try to pass a message through the mail, perhaps by making an invisible ink and writing between the lines of some legitimate correspondence. But this too was fraught with risk. All mail was liable to be censored and tests might be made to see if the paper had been tampered with. Most invisible inks, for instance, respond to heat.

  Having explained why Daniel had not entrusted his message to either a Bedouin or invisible ink, Ponting went on to give the reasons for the delay. The agent had sent his information through Aaron Aaronsohn’s network even though they were quite unaware of Daniel’s existence as such – a healthy arrangement. In the past this had always been regarded as the safest way to get information back. But there had been a disaster.

  The Monegam’s sister ship, the gunboat which shared its pick-up duties off the Levantine coast, had been torpedoed before it even reached the little fishing-port with its round Crusader tower. A lieutenant from FIL was missing, either drowned or captured. Then spring storms had delayed the Monegam from making the pick-up. Now experiments were being conducted to install a more powerful wireless transmitter on the monitor to enable it to send material back to Cairo almost as soon as the pick-up was made. To facilitate reception, Signals had set up an aerial on the summit of the Great Pyramid itself – much to the consternation of some of the locals, who feared the English had added witchcraft to their war effort.

  ‘However,’ wrote Ponting, ‘we face the usual problems with wireless telegraphy. One is that even with the assistance of the Great Pyramid atmospherics might sometimes make it impossible to get a clear message back to Cairo. Another is that whether we receive the message or not German operators based on the coast almost certainly would, and even if they were unable to decode our morse cypher the transmission would alert the enemy to the vessel’s presence. Knowing the Navy’s caution in these matters, a prudent captain might well insist on maintaining wireless silence until he was practically back in Alexandria harbour.’

  Ponting paused here and asked himself if he wasn’t going a bit far? After all, they had just lost a ship. He looked at it again. Dammit! He was damned if he was going to rewrite the whole page, and it was just the sort of thing the Navy would come up with. So what if they had just lost a ship? They weren’t excused casualties. The sooner Meinertzhagen realised what they had to put up with from the Senior Service the better.

  Now he needed something to conclude his memorandum – preferably a suggestion. One thing he had learned about his new boss was that he was a man who expected his subordinates to come up with solutions as well as problems.

  He got up and walked over to the window again and looked down at the Nile. The sun had not quite set. Some late sparrows were still in headlong flight. In the distance he could make out the triangular silhouette of a felucca’s sails.

  Nearer the bank was a high-bowed skiff with a small boy in a dingy jellaba struggling with a massive pair of crudely-cut oars shaped like chop-sticks and twisting his young shoulders against the current. Another flock of sparrows flew above the skiff. It came to him then, watching the birds: pigeons. Why don’t they use carrier pigeons?

  He went back to his desk and started a fresh paragraph, pointing out that pigeons had been well used, admittedly over a much shorter distance, by Belgian agents on the Western Front. He added that some Signals units were already using birds in the Sinai. All they had to do was acquire some Egyptian homing pigeons and deliver them to Sarah Aaronsohn.

  Ponting was certain Meinertzhagen would like the idea. In fact, he would probably kick himself for not thinking of it first. For although Meinertzhagen took almost as much delight in killing all feathered and furry things as he did in disposing of His Majesty’s enemies, he was also a passionate ornithologist. His notes and sketches on the subject already filled several exercise books. He was, of course, particularly fond of birds of prey, the result of being allowed to keep a pet eagle at school.

  When he had finished he took it up to Meinertzhagen personally, since it was his custom to see his superior before he left for the night in case any urgent business had cropped up. Ponting’s slightly dilettante manner was thin camouflage for a very conscientious soul.

  The colonel’s office was one of the Savoy’s finest suites. It was across the gable end of the building and approached down a long corridor.

  ‘Enter,’ boomed Meinertzhagen to Ponting’s short knock and turn of the brass door knob. He was sitting behind a large desk and was just about to return a telephone to its cradle. Ponting noticed that his knobkerrie had been placed neatly along the edge of the desk. The business end of the club was darker than the rest of the wood, as if it had been marinaded in blood for a century.

  Meinertzhagen glance
d at the first couple of lines of the report on Daniel’s communication problem and then put it down again. ‘Allenby,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ said Ponting, his mind on migratory birds.

  ‘Lieutenant-General Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby to be precise – the new Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force.’

  For the first time Ponting noticed that an open copy of the Army List lay on the desk. ‘Old chum of mine at GHQ just called to tell me. Been looking him up. Cavalryman. Skin. Started in France commanding the Cavalry Division. Last job was commanding Third Army Corps at Arras.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Ponting. He remembered the name now. Allenby had been charge of the Canadians when they took Vimy Ridge. That had been last April when the EEF was making a mess of things at Gaza and Meinertzhagen was still in East Africa running around in circles after von Lettow-Vorbeck. A breath of cheer from the mud plot. Early in the war Ponting had served in that sector himself until a bad chest wound left him unfit for regimental duties and he transferred to Intelligence. He would not be overseas now had a Medical Board not allowed him to persuade them that Egypt’s dry heat would be good for his damaged lungs.

  ‘Ever met him?’ inquired Meinertzhagen.

  ‘General Allenby? Can’t think that I have, sir.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something – I once got him out of bed at sword-point!’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Despite the fact that he knew this was going to lead to a long anecdote, and he badly wanted to tell him about his carrier pigeon idea and then get off and have a bath and some dinner, Ponting’s curiosity was genuinely aroused. Meinertzhagen was a good story-teller, uninhibited by false modesty. There was, for instance, the matter of that knobkerrie, which he insisted he had wrestled off a German officer in the dark and then used to bash the man’s brains out.

  ‘Quite true,’ said Meinertzhagen who was loading his pipe from a zebra-skin pouch. ‘Before I came into the army properly I was in the Hampshire Yeomanry. That would be about ‘97 or ‘98. We had an exercise against the Aldershot Cavalry Brigade under French. Allenby was on his staff. I don’t know whether you know the area – Farley Down? Anyway, one night four of us were sent out on an officers’ patrol to try and locate the “enemy”! We found French’s headquarters bivouacked at a spot called Beacon Hill. I suppose we should have slipped quietly away to tell our side.

  ‘But I was about eighteen at the time, a very new second-lieutenant just down from Harrow and not all that au fait with military etiquette. As soon as I realised they didn’t have any pickets out I drew my sword, started yelling like a Red Indian and we charged. I suppose we were all pretty young fellows. You can imagine what it was like. All that top brass tucked up in their flea bags and us crashing right through them, whooping our heads off, swords flashing. They had hobbled their horses but that didn’t prevent them tottering off in all directions as fast as the ropes would let them.

  ‘Of course, the next day the exercise had to be cancelled while everybody helped to round them up. I expected to get a real dressing-down from French, but he and Allenby and some of the others were quite tickled about it. Cavalrymen like a good raid, y’know.’

  Meinertzhagen paused to puff at his pipe, obviously pleased with his reckless youth.

  ‘Do you think he’s going to be the right man for the job, sir?’ asked Ponting. It had suddenly occurred to him that if Allenby harboured a deep, consuming desire to use cavalry they might be getting the kind of general who would tilt at cactus hedges.

  ‘There’s no reason why this shouldn’t develop into the right sort of campaign for a cavalryman,’ said Meinertzhagen, as if he had read his deputy’s thoughts. Like Ponting he was an infantryman; his horse soldiering had stopped with the Yeomanry, although all infantry officers in the pre-war army rode. In any case, he had been detached from regimental duties for too long to allow corps prejudices to cloud his innovative mind. The terrain’s right for it until you get to the Judaean foothills. If we could punch the right sort of hole in the Turkish line and pour the cavalry through they would have a field day.’

  ‘Providing we can find the right sort of water for their horses,’ reminded Ponting, who often felt all cavalry should suffer the fate of the dismounted 74th Yeomanry division.

  ‘Ah, the water problem. Our friend Aaronsohn could be on the right track there. Just a matter of knowing where the wells are and digging for it, eh?’

  ‘As long as the geology hasn’t changed in the last two thousand years. It might not be as simple as Professor Aaronsohn would have us believe, sir,’ cautioned Ponting, who was beginning to wish he had added this codicil to his report. Meinertzhagen’s enthusiasms could be worrying.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose it will – but I’ve heard of madder schemes working and it has the genius of the race. I’m going to send it to GHQ with my blessing. The way I remember it two thousand years is about two minutes as far as geology is concerned. If Allenby wants to use his cavalry properly he’ll need all the water he can get.’

  Meinertzhagen began to leaf through the document Ponting had placed on his desk. ‘Ah pigeons,’ he beamed. ‘Now there’s an interesting thought.’

  2

  Yeomanry Camp, El Marakes: July 1917

  ***

  Walter Calderwell sauntered back to his tent from the armourers with his new sword, which he held under the hilt by the scabbard. He was one of the new draft to the Yeomanry – reinforcements sent out to replace casualties and the men felled by malaria and the waterborne sickness bilharzia, which the Tommies called Billy Harry. All had arrived in Egypt equipped with gleaming armes blanches. And all had been told by their respective sergeants that if they wished to ride with his troop they would kindly go and get their toy soldier cutlery replaced by a proper weapon with a dulled bowl guard and scabbard which would not catch the rays of a rising sun and heliograph the presence of a dawn patrol to a Hun airman out to commit murder before breakfast.

  Private Calderwell fancied himself as a bit of a card, as is often the way of very young men barely out of adolescence. Suddenly his sword transmogrified into a cane, his knees bent and he did his Charlie Chaplin walk. But he stopped after a few paces when he somehow placed the weapon between his legs and seemed to come perilously close to snapping it in two. A cavalry sword was really too long to be a proper substitute for the little fellow’s chief prop. He recalled his introduction to the weapon during basic training which, coming after a morning of gas mask instruction, had caused a fellow-recruit to remark: ‘From Jules Verne to the Three Musketeers in one ruddy day.’

  The man’s imagery had undoubtedly been inspired by their middle-aged Cockney sergeant instructor, a regular from the Life Guards and as fiercely moustached as any Dumas chevalier.

  ‘Now this is known as the ho-hate, basket ‘ilted cavalry sword,’ he had screeched, holding the aforesaid between two outstretched hands above his head. ‘And its blade is exactly thirty-six inches long, which the clever ones among you will know is three feet. It is called the ho- hate sword because it was designed in the year nineteen hundred and hate by a committee of distinguished cavalrymen presided over by none other than Colonel Baden-Powell, with whom I had the honour to serve during the late unpleasantness in South Africa. Those of you who can read and write might ‘ave heard of that distinguished officer. I dare say some of you ‘ave even been little boy scouters and know all about tyin’ knots and ‘elpin old ladies across the road. Now listen carefully. This is a sword. I repeat – a sword. I ‘ave heard some ignorant people around this depot talk about sabres. It is not a sabre. Sabres are what old-fashioned cavalrymen use for slashin’ at the enemy. Nowadays we do not slash. We stick. We lean out of the saddle with our arms outstretched and we puncture the enemy like a sausage. A German sausage. Any questions?’

  The words came back to Calderwell as he reached a crossroads in the pattern of bell tents. He made a savage, sausage-puncturing lunge, his left arm curved above his head like a mus
keteer.

  ‘Steady Yeoman!’ A portly officer coming from Calderwell’s left escaped a severe denting with a sheathed blade only by sucking in his belly. ‘Trying to arrange a bit more sick leave for me, are you?’

  Captain Rudolph Valintine, Calderwell’s squadron commander, had recently returned from England where he had been convalescing from wounds received the previous spring. It was common knowledge he had turned down a desk job in Cairo in order to be back with his regiment, the Warwickshire Yeomanry.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Calderwell, snapping to attention and transferring the sword to his left hand with credible dexterity so that he could salute.

  ‘What exactly were you doing?’ asked Valintine, returning the salute.

  ‘Practising, sir.’

  ‘Practising? Practising for what – the ballet? Calderwell, isn’t it – one of the new draft?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you something, Calderwell: to quote one of our more successful generals, you might not frighten the enemy but by God you frighten me! If you want to play with cold steel I’m sure I can make arrangements for you to attack something in the kitchen. The cooks are always looking for volunteers.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Now take your sword to your tent and don’t wave it about again until you see some Turks in front of you. Understood?’

  ‘Yessir,’ said Calderwell, blushing madly. He who was no longer a card, just a crestfallen teenager.

  Valintine walked off a couple of paces and then he stopped. ‘Calderwell,’ he said.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We mostly shoot ‘em.’

  When the private got back to the bell tent he shared with seven others the only other occupant was Isaiah Mace, who was lying on his palliasse with a fag going, contrary to standing orders which forbade smoking under canvas. In camp almost everybody smoked continuously for as long as they had tobacco. The maintenance of a constant smoke-screen seemed to be the only way to keep the number of flies at a tolerable level. Calderwell had neglected to drape a piece of mosquito curtain over his helmet. While eating a jam sandwich in the transit camp in Alexandria, he had been stung on the tongue by a wasp and unable to take anything but liquids for two days.