Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Well, I’m not suggesting that it was Daniel himself,’ said von Papen testily. He was beginning to loathe the patronising tone of this underpromoted pleb ten years his senior. ‘I don’t suppose he follows Colonel von Kressenstein about listening through keyholes or the slits the Janissaries made for their boiling oil. I just find it disturbing that two German officers cannot hold a conversation after curfew without somebody trying to listen in.’

  ‘As I said, there is a tradition of informers here,’ said Krag, slightly uneasy about the speed with which he had got under the other’s skin. There was no sense in making too much of an enemy of a von, especially a von who had the ear of other vons. Better that they should be blissfully unaware of his contempt. ‘There are scavengers about who will cock an ear at any conversation in the hope that it might lead to a crust. And there’s very little trust. They spy on each other. Informers are probably the most informed upon of all. You have to imagine the leaves of an artichoke: layer upon layer.’

  ‘I see,’ said von Papen. ‘So everybody listens. You make it sound like a kind of national sport.’ Fancy somebody like Krag knowing anything at all about artichokes.

  ‘Not a national sport, an Ottoman sport, Major. There are many nationalities here. That’s part of the problem.’

  A runner – military flattery for an overweight Dusseldorf grocer with flat feet – arrived with a sheaf of telegrams for Krag, and von Papen seized the opportunity to leave. ‘I’ll keep you informed,’ he said at the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Krag who was busy reading the top message and, despite his misgivings, did not bother to look up as von Papen went out. It was a copy of a signal that had been sent to Kress from the German liaison officer at Hassan Bey’s headquarters in Nazareth. It said that the Jew Sarah Aaronsohn, who was suspected of being the spy codenamed Nili responsible for sending the British coded messages by carrier pigeon, had somehow managed to shoot herself during interrogation. It did not explain how. She was still alive but expected to die. It said nothing about Daniel.

  Krag wondered if the liaison man at Haifa really believed the bullet wound was self-inflicted. Whatever their other shortcomings, Turkish soldiers were not usually in the habit of allowing women to grab their rifles.

  He made no attempt to call von Papen back. Instead, the intelligence officer studied the document for some time, absently toying with the spectacles his visitor had left on his desk as he did so. After a while he examined the frames again and recalled that he had seen somebody wearing half-moons like these quite recently, but he could not remember who it was.

  ***

  Krag’s instinctive rejection of von Papen’s account of how Sarah Aaronsohn got her fatal bullet wound turned out to be quite wrong.

  Soon the details would not only come to him but also filter through the entire Yishuv, where the story of Sarah Aaronsohn was passed from settlement to settlement. It was sometimes a little changed in the telling, as sagas tend to be; it was particularly vague about the exact nature of her suffering. But the words of a Turkish officer who was alleged to have witnessed her defiance were invariably quoted: ‘She’s worth a hundred men.’

  Even those Jews who were against her, who were being daily reduced by the new Turkish harshness towards the Zionists, often wept when they heard the tale and took a certain pride in her courage. Pro-German Zionists became neutral, and the neutral became pro-British. Those with no political chasms to leap simply became angry. This last category quoted not only the admiring Turkish officer but a note Sarah is said to have left. ‘You are murderers, you are bloodthirsty animals, you are cowards and I, by myself a weak woman – I rose to protect my people so that you will not do to them what you did to the Armenians . . .’

  What exactly was done to Sarah Aaronsohn has never been made clear. Some accounts have it that she was first tied to a gate-post and flogged until she was unconscious. This is said to have been followed by rape, the removal of finger nails, burns applied with a heated bayonet, the scalp torn and bloody where hair had been pulled out.

  Others would indicate Sarah was not badly hurt if she was hurt at all. In these accounts both sides exhibit a certain chivalry. Sarah confesses that she has been running the Nili group since her brother’s departure. In return, the Turks accept her plea that none of the other Jews at Zichron Jacob, including her father, are involved. What is indisputable is that at some point during the second day of interrogation the Bey suddenly announced that she was to be allowed to change her clothes.

  His reasons for doing this are again a matter of dispute. Some say it is quite simple: the Bey was a gentleman. The version Krag believed was that he intended to take her to Nazareth or even Damascus for further interrogation and, given the prevalence of German and Austrian staff and liaison officers in those parts, thought it best that she did not appear to have been too ill-used.

  Whatever the reason, Sarah was unescorted when she was allowed to use the bathroom, the envy of the settlement with its large enamel bath. The house had already been torn apart and a Winchester carbine removed from its narrow, upright hideyhole, built into the woodwork around a door. They had also found a trapdoor, skilfully set in the tiled floor and covered with a rug, which led through the cellar to a narrow escape tunnel Aaron had built with Syrian raiders in mind.

  When they heard the shot the Bey was the first back. Sarah was lying face down on the red tiles in the bathroom, bubbling blood. She was still holding the little Derringer with which she had shot herself through the mouth. There was no sign of where the pistol had been hidden. Later, when they were pressed for explanations, the Turks said they thought it might simply have been placed behind one of the legs of the high bath where a scrap of blue rag soaked in gun oil was found. But Krag was probably the only German officer in Palestine who gave this any credence.

  ‘The Bey gave it to her,’ pronounced Kress when the Aaronsohn case came up while, once again, they were going over the Daniel Intercept.

  Von Papen agreed. Wasn’t it the way the Turks worked? That perverse sense of honour that would enable them first to torture a woman and then to slip her the means to kill herself?

  Krag raised an eyebrow at this sudden display of expertise on the Turkish official caste by a newcomer. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re not like that.’

  Some things were apparently indisputable and written in the clear hand of the Jewish doctor – one of several conscripted into the Turkish medical corps at the outbreak of hostilities – who had been summoned from Haifa to attend her. But it did not tell the whole truth. It simply told the Bey as much as he needed to know, as much as the men he had left behind (for he departed almost immediately after Sarah shot herself) might have passed onto him in their layman’s fashion.

  The Bey had asked for the report yet once he had read it he would have liked to tear it into very small pieces. This, however, was not possible, for Damascus as well as von Kressenstein was interested, so he had to pass it on.

  The patient had fired a large-bore .44 bullet into her mouth, the doctor wrote, which had exited through the back of her neck. The round had severed her spinal cord, leaving her a paraplegic. The physician noted that the young woman had other wounds but said that these were not of a life-threatening nature. When he read this Krag shuddered, remembering the way a kourbash could curl round a body like a python.

  Certainly, there was much the doctor knew and did not write. He did not write how she had recovered enough voice to plead with the women who were nursing her to finish her off with poison and how, with the Kurds still in attendance, they were too fearful to render this small favour. Only on the fourth day did Sarah Aaronsohn come to terms with the fact that no help was forthcoming and, since it was unscientific to say she willed herself to die, the doctor wrote that it was a haemorrhage that ended it.

  The Bey read the report at his headquarters in Nazareth. When he had finished he stood for a while staring out of an open window at the dried up Galilean hills, smoking one of his speci
al cigarettes. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the buzz of an aeroplane engine.

  It was his fault, of course; he should not have felt pity for the woman and allowed her to put on fresh clothes. Damascus had already made it plain that they were not pleased with the publicity the Aaronsohn affair had engendered. And the Bey had to agree that it would have been much better had their Christian allies not learned of it until they had found out all there was to find out.

  Nili he could not be sure of. But like every other senior Turkish officer aware of the case, right up to Djemal Pasha himself, he was convinced that Daniel was a Turk. Somehow they sensed that here was a man enjoying his revenge. There was about him that sweet smell of treachery they all knew so well.

  7

  Beersheba Sector: 3 October 1917

  ***

  It was much hotter here than in Jerusalem, where every day now the skies promised but never quite delivered the beginning of the winter rain and the first of the migrating storks had been seen heading south down the Jordan Valley towards the Dead Sea.

  Here the desert slowed a man’s pace, trickled sweat into his eyes and broke up the outlines of distant ridges. In the souk there was camel meat for sale for those who could afford it. Once they had sold their redundant mounts some of the Bedouin stayed to watch the quartermaster’s wagons load up at the railway station and note which sentries grew sleepy around noon.

  ‘We have a new trench mortar, Field Marshal,’ announced their escorting officer, a Turkish major with a humorous mouth and eyes. ‘You must see it.’

  Von Falkenhayn motioned him to lead the way, and von Papen and Weidinger came up behind. This was the second and final day of their tour of the Gaza–Beersheba line.

  Kress had suggested it casually to von Papen as a means of explaining why he was opposed to Yilderim, and why the better Turkish commanders like Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, shared his views on it. Von Papen was already more than half convinced by Kress’s arguments anyway, while von Falkenhayn, like most senior commanders, had a journalist’s relish for a quick sniff at the front and jumped at the chance. The aide de camp was also glad to get away from the Turko-German sniping and the nasty little social ambushes one could run into at Jerusalem headquarters. He was getting nowhere with the Daniel Affair, and the lugubrious Krag seemed more than content to be in sole charge for a few days.

  Weidinger had arrived in Beersheba before any of them and would be staying longer because Kress wanted him to organise some extensive reconnaissance patrols. Kress was increasingly worried about his left flank and wanted reassurance that the desert really did make it impossible for Allenby to push his cavalry from that direction. He was also there to try to gauge how von Falkenhayn felt about the Yilderim plan once he had seen the situation on the ground. Kress liked von Papen, but he wanted to hear from his own man.

  The Turkish major picked a careful route through the casual defecations of his troops to a pit about 200 metres behind the unit’s most forward entrenchments, where the mortar crew reluctantly extinguished the pipes and cigarettes that were the most effective way of keeping the flies away.

  They were Anatolians in grey-green German uniforms whose only concession to the heat was a preference for rope-tied leather sandshoes instead of jackboots. The exception was their commander, a dazzling young Muzalim-i-sani, the Ottoman equivalent of a second lieutenant, who not only wore boots but, against all odds, had somehow managed to wax his moustache.

  The machine he was in charge of was even more gleaming, for its barrel was the brass shell-case that had once contained the propellant for a British 18-pounder. This had been set into a carved wooden stock like an outsized rifle butt, and the whole edifice was mounted on a bi-pod that appeared to have been hammered out at a farrier’s campaign forge. It reminded Weidinger of those pen-and-ink drawings of medieval siege machinery that used to enliven the pages of his history text books.

  ‘Does it work?’ von Falkenhayn wanted to know.

  ‘Certainly, General,’ grinned the Muzalim-i-sani. ‘It is a good weapon.’ He spoke passable German.

  ‘Well, we’re waiting,’ said the field marshal, ignoring his demotion.

  Two of the crew picked up a bomb. It occurred to Weidinger that the machine did not seem to possess any mechanism capable of adjusting the range.

  ‘Hadn’t we better step back?’ said von Papen. ‘It’s not exactly Krupp.’

  But whether the field marshal might have preferred discretion to a display of confidence at the resourcefulness of the infantry he ultimately commanded the ADC never found out. For at that moment the Muzalim-i-sani yelled fire and the crew dropped the first bomb down the brass spout of their machine. There was an ear-splitting crack, followed by a dull clanging sound as the missile exploded in some low-lying land to the east where the nearest British positions were supposed to be. It was quickly followed by another and then a third.

  ‘If this was France,’ thought Weidinger, ‘we’d get one back for this.’

  ‘Very good,’ said von Falkenhayn.

  ‘How do you adjust the range?’ asked Weidinger, anxious to show the field marshal he had taken an intelligent interest in the proceedings.

  ‘Watch,’ said waxed moustache. He barked out some fresh orders to his men but they were doing his bidding before he had finished. Two of them placed sandbags beneath the legs of the bi-pods and then lay on their stomachs either side of the mortar holding its legs down onto the bags with both hands. The angle of the barrel was now another ten degrees closer to the vertical.

  ‘Fire!’ shouted the Muzalim-i-sani. For the first time Weidinger realised that he said this in German, presumably because he had been trained to use a mortar in that language.

  This time the sound of the outgoing crack and the incoming round were almost one and all the Germans, even the field marshal, found that they had sunk to an involuntary crouch. When they got up their ears were ringing, and it must have been a few seconds before they heard the screams.

  ‘What’s that?’ Weidinger had asked, knowing full well what it was but desperately hoping otherwise.

  Smoke drifted from the forward position where the bomb had landed short, and as it cleared some stretcher bearers could be seen running to the scene. The major and the Muzalim-i-sani scrambled out of the pit and headed in the same direction.

  ‘My God!’ said the field marshal – and to the amazement of all those present he aimed a kick at the mortar, which collapsed off its sandbags as if shot. ‘See to it that this abortion is never used again,’ he yelled at no one in particular. As they strode off he turned to von Papen and said, ‘Mortars, Franz. Make a note of that. They need proper mortars.’

  And von Papen went through the business of extracting his notebook and pencil from the top pocket of his tunic and writing on a fresh page: ‘Beersheba – mortars.’ After a little while the Turkish major, all the good humour drained from his face, caught up with them and led them tight-lipped to the Mercedes staff car where the chauffeur was waiting to issue them all with goggles against the dust.

  ***

  Now they stood in the station-master’s office at Beersheba while the sleeping-car Djemal Pasha had loaned the marshal – ‘like a tart’s bedroom,’ von Falkenhayn had observed when he first glimpsed its divans and piles of silk cushions – was prepared for the journey back.

  The station-master had drawn his blinds against the sun and left his front and back doors open to create a cooling through draught. Nevertheless, it was still stifling in the gloom inside and von Falkenhayn, standing in the yellow bar of light made by the open doors, was constantly dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Apart from the station-master – a small, worried-looking man with an unctuous manner – coming in to remove an upright chair from a desk in the corner, apologising for the disturbance on entry and departure, they were left to their own devices. When the field marshal’s hand went to his forehead both von Papen and Weidinger noticed yellow sweat stains on
the armpit of the third white tunic jacket he had changed into since the tour of his southern front had started almost forty-eight hours before.

  The unit with the home-made mortar had been one of the better examples of the troops at von Falkenhayn’s disposal. There were also some Corset Staves, German and Austrian support troops who were mainly machine-gunners and artillerymen, plus a company of signallers equipped with field telephones and Goertz heliographs. The rest had not been impressive.

  Time and again von Falkenhayn and his party had discovered that what the chips on the Yilderim war-game table represented as an entire infantry regiment turned out to be a bunch of sick, demoralised Arabs or Kurds of half that ration strength – when they got rations. There were hardly any reserves, and those that existed were mostly the mutinous recently conscripted who had to be closely watched in case they deserted en masse. At the end of that last day in Beersheba von Falkenhayn was stressing the need for barbed wire, minefields, extra trenches – defence-in-depth. Von Papen knew then that Yilderim was over.

  Weidinger bid the field marshal and von Papen goodbye on the platform. As he saluted and then warmly shook von Falkenhayn’s proffered hand, he felt rather overcome by the gesture. Somehow that awful business with the mortar had brought them all closer together. ‘Remember, you’re my eyes and ears,’ the old soldier said. ‘Without you I’m like a blind man with an ear trumpet.’

  Von Papen was about to shake hands too when they were all distracted by a commotion at the other end of the platform, where a crowd was gathering.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Weidinger.

  ‘Why don’t we find out?’ said the field marshal.

  They walked towards the crowd. On the way they met the unctuous station-master who had disposed of the chair. He looked rather pale.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Weidinger.