Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Aren’t some of the Zionists like that?’ asked the Widow Shemsi, who was adjusting her hat again.

  ‘I believe so, but I’m not a Zionist – though if I were I would support the Germans because they’re the people who’ll make sure that the Turks aren’t too hard on the Jews here despite this Aaronsohn business.’

  ‘The way they did with the Armenians, you mean?’ She quite shocked herself with this. It was the sort of thing Krag would have said.

  ‘That was different,’ said Maeltzer. ‘In the last month German influence has become much stronger. They have to do what they tell them. No, the Zionists will be all right as long as the British don’t win. I think Jabotinsky and the others are fools to trust the British. They probably won’t even let them be a self-governing colony. It might give some of their older imperial subjects ideas. Personally, I hope the Germans don’t put too much pressure on the Turks to give the Jews a homeland. I don’t subscribe to this Altneueland nonsense.

  ‘But the reason that I don’t advertise my Jewishness is not because I am ashamed of what I was born, although I’ll admit that it is more convenient to be a Catholic. It is still amazing the prejudice one encounters in even the most enlightened and convivial circles. No, it is because I regard myself as a fully assimilated European. I’m a German-speaking Swiss and I wish to live out my days there. I don’t want to be told that there is only one country for a Jew and that is Uganda or Palestine or whatever other pestilential spot some European power has decided it might be convenient to plant us.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m making speeches at you. I’ve been here for too long on my own. Too much time to think.’

  She brushed the back of his hand again. Just the lightest of touches. It could almost have been accidental.

  ‘Herr Maeltzer,’ she said, and he fancied that her moist eyes sparkled. ‘I like your speeches. I’m not sure I believe everything you say, but I hope they don’t hang you.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said Maeltzer. ‘At least that’s something we have in common.’

  She rose then and kissed him gently on the forehead, like a sister or a daughter. Before he could get properly to his feet she had gone, leaving a faint scent of eau de cologne behind. And something else.

  After the guard had locked the door Maeltzer noticed it gleaming on the floor near the chair she had been sitting on. He picked it up, pricking his finger in the process. It was the hatpin. At least six inches long, with an imitation pearl top, it was the kind of hatpin that ladies had been known to preserve their honour with.

  Maeltzer wondered whether it had been left there by accident or design. Surely she didn’t intend it to be his last resort before the hangman? He decided it had to be an accident. By her lights she had risked enough already by visiting him.

  He looked around his cell for a hiding-place. After a moment’s hesitation, he plunged it into the side of his palliasse near the spot where he rested his head. Maeltzer lay there for a second or two, exploring the straw with his fingers until he discovered the pin’s rounded top. After a couple of tries, he found he could do it quite easily.

  15

  Jerusalem: 31 October 1917

  ***

  ‘Have you seen Maeltzer since the tribunal?’ von Papen asked Weidinger.

  ‘Sir, two rats have ruined my career. One I shot, and I wish to God I could shoot the other. As I can’t, the only place I want to see him again is on the gallows.’

  ‘Two rats?’ Von Papen’s curiosity was aroused. This ruined young man . . . how could anyone have behaved so foolishly?

  ‘The first one bit me in the arm. This arm.’ Weidinger slapped his empty sleeve. ‘It was in the Champagne sector. My regiment were serving as infantry. It wasn’t ideal, but we had hardly seen any action after the first month of the war and most of us welcomed it. At least we would be doing something better than trying to protect our horses from air raids.

  ‘We were expecting a French attack. They were trying to take the pressure off Verdun. Two nights before it happened I was bitten by a rat while sleeping. You probably know, it happens all the time in France. They feed on the dead and in latrines, and they’re in every dugout. We had just taken over and the previous unit, Bavarians I think, had been a bit slack over sanitation. Anyway, I found the damn thing with a flashlight and shot it with my Luger.

  ‘I thought nothing of it. But the next morning the bite had begun to fester and the arm to swell. I swabbed it with brandy and put a wound dressing on it. The following day it was really getting painful and was obviously badly infected. I suppose it had taken quite a bite. You see, it wasn’t attacking me. It was trying to eat me, mistaking me for a corpse. It must have been a very old and stupid rat. Not like Maeltzer at all.’

  Von Papen grimaced. He found himself wondering how Weidinger could have gone through all this and still remain so in love with his chosen profession.

  ‘I showed it to our medical officer who put a dressing on but told me I should go to the divisional field hospital and get it properly treated. But, of course, I didn’t go. We were expecting an attack and I wanted to be with my men. I got one of our own stretcher-bearers to drain and dress it as best he could.

  ‘The next day the attack came. The French took part of our line. Our regiment was virtually cut off for eight days. We had to bring everything up at night.

  ‘By the time we were relieved I was lying among the wounded. I had hardly received a scratch from the poilus; some grenade splinters in the leg, that’s all. But I had an extremely high temperature and was almost crazy with pain from the rat bite, which was throbbing like a thousand toothaches. I was practically delirious. One of the orderlies thought I might even have rabies. The field hospital was in a church. Lines of us were waiting outside on stretchers for the surgeon. It was raining – drizzle at first but then suddenly it got heavy, almost as if I was lying under a waterfall. I looked up and saw the water gushing out of the mouth of this corner gargoyle right onto the end of my stretcher which was soon full of water. I just lay there looking at it until some orderlies spotted what was happening and moved me. I remember that very clearly out of my delirium.

  ‘When my turn came it was night. I vaguely recall the smell of the oil lamps in the operating theatre before the chloroform knocked me out. They told me afterwards that it had turned gangrenous. A doctor friend of my father’s told him that he thought the arm could probably have been saved had it been properly drained, but it was late and the sawbones had had a very hard day. A decision had to be made. I’m not bitter. At least, I used not to be bitter. It could have been a shell. It happened to be a rat. And rats don’t rate Iron Crosses.

  ‘Maeltzer was the other rat in my life, the biggest and the cleverest. Perhaps I was a little indiscreet with him at times, but nothing stupid – and there were things Kress wanted to get into a neutral newspaper. I always had complete confidence in Maeltzer because he was so whole-heartedly on our side. None of your neutral observer there. What an actor, what a chameleon our Jew turned out to be! I had no idea. Now I know it I can see it. But on my oath, I never suspected for one moment that he was Jewish. It just didn’t cross my mind. It should have done because half those socialist swine on the Berlin press before the war were Jews. But somehow Maeltzer, I don’t know. . . .

  ‘The strange thing is I’ve always regarded myself as a good judge of character. When I commanded my first troop in ‘13, my squadron commander congratulated me about the way I handled my men – the way I could tell a good ‘un from a bad ‘un. Not that we get many bad ‘uns in my regiment. But I couldn’t tell this bad ‘un. I think I must have been under a spell. Perhaps I’m only a good judge of German character?’

  Weidinger shrugged, slumped in his chair before von Papen’s desk at Fast’s, the picture of defeat. He was indifferent to the other’s seniority, for he already felt a civilian.

  ‘Being a Jew doesn’t necessarily make him a spy,’ said von Papen. Weidinger found his tone irritating; it reminded him of a school
master.

  ‘The Aaronsohns are only one faction of the Zionists,’ the ADC went on. ‘The headquarters of the movement is still in Copenhagen even if the Rothschilds do try to call the tune.’

  ‘Yes, that may well be,’ said Weidinger, refusing to be mollified. ‘The point is he always made such a damned secret of his Jewishness.’

  Von Papen gave him a quizzical look. ‘Tell me something, would you have been so friendly if you had known he was Jewish?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Then why should he tell you?’

  ‘It was all part of his lies,’ insisted Weidinger.

  ‘Was it? Did he ever tell you he was not Jewish?’

  ‘No. One just assumed.’

  ‘He still denies he is Daniel? Says Krag wrote the secret message on his despatch?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘Extraordinary.’

  ‘He also told me about his diary. Do you remember him keeping a diary?’

  ‘Oh yes. A green-covered exercise book. He was always scribbling away in it. He used to say it was for his memoirs.’

  ‘He claims that everything he ever did of importance was in that journal. People, places . . .’

  ‘Well, that was my impression. Every fart and sneeze he ever made lovingly recorded. Also some mention of the soldiers he encountered in these parts.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be an odd thing for a spy to do though?’ asked von Papen. ‘Surely, if it was a true account, it would be a very odd thing to do?’

  ‘Perhaps it was intended to be camouflage? A lot left out and a lot of lies put in?’ suggested Weidinger. But he was beginning to perk up a bit, sit straighter in his chair.

  ‘It could be. To my mind the odd thing is that it was not produced at the tribunal.’

  ‘I suppose the Turks could have taken it?’

  ‘I’ve asked them and they say they didn’t. I think you would probably agree that doesn’t mean much, but apparently there was no officer on that raid. I can’t imagine some Turkish sergeant or one of his men bothering to pick up a book.’

  ‘So where is it?’

  ‘Good question. Major Krag might know, but he’s no longer here. He went down to the new headquarters at Etline with Kress and the others the day before yesterday.’

  ‘But surely if he had it he would have produced it at the tribunal?’

  ‘Ye-es – unless he didn’t find anything of interest in it.’

  ‘There must have been something of interest in it.’

  ‘Well, one would have thought so,’ said von Papen in a puzzled voice. ‘Then again, perhaps it was, as you said, all farts and sneezes.’

  ‘In this context I should have thought even those could be of interest.’

  ‘Yes, but Major Krag is an experienced intelligence officer. He knows what’s important. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Oh yes, he knows what’s important,’ said Weidinger bleakly. ‘And, of course, he was very pleased with – well, everybody was very pleased with him. Kress in particular. He was delighted that he had cleared up the Daniel Affair.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said von Papen, shuffling some papers on his desk and avoiding the other’s gaze.

  Weidinger sat there, waiting for the other to continue, his posture beginning to return to its former slouch. The pause was in danger of becoming indecent, a yawning punctuation, when the younger man, suddenly upright again, a little bead of sweat forming on his brow, said: ‘You think Maeltzer’s innocent, don’t you? You don’t believe he’s Daniel?’

  The words echoed around the room like a drum.

  ‘I believe there is room for doubt,’ said von Papen, in a prim, rank-pulling tone.

  There were limits, frontiers of behaviour he was not prepared to cross. It was his calculation, his almost total lack of impulse, that made von Papen so much cleverer than people like Weidinger whose emotions were already hitched to the ever-widening pendulum of the incipient manic-depressive.

  The ADC detected some of this and was alarmed to find the old jaunty exterior already so visibly fissured. He wondered whether a man who felt his star had run its course would even be able to accomplish the small thing he now had in mind. He had the look of a young man whose pistol might soon be reaching for his temple. God knows he had seen it often enough before the war with Weidinger’s sort. They were fine with the wind behind them, capable of great physical bravery and endurance. But when it came to more subtle wounds they had little resilience. Humiliation was the worst blow of all.

  ‘And does he still insist that he didn’t murder his holy friend?’

  ‘Yes, he does. He appears to be quite upset about it. He said there was no harm in the man.’

  ‘But if not Maeltzer – who?’

  ‘Well, the motive could have been exactly what we would have assumed it was had Krag – thanks to you, of course – not discovered his involvement with Daniel and the Aaronsohns. Robbery. His empty purse was found some metres away from the body, tossed onto a grave.’

  ‘That could have been anybody – a passing Turk.’

  ‘Do Turks pass through the Jewish cemetery?’

  ‘If they’re looking for a grave to rob they do. Arabs and Turks.’

  Von Papen found himself becoming increasingly irritated by the other’s truculence. He longed to say something like: ‘Pull yourself together and sit up straight, man!’ But what if he didn’t? In any case, he was saving something that would probably correct his posture.

  ‘Well that may be, Oberleutnant. But to get back to the matter at hand, I find this business of the missing diary puzzling. What I want you to do is go down to Etline and deliver Major Krag a note from me asking if he has any idea of its whereabouts. I should tell you that I have already sent him two encoded telegrams but have not yet received any reply. Of course, everybody down at Eighth Army Corps is very busy at the moment and I hesitate to involve Colonel von Kressenstein himself. As you may have heard, since six o’clock this morning he has had the British offensive on his hands.’

  ‘Sir? I heard the bombardment had started at Gaza but –’

  ‘No, not at Gaza. It looks as though you may have been intended to pick up those documents, Weidinger. The bombardment started at Gaza all right but it was the Englishmen’s last trick. Allenby has attacked at Beersheba.’

  PART FOUR: The Plain of Philistia

  1

  Beersheba: 4 November 1917

  ***

  Ponting’s throat was parched, his eyes burned, and his ears felt as though half the Sinai had been poured into them and somebody had rammed in a cork. He had tried to unblock them by squeezing his nose and blowing but it didn’t seem to work. From the hills above him came a series of hollow clanging sounds, as if great sheets of corrugated iron were falling on concrete. The British artillery had been keeping up a steady harassing fire for almost twelve hours now, ever since Allenby had launched the second stage of his offensive at five o’clock that morning, about three days behind schedule. In between the salvoes could be heard the crump of incoming rounds. The Turks might be on the verge of a general retreat, but they did not appear to be short of ammunition.

  The intelligence officer took another guilty swig from his water-bottle, holding down the map it was helping to keep in place as he did so. He was seated at a desk that, exactly a week before, had been used by Ismet Bey’s aide de camp and still bore several traces of that gentleman’s occupation, including a bottle of scent somehow left undrunk by the victorious Australian Light Horse.

  A khamsin wind, that clinging fog of mobile desert dust, had smothered the town ever since the Australians captured it. Apart from reducing visibility and forcing itself into every orifice of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, it had considerably added to Allenby’s water problem and hence to Ponting’s guilt. Every man on the British right flank now seemed to be drinking almost twice the allocated ration of four pints a day.

  Aaronsohn’s ancient wells at Abasan el Kebir and Khalasa, the ones corrobora
ted by no less than Josephus Flavius in the agronomist’s original report to Ponting, had been there all right. Ponting had been present at Abasan el Kebir when Aaronsohn ordered some mystified Royal Engineers to start drilling near a pile of rocks alongside an old camel track.

  At one stage the soldiers had wanted to call it off – and would have done so if Aaronsohn had not begged them to continue, and Ponting had not outranked the officer in charge. And suddenly there it was, yellow and brackish at first because of the amount of topsoil they had dislodged but then, after they had pumped out the first few gallons, marvellously sweet and refreshing: water that had not seen daylight in two thousand years.

  ‘A bleedin’ miracle!’ one of the sweating Sappers had declared. And Aaronsohn had smiled, which Ponting had observed to be a rare thing since his sister’s death – an event which, with Allenby’s blessing, he had taken to retelling to assembled battalions in order to disabuse them of any lingering notions that, unlike the Hun, Johnny Turk was a bit of a gent.

  On the British side of the line the water problem had been solved. It started again once they captured Beersheba. For although the fantastic charge by the Australian Light Horse had resulted in most of the wells in the town being seized before the demolition charges could be fired, they had not lived up to expectations. They simply did not pump enough water. Some of the Australians had had to ride back to Karm to water their horses – a round trip of almost thirty miles.

  Ponting went back to his map. He had before him a deciphered wireless message from GHQ, to Lieutenant-Generals Sir Harry Chauvel and Sir Philip Chetwode, Bart, who were, respectively, commanders of the sector’s cavalry and infantry – in all about 40,000 men. Partly, Ponting was pleased to say, through his own recommendations, based on analysis of interrogation reports of officer prisoners and their revelations about water supplies, Allenby had now modified his plans.