Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  He had intended to send his cavalry up to a place called Tel En Nejile, which was on the main railway line south from Junction Station. It was to have been an ambitious outflanking movement designed to net von Kressenstein’s Eighth Army Corps and some of the Turkish Seventh before they had time to get back to their well-prepared concentric defences in the hills around Jerusalem. Now the khamsin had obliged him to reduce the size of the net. Instead of Tel En Nejile, the cavalry were going to try to advance in a more north-westerly direction and capture Jemmameh and Huj.

  Ponting had himself confirmed that there was adequate water there in a ludicrously simple way. Among the prisoners was a proud young Damascene captain of the 27th Division who had been knocked senseless by a flying hoof when the Light Horse cantered over his trench. He had regained consciousness well after dark when he woke up to find himself pinned down by the bodies of those of his men who had not fled or surrendered in time. Trying to extricate himself he drew the attention of some passing Diggers who, magnanimous in victory, had elected not to kill him but pulled him out and gave him water in exchange for his watch and silver cigarette case.

  By the time he came to Ponting’s attention the Syrian had spent twenty-four hours in the EEF’s field hospital and was probably in better shape than the intelligence officer, who had hardly slept for forty-eight hours. But fortunately for Ponting the Arab, who had finished his education at a Protestant school in Beirut, was anxious to show off his knowledge of English.

  ‘Aren’t you worried, Major,’ he had asked politely, a large grin on his bruised and handsome face, ‘that since you have so many men here in Palestine the Germans will soon be able to march to London?’

  ‘And aren’t you worried,’ Ponting had snapped back, ‘that your army has no decent water supply between here and El Dhaheriye?’

  ‘That is not true,’ the Arab had beamed. ‘The wells at Huj and Jemmameh are bigger than the fountains of paradise.’

  ‘Really? How very interesting. Have a cigarette, Captain.’

  And Ponting had left the crestfallen young officer sucking deeply on one of a specially rolled brand sent to officers in the field in plywood boxes of one thousand by a Mayfair tobacconist.

  Ponting worked solidly over his interrogation reports and maps for another three hours, as all the Corps commanders and GHQ would want copies by dawn in time for their first conference of the day. It was a pity, he mused, that the chances of Daniel confirming any of his theories appeared to be practically nil, unless he somehow found another means of communication.

  At about nine Ponting broke off to take dinner in a room pockmarked by grenade shrapnel, which had been designated the officers’ mess. Dinner was what Ponting called Boeuf à la Fellaheen – bully beef mashed into a stew, to which had been added the beans and onions that were the staple diet of the Egyptian peasant. Hard-tack biscuits were also available. A piece of sacking had been nailed across the broken window and they ate at a long trestle table by the light of candles and hurricane lamps, waited on by two old soldiers, both lance-corporals, who were officially designated clerks.

  ‘There’ll be a mutiny if they serve too much of this slop to the lads,’ said a major in the Black Watch with a patch over an eye that had been sightless since his last visit to Ypres. His name was Archie Wavell. He was on Allenby’s personal staff and reputed to be close to him.

  It was well known that the men always loathed heated bully, much preferring it cold. However, authority had decreed that a fighting man must, whenever possible, be given at least one hot meal a day whether he wanted it that way or not. Bully contained a good deal of fat and boiling it made a greasy dish, guaranteed to sort out the hungry from the merely social eaters.

  Ponting was in fact ravenous although one would not have thought so to watch the controlled mastication before he raised the next forkful. The only indication of his hunger was the way he mopped up some of the remains of the stew on one of the hard-tack biscuits.

  ‘No complaints from you anyway,’ observed Wavell.

  ‘Well, it’s not the Ritz,’ said Ponting. ‘As a matter of fact it’s not even Shepheard’s, but I get so damn hungry I could eat a horse.’

  ‘You probably just have,’ grinned Wavell.

  ‘Shush!’ said Ponting. And then in a stage whisper, ‘There might be a cavalryman about.’

  In fact, there was almost nobody but cavalrymen about. Most of the other diners belonged to the staff of Harry Chauvel’s Desert Mounted Corps or were visiting line officers who had dropped in on the off-chance of a meal. They looked like men who had spent the best part of a week locked in a desert trying to prevent 27,000 horses from dying of thirst. ‘It couldn’t have been one of ours. They’re so bloody dry they’d choke you,’ said a New Zealand captain with black rings of weariness round his eyes.

  ‘I’m told the Fifth aren’t much better off, and they’re in the van tomorrow,’ said Wavell. Ponting looked slightly alarmed at all this talking shop in the mess, even if they were within range of the enemy’s guns.

  ‘About time somebody else had a chance!’ exclaimed another captain seated at the far end of the table. Ponting looked up and saw a square-jawed fox-hunter well into the nursery slopes of middle age, as was typical of the Yeomanry. ‘About time somebody else had a chance. The Light Horse are the only ones who’ve had a decent charge, and we’ll have the rains soon.’

  ‘And we’re not even cavalry, Mr Valintine,’ said an Australian voice. ‘Just poor bloody mounted infantry. Some of my boys got bloody backache they had to lean so far over to get at those Turks with their bayonets.’

  ‘We feel for you,’ laughed Wavell. ‘We’ll have to get you some proper prongs just like the Fifth Mounted Brigade. Nice long ones.’

  ‘Not too soon,’ said the master of foxhounds in a captain’s uniform. There was a smudge of campaign ribbons from the South African war on his tunic. ‘Give somebody else a chance first. It’s only fair.’

  ‘It could be too late,’ said the Australian, lighting up a cigarette – which would have been unthinkable behaviour at table in most British regimental messes even if the ‘meal’ was finished. ‘They seem to be on the run.’

  At that moment there was a particularly loud wheee-crump of an incoming shell, which probably landed on the nearest British positions north along the Hebron road, about a mile away. Everybody laughed.

  ‘Perhaps not all of them,’ said Ponting and, always willing to adapt, lit up one of his own.

  ***

  Later he slept fitfully on a camp-bed his batman had made up alongside his desk – the man had only put on one blanket, and the temperature dropped enough at night to warrant two. Once he was woken by a telephone call from Meinertzhagen, who urged him to pick up any information he could from captured officers about persecution of the Jewish colonists since Balfour’s declaration promising a homeland. ‘It’s not gone down too well with Djemal Pasha,’ Meinertzhagen had said. Ponting wondered how well it had gone down with the Palestinian Arabs.

  At about one he came shivering into consciousness again, with the blanket on the floor. He had been drawn out of his dreams by a persistent humming, almost a dirge. Then he caught the clip-clop of horses and realised he was listening to the Yeomanry moving out, singing words that some wag, amused at yet another night ride, had probably started up out of a sense of irony. But they caught the mood and were taken up along the length of the column – which was hardly surprising since they belonged, after all, to one of the most popular songs of the war.

  There’s a long, long trail a-winding,

  Into the land of my dreams,

  Where the nightingale is singing,

  And the white moon beams

  There’s a long, long night of waiting,

  Until my dreams all come true,

  Till the day when I’ll be going down,

  That long, long, trail with you.

  2

  Etline Junction: 5 November 1917

  ***

&nbs
p; Morning conference in the map-room at the Turkish Eighth Army’s new headquarters was interrupted by an air raid – the second in twenty-four hours.

  The day before when, because of some oversight, no air raid lookouts had been posted, the Royal Flying Corps had taken them by surprise. Bristol Fighters had come in with the rising sun shortly after dawn just in time to catch the headquarters platoon paraded around the flagstaff for the raising of the Imperial Eagle. Casualties had included a recently-arrived Oberleutnant who was supposed to replace Weidinger.

  ‘Where the hell are our aeroplanes?’ Kress von Kressenstein asked Krag. They were among the last of the German and Turkish officers to find a friendly dugout. Krag landed almost on top of a portly clerk, while outside the first of the Royal Flying Corps’ bombs exploded, followed by long bursts of machine-gun fire.

  ‘Berlin thinks we can manage without them like we manage without everything else,’ said Krag glumly. He had just returned from a trip to the Gaza sector to find von Papen’s telegrams waiting, and his mood would have been morose enough without the RFC’s intervention.

  ‘If we had had a couple of squadrons of Fokkers,’ said Kress quietly, ‘we might have discovered that Allenby had moved his cavalry to the Beersheba flank.’

  On this fifth day of the battle it was already quite plain to Kress that they were not going to be able to hold the British. All they could do now was launch a limited counter-attack and hope it would knock them off balance enough to organise that most difficult of all military manoeuvres, a general retreat. The loss of Beersheba to General Grant’s Australian Light Horse on the first day had been crucial. It had knocked a hole in their line which they had not been able to plug.

  The Australians in their plumed slouch hats, which always reminded Kress of the chevaliers’ costumes Bavarians donned during autumn pageants, had captured the town on Day One. They came at dusk in a mad charge, swinging low in the saddle and slashing at the Syrian 27th Division with their seventeen-inch bayonets, the nearest thing these mounted infantry had to the swords of the Yeomanry.

  The 27th had watched them approach and had expected them to dismount once they were within rifle range and to come skirmishing in, one platoon giving covering fire while the other advanced. These were normal tactics for mounted infantry.

  Even when they kept on coming, entrenched riflemen should have murdered the Australians. Instead, they had been so transfixed by the great cloud of dust bearing down on them that they failed to adjust the sights on their Mausers. They were still firing with rifles set for 800 metres when the colonials were only half that distance away and about to let out a baying ‘Hurrah’ that the surviving infantry would remember until their dying days.

  The noise of an aircraft intensified, and then Krag felt the friendly tug that a nearby explosion gives to clothes in that half second before the sound catches up. When the bang did come it had them all crouched on the floor of the dugout with their hands on their heads, while great curtains of sand fell from between the roof beams. It powdered their hair, mingled with the sweat down the necks of tunics, and started a dust storm. Someone began a bronchial coughing. Krag fancied the entrance to their hole darkened with the shadow of the aircraft as it pulled out of its dive. Beside him the fat clerk murmured, ‘No, no,’ almost as if he was trying to reason with a child.

  An anti-aircraft pom-pom opened up. It had been set up on the flat roof of a building the signals section had requisitioned as their wireless and telegraph station, and was crewed by some of the reinforcements von Falkenhayn had squeezed out of the High Command for his now defunct Yilderim scheme.

  ‘They took their time,’ grumbled Kress, who nonetheless started back up the rough stairs of the dugout, ashamed to be taking cover while some of his command faced the enemy, however irrelevant his own presence. Nobody followed him. Only when the explosions stopped and the engine noises had subsided to distant and discordant hummings did Krag and the others emerge, dusting themselves down, to find Kress handing out cigars to the anti-aircraft crew.

  They soon saw why. About a mile to the south a tall column of dirty black smoke was rising from a spot near the railway tracks. ‘That’s one Englishman who won’t be following the lines home,’ said Kress while the victorious Feldwebel in charge of the anti-aircraft gun carefully held a lucifer to the cigar the colonel had saved for himself.

  They all walked over towards a brick-built bungalow. Substantial by Etline standards, it was the station-master’s residence. This official now lived in a tent pitched behind his home, and his family had evacuated to Jaffa. Just outside the front door some Syrian soldiers were prodding gingerly with their bayonets at a small unexploded bomb, its yellow fins protruding jauntily out of the red earth. Krag ordered them to stop and sent a runner for the well-boring engineer, the only person he could think of who was in any way qualified to deal with it. They would have to dig it out before they could defuse it.

  The officers went inside to resume the briefing. A couple of Turkish stretcher-bearers went by carrying a dark, quivering bundle which even the veterans – especially the veterans – contrived not to see. From the horse lines, near a grove of dusty-leaved olives, came the sound of pistol and carbine shots: some cavalrymen were finishing off five remounts.

  Otherwise, the casualties appeared to have been light, thought Krag. Most of the bombs had landed wide of the headquarters buildings, although not a single pane of its glass remained intact and just below the anti-aircraft gun three feet of the wall had been neatly embroidered by the Bristol’s .303 machine-guns.

  Some bell-tents in the German lines had also suffered the effects of a near miss. Krag’s tent had been toppled by blast, and books, papers, maps and bits of uniform were scattered over a wide area. His batman was going around picking them up. He had got within two metres of Maeltzer’s diary when Weidinger and the Widow Shemsi turned up.

  They had met on a night train down from Jerusalem. Night trains were a recent innovation because of the increase in air raids on the railways, and neither side flew at night in Palestine. Their particular train had been crammed with a German-trained Turkish shock-troop battalion – military athletes in coal-scuttle helmets.

  The train took hours longer than it should have done to grumble down the gradient to Junction Station. Normally, the journey could be done in less than three hours but now there were frequent stops while a platoon, accommodated in a cattle truck immediately behind the locomotive’s coal tender, went forward with swinging hurricane lamps to check the line for tulip mines. Ever since Allenby’s offensive had started Palestine was supposed to be brimming over with British agents and saboteurs, and rifle shots were becoming the norm after dark in places miles away from the front. Lishansky was still at large. Reward posters for him were everywhere.

  They came into Junction Station with the first faint streaks of dawn. Stretcher cases were being unloaded from an ambulance train which had then been shunted into a siding. As they approached they could sense the urgency in the firefly bobbing of the lamps carried by the doctors and orderlies moving among an array of dark bundles on the platform. Afterwards, it seemed to the Widow Shemsi that she had heard the groaning long before their locomotive hissed to a halt.

  There were about two hundred wounded from the Gaza sector. Most had been hit by shellfire, victims of the diversionary barrage that had included a demonstration of Anglo-French naval power. Some of them had been on the ambulance train since the previous afternoon when they were jolted up to the south-western terminus at Deir Sineid in the back of horse-drawn ambulances. They had then waited for over eight hours while all the carriages were filled before the train rattled its way up the thirty kilometres of permanent way to Junction Station. Some had already succumbed to their wounds, and others were dying. There had not been enough orderlies to tend them. There had not been enough water. Many of them lay in their own filth, and some were in so much pain that even the natural stoicism of the Anatolian had broken down.

  Weiding
er helped the Widow Shemsi down with her Gladstone bag and two hat-boxes. She alighted wearing a straw concoction with a green plume, its front brim pushed back and up in a manner which reminded Weidinger of a Mexican bandit. Shemsi was due to change here for the northbound train through Lod to Ras el Ain where horse buggies were said to be available to take passengers to Jaffa.

  ‘My God!’ she said when she was on the platform. ‘This is horrible. Why doesn’t somebody do something?’

  ‘I think we’d better get you out of here,’ said Weidinger, who realised that they had landed in the middle of a charnel house.

  Shemsi had turned to go when her skirt seemed to catch on something. She looked down and saw that a hand had attached itself to the hem. At her feet lay a teenaged Turk, asking for water. ‘Please, sister,’ he was saying. ‘Could I have some water? Please, sister.’

  An orderly, a Syrian, came up and snatched his hand away. ‘Wait. There are others!’ he snapped in what Shemsi recognised as Beiruti-accented Turkish. The soldier lay back without a word.

  ‘Come on, this way,’ said Weidinger, pointing to a well-lit brick building which he imagined must be where Authority dwelt. He spoke in a rougher tone than he intended, convinced that his train would pull out and leave him stranded if he failed to galvanise the woman sufficiently.

  ‘Not until I’ve got this boy some water,’ said the Widow Shemsi firmly.

  ‘Madame,’ pleaded Weidinger. ‘They all want water.’

  But she had already turned back towards their train, going to the overcrowded trucks and broken-down carriages behind the officers’ car, where the heads of the storm troopers clustered at doors and windows like bunches of grapes. Some of them were throwing cigarettes to the less badly injured.

  She came back with a full water-bottle and knelt besides the private who had clutched her skirt. He drank greedily.

  ‘Not too much,’ urged Weidinger. ‘He may have a stomach wound.’