by Colin Smith
Krag noted that the Turks began to look concerned again.
Kress paused to let what he had just said sink in and then suddenly dismissed them. ‘Well, that’ll be all, gentlemen,’ he said.
Krag watched them file out past the well-borer and his party, who continued to swing their tools like men accustomed to more bluntly agricultural pursuits.
Kress was also looking at the stiff, retreating backs. ‘I don’t think the gallant allies were very happy this morning, Krag,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir. They want you to save a piece of their empire for them but pretend you didn’t do it.’
‘I know,’ sighed Kress. ‘They would also like the Kaiser to lend them all his aeroplanes for a month or so. Mind you, we probably wouldn’t have been caught on the wrong foot at Beersheba if we had had a few more, however many staff officer’s haversacks the British delivered us.’
‘You believe the documents Weidinger’s patrol found were fake?’
‘I do now. Don’t you?’
‘Perhaps it was a bit too easy,’ said Krag, after a moment’s hesitation.
‘It’s possible it’s some sort of double bluff, I suppose.’ Kress had turned and was staring once again at his map on the easel. ‘All the briefings I have received from Berlin informed me that this man Allenby was a heavyweight cavalryman of the English fox-hunting school. Brave, and perhaps capable of displaying a little dash in minor tactical matters, but hardly a Clausewitz. You know the breed I’m talking about, Major?’
‘Ah yes,’ said Krag. ‘The English gentleman.’ He did too. As a young officer with Liman von Sanders’s military mission in Constantinople Krag had frequently socialised with the English. The French and Russians too. Even the Americans. It was all part of the business of spying on each other.
‘Well, he obviously has somebody on his staff with a brain. Somebody who likes tricks,’ mused Kress. ‘I know I’ve just told the Turks what von Falkenhayn thinks and where his counter-attack is going to go, but I’m still not certain the field marshal is right about Beersheba. If another of our divisions is transferred to Seventh Army it could well be that Allenby will make his main thrust along the coast after all.
‘The point is the English have so many men at their disposal. I don’t suppose Allenby has even begun to commit his reserves yet. It could even be his intention to hammer away at both flanks and then put his reserves at whichever door shows the most signs of breaking down.
‘But we don’t have that many men, so we will have to be prepared to move in either direction. That’s why Sheria and Huj are important. In fact, what I would like you to do is have a good look at the central sector. You could start at Sheria. Get the first train down there you can. If there isn’t one take one of the staff cars.
‘Once you’ve had a look around there move over to Huj and see if those ammunition stockpiles I was talking about are building up properly. I don’t know about Huj but there is definitely a wireless and telegraph at Sheria and Deir Sineid. If you get moving you should be able to send a ciphered situation report back to me tonight. Use telegraph rather than wireless if you can. I don’t trust the wireless. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve got our codes. If not from Maeltzer, from somebody else. Try not to take too long. Couple of days should do it. I need you back here.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Krag who clicked his heels with an enthusiasm associated with a much more junior officer before striding out.
Kress watched him go and thought, he’s a good man but he doesn’t like me – which doesn’t matter all that much, though it would have been pleasant to have more rapport with my chief intelligence officer. He found himself comparing Krag with von Papen, who would have departed with a little less abuse of his footwear. Then Kress von Kressenstein frowned, annoyed with himself. It was, after all, unworthy thoughts such as these that had made Krag the way he was.
Krag had not quite left the station-master’s bungalow when the unexploded English bomb went off – as he had always known it would do. He was blown through the doorway and lay on his back across the threshold for a few seconds listening to the sound of bodies falling all round him. One landed with a terrible thump at the bottom of the porch steps. He looked down to see a headless trunk covered in scraps of uniform, its innards oozing out like sand. Then he realised it was sand and that it was one of the sandbags with which the well-borer had covered the bomb.
As he was getting to his feet, Kress arrived. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.
‘Thank you – I’m all right sir,’ said Krag. ‘Those damn fools with the pick-axes – the vibration must have set it off.’
They both squinted at the spot where the bomb had been but an ochre-coloured cloud had settled over the place like a smoke-screen and visibility was down to a few feet. Gradually, they made out more split sandbags and figures getting shakily to their feet. Both Kress and Krag recognised the bearded drill-borer among them. There was no screaming or moaning. It seemed that by some miracle casualties had been confined to sandbags.
The yellowish fog prevented them from seeing Weidinger and the Widow Shemsi, who had been at the periphery of the blast and were now dusting themselves off. They were still about four hundred metres away when Krag began to return to his tent to throw what he needed into a grip for his journey down to Huj. He went by a different and more direct route than the one his pursuers had meandered along to the commandeered station-master’s bungalow.
In the few seconds it took Shemsi and Weidinger to complete their journey Kress had also departed, bound for a nearby airfield. He was hoping that the personal touch might squeeze some more reconnaissance missions out of a bone-weary squadron commander. While Weidinger tried to find Krag, the Widow Shemsi flopped into a cane chair on the bungalow’s porch, grateful to be spared the kind of butcher-shop scenes for which she had been steeling herself.
When they got back to Krag’s tent, which was now upright again, his servant informed them that he had just left for Huj in a staff car.
‘Did you tell the major we had called?’
‘No, sir. I thought you must have met up with him after you left here.’ The servant looked a bit sheepish.
‘Did Major Krag take any papers with him?’
‘A few, sir. Maps and suchlike.’
The tent’s front flaps were open. Weidinger glanced inside to see if he could see the diary, but even if it had been lying on the camp table or the low canvas bed with its neatly refolded blankets and mosquito net – which it was not – he would have been as constrained about taking it as he was when he first saw it. For that he needed Krag’s permission, and to get it he could either wait for him to return or go and find him.
As far as Weidinger was concerned there could only be one possible course of action. Huj was nearer the front and a battle was on. Somehow he might yet be able to redeem himself. The diary was not important. What was important was getting closer to the sound of guns. Perhaps he could even get involved with some cavalry. Once again he gave up heartfelt thanks that von Papen disliked Krag as much as the rest of them – which was what this obsession with Maeltzer’s diary was really all about.
Before he left he went to the headquarters’ signals office and wrote out a message for von Papen which he passed to one of the telegraphists there. It read: ‘MAJOR KRAG NOW AT HUJ WITH DIARY STOP AM FOLLOWING.’
3
Jerusalem Citadel: 6 November 1917
***
Maeltzer heard the fajr prayer as usual and then, just before dawn, he dreamed. They were sudden, small dreams that dissolved into each other so quickly that he quite forgot what linked them. First he dreamed he was a boy again in Switzerland living in the little red-gabled house with the pointed roof that went with the position his father held at the clinic. There was snow and he was lying on his stomach on a small green toboggan which his father was pushing down a slight slope that spring would reveal to be the meadow where the cow grazed.
Maeltzer had on a woollen hat and scarf and mitte
ns attached to a string around his neck so that he wouldn’t lose them. His father sported a check peaked cap of the kind English gentlemen wore, although he knew beneath it would be the maroon yarmoulka.
It was cold. He could feel how cold it was by touching his nose with the back of his wrist where there was a space between his mitten and his fur-lined jacket. As the sledge gathered speed he looked behind him and saw that his father’s breath was coming out in great white clouds. ‘You’re breathing like a train, Papa!’ he said. And he could see that the parent was delighted with the metaphor. Such precocity! The boy would go far! In his exuberance the man gave the sledge an extra hard shove so that it went so fast he was unable to keep up with it. It went careering off towards the snow-covered wooden fence at the bottom of the meadow, which had now grown steeper.
At first the child Maeltzer was thrilled by the way the toboggan’s runners sprayed the loose snow into his face. He looked back for his father but all he saw was the rushing whiteness. Then he was going faster and faster like the way his father had told him the mad English milords went down their ice tunnel at Cresta. He heard himself squealing in terror. The little green toboggan swayed from side to side and he knew that his only hope was to throw himself into the soft snow before he hit the fence. Yet he seemed to be paralysed with fear and gripped the wooden sides of the machine harder than ever. He could no longer even squeal. Instead, a soundless shriek rose from his throat as he approached his nemesis. At any moment he would have to pay for the cowardice which kept him glued firmly to the sledge.
Then, at the last second, in one stomach-turning transition, almost a metamorphosis, he escaped certain death by becoming airborne. Still on the toboggan he began to soar above the red-gabled house, saw his father waving to him as if he had intended this levitation all along. The flight continued and now he was floating over a valley which contained a quiltwork of green and yellow fields, so clear of snow they must have been in another country. He hovered like a hawk over this valley for some time, felt the friendly warmth of the sun on his back, and was beginning to fall into a gentle doze when the sky darkened and he heard the beating of the wings before he felt their draught in his face.
They appeared to be some sort of huge seabirds, albatrosses perhaps, and they swooped flapping and cawing, their filthy yellow beaks jabbing towards his eyes. At first he tried to beat them off with his fists, large fists for he had grown back into the adult Maeltzer. But their bills were razor-sharp and gashed his knuckles, so that in the end all he could do was put his head down and his hands over his face. He felt the grip of the talons on his shoulder and was wrenched off the toboggan. He fell with the bird, watched the ground come up. It was dark green; the tops of trees.
He was in a wood with Ilse, the daughter of his German teacher from school, a man he still feared and respected although he had now left the gymnasium and was studying modern history and philosophy at Zürich University. They were having a picnic in a small, grassy clearing. Ilse was eighteen and attending a nearby finishing school. She had high Slavic-looking cheekbones and rather thick pouting lips, a bit like the Widow Shemsi. There was an auburn glint in her dark hair which she had put up into a bun. She said, ‘That chocolate gâteau, Carl – it was delicious.’
Her brown eyes flashed and as she turned towards him he caught the glint of the silver crucifix she wore at her throat. He offered her some more of the cake and refilled her glass of wine. They were lying on their sides facing each other on a tartan rug together with some plates and glasses that had stealthily been placed towards the edges, so that there was increasingly less space between them. His excitement at having this unchaperoned meeting with his darling Ilse was immense. The lies she must have told to arrange it! They were now practically hip to hip.
The top two buttons of her blouse were undone; somehow the crucifix had slipped down and planted itself in her cleavage. He picked it up and put it to his lips. When he looked up he saw that she was looking at him in a tender, quizzical way. They kissed, gently at first and gazing into each other’s eyes, but these soon became great passionate tonguings that glued them together in unseeing bliss. He became aware of the monstrous swelling between his legs. He moved slightly forward so that the painful bulge was touching Ilse. Had she noticed? He pushed a little harder. To his amazement she pushed back, ambiguously at first but soon with a quite definite pelvic certainty.
Still joined by their lips his right hand went to her hair as he began to search for the pins that kept her bun in place. To his astonishment he found the entire device was held together by a single large hatpin. He pulled it out and as her hair came down felt her arms enfold him. He pushed her down onto the tartan rug and moved on top. His left hand was under her skirt now, under her skirt and under her other clothing and up on her thigh and then to the warm, moist place. He felt her legs begin to part. The grip on his shoulders became stronger, more urgent, talon-like. Then he became aware of movement above him and knew that the great bird was back on his shoulders pulling him away from Ilse. She tried to hold onto him but the bird proved too powerful. He saw the look of horror come over her face as he was pulled away – except that it was not Ilse’s girlish beauty he was looking at, but the mature features of the Widow Shemsi.
Maeltzer woke up then, the hand on his shoulder becoming more persistent. His own right hand was still on the Widow Shemsi’s hatpin where he had hidden it in the palliasse. He let it go and turned over onto his back. Above him somebody was holding an oil lantern. He squinted into the light and saw that it was the portly Austrian prelate, Liebermann. Behind him were some Turkish soldiers, one of them an officer. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Liebermann. ‘It’s time.’
‘What?’ said Maeltzer. He was still with Ilse or Shemsi.
‘It’s time – I’m sorry.’ The priest looked embarrassed.
For a moment Maeltzer thought he might still be dreaming. Then he took stock of the waiting soldiers and some other shadowy figures behind the cleric and realised what he was trying to tell him.
‘Now?’ he asked. Fear was beginning to flood through him. ‘Why no warning? I don’t understand.’ He made it sound as if it would be all right if he understood but as he didn’t it was truly unthinkable. ‘Why now?’
‘Orders from Damascus, I think.’
‘At night? They’re going to do it at night? In the dark?’
‘It’s almost dawn.’
‘Of course, I heard the fajr prayer. I always do.’
‘At least you had sleep,’ said Liebermann, who was secretly relieved that the Turks had not allowed him some agonising death watch in which he would have been obliged to have tried to save Maeltzer’s soul for eternity. Normally, he would have been outraged by any authority which failed to give a condemned man at least twenty-four hours to prepare himself for his Maker. As it was, he was still convinced that this spy would be more comforted by having a rabbi on his last walk along the battlement to the noose that awaited him above the Damascus Gate.
However, Liebermann knew his duty. ‘Wouldn’t it be better,’ he inquired gently, sitting himself down at the edge of the palliasse, ‘if you met your God repentant and cleansed of your sins? If you are the spy Daniel then surely now is the time to confess it?’
‘Oh my God!’ cried Maeltzer, burying his face in his hands and then turning back onto his stomach.
Liebermann put his hand on his shoulder. Maeltzer was reminded of the dream bird. He plunged his fists into both sides of the palliasse and hung on the way he had clung to his flying toboggan.
‘Death comes to us all,’ said the Austrian. ‘Be brave. You will only make it worse for yourself.’
But Maeltzer seemed to sink deeper into the palliasse.
Behind the priest the officer in charge of the escort, an elderly and befezzed major who had spent a good part of his career hanging men before breakfast on behalf of his Sultan, was beginning to get impatient.
‘We cannot wait forever, Father,’ he said, in passable German, f
ingering the guard of the short sabre he was wearing. ‘If the prisoner is unable to get to his feet I shall instruct my men to assist him. He will not be the first man to be carried to the gallows.’
There was a brief flurry of movement. Liebermann screamed, stood up and then began to stagger back across the cell, clutching his right bicep. ‘Good God!’ he shrieked. ‘He’s stabbed me.’
Maeltzer was on his feet, his right fist balled, and in the half light the major did not see the Widow Shemsi’s hatpin contained in it although he felt it quickly enough. Its tip just pierced his colon and would have done more damage had the organ not been protected by the waist lard of middle age. The Swiss left it there and removed the major’s sabre from its scabbard while its owner was pulling incredulously at the excruciating slither of steel that now grew from his navel.
Once he had the weapon in his hand, Maeltzer’s first action was to deliver a slashing blow at the officer’s neck. The Turk saw it coming and tried to fend it off with his arm, which was almost severed below the elbow as a result.
Maeltzer then made a dash for the door, elated by his own courage. He had jumped from the toboggan after all. He was practically through when the soldiers, initially stunned by the speed of events, came to their senses. They went for the big man with their rifle butts and, once he was down, with their feet. An NCO finished it with a blow from a brass-ended butt to the head that could well have deprived the hangman of his morning’s work.
Both Liebermann and the major, the latter bleeding profusely from his hacked forearm, had been carried away to the infirmary and the Turks were trying to revive Maeltzer with bucket of cold water when a breathless von Papen entered waving a piece of paper. He had arrived at the Citadel with the dawn, a good ten minutes after the hour fixed for execution, and feared he was too late. When he saw Maeltzer lying on the stone floor his first thought was that the hanging had taken place, and that the Turks had brought the body back to the cell for some macabre rite. It took a while to convince the Turks that the piece of paper in his hand was a telegram from Damascus ordering a stay of execution. Von Papen had secured it after Weidinger had confirmed the existence of the diary in his telegram from Etline. A reprieve would take a little longer – if Maeltzer survived a broken skull.