by Colin Smith
4
Tel esh Sheria – Huj Road: 7 November 1917
***
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Weidinger. ‘Better than a sunset.’
It was almost three in the morning. A cloud obscured the moon but in the cabin of the truck the Oberleutnant could see the Widow Shemsi’s face clearly, lit up by the fire which had been started when the stores and ammunition were torched at Tel esh Sheria station. There was also a certain amount of British artillery fire. Weidinger estimated that one round had landed no more than half a kilometre from where they were parked.
‘It’s not my idea of beauty, Herr Weidinger,’ she said, stifling a yawn.
‘Madame,’ intoned Weidinger, ‘when a soldier is retreating he must learn to appreciate the beauty of the scorched earth.’
‘Clausewitz, I suppose?’
‘No. Weidinger.’
They both laughed, and not for the first time he marvelled at her ability to do so, though it was true that she did not always understand the danger she was in unless immediate and dramatic proof was provided. What he had not told her now, for instance, was that it was hoped that the blaze would deprive the English of enough cover to deter them from launching a night attack. This would give the rearguard a chance to escape. Or it would as long as they weren’t outflanked.
Everybody dreaded Allenby’s cavalry might come around the rearguard to descend on soft targets like wolves on the fold – shooting up, for instance, a stationary lorry, which was protected by an amputee armed with a captured revolver and a sleepy overweight driver with a carbine stuffed under his seat. Ahead of them, already on the road to Huj, was an even juicier target: horse artillery on the move, unprotected by either an infantry or a cavalry screen.
They were waiting for Pichler, the Austrian artillery officer who had done so well against the British tanks outside Gaza at Easter. The lorry was the baggage wagon for his gun battery, whose horse-drawn limbers were about half an hour ahead of them.
‘Do you think Hauptmann Pichler has forgotten us?’ she asked.
‘He’s busy,’ said Weidinger.
Pichler was no more than fifty metres away in the dugout of the Turkish commander of the infantry rearguard. They were poring over a map and trying to work out where to put his Skoda guns when they got to Huj. A ridge just outside the oasis seemed the best bet. By first light he was supposed to have his battery in a position where it could cover the latest phase of the withdrawal.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ asked Weidinger.
‘Not as long as you give me one.’
It was the answer he had been expecting. In the last twenty-four hours the Widow Shemsi had abandoned all modesty as far as smoking was concerned. This had quite shocked Weidinger at first. The only females he had ever witnessed using tobacco in public had been common prostitutes. Even so, there had been enough reason for anybody to seek the solace of tobacco since they left Kress’s headquarters at Etline.
She had insisted on accompanying him south despite his objections that it was much too close to the front line and no place for a woman.
‘What am I going to do?’ she had demanded. ‘I can’t get to Jaffa and I can’t stay here.’
‘Madame, I understand your anxiety to see Major Krag but –’
‘No you don’t. You don’t understand at all,’ she had screeched, and the rise in decibel level had greatly added to Weidinger’s discomfort. ‘Don’t you see? I’m responsible. I’m the one who told the major about the lemons. I’m sure that if I hadn’t told him about them – and I can tell you now I wish to God I hadn’t – he would never have suspected Herr Maeltzer.’
‘I see,’ Weidinger had said, although he did not see at all.
‘You know I saw him?’
‘Who?’
‘Herr Maeltzer. I visited him in prison, in the Citadel. He still swears he is innocent.’
‘Condemned men usually do.’
But Weidinger had been impressed. Not with Maeltzer’s continued protestations but her determination. It must have taken a lot of baksheesh to get in there.
‘And now there is this business of his diary. Why wasn’t it produced at the tribunal? Do you suppose it was because it would have shown where Major Krag got –’
Weidinger had interrupted her then. ‘I really don’t think we should speculate on these matters,’ he had said, and said it so sternly that she almost believed him.
‘Surely somebody must think that diary is very important to bother to send you to collect it.’
‘Perhaps,’ Weidinger had conceded in a more conciliatory tone, ‘I don’t know. What I do know is that the evidence against Maeltzer was overwhelming. It wasn’t just your lemons, you know.’
‘Wasn’t he a friend of yours?’
‘I thought he was.’
‘Do you want to see him hang?’
‘If he’s guilty – yes. I would do the job myself.’
‘But you’re saying, “if he’s guilty”. It sounds as if you think there might be some doubt in the matter. Suppose he isn’t? What would you do then?’
But all Weidinger had said was, ‘I think you’re being very foolish. It will not be a comfortable journey.’
He was right. For a start they had been unable to find motor transport. Almost everything powered by an internal combustion engine seemed to be coming the other way, as rear echelons began to anticipate the general retreat. It had to be the train down to Tel esh Sheria, unless one wanted to spend a day in one of the mule-drawn sutlers’ wagons which were doing something that should have been attended to months ago: taking tenting down to the front-line troops, so that they might have dry billets when the rains started and their ranks would not be even further depleted by bronchitis and pneumonia.
British air raids had become so frequent that only the most urgent troop movements took place before dusk. Even so, there were still enough soldiers heading towards the front – some of them rounded up from convalescent centres to reinforce depleted formations – that non-priority passengers such as Weidinger and Shemsi were advised to claim a place hours before departure.
The train they had eventually boarded made their journey from Jerusalem seem like the Berlin-Vienna express. There were three horse boxes, two flat-bedded wagons carrying anti-aircraft guns in case they were caught on an open track in daylight, and a dozen open freight wagons, some with their sides down, crammed with troops.
The officers had been even more crowded because privilege of rank demanded that they travel in the covered guard’s van in the rear, which was much smaller than any of the wagons. There were seats for no more than six people. After a certain amount of glaring on the part of Weidinger a young artillery captain, the most junior of the seated officers, had reluctantly surrendered his place to the Widow Shemsi, having first made it plain that unveiled women travelling with German officers could hardly be expected to be taken seriously.
In theory it should have taken no more than ninety minutes to cover the forty or so kilometres to Tel esh Sheria. But all their malnourished locomotive could manage on its dismal diet of olive wood and camel dung was a ten kilometres an hour crawl. They had been further delayed by the fact that the nearer they got to their destination the more frequently they stopped while fresh inquiries were made as to the whereabouts of the enemy.
By the time they had climbed the gradient up to Tel en Nejile the sound of the artillery fire from the battle raging around Tel el Khuweilfeh was distinctly audible. Weidinger had suspected the Widow Shemsi of being made a little nervous by this although she did her best to hide it. Every time he had caught her eye and raised his eyebrows slightly in a gesture that was meant to say, ‘I told you so’, she had smiled back at him with what he considered uncharacteristic sweetness.
Among the officers was a teenaged Austrian ensign from Pichler’s battery who claimed, despite an alarmingly flavescent appearance, to have got over the attack of jaundice that had found him in hospital in Jerusalem when Allenby start
ed his attack. As they bounced down towards the front like a bunch of city commuters, sometimes obliged to cling onto each other to remain upright despite the train’s slow speed, the ensign told him that he expected to be part of a rearguard action intended to keep the English cavalry at bay until the rain started and flooded wadis did the job for them.
‘Flooded wadis won’t just give the British problems,’ Weidinger had said, suddenly the wise old Frontkampfer before this madly optimistic youth.
It had not been long before the ensign had his eyes opened. When their train pulled into Ameidat station, about eight kilometres from Tel esh Sheria, the wounded were lying all over the platform as they had been at Junction Station. But there the similarity ended. For at Ameidat the stretchers were outnumbered by panic-stricken stragglers from the 27th Division, the routed defenders of Beersheba who had been allowed to hang about the rear areas for almost a week. They were ragged, they were hungry and they had convinced themselves that the British, and particularly the Australians, did not take prisoners. A few of them were still armed. Even before the train came to a halt they were trying to get aboard.
They came hammering on the door of the guard’s van too, but the officers were prepared because some of them had been obliged to travel on the open balconies at both ends of the vehicle and they had seen what was coming. When the doors were opened the stragglers, who were mostly Syrian conscripts, had found themselves facing a line of drawn pistols, Weidinger’s Webley .455 among them. They had begun to back off, until a big man at the rear of the crowd had levelled a Mauser rifle and put a round clean through the torso of a handsome Turkish major standing next to Weidinger which lodged in the right shoulder of a cavalry Muzalim-i-sani standing behind him.
The major, ashen-faced and blood beginning to pour from the exit wound in his back, had sat rather than fallen. Before collapsing onto his back, dead or very nearly so, he had squeezed off a shot that went through the van’s wooden floor.
The sound of his shot had been lost in the return fire, in which Weidinger got off three rounds in so many seconds. The result of this fusillade was two dead Syrians, one of them the major’s murderer, and three wounded badly enough to be unable to move. The survivors fled, telling each other the Prussians were murdering them.
Inside the van the Widow Shemsi had hovered uselessly over the wounded cavalry subaltern. ‘I think we had better leave,’ Weidinger had said, taking her, not all that gently, by the arm. His hand and face had smelt of the burned powder from the big .455 rounds.
Outside, after he had helped her down the steps, she had made her first request for a cigarette.
It was not until then that he had noticed how she was trembling.
That was at Ameidat. Now, seven hours later, he was out of cigarettes and felt obliged to offer one of his precious cheroots. He had discovered that she was just as fond of his dwindling supply of the stock Maeltzer had got his sister to send him from Zürich – a strictly business transaction, he was glad to say, although it had never occurred to him how few Swiss francs the Kaiser’s money bought nowadays.
Weidinger supplied a light by gripping the matchbox in the right corner of his mouth and then extracting a match and striking it outwards on the projecting part of the box. When drunk he had been known to strike them inwards with painful results. He was slightly drunk now. They had both been drinking arak. He moved slightly towards her with the flame and she caught his wrist and brought her head close to his to get to the match so that he caught her scent – some French perfume supplied by Krag, he supposed. No doubt she had felt obliged to be unusually generous with it as their distance between Jerusalem and her last bath increased.
Ameidat had proved to be the terminus. The train did not go any further because the British had managed to bring their big 4.8s, siege artillery, across the Wadi Imleih and were shelling the line south of the station all the way down to Tel esh Sheria. It was the sound of this harassing fire that had panicked the remnants of the 27th Division. But Pichler had sent the baggage lorry to collect his ensign and, since his battery was last reported to be just outside Sheria station, Weidinger decided that they might as well go with it.
When they got to the battery Pichler, apparently his normal cheerful self, confirmed that Krag had left for Huj that afternoon. ‘We’re heading for the same place first thing tomorrow morning – a couple of hours before dawn, I should think,’ he said. ‘I advise you to get some sleep and come along with us. I’m afraid we weren’t expecting any lady visitors just at the moment but I’m sure we can work something out after dinner.’
The Widow Shemsi thought he sounded exactly like somebody coping with an unexpected house guest and was duly impressed. Weidinger could not believe that he was still stuck with this woman.
‘You’ll have to go back,’ he had said.
‘We’re all going back, aren’t we?’ she had inquired innocently. ‘We’re going to Huj, and that’s back.’
He could not argue with this, but he did resolve that if Krag turned out to have left Huj – and with the start he had on them he was fairly certain that this would turn out to be the case – he would send her back to Etline on her own. He was in no hurry to return himself, not while there was a chance of attaching himself to a fighting unit even if it was artillery.
Dinner had been a surprisingly tasty goulash manufactured by a corporal cook from Budapest, a dark-skinned man with long eyelashes whom Pichler called ‘Gypsy’. The only one who didn’t eat was the ensign who excused himself and lay shivering under a greatcoat, apparently unable to get to sleep.
‘Poor boy,’ Shemsi had whispered. ‘He shouldn’t be here.’
‘He doesn’t know what’s good for him.’ Never having had hepatitis Weidinger was quite unable to imagine the nausea and lack of appetite that goes with it.
The officers and Madame Shemsi had dined off metal plates on a table made up from the wooden ammunition boxes that had contained shells. ‘It is very good,’ agreed Shemsi. Like Weidinger she was ravenous. ‘What is it?’
‘Camel,’ grinned Pichler. ‘That riff-raff in the 27th left a lot of their transport animals loose so we shot and butchered a couple for the pot.’
The Widow Shemsi put down her spoon, suddenly full. She had heard that the Bedouin and the Egyptians ate camel but she had no more expected ever to have to eat one herself than to consume another human being. And here were these Europeans acting as though they were weaned on it.
‘I think I’ve got something that will help you digest your dinner,’ Pichler had announced. A bottle of Mount Hermon arak, the best grain spirit of the region, had been produced, together with three tin mugs, and generous tots poured. ‘We saved a wagon-load of this stuff from falling into enemy hands,’ the Austrian had confided.
‘Where was it?’
‘Sheria station. We were ordered to burn it but I thought a case or two might keep the lads’ morale up. And as you may have noticed, it gets cold at night.’
‘In my army you’d get shot,’ Weidinger had said, only half joking, and raised his glass. ‘Prosit!’
The men drank and so, only slightly more slowly, did the Widow Shemsi. After a while they began to drink toasts: to the Kaiser – may God protect him! To His Imperial Highness Charles, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary – but not a patch on dear old Franz Josef, God bless him! To the Sultan! No, not to the Sultan. To the Fourteenth Army! Yes, to the glorious Fourteenth Army!
‘The Fourteenth Army?’ inquired the Widow Shemsi.
‘The German Fourteenth Army has gone to fight alongside the Austrians in Italy,’ said Weidinger. ‘Seven very experienced divisions. That’s 70,000 men, some of the best troops we have.’
‘That’s where we should be, my old friend,’ drawled Pichler who was beginning to sound a little drunk. ‘On the banks of the Isonzo. At Caporetto, hammering the Italians – who, I’ve heard, run even faster than the dear old Twenty-Seventh. We shouldn’t be wasting our time on this sideshow, bleeding for a h
andful of sand.’
‘I disagree,’ said Weidinger. ‘The Fourteenth Army should be here. If it was we would be in Cairo by now.’
‘No, not Cairo, Calcutta. With the Fourteenth at our side we’d be in Calcutta. Don’t you agree, Madame Shemsi?’
‘At least,’ she said, entering in to the spirit of things. ‘Even New York.’
‘Wrong direction,’ said Pichler.
‘Not if you go all the way round,’ Weidinger had said quickly. After all, a woman wasn’t supposed to have a sense of geography.
‘That’s what I meant,’ she said, flashing him a grateful smile.
‘To the conquest of America!’ said Weidinger, draining his glass.
An orderly came up and announced that Pichler was wanted on the field telephone. He excused himself and disappeared into the gloom, which was broken every now and then by the embers from the small fire the men had started to try to keep warm. Weidinger had an idea that these fires were also against standing orders. Even though most of them had been built in the shallow foxholes scraped out near the guns, they would be a real giveaway if an English patrol did manage to slip through. No wonder the Austrians tended to get on better with the Turks. They were so much like them. Slack.
When Pichler came back he no longer appeared in the least drunk. ‘I may be called on to give some support fire in a couple of hours,’ he had explained. ‘So it’ll be a bit noisy. I should get some sleep while you can.’
The Austrian gave them blankets, choosing the least verminous for the Widow Shemsi, who tried to find sleep propped in the cab of a truck, which Pichler had indicated was the only proper place for a lady. Weidinger had stretched out, much more comfortably – and only a little colder, as it happened – in the open back of the vehicle, lying amidst cardboard boxes which contained the battery’s supply of canned food. Some of it was stolen British bully beef the Bedouin had sold them.