Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Perhaps we were meant to pick it up?’

  ‘Hmm. Doubt it somehow. If it was a present I’m sure they would have wrapped it up nicely with plenty of string to unravel. More likely because the wireless station is about to close down and they’ve got too much traffic to handle.’

  ‘How much trouble do you think Daniel is in?’

  ‘Not certain. Could be big trouble.’

  ‘Is there anything we can do to help?’

  ‘Not for the moment. But I think I’m going to move over your way.’

  5

  A ridge almost two miles from Huj: shortly after midday, 8 November 1917

  ***

  The ideal exploitation by mounted troops is not a pursuit but an interception. It aims to strike, not the rear of the retreating columns, where the sting is, but the less protected flanks or head to cut in on the line of retirement at the most favourable time and place – a defile for choice – to head off as large a portion as possible of the withdrawing force and to hold it till the infantry can come up and complete its destruction.

  Private Calderwell, lying on his back, looked up to see a sun the size of a shilling slide behind the one small dark cloud that marred an otherwise blue and white sky. If we were home, he thought, if we were in Coventry that cloud would definitely be a rain cloud and very shortly it would do what it was supposed to do. But we’re not at home, we’re in bloody Palestine where nothing works quite the way it should do. And there have been clouds like that around for days and nothing has happened although Isaiah Mace assured me that by this time last year they were well into the winter rains. After a few days, Mace had explained, the land turned into the kind of nice thick glue that persuaded generals to give their cavalry a rest unless you were unlucky enough to be used as infantry. But this year it wasn’t going to happen. This year the land would stay baked and they would go on chasing the Turks until the poor fuckin’ horses dropped dead or they did.

  Shells from an enemy battery ahead of them were landing among the 60th Division, Shea’s Cockney infantry, whose dust could be seen on the plain below. Some of them passed close enough for the Yeomanry, who were behind the lee side of a shallow ridge, to hear the whiz and zip of them overhead. Only the horses paid any heed. Calderwell noticed that every passing shell caused Villa to pin her ears back and paw the ground on which she was trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to find some nourishment.

  The whizzing overhead may have worried the horses, but their riders were so exhausted that some had fallen asleep almost the minute they had dismounted and stretched out on the bank. Others had not yet learned that the ability to cat-nap was an essential military virtue and found their dread of being wakened kept them awake.

  Through lowered lids Calderwell watched a small cloud of dust detach itself from one of the larger clouds on the plain and weave towards them through the black and white shell bursts. Dully, he registered the fact that this must be a motor vehicle, but apart from that he viewed the events below with complete detachment. His mind barely registered what his eye took in. It never occurred to him that he was witnessing Allenby’s advance grind to a halt for the first time in forty-eight hours as the artillery fire maimed and murdered the infantry on ground almost devoid of cover. They were in their war and he was in his. And he was very tired.

  It was two nights now since any of them had slept properly. They had started out fresh enough shortly after midnight the day before, having rested themselves and the horses at Beersheba for a couple of days after fighting as mounted infantry around El Khuweilfeh. Calderwell had emerged from this baptism at ease with himself. He had been under fire and had not disgraced himself in front of his mates. He felt his newness was wearing off. Certainly, he would no longer be the automatic choice to return stray pigeons to their rightful owners while everybody else went racing.

  They had all set off from Beersheba in cheerful mood, singing their heads off, sad songs and glad songs, as they said at the music halls. After the elegiac, ‘Long, long trail a-windin’’ that had woken Ponting from his slumbers they had gone straight into:

  ‘Oh the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin

  His boots need blackin’, his bag needs packin’,

  And his old baggy trousers they want mendin’

  Before they send ‘im, to the Dardanelles.’

  Between songs someone would inquire in a loud voice: ‘Are we down-hearted?’ And everybody would yell back, ‘Nooooohhhh!!!’

  Which was true enough. On the first day of the battle one man had been killed and Captain Valintine slightly wounded by shrapnel in an air attack when they were lying in reserve behind the Australians. Valintine had declined to relinquish command of B Squadron, declaring that he’d done a damn sight worse to himself hunting than the Hun had ever achieved. Another man had been killed and nineteen wounded during the hill fighting around Tel el Khuweilfeh. But these casualties were far lighter than expected. For the moment they were winning, and they knew it.

  Calderwell had an additional reason not to be down-hearted. In the left breast pocket of his tunic, next to his now slowly beating heart, lay a coloured Bamforth postcard from his beloved Ethel. On it she had written: ‘I trust this reaches you as it leaves me. All My thoughts are with you in your dangerous duty in the Holy Land. Me and your sis went out for a little drink the other night and we both had a good cry and I hope it will not be long before your safe return so until then we are all praying for you. God Bless. Your friend, Ethel Parkinson.’ All this was in pen and ink in a careful, sloping hand, with loops on the ‘f’s and little curls on the capital ‘m’s.

  It may have been a bit more formal than even The Complete Letter-Writer for Ladies and Gentlemen laid down for correspondence of a romantic nature and there was that breathtaking leap from the general to the particular between the second and third sentences. But as far as Calderwell was concerned it was the most exciting thing he had ever possessed. Just gazing at the picture on the cover with the four lines of verse underneath made his throat go dry.

  It showed a good-looking girl about Ethel’s age – as good-looking as Ethel almost, in a different kind of way – seated in a well-kept garden with what looked like a lake behind her, beyond which the sun was setting. She was seated on a stool, staring thoughtfully at what appeared to be a row of pink busy lizzies growing up bamboo poles. Just in case anybody had any doubts about them, her thoughts were spelled out in the top right-hand corner of the card, where the clouds had opened to reveal her, in a different dress Calderwell noticed, falling into the arms of a tall, dark young soldier whom he had to admit looked a lot like himself had his hair been dark and his nose a different shape. Beneath the picture were four lines from a song which Calderwell vaguely remembered, though he could not properly recall the tune. Tired as he was he got the card out and tried to hum along as he read them, like the message on the back, for the umpteenth time.

  ‘Sometimes you’ll remember, tho’ the skies are blue,

  Someone’s sadly pining all the time for you;

  Somewhere we shall meet, dear, when the years have flown,

  Someday you will tell me you are mine alone.’

  This sort of concentration proved too much, and he suddenly fell asleep with the card still clutched in his hand. It had come in the last batch of mail they had received, which had caught up with them at Beersheba on the afternoon of the sixth, the day before their first night ride.

  In the early hours of that first morning they had ridden in a northwesterly direction to Abu Irgeig, which was about six miles from Beersheba and yet still behind the vanguard of the EEF. They had cooked breakfast there as the sun came up – fried eggs that had been carried in a sackful of straw, and plum jam smeared on hard-tack biscuits, all washed down with very black and very sweet tea. They had also fed the horses some of the hard barley they were carrying, nineteen pounds of it in the two nosebags that were on every horse. By nine o’clock they were back in the saddle and heading towards Abu Hareira, which was
still believed to be in Turkish hands and was being pounded by British guns as was the station at Tel esh Sheria.

  That was the day they had expected to tangle with the Turkish rearguard but it hadn’t happened. At one point they had been quite heavily shelled but had escaped casualties by an extremely rapid withdrawal, which Calderwell had found himself leading because he had virtually lost control of his terrified horse – though he had to admit afterwards it was a toss-up who was more scared or farting more.

  ‘Oi’ll tell yow wun thing, yow’re a good man in retrait, Caldy,’ was Isaiah Mace’s only comment when he caught up with him.

  They had re-formed, lunched on hard tack and bully and then resumed the advance at a gentle walk, with frequent rests for the horses. That evening the Yeomanry had crossed the Wadi Sharia and wandered about for a couple of hours with drawn swords looking for the enemy or the Australian Light Horse, who were supposed to be somewhere on their right. They had failed to find either party, which Mace had said was just as well since both were liable to be equally trigger-happy after dark. Calderwell was relieved. He had found the whole business quite nerve-racking, wondering whether every second shadow was a Turkish rifleman or lancer with a somewhat longer reach than the thirty-eight inches of cold steel in his own right hand. They had turned back, stopping to water the horses at a well near Tel esh Sheria – where, like Weidinger, they were impressed by the way the night sky was lit up by the stores the Turks had torched there – and were back in their bivouacs shortly before midnight.

  Like the others, Calderwell’s last bed had been a dent he had scraped into the ground with his bayonet and his boots – none of them had entrenching tools, which were thought an unnecessary encumbrance in an attack (as it was, even the horses with the lightest men on board were not carrying less than two hundred and fifty pounds). Into this shallow grave he had laid his rubber groundsheet; he had used his saddle for a pillow and, after removing his boots and tunic, lay fully clad under a single blanket which stank of horse.

  It had been a bitterly cold Sinai night, and sleep was surprisingly hard to come by. When it did come it had not lasted very long, and Calderwell woke shivering to find that his blanket was soaked with a heavy dew. He did not possess a watch – his mother was saving from her housekeeping to give him one for his twenty-first – and had no idea what time it was. Eventually he had groped in his tunic pocket for a packet of Woodbines and lay there for almost an hour chain-smoking for warmth, until a corporal came round to get them up shortly before five.

  A rum ration was issued from one of the barrels kept in the general service wagons that followed them about the place with their rations. They did not get it neat but poured into the black tea the cooks had brewed. Old sweats like Mace had groused about their drink being diluted but Calderwell, who had hardly ever had spirits in his life, thought it was just the thing although he pretended to agree. After a second mug he could almost feel his feet, which were housed in boots as sodden as his blanket.

  They had set off at six o’clock across an undulating countryside that became increasingly less of a desert until they were eventually riding through fields of newly threshed corn, though the Arabic-speaking peasants who owned it had disappeared. They were joined by two squadrons of the Worcesters, and together they found the Turkish rearguard well before ten – and kept finding it, for they had practically fought them from ridge to ridge after that. But it had been distant stuff. Twice they had dismounted to open rapid fire with their rifles at small figures on a far skyline, and on one occasion the machine-gun troop came up and joined in with their Hotchkiss guns.

  As he lay in the prone position and worked the bolt of his Lee-Enfield, the sights up and set at one thousand yards, Calderwell had had very little sense that he was firing at people. It was not until he had heard the distinct zizz of bullets passing close overhead that he paused to think what his own bullets might have been doing.

  ‘The boggers are firing back,’ he had said, genuinely surprised.

  ‘Try not to take it personally,’ the corporal alongside him had said. He was a man in his mid-thirties from Birmingham, who had stopped Mauser lead when he was about Calderwell’s age in the South African War.

  Then the order had come to mount and they were up and galloping towards some mud ruins which turned out to be an Arab village called Kauwukah. They were slightly behind – in echelon, as the staff officers said – the Worcesters, whose dust obscured their view. And for the first time in Palestine Calderwell had heard a sound which made his blood chill: ahead of them somebody was playing ‘Gone Away’ on a hunting horn, the doubling note a huntsman makes when a fox is sprung from the covert.

  When they got into Kauwukah the only Turks left were the dead and the wounded, whom they had helped the Worcesters to make as comfortable as they could while they waited for the ambulance wagon to catch up with them.

  ‘Did you ‘ear it?’ Mace had asked. ‘Did you ‘ear old Toby Albright blowin’ ‘is horn?’

  They were both crouched over a young Turk who appeared to have caught a burst through the back from one of the Hotchkiss guns. Mace had an arm around him. They had given him water but it had reappeared on his lips as a blood-tinged froth, which the flies were trying to feast on.

  ‘November, you see,’ Mace had gone on. ‘Start of the ‘untin’ season. If we were ‘ome now our Val would be polishin’ his topper with Guinness stout and gettin’ his ridin’ boots polished with champagne and apricot jam.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Calderwell had said, fanning the dying Turk. The boy had looked even younger than he was, not a day over seventeen, and he had hoped it was the Hotchkiss and not one of his bullets. ‘I could think of better things to do with that lot than cleanin’ my fuckin’ kit. I could think of a lot better things to do with it.’

  ‘He’s gone,’ Mace had said, and Calderwell had looked down to see that the boy’s eyes had disappeared into the top of his head.

  The Turks had started shelling Kauwukah shortly after that and they had moved forward again, leaving the medics to sort out the dead and wounded, who now included three British. Within an hour they had chased some Turkish stragglers through another field of freshly threshed corn and reached the ridge where Calderwell was now dozing, oblivious of the shellfire. Ethel’s postcard was still loosely attached to his right hand – though she did not feature in his dream, which was of a bicycle ride to a South Wales beach that he and his mates had always intended to do but somehow never got organised.

  He was arguing with Ron Ash – which was odd because Ron had gone missing in France the year before – about whether a patch of blue ahead was sea or sky, for Ron always took a contrary view, when some terrible unseen marine creature began roaring at them. When he woke, Calderwell realised he was listening to the agonised sound of an internal combustion engine tearing its guts out as the wheels it served fought for purchase on the slope.

  He sat up just as one of the strangest vehicles he had ever seen came to a halt about a hundred yards below him. It was a Model T Ford to which a few sheets of steel had been bolted, turning it into an armoured car. Somebody stepped out of the passenger door. From where he was sitting Calderwell could just make out the back of a pith helmet, but he guessed it must have been a senior officer by the sharp salute the visitor got from Hugh Gray-Cheape, the Warwicks’ colonel.

  Calderwell watched as Gray-Cheape listened intently to what was being said. Twice the colonel turned to follow a blackthorn stick his visitor was pointing, first in the direction of the exploding shells he had just driven through and then the other way, vaguely towards the guns that were firing them. Then Gray-Cheape said a few words and saluted again, and the visitor departed towards the incoming artillery fire in his strange conveyance – which rapidly became once more the fast-moving dust cloud which Calderwell had noticed before he fell asleep. Shortly afterwards they got the order to mount.

  ‘You know who that was?’ said Mace, who was riding alongside him. That were fookin’ Gener
al Shea himself. I reckon we’re gooin’ after those guns hammerin’ the Sixtieth down there.’

  ‘Why are we takin’ the horses?’

  ‘So we won’t have so far to walk, I suppose,’ said Mace.

  ‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Calderwell. ‘For a moment I thought you were going to say we were goin’ to have at them like the bloody charge of the light brigade. Half a league, half a league, half a league bloody onwards.’

  ‘Not while we’ve got these,’ said Mace, tapping the Lee-Enfield in his saddle boot. ‘Besides, those lazy sods in the machine-gun squadron and the ‘orse artillery ain’t caught up with us yet. We’d never charge without cover from them.’

  ‘I’m sure that mad bogger in the Worcesters with the huntin’ ‘orn wouldn’t mind going in with his sausage-sticker.’

  ‘Not before we’ve got them runnin’,’ said Mace. ‘I think them Diggers were bloody lucky at Beersheba.’

  ‘Well, just as long as your huntin’ friends remember that. They might have brought the rations up first. Moi belly tells me it’s time for me dinner.’

  ‘It’s twenty past wun,’ said Mace, extracting his fob watch from the top pocket of his tunic.

  Calderwell no longer felt in the least tired. He might have slept for ten hours instead of ten minutes.

  Because they were riding along the ridge they could not spread out as they usually did but rode in columns of half squadrons, with each squadron of about eighty men divided into two lines. Calderwell was riding to the right of Mace, who was that much nearer to the enemy. There was a gap of about two hundred yards between the squadrons, and the Worcesters were in the van. Their CO had ridden back to Kofkah just before Shea’s arrival to ask the Third Australian Light Horse if they would come up and cover their right flank. With the colonials he found it politic to do this sort of thing himself rather than send a messenger.

  When they got to the crest of the ridge the two lines of horsemen automatically speeded from a walk to a trot and then a canter, because for the first time they could see the enemy. To their left there was movement about three-quarters of a mile away on another dusty ridge which curved around so that one end was facing them. The Turks had a battery of small mountain guns here, which the leading Yeomanry officers could just about make out through their field glasses. The enemy’s main batteries, the big guns that were still booming away at the infantry, were in a hollow to the enemy’s right.