Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Behind the Swede trudged one of those gaunt men typical of Jerusalem in this third year of war. His jellaba contrived to open at the chest, providing glimpses of an emaciated torso and prominent collar bones. When it rose above his bare feet it revealed twig-like legs. As he walked his eyes rarely left the ground, presumably in the hope that some poor fool had dropped a crust. Only occasionally did he look up to make sure that Magnus’s blond mane was still ten feet ahead.

  As they reached the claustrophobic covered passageways of the old souk, a litter came by and everybody but Magnus, who showed not the slightest regard for such things, flattened themselves against the walls. In the wake of the litter came a wailing female, careless of her veil. She was a large woman, wide-hipped, and her grief made her sway from side to side. Weidinger’s Syrian had difficulty in getting past her, and for a moment he thought he had lost Magnus.

  He pivoted almost a full circle on one heel, his eyes darting in all directions. It was the staff that led him back to the Swede. He could hear it clonking away on the flagstones. He turned again and saw Magnus going down a dark passageway that took him into the Jewish corner. He almost ran after him. Almost.

  ***

  Krag looked again at the report, one-and-a-half-written pages of dates, times and places. Even when added together it produced nothing damning. So what if Swedish maniac with sovereigns to spare visited an old Jew from time to time? Nobody could make anything out of that. The Turks could, of course. The Turks could probably make the Pope confess to being a Bolshevik with Calvinistic tendencies, but the Turks weren’t going to get the chance if he had anything to do with it. ‘Either something is missing or he’s innocent,’ he told Weidinger, who tried not to look as crestfallen as he felt. He had been hoping for a better reaction than this.

  ‘However, you’re right to have drawn the matter to my attention,’ Krag went on. ‘I just wish you’d done it earlier. For all I know your man may be quite good, but having him followed about like that is risky. He could have spotted him and if he is working for somebody other than God he will have stopped what he is doing. I have people who are very good at watching without being seen – years of experience working for the Turks. So call your dog off and I’ll put my own on the scent. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. Please don’t misunderstand me, Oberleutnant. I am extremely grateful that you should have taken time off to do this. It shows great initiative and I commend you for it. I shall make sure others hear of it too.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Weidinger.

  ‘In the meantime – discretion please! Mention it to nobody. You know how everyone loves to gossip in this city.’ There may have been the slightest hint of irony in Krag’s voice.

  When Weidinger had gone Krag looked down at the report again. The Oberleutnant’s investigations had not thrown any light as to where the Swede’s money was coming from and Weidinger had felt duty-bound to mention the fact that he was known to beg: he had even cited Maeltzer as an example of the kind of person who donated.

  Ah Maeltzer! Good old Maeltzer. Kress’s favourite newspaperman. Now there was a thought.

  PART TWO: The Waters of the Nile

  1

  Cairo: June 1917

  ***

  Flocks of panic-stricken sparrows stampeded up and down the Nile, their wings flattening against their bodies every third beat as they raced to find a perch for the night in palms silhouetted by a dying sun.

  Ponting watched the birds from his office in the Savoy Hotel and thought such frenetic activity was quite in keeping with the present mood of the place. The city was abuzz with rumours, the anticipation of being swept up in great events. Those who had been with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force since the beginning declared there had not been such electricity in the air since December 1914 when, for a moment, it seemed the Turks might breach the defences along the canal and spark an insurrection among the felaheen in the name of the Caliph.

  It was like the heavy energy in the air before a storm breaks. Ponting could feel it gathering around the marble-topped tables in those cafés where the Egyptian intelligentsia showed their distaste for most things British by breaking loudly into French over their interminable coffees and sticky cakes, thwacking away flies with rolled copies of Images and al-Muqattam. It was particularly noticeable among the officers gossiping in the bar at Shepheard’s and on the trim lawns of the river island of Gezira where the senior administrators of the Protectorate asked each other when the army was ever going to put its house in order?

  Everybody knew that Sir Archibald Murray’s days as Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force were numbered. Twice he had failed to break through at Gaza despite the EEF’s numerical superiority. Now it was not a question of whether he would be relieved of his command, but when and by whom.

  At GHQ some people thought the job should go to General Sir Stanley Maude, the man who had avenged Townshend’s defeat at Kut by capturing Baghdad. Maude was a bit of a plodder – his staff called him ‘Systematic Jo’ – but he had justified his reputation for getting there in the end. Yet it was Ponting’s opinion that this would not be the case.

  Just over a month before General Erich von Falkenhayn had been given what was virtually command of all the Turkish forces in the theatre. Von Falkenhayn had been sacked as commander-in-chief on the Western Front the previous August after his costly failure to break through against the French at Verdun. Since then he had redeemed himself somewhat by driving the Kaiser’s enemies out of Rumania, using a hotch-potch of Bulgarians, Turks and Austro-Hungarians. Ponting found von Falkenhayn a very worrying prospect indeed. Here was a hungry Prussian, still in his fifties, seeking the kind of success that would restore him to what he surely regarded as his rightful position in the main fray – the Western Front.

  For the life of him Ponting could not see the War Office matching von Falkenhayn with Systematic Jo – especially with a prime minister in office who saw quick morale-boosting victories in other theatres as the best way around the European stalemate. It would have to be someone with a bit of flair, not a meatgrinder. The trouble was most of the talent remained convinced that with so much blood and treasure invested in Flanders, the breakthrough had to come on the Western Front. And when it happened they wanted to be there, not stuck in some sandpit while old friends mopped up the glory or, almost as bad, the Americans did it for them.

  Meanwhile, as the EEF licked its wounds and waited to hear who its new boss would be, Ponting’s unit was under pressure to produce. Signals had been sent out to all their agents urging them to be on the look-out for the kind of build-up in men and materials that might herald an offensive. So far, the only indication of anything untoward was a report from a spy in Constantinople that the Germans were removing some of the heavy guns from the cruisers Breslau and Goeben, which had been trapped there since the beginning of the war.

  Ponting watched as the sparrows continued with their terrified dash against the waning light and, once they got to the trees, brawled with each other over the most suitable accommodation. Below them a troop of cavalry in newish-looking tropical-weight khaki came into view, walking their horses down the street which ran along the bank towards the Kasr el-Nil barracks. Ponting guessed that they were recently-arrived reinforcements for some of the Yeomanry regiments brought into Cairo in order to help out with internal security while they were getting acclimatised.

  There was need for a show of force in the city at the moment. Last month there had been serious riots; property had been burned and the ringleaders shot dead in the streets before order had been restored. The reason was the growing discontent about recruitment into the Egyptian Labour Corps. Officially Egypt was a self-governing ‘Protectorate of the Crown’. As far as the war effort was concerned, all that was required of its citizens was that they should not befriend His Majesty’s enemies.

  The campaign that had evolved east of the canal in the Sinai desert and then up to Gaza, as the Br
itish slowly pushed the Turks back, had changed all that. More and more men were required to build railroads or lay the pipe line that was slowly bringing the waters of the Nile to Palestine. In Upper Egypt village headmen were paid well for maintaining a steady flow of ‘volunteers’ to the Labour Corps. Ponting and every British soldier in Egypt had heard the favourite Arabic song of these pressed men. ‘I miss my home,’ they sang. ‘I want to go home.’ Over and over again.

  Ponting noticed that the Yeomanry had sword scabbards as well as rifle-buckets attached to their saddles. All right for keeping the wogs in order, he thought, but bloody useless when old Johnny Turk was smiling at you down the sights of his ‘98. He had started his career in the Rifle Brigade, and his natural prejudice against horse soldiers had been reinforced by present trends.

  All the same, he was heartened to see that there was no nonsense about not reinforcing defeat. New men were pouring in despite the setbacks at Gaza. There was certainly something reassuring about that. Of course, it was common knowledge that the prime minister himself had declared that the EEF must be strengthened. Personally, Ponting had never had much time for David Lloyd George. For a start he had been a Boer-lover, and then there had been his fiscal polices, his so-called ‘People’s Budget’ in ‘09 which was downright Bolshevism and had been promptly nipped in the bud by the Lords. Lloyd George as a war leader, in what he believed was a casus belli, was a different kettle of fish. He had hit on this idea of what he called ‘knocking the props away’, going for Germany’s allies. And it was hard not to warm to a man who was a convinced ‘Easterner’, whatever his motives.

  The 60th Division, Cockney Territorials under General Shea who had started the war in France, had begun to arrive from Salonika where they had been resting after an ill-advised mountain offensive against the Bulgars. At one point the enemy had responded by loosening little avalanches against them. The Italians and French had sent token contingents in order to reinforce their claim to some of the spoils that would surely follow the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The French wanted territory – Damascus and the northern coastal lands around Mount Lebanon; the Italians claimed long-term ecclesiastical interests in Jerusalem, the latest round in the old quarrel between Byzantium and Rome. They had sent a unit of Bersaglieri who wore the feathers of black fighting cocks in their solar topees and were constantly getting into fights with Australians or Tommies who wished to transfer them to their own headgear.

  Ponting went back to his desk, eased the heel of his right boot off with the toe of his left, and then decided that he could not be caught sitting in his socks and stomped it back into place. Despite the heat he wore long brown riding-boots with a batman’s shine still discernible under the dust that always covered everything in Cairo. All the British military intelligence officers working in the Savoy Hotel wore similar footwear except for some of the odd-balls from the Arab Bureau like Newcombe and Lawrence.

  The major thought little Lawrence was becoming an appalling exhibitionist, always tricked out in his night-shirt and sandals even for his increasingly rare visits to Cairo. According to his latest despatch, he was poised to take Akaba, the Turks’ remaining port on the Red Sea coast. Ponting was not alone in thinking that this was unlikely even if Faisal’s Bedouin rebels did outnumber the garrison five-to-one. Irregulars rarely brought off a frontal attack. Nor did it matter all that much since the Gulf of Akaba was blockaded by British and French warships which regularly sailed up to the port and shelled it. As far as Ponting could see, the only conceivable point in capturing the place would be to relieve this flotilla for duties elsewhere. He supposed that Lawrence was doing some good making a thorough nuisance of himself, mining the Hejaz railway, that sort of thing. He had to admit that sometimes gifted amateurs could be an asset – as long as they were properly controlled.

  Take the man whose report he was dealing with at that moment – Aaron Aaronsohn. It was an attempt by the Jewish agronomist to persuade the British High Command that they could augment the water they were piping across the Sinai by drilling for the vast natural cisterns beneath the sand. ‘The rocks indicate it and Josephus Flavius corroborates it,’ Aaronsohn argued in his scholarly way.

  If the enemy was still unaware of the defection of Sarah Aaronsohn’s elder brother then their spies in Cairo were blind men with cracked ear trumpets, and Ponting happened to know that this was not the case. It was just over a year ago that Aaronsohn had persuaded Djemal Pasha that he needed to leave Palestine to consult with various experts in Sweden and America about a process to extract oil from sesame seeds. When they were off the Orkneys their ship had been intercepted by a Royal Navy destroyer, and Aaronsohn and his companions had been taken off by a boarding-party.

  In London Aaronsohn had seen Lord Rothschild, Weizmann, and sympathetic people like Churchill; and within the month he was in Cairo lunching with Ponting at Shepheard’s.

  ‘Do you not think that your presence here might endanger your sister?’ Ponting had asked him.

  ‘There’s always a danger,’ Aaronsohn had replied. ‘But the Turks will pay less attention to a woman. They’re too contemptuous of them. It’s not their way to see how dangerous the weaker sex can be.’

  Ponting had let the matter drop – there was no choice. His department – Field Intelligence Levant or FIL – had wanted the Jew to stay in place. After all, it wasn’t every day you ran an agent with an ear to one of Turkey’s ruling triumvirate. Even the spy Daniel, FIL’s other star performer, wasn’t that well placed. But Aaronsohn had insisted that his relationship with Djemal Pasha was deteriorating and that he would be more use outside, where he could analyse and interpret reports from the Nili group, the network he had set up.

  The major suspected that his real reason was that Weizmann had asked him to do his best to get the British moving before the Turks did to the Yishuv what they had already done to the Armenians. For the moment the Germans were holding them off. The future of the Zionist settlers seemed to depend on how much the Kaiser still rated Jewish influence now that American Jewry had not prevented the United States coming in on the same side as the Cossack rapists. If Wilhelm withdrew his protection and the EEF did not succeed in occupying Palestine immediately, they might be in a lot of trouble.

  ‘Please tell me, Major Ponting,’ Aaronsohn had inquired shortly after that first meeting, ‘is it an irrefutable law of military science that a big army is always a slow army? I think even an elephant can charge.’

  And Ponting had tried to explain to this impertinent civilian that vast armies were not nomadic tribes to be moved overnight. But in a way he was right. The EEF was not the lean machine that had started out in 1915, and if it had never known outright defeat it had never known a victory either.

  He found Aaronsohn’s solution to the water supply problem an interesting one. God only knew, it was one of their biggest headaches. The animals and men of the EEF were estimated to consume 400,000 gallons of water a day. They had just bought some twelve-inch piping from the Standard Oil Company of America to join a network that stretched hundreds of miles from the Sweet Water Canal to the railhead at Rafah where it was transferred to camels. Each beast carried on its flanks two small tanks known as fanatis. They were supposed to hold twelve-and-a-half gallons each, but often it was much less by the time they had sloshed up to the forward positions.

  Ponting set to work on a précis of Aaronsohn’s account of the natural water resources they could tap. He did go on a bit – Joseph Flavius indeed! The major wrote in a large clear hand he had developed especially for the male typists who worked in cubbyholes down the corridor with the dedication of men who knew there were worse ways to spend a war.

  When he had finished he rang a bell on his desk, and a private soldier came to bear his message to the lance-corporals and a corporal crouched over their Underwoods.

  ‘Tell them three copies,’ he said. ‘Two up to Colonel Meinertzhagen and one back to me.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  Ric
hard Meinertzhagen was Ponting’s new boss. He was already somewhat in awe of him. He had arrived in Cairo some three weeks before, a little later than scheduled because his ship had been torpedoed off the Italian coast. The colonel claimed to have spent five hours in the water fighting off some panic-stricken horses with the African knobkerrie he habitually carried with him, and consuming two bottles of brandy he had had the foresight to remove from the officers’ wardroom before abandoning ship.

  One of the drowning chargers had winded him with a flailing hoof before he was rescued by a Jap destroyer which scooped the survivors up in a net. He told Ponting that as soon as he had recovered he had written a report pointing out that troops on sinking ships should not be permitted to sing ragtime songs since it impeded the carrying out of orders necessary for their survival. Over two hundred had died, some of them singing. He had been surprised at the number of non-swimmers.

  Despite this unfortunate start Meinertzhagen had thrown himself into his new post with considerable enthusiasm, and was obviously more than sympathetic to the Zionist aspirations of Aaron Aaronsohn’s Jewish network. At first Ponting had wondered whether Meinertzhagen’s enthusiasm might be explained by the fact that he was that extraordinary thing, a regular British army officer and a Jew. But an officer who had known Meinertzhagen in Africa before the war had explained to Ponting that his superior came from a family of Danish descent who had made their considerable fortune as merchant bankers in London. As an old Africa hand Meinertzhagen had spent most of his war in East Africa trying to pin down the Lilliputian forces of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who had turned out to be one of the most nimble-footed tacticians the world conflict had produced.