Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Where did you get them from?’ Calderwell had asked Mace, examining his blurred reflection in the back of a mess tin. He had never worn goggles before and he liked the air of dashing flyboy menace they gave him.

  ‘Never you mind,’ Mace had said. ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies. Just a bit of buckshee that’s all.’

  Buckshee was one of those Arabic-rooted words, from the beggars’ plea for baksheesh, that had been absorbed by Urdu, the lingua franca of the British Indian Army. Mace had never been further east of Suez than Palestine, but anybody who claimed to be an old sweat peppered his speech with the language that was the lingua franca of the Raj. Buckshee meant an item was spare. Items were considered spare when they were not nailed down.

  ‘Good old Macey,’ Calderwell thought as they shuddered and bounced from one spine-jarring pothole to another. He would have been half-blind without the goggles. No doubt somewhere in Palestine a motorcycle despatch-rider had had the cost of a new pair of goggles docked from his pay, but he should pay more attention to his kit.

  At his feet was the adjutant’s picnic hamper, a strong wicker basket from Fortnum and Mason. From it emerged some mournful cooing sounds. The corporal, who was in the cab with the driver, had bought the bird in the souk at Rafa, after the adjutant had discovered that Ponting’s pigeon was beyond reprieve.

  Calderwell put his hand in the right-hand pocket of his tunic and produced The Complete Letter-Writer. As usual he turned to the first part of the book, the section devoted to advice on ladies’ correspondence. He flicked through until he came to letter number 161 – ‘A Lady Writing to her Lover on Christmas Eve’. It was one of the best. He almost knew it by heart which was as well because it was hard to read with the goggles on and impossible with them off. ‘. . . I wish, indeed, my dear, I had some better gift to offer you tomorrow. But the will is here, though not the power and you will take that will for the deed . . .’

  Calderwell sighed. He tried to imagine some of the girls he knew back in Coventry writing to him like that. In particular he tried to imagine his younger sister’s friend Ethel, whom he had kissed behind the bandstand in the park on his embarkation leave, promising him a ‘better gift’ instead of saying that he was a naughty boy and if there was any more hanky-panky she would have to go home. She had accepted a cigarette fast enough though, and put her head close to his again so he could smell her lavender scent as she cupped her hands around the proffered match.

  Come out with her own fags too later on. God knows she could afford them. Ethel had started her working life at fourteen as a live-in housemaid for a family in Lichfield. Now she worked twelve-hour shifts in one of the new munitions factories, machining the belts that held Vickers bullets, and took home almost as much as a working man might have earned to feed a family pre-war. All the factory girls had the reputation for being fast. Calderwell had felt obliged to reprimand his sister when he caught a whiff of gin on her breath.

  At the time Ethel had proved a disappointment, not quite fast enough. Now Calderwell felt a certain tenderness about it. After all, she had kissed him and pretended she had not noticed him squeezing her right breast – at least at first she had. Even when he tried the other stuff she had not stopped him right away, though this may have been because it was hard to feel anything under all those clothes. And every young soldier ought to have a sweetheart, or so he thought. To date he had sent her two letters and one Bamforth postcard depicting great-coated soldiers sitting around a camp fire while an angel hovered in the background. ‘Will you be my guardian angel?’ Calderwell had written. He had not received a reply yet. The last mail from England to be distributed at El Marakes camp had been posted no later than the end of June.

  Every now and then the track they were following practically disappeared, but the driver had obviously pinned his faith on the pipeline to their right. Until the railway finished they had not really noticed the twelve-inch circumference pipes, half-buried in places and then glinting dully where some trick of the wind had removed the sand. Once their lorry had slowed alongside a dozen or so soldiers in newish-looking uniforms with Fusilier flashes, and the corporal and driver had called out from the cab, ‘Eyes right for the Skinback Fusiliers.’ This had been followed by, ‘No advance without security.’

  They were an advance party from one of the Jewish battalions Jabotinsky had raised in England. These battalions had been designated Fusiliers, for the War Office would not countenance a Jewish regiment as such on the grounds that, before they knew where they were, there would be demands for separate regiments for Catholics and Dissenting Presbyterians etcetera. Most of them were Americans, well-built men whom Calderwell had mistaken at first for Australians.

  The corporal and driver had learned their taunts from the Cockneys of 60th Division for, like the majority of the men from the shires, they had never met a Jew and had no real feelings about them one way or the other. Isaiah Mace, for instance, was one of several in the regiment who bore biblical names because of their parents’ Nonconformist regard for the Old Testament rather than any Jewishness in their genes. Calderwell looked down and saw an angry-looking Fusilier who pushed his service cap up and yelled at him, ‘Why don’t you save your lip for the goddam Turks, mister? We’re on the same side, you know.’

  He had wanted to explain that he had not been responsible for the insults. Indeed, Calderwell had not understood them since he had no knowledge whatsoever of male circumcision rites, any more than he understood the punning allusion to money-lending practices.

  Nonetheless, Calderwell was quite shocked when the driver told him later that these muscular-looking, sun-burned men were Jews. His notion of the faith was derived from an uncle who, as a boy, had worked for a Jewish jeweller in Birmingham and swore he was paid only in boiled sweets. ‘‘Ave another sugar fish my son?’ Uncle Clarence would always repeat as he got into his tale, and his mother, who knew it by heart, would hold her sides and gasp, ‘Oh go on Clal, pull the other one. You’re filling the boy’s head with rubbish.’

  Yet it had been she who had confirmed this Jewish tendency to exploit child labour by reading the Fagin passages from Oliver Twist most movingly. Calderwell’s mother was proud of her reading voice and rightly so. Jews, then, were hook-nosed, predatory old gentlemen who, like griffins or dragons or unicorns even, were not often to be found in real life. When they did make an appearance they dispensed sugar fish.

  For the last hour they had been passing gangs of Egyptian workmen beating back the desert with picks, shovels and camel-drawn heavy rollers. They were almost invariably deracinated fellaheen from Upper Egypt, pressed labour glaring from under fantastic turbans which were wound down around the lower half their faces as masks against the dust, so that only a pair of resentful eyes would be showing. Sometimes they would pass a group singing one of their sad, homesick songs and, like most young soldiers, Calderwell would see and hear all this without the slightest comprehension of their misery.

  Besides, he had his own problems, for Calderwell and the bird were being thrown this way and that as the lorry’s solid tyres bounced from one rut to another. The constant jarring seemed to reduce the bladder’s capacity for the brackish water he kept swigging from his canteen. The corporal must have had the same trouble, for every hour or so he called a halt for what he called a ‘piss stop’.

  ‘C’mon Caldy, get fell in for short-arm drill,’ he would yell as he lurched out of the cab.

  During one of these halts they lined up alongside the pipe and pissed their ephemeral little streams into the great desert. When he had finished Calderwell noticed that he had exposed some engraved lettering on the pipe near his right boot. He squatted down beside it and read the words ‘Standard Oil Company USA.’

  ‘‘Ere corp,’ he asked. ‘Are these pipes taykin’ oil up, then?’

  ‘Oil? What the fuck we want oil for?’ said the corporal, a worldly man.

  ‘But it says –’

  ‘Aye. I know what it says. W
e borrowed them pipes from the Yankees for our water. That pipeline is taking water all the way from the fuckin’ Nile to Palestine just to give you and me a nice dose of Billy Harry.’

  ***

  They found Ponting reading a three weeks’ old copy of The Times and sitting with Meinertzhagen at the sandbagged entrance to a large dugout practically on the beach. Meinertzhagen, who was scribbling in a notebook, was wearing long shorts and puttees and Ponting was in jodhpurs and riding boots. The British front line was about five miles away and every few minutes a series of distant rumbles sounded above the surf.

  Calderwell thought the officers looked a little startled when they produced the pigeon from the basket, almost as if they were confronting them with evidence of some shameful deed. And when the corporal handed over the little cylinder containing the coded message Meinertzhagen pocketed it so quickly it was as if it had never existed. Then they were dismissed.

  The corporal saluted and turned away, but Calderwell came rigidly to attention. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said to Ponting, ‘but can I have the basket back?’ The adjutant had made it quite clear that he was responsible for the basket. He wanted it returned, he said, in ‘pristine condition’. Calderwell was not quite sure what this meant but he had an idea it had something to do with bird shit.

  ‘The basket?’

  ‘The pigeon’s basket, sir. It belongs to our adjutant. It’s his picnic basket.’

  Meinertzhagen began to beat his left palm with the head of his knobkerrie, like a drummer warming up.

  ‘Oh well, we wouldn’t want to deprive him of his picnics, would we?’ said Ponting.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Meinertzhagen, speaking for the first time.

  ‘Take the bird to our loft,’ ordered Ponting. He pointed towards a couple of palm trees just before the beach where there was a low shed which looked as if it had been made out of old packing cases and driftwood.

  As the Yeomanry were about to move off Meinertzhagen rose. ‘How long have you been out here, young man?’ he said, pointing with his knobkerrie at Calderwell, who had just picked up the basket.

  ‘Two weeks, sir.’

  ‘Well, you’ll find that war is no picnic, laddie.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Just remember that.’

  Calderwell started to raise his right arm in a salute, a difficult feat because it involved letting go of one side of the basket and tucking it into his left side. But Colonel Meinertzhagen had not finished with him yet.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he said, holding his club aloft.

  ‘Not exactly sir.’ Of course he knew what it was. It was a bloody old stick but that sort of answer was unlikely to please an officer just as it had never pleased gaffers and schoolmasters and others of that ilk.

  ‘It’s an African war club, laddie. It used to belong to a tribal chief who was killed in single combat by a German officer. Now it belongs to me.’

  Calderwell tried to look attentive. This was the part of the army he hated most: when some hoity-toity officer treated you like a kid. African war club indeed.

  ‘There is a legend that whoever owns this club shall die from it,’ said Meinertzhagen. ‘But legend is just another word for fairy story and war isn’t a fairy story – is it, corporal?’

  The NCO, who had been looking down at the ground with his arms akimbo, uncertain whether to stay or leave, suddenly straightened up. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Seen the enemy yet, corporal?’

  ‘Yessir. I was at Katia and I did a couple of months at Gallipoli before that.’

  ‘How many did you kill?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know, sir, a few,’ said the NCO, who as a matter of fact had only ever fired a few shots at some distant figures and had no idea what misery, if any, they had caused. Besides, at heart he was a God-fearing man who considered that sort of question indecent.

  ‘Good man,’ said Meinertzhagen, rapping one of his cloth bound calves with the knobkerrie. ‘See the orderly sergeant about a meal before you go back.’

  When the Yeomen had gone Ponting said, ‘Extraordinary tale, sir.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About your club – your knobkerrie.’

  ‘Quite true.’

  ‘And the German officer – how did he die?’

  ‘It was a night action. We bumped into each other in the dark. I wrestled the club off him and brained him with it.’

  For a moment Ponting was tempted to ask how he had learned the history of the weapon after such a brief acquaintance with its last owner and, having learned it, why he risked keeping the awful thing. But he thought better of it. Some stories were too good to check. Instead, he went off to see how the cypher clerks were getting on with the message the pigeon had delivered.

  Meinertzhagen picked up Ponting’s Times. There was an account of the latest British offensive in Flanders. The main battle was taking place around a village called Passchendaele, somewhere near Ypres. According to its correspondent there had been an incredible prelude to the attack. Shortly before dawn the British had detonated nineteen mines containing just under one million pounds of high explosive under the Messines ridge. To tunnel under the German lines had taken weeks of nerve-racking labour with muffled picks and shovels. The result had been a series of rose-coloured, mushroom-shaped clouds rising miles in the air and hundreds of dead Germans. Even more incredible – in fact Meinertzhagen could not bring himself to believe it – were reports that the sound of the exploding mines had been clearly audible in London.

  The colonel sighed. All the same . . . one million pounds of high explosive . . . that was a very big bang. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine all those Huns and bits of Hun flying around the Belgian countryside. It was a deeply pleasing thought. The knobkerrie warmed to his approval and beat a little tattoo against the side of his leg.

  He put the newspaper aside and went back to his notebook. There were several drafts of the work in progress, for he was labouring at his words as diligently as any novelist. Meinertzhagen was trying to write a love letter. His latest attempt was in the explicit style Calderwell had sought in vain among the brisk pages of The Complete Letter-Writer. He read it again. ‘Dearest Bertie,’ it began. ‘I miss you so very much. Every night I lie with you but in the morning you are gone. Oh! My Darling Boy. How much longer will . . .’

  ***

  The cypher clerks were housed in a large bell-tent pitched near another dugout. They were good at their job and had almost finished typing out the deciphered signals when Ponting arrived. He looked over the shoulder of the clerk who was handling it. It was from Nili and contained some useful stuff on troop movements, obviously monitored by their agents on the railways. A fresh German machine-gun company had been spotted. Nothing from Daniel.

  PART THREE: The Book of Daniel

  1

  Jerusalem: August 1917

  ***

  ‘Amateurs talk about tactics,’ Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn was saying. ‘Professionals talk about logistics.’

  Von Falkenhayn emphasised his words with a tight smile, a faint twitching around the left-hand corner of his mouth. In the last year his hair had turned quite white and fatigue was etched into his face like a trench network. As well it might be, thought Krag, who was watching him with the intentness he habitually reserved for the aristocracy. Von Falkenhayn had spent himself against the French anvil at Verdun. Blow after blow until the hammer broke – or at least it would have done had the Kaiser not been persuaded to sack the arm that wielded it.

  To an extent he had redeemed himself in Rumania although the opposition there was hardly up to the standard of Petain’s poilus. It was said that homosexuality was so rife among the Rumanian officer corps that only majors and above were permitted to wear make-up. Now the old warhorse had another easy one. All he had to do was to persuade the British to continue squandering troops in a sideshow. If he succeeded in doing anything else it was a bonus. Von Falkenhayn was a man whose life had been built on winnin
g bonuses.

  Almost the entire staff of the Eighth Turkish Army corps were gathered in the Kriegspiel room at Fast’s to listen to their new commander. They were standing around several trestle tables pushed together. On them was pinned, section by section, a large-scale map of the Eighth’s operational area – more or less everything west of the Jordan from Galilee in the north to the Gaza-Beersheba front line in the south. East of the Jordan was the Seventh Army Corps under the irascible Mustafa Kemal.

  Blue, red, green and brown chips represented formations of infantry, cavalry and artillery. There was also a large pair of dice and several steel rulers and protractors, the latter to determine the limits of artillery traverse. The dice were different from ordinary dice in that they did not carry the numbers one to six but had instead an extra three and a four. They were what war gamers call Average Dice and were used to include battlefield imponderables such as the question of fluctuating morale in their equations. Average Dice keep Lady Luck’s role down to a realistic level.

  But for the moment their war game was forgotten. The marshal was chatting to them with that exaggerated bonhomie sometimes assumed by very senior officers. Everybody seemed entranced. Even Kress, the elegant Bavarian, appeared by no means immune to it.

  Permission had been given to smoke and a pall hung over the table. The marshal was telling them about the huge Russian offensive which had been launched by Alexander Kerensky, the War Minister in the Provisional Government that had overthrown the Romanovs. According to communiqués coming out of Berlin, forty-four divisions had been thrown back by German and Austro-Hungarian forces half that size. The marshal believed that one reason for the Russian failure was that Bolshevik agitators had persuaded the railwaymen to go on strike. The Reds had deprived the front of ammunition and rations at a crucial stage. Hence his little homily about the importance of logistics.