Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘A Bedu is being hanged, your honour,’ the official explained.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘He was stealing sugar from one of the quartermaster’s wagons. They do it all the time. This one was unlucky.’

  They walked into a crowd of Bedouin who stepped reluctantly aside. Von Falkenhayn pretended to be unaware of their hostility; Weidinger and von Papen ostentatiously unclipped the flaps of their holsters. When they had got through the Arabs they came to a semicircle of Turkish soldiers standing with bayonets fixed around a railway signal arm. A rope with one end made into a noose had been thrown over one of the supporting girders. Beneath it three soldiers were trying to persuade a skinny youth with wild unkempt hair, tears streaking his cheeks and his hands tied behind his back, to step on the station-master’s chair.

  The boy – Weidinger estimated he was no more than eighteen, and probably younger – was struggling wildly and screaming over and over again in a high-pitched voice, ‘Allah, Yah, Allah.’ As they struggled their feet ground into the dust the boy’s headdress and the black rings which had kept it in place. At one point the soldiers lifted him bodily onto the chair and were about to put the noose around his neck when he managed to jump off and wrap one of his legs around the putteed calf of one of his executioners.

  One of the soldiers stabbed the boy with a bayonet in the back and the buttock and soon there were widening red stains on his robe. The boy began to scream even louder, only this time one word was particularly distinct. He was saying, ‘Aba, Aba.’

  Weidinger, who had picked up a little Arabic, found himself wondering whether the Bedu was calling to a spiritual or earthly father. In any event, he very much wished von Falkenhayn would either intervene or lead them away from the wretched business. Then suddenly a grey-bearded man with blazing eyes came to the front of the crowd and, ignoring a bayonet inches from his chest, yelled something in an angry voice.

  The boy stiffened. The old man repeated what he had said in a quieter tone. The boy ceased to struggle and allowed himself to be lifted onto the chair. Ten seconds later he was choking slowly to death over the place where the chair had been. In his agony his knees were drawn up to his chest and his tongue horribly distended. The old man gazed up at him, tears coursing his own cheeks.

  ‘I think he was his father,’ Weidinger explained as they walked back to the carriage. ‘He was telling him to die like a man and that they would all meet in Paradise.’

  The field marshal managed to look quite shocked.

  Von Papen said, ‘I wonder how many English spies that business made?’

  Weidinger shrugged it off. The Turks were always hanging people.

  8

  Girheir, Beersheba Sector: 10 October 1917

  ***

  Weidinger was nominally leading the patrol, though it was impossible to tell who was in command at first glance because both armies had discovered that cavalry were less vulnerable if they rode abreast in loose, extended lines rather than in column. Horsemen were not so visible from the air this way, their dust being less concentrated. Nor, since they were more spread out, were they likely to take large casualties from a single artillery shell. That was the theory anyway.

  They were a troop of twenty-seven Turkish lancers under a Muzalim-i-Sani, their weapons slotted into leather holsters by their right stirrups and the pennanted sharp-ends swaying above them like the masts of a little fishing flotilla. Each man also had a Model 87 Mauser carbine and fifty rounds of ammunition. The lucky ones carried them in the same sort of leather rifle boots the British Yeomanry regiments were equipped with. But at least half the troop had their carbines slung across their backs on bandoliers that chafed their shoulders as they rode.

  They had breakfasted shortly before dawn on bread, goat’s cheese, coffee and tobacco and had set off with the first grey streaks of daylight coming up behind them as they headed into the no-man’s land north-west of Beersheba. Even at that point Weidinger was already beginning to feel a pleasurable little surge of adrenalin at the prospect of the unexpected.

  It was, he told himself, only at times like this that he began to feel a whole man again. Certainly, it was better than walking on egg shells around a field marshal. He was looking forward to telling Maeltzer about it. The journalist had wangled another one of his trips to the front, and a signals officer had passed on a message that von Falkenhayn hoped to be in Beersheba with his escort tomorrow.

  Now the German bent to bite the cover off his watch, instinctively tightening his knees on his chestnut mare as he did so. The horse was one of the most sure-footed the lancers had, a Waler captured from the Australians at Gaza last April. Weidinger rode it almost as well with one arm as he would have done with two.

  According to his watch it had just turned 9.45. They had been going for over four hours, occasionally breaking the horses from a walk to a brisk trot, but nothing too tiring. Most of the troops were on broken-backed, fistulated mounts that any decent veterinary surgeon would have retired from active service years ago. Weidinger turned to the Muzalim-i-sani who was riding alongside him. ‘Shall we look at the map?’ he said. He wanted to tell him his plan. There had not been an opportunity before because the Turkish subaltern had been asleep when Weidinger arrived at the lancers’ camp late the previous evening.

  All the Turk knew was that he was to take this German staff officer on a reconnaissance patrol to the north-west, roughly parallel with the railway track, and that his main task, his squadron commander had emphasised, was to bring their troublesome visitor back in one piece. Or at least with the same number of pieces he had started out with. The missing arm had come as something of a surprise. The subaltern was curious to see whether he would be able to stay on his fine English mount if they had to make a run for it. Still, he was an Uhlan. He had also had the good sense to kit himself out with a field-grey tunic, which he would shortly be sweltering in, instead of those tropical whites some of these Prussians insisted on wearing even at the front.

  Once the troop had halted Weidinger offered the Turk his matches and a cigarette because he had watched Kress do this with Turkish officers to whom he was about to make a ‘suggestion’. This one was, he thought, a particularly surly specimen: heavy-featured, but with surprisingly blue eyes and a straggly blond moustache.

  ‘Yes, Herr Oberleutnant?’ said the Turk, exhaling the words with his smoke.

  Weidinger reached for his map case which was hanging by a shoulder strap across his tunic so that it hung under the empty sleeve on his left side. It was folded at the relevant section.

  ‘I think we are about here,’ he said, pointing to an area between Wadi Hanafish, which was towards the British line, and Wadi Imleih, which was just behind their own wire. About half an hour before they had left the last of the dunes and were now passing through a flat, cactus-strewn terrain. The place he had pointed to was marked ‘Girheir’ on the map, but if there had ever been a hamlet of that name it appeared that the Negev had long since swallowed it up.

  The Turk scrunched up his eyes, as if the sun was already too strong for them, and stared at the spot where Weidinger held his finger. ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘Where do you think we are then?’

  ‘As you say, somewhere between the wadis, but I cannot be exact.’ His German instructors had taught him to be exact. Now he was giving them their exactness back.

  ‘Well, I think that’s near enough for the moment,’ said Weidinger, barely able to conceal his irritation. ‘What I want to do is to enter Wadi Hanafish about a quarter of the way along it – that should provide plenty of cover. We go down as far as this fork –’ he pointed to an upturned ‘V’ – ‘and then dismount and a small party of us will proceed on foot up the left fork – the one that is going almost due south towards the British lines.’

  ‘And when we have had this walk, what do we do?’

  ‘We wait, we look, we see what we can see. And perhaps before we go we snipe. Leave them our calling card.’

&n
bsp; Weidinger offered the last bit because he thought the prospect of a little action might please, but the Turk showed absolutely no emotion unless you counted another deep drag on his cigarette. Then he said: ‘There are observation posts. The English have them at Khasif and Goz-el-Geleib.’

  Weidinger looked at the map again. The places he had mentioned were hillocks, pimples a couple of hundred feet above the general level of the terrain. ‘Can they see into the wadi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve been there before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened. We went as far as the fork. No closer.’

  ‘So at least they can’t see us up to there.’

  ‘Perhaps. But there were only three of us. They may have been waiting to see whether more were coming before they used their mortars. The English are cunning like that – unless they’re Australians.’

  ‘It’s a deep wadi. They probably couldn’t see,’ said Weidinger with more confidence than he felt.

  They moved on and after about ten minutes’ ride came across what might have been a nomads’ camel track that appeared to lead down towards the wadi. They were going to descend when the lancer riding scout on the extreme left flank of the patrol, which was now in a loose horn formation, suddenly gave a cry and started pointing.

  At first Weidinger could see nothing. Then he made out a moving figure, perhaps a kilometre away on this flat stretch of ground. At that distance it could have been anything from General Allenby to a grazing camel. His field glasses were around his neck on a short strap. When he had focused them he could see that it was a man on a horse riding towards them along the edge of the wadi and on their side. When the man was six or seven hundred metres away he thought it possible that he was wearing the kind of solar topee favoured by the British although he was not positive of that any more than he could be certain, at that range, that the rider was wearing khaki and not field grey. ‘What do you think?’ he asked the Muzalim-i-sani, who had produced an old-fashioned brass telescope from his saddlebag.

  ‘English,’ he said.

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the way he rides. Like a statue.’

  ‘Then let’s get him.’

  Weidinger’s Waler had a surprising turn of speed for a small horse. The German and the Muzalim-i-sani, who was on a good-looking grey, were rapidly about three lengths ahead of the rest of the field, who straggled out behind them like some spoilt Derby ruined by bad handicapping.

  Ahead of them the lone rider had now taken heed of their presence. For a moment he ceased his leisurely progress and sat rock-still facing them, as if trying to assess the situation; then he turned his horse and, judging by the dust, removed himself at a smart gallop. Almost a length ahead of the Muzalim-i-sani, Weidinger pressed on, intoxicated by the chase. A decent reconnaissance was one thing; a prisoner, God willing even an officer, was gold.

  But their quarry was obviously well mounted and it soon became apparent that not even Weidinger had noticeably closed the distance between them. The Muzalim-i-sani caught up with him, his grey foaming at the mouth. ‘We must stop,’ he said. ‘My men are scattered. Besides, he could be leading us into a trap.’

  Reluctantly Weidinger reined in, cursing the corruption that meant every horse thief in Syria could sell a broken down nag to the Turkish cavalry if he knew the right procuring officer. The others gradually assembled around them on their winded, wild-eyed, and, in one case, distinctly lame mounts. Weidinger looked ahead. The dust was settling. Surely this Englishman – it must be an Englishman – had not stopped as well? There was no immediate sign of him. Perhaps his horse had gone lame or had snapped a fetlock in some treacherous burrow of a desert rat. Perhaps, thought Weidinger, we haven’t finished yet. He was in the act of lifting his field glasses when the first shot rang out.

  The bullet zizzed alongside his head and passed through the chest of one of the lancers sitting behind him. The trooper collapsed onto the neck of his horse but managed to hang onto its mane long enough for two of his comrades to dismount and place him gently on the ground. As they did so three more shots came in close succession. One of these drilled the neck of the Muzalim-i-sani’s grey, which threw its rider and bolted away in a mad gallop before it suddenly slowed and collapsed about four hundred metres away.

  ‘You swine!’ roared Weidinger. He thought he could see him now, crouched behind a clump of cactussy rocks about six hundred metres away. There was no sign of his horse.

  Some of the lancers began to return fire from the saddle. Weidinger thought it would be a miracle if they hit him with those old carbines. The 87s were, at best, at the extreme of their range, whereas the British had deliberately designed their Lee-Enfield to be longer than the average carbine and a bit shorter than most European service rifles so that it could double as both an infantry and a cavalry weapon. This put them at a disadvantage sometimes when they came up against the Mauser 98, as they did all the time in Flanders, but made them ideally equipped to refight the South African war or score points in a skirmish in the Palestinian desert.

  Somebody near at hand was yelling in Turkish. Weidinger looked down and saw that the Muzalim-i-sani was screaming at a reluctant trooper to hand over his frayed-looking palomino. Weidinger started to yell at the troop in German, ‘Form up! Form up!’

  Most of them didn’t understand, but they were cavalrymen and they guessed his intention. Carbines were slung back over shoulders or rammed into their saddle boots, and right hands began to play with the lances. They formed a rough line, though three or four whose horses were truly spent had difficulty in bringing their mounts up. At the last moment the Muzalim-i-sani came alongside Weidinger on the palomino and started shouting out orders. Walk. Trot. Charge! On the last command the lances went down.

  Weidinger’s own weapon was a captured Webley .455 revolver Pichler had picked up after Gaza and given him for a bottle of cognac because Weidinger found it impossible to cock his issue ‘08 Luger automatic with one hand unless his knees were free to hold it. With the Webley he did not even have to bother to thumb the hammer back for the first shot if he didn’t want to as long as he had the strength to pull the trigger.

  Once they were at the gallop Weidinger was well in the lead. For a moment he lost sight of the quarry and then he saw that the land dipped slightly and that in this dip was the Englishman’s missing horse, a coal-black Arab by the look of it, which he was now in the process of mounting. There was a crack behind him and the zizz of a round passing uncomfortably close to his head. He looked round and saw that the Muzalim-i-sani was firing his revolver, while immediately behind him were half-a-dozen or so levelled lances. The rest of the troop were already lagging but, however badly mounted, everybody was intoxicated by the chase and yelling like Apaches.

  Weidinger saw the Englishman pull himself into the saddle and rake his animal’s flanks with his spurs. He was no more than three hundred metres away. It was then that the Uhlan officer realised how truly well-horsed his adversary was, for the black went straight into a loping gallop and began to increase the distance between them without any apparent effort. But one thing was for certain – he wasn’t riding like a statue now.

  When Weidinger came to the dip where the man had mounted up he saw that his rifle was lying there. A little further on came more proof of panic-stricken flight in the form of a haversack lying across the trail they were following along the steep edge of the wadi. Then, quite suddenly, Weidinger realised that the dust had stopped. The pursued had disappeared as neatly as a fox going to earth. It was as if the ground had swallowed him up. He slowed his chestnut to a walk for now it was no longer a chase but some sort of stalking affair and it was necessary to examine the hoof prints of the horse ahead. The Muzalim-i-sani caught him up. He was carrying the dropped rifle and haversack. ‘He’s hurt,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  Weidinger took the Lee-Enfield from him and saw that the butt and the stock were st
icky with blood to which fine grains of sand had become attached, so that its woodwork felt a bit like emery paper. Some lucky round had found its mark after all. Amazing! He handed the weapon back. ‘One of your men shot well,’ he said, fighting down the temptation to add that others had not: firing a revolver from a moving horse when a superior officer is in front of you was something that should be left to the Bioscope cowboys. ‘Where do you think he’s gone? Into the wadi?’ Weidinger was looking at the ground to see whether he could spot any splashes of blood.

  ‘Yes, there must be another track into it up there like the one we were going to take when we spotted him.’

  The Turk was right. They soon came to it. The track started after a tall clump of cactus and led into the wadi around a blind corner. They paused and looked down at it, and then they looked at each other.

  Weidinger knew that he could not possibly order the man to take his troop down there and that even if he did he would probably refuse. He would be right too. It was one thing to go into the wadi when the British weren’t expecting them and quite another when they had been forewarned. Their man could have already reached his forward listening posts and the English would be in the process of preparing a reception for them. They might well send an aircraft up to look for them as well. God only knew they had enough of them nowadays.

  ‘I suppose we’d better go back?’ Even now Weidinger was half hoping that the Turk would put common sense aside and want to continue the chase. They had been so close to getting a prisoner.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Muzalim-i-sani, trying to keep the relief out of his voice, for he could sense this German would have gone on. Perhaps, he thought, he hadn’t been paid in full for that arm? ‘They will be waiting for us. He may even have been bait for an ambush. He shot at us when we had stopped. Most people wouldn’t do that. It’s almost as if he wanted to be followed.’

  He’s probably not most people, thought Weidinger. He’s probably what Maeltzer would call a ‘sportin’ m’lud’. He’s got bone where his brain should be and he thinks he’s out on safari. But all he said was ‘Possibly,’ and turned his horse around.