by Colin Smith
A great twinkling canopy of stars was overhead, so closely clustered that only the most dedicated astronomer could pick out the pattern of the Bear or the Plough. It was, Weidinger had thought, so much more intense than the well-ordered night skies of the Fatherland. Then so was almost everything else about this land.
In Jerusalem he had never felt the slightest religious awe. He regarded himself as a good Christian, a good German Lutheran who would remain so as long as God stayed on the right side. Yet when he stepped into the Holy Sepulchre, even when he approached the spot which was supposed to be the site of Calvary itself, he was conscious only of the nauseating stench of the Orthodox tapers and the fawning greed of the importuning monks who tended the place. It seemed to Weidinger that the only people who could derive any sense of sanctity from Jerusalem were poor fools like that murdered Swede Magnus. But here in the Sinai, with its day heat and night cold, it was different. Here a man could believe in miracles, that great things had once happened. Might happen still.
He had hoped, prayed in a way, that this trip would provide a miracle of sorts, the kind of miracle that would save his military career, something a little more daunting than shooting panic-stricken deserters, shepherding other men’s mistresses or retrieving the diary of an alleged spy. He still thought von Papen attached far too much importance to the latter. What if Krag had omitted to mention it when he gave his evidence at the tribunal? He had done it to make himself look cleverer – that was all. The intelligence officer wanted to be the man who had broken the spy by confronting him with his own brilliant deductions. No matter. There was still the journalist’s secret messages in his despatches, his writing between the lines as Krag had so wittily put it. Nothing could be more damning than that. Unless – surely that was not what Shemsi meant by ‘I can ask him things that you can’t’? Did she suspect that Krag himself, so jealous of von Papen, so anxious to be the man who exposed Daniel, had made up those messages?
The idea became so powerful that for half a minute or so Weidinger seriously debated getting into the cab and confronting Shemsi with it. But what if he was mistaken? What if she said that she had never thought any such thing? How would he look suggesting to a brother officer’s mistress that she might be toying with the idea that her lover was prepared to send an innocent man to the gallows as fuel for his own ambition? Nor would it detract from his own sins, also primed by ambition. For what other reason had he shown the captured British despatches to Maeltzer on the train other than his desire to know if they were important enough to risk bypassing Krag and delivering them directly to Kress? Beneath his blankets Weidinger squirmed like a drunk recalling the indiscretions of the night before.
Weidinger had wrapped the blankets more tightly about him but despite the arak and his general fatigue, sleep did not come as easily as he would have wished. In the distance the British guns sounded every two or three minutes. They made a barking noise. Ba-grumph. Grumph! Grumph! It was nothing compared to the Western Front, but by Palestine standards it was quite a heavy barrage. His mind raced on. What would happen to him once he returned to Jerusalem with the wretched diary? Would von Papen find him other work, other errands, however humble? Or would he think it not worth risking Kress’s displeasure if he discovered that his sacked staff officer was still in the country? If that was the case it would be the next train for Berlin and the medical board that would finally declare that his services were no longer required. Ba-grumph. Grumph! Grumph! He found it rather soothing. Almost a lullaby. At least he was near where he should be.
Pichler’s guns had started just before two o’clock. Weidinger, snoozing by then, had been half aware of the activity that preceded the first explosion: the crunch of boots, whispers, muffled orders, the turning of well-oiled machinery, the clang of metal against metal as a round was sealed in the breach.
Shemsi had appeared to have been in a deep sleep when the sound of the first salvo made her cry out. Weidinger had got up and jumped down to the side of the cab, to find her crouching there with her hands over her ears. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘They’re ours.’
But she had seemed quite unaware of his presence until he gently pulled her left hand away and told her again. In doing so he had held her by the wrist for several seconds, and when he had finished telling her she had not immediately removed it but said, ‘Of course. I had quite forgotten. You must think me a very silly woman.’
‘I don’t think you’re silly at all. I think you’re very brave.’
‘For a woman?’
‘For anybody,’ he had said, suddenly conscious of the truth of his words. ‘I’ve known men do far worse than cover their ears when they’re close to the guns for the first time.’
‘Yes,’ Shemsi had said, recovering her poise a little. ‘I suppose the first time at anything is always difficult.’
And in the dark she had not seen him blush when he let go her wrist, for Weidinger was still a virgin, his terror of syphilis keeping him out of the brothels. He had persuaded her out of the cab then, and together they had walked over to the nearest gun – where she had taken an intelligent interest in the proceedings although she still flinched every time a lanyard was pulled.
Brass cases glinted in the darkness. Men mumbled curses or roared orders. A man crouched over a shell holding in his right hand something that looked like a key, which he slotted into a groove at the business end of the round.
‘What’s he doing?’ Shemsi had asked.
‘He’s setting the fuse,’ Weidinger had said, suddenly as delighted to inform as any fresh-faced ensign at a field day. ‘There are basically two types of shells you see. There are those that explode on impact. They’re packed with high explosives and the sort of thing you want for getting into trenches or dugouts. The other kind you can set to explode in the air and scatter shrapnel over a wide area. That thing he’s got in his hand is called a fusing tool. You can’t see it from here but at the top of the shell there is a coloured cone. It’s really a series of rings like one of those children’s toys built around a central stick. Each contains a trail of powder around its rim. Once that’s burned through it releases a firing pin and the shell explodes. You can usually set them from between zero and twenty-five seconds.’
‘Zero? Why would you want to set them to zero? Wouldn’t they explode in your face?’
‘Well, almost. A couple of metres off the muzzle of your gun I should imagine. The spread would be incredible. Like the old grape-shot the Russian gunners used on the English Light Brigade at Balaclava.’ They had watched two of the newly-fused shells being fired. Then, much to Weidinger’s embarrassment, the driver strolled up and, quite oblivious of Shemsi’s presence, amused himself by pissing into an empty case, still warm enough to cause a visible column of steam to rise.
‘I think we’d better go,’ he had said, hastily taking her arm.
‘Ah, the horrors of war!’ Shemsi had giggled as they went back to the lorry.
That had been an hour ago. Now the guns had moved off and Pichler had just emerged from the dugout, where it had been finally agreed that the new position for his battery would be the ridge overlooking Huj.
‘Let’s catch up the guns,’ he said as he joined them in the cab. The driver, suddenly awake, went out front with the starting-handle and the engine came to life at his third crank. As they moved away, Tel esh Sheria station was still burning fiercely behind them to the south-east.
‘Like dawn, a false dawn,’ Shemsi thought.
They passed the gun limbers, the horses sweating despite the night cold. Weidinger cast a professional eye over them and guessed that they had not been watered properly for days. The real dawn began to come up as they first sighted Huj, which seemed to consist of half-a-dozen single-storey wooden buildings and about twenty tents, all clustered round a clump of palms. As they got closer they could see by the number of people milling around that the camp was already awake.
It had been crowded with the four of them in the cab. Pichler
sat by the driver, so that he could give him orders, and next to him was Weidinger. Shemsi sat at the end of the bench seat, occasionally hanging on to the door frame when they hit a bump. On the smoother stretches she would nod off, her head sometimes coming to rest on Weidinger’s shoulder.
Weidinger enjoyed these moments. He liked the weight of her against him, the smell of her hair in his nostrils. There was something about these olive-skinned Levantines that both attracted and repelled him.
He always fantasised about German girls in scenes of operatic distress, perhaps beset and half ravished – though never fully, of course – by bandits in some dark forest. Once he had disposed of the girl’s assailants with his sabre she surrendered to him what she had denied the others. Sometimes a storm blew up, a tempest as mad as King Lear’s, and they had to shelter under his cloak on a bed of leaves . . . .
He thought differently about those females, like Shemsi, whom he categorised as Europeanised Orientals, wild and haughty beings at war with themselves. He imagined them as odalisques in diaphanous pantaloons, offering whips for their chastisement, willing to undergo any carnal indignity to arouse their lords’ jaded appetites, or as loud in their own desires, straddling a man as a girl would a pony. But he also saw them, whether Christians, Muslims or Jews, as cunning Semites, cosmopolitan and incomplete characters whose souls were not big enough to absorb notions as large as love of Fatherland, capable only of loving themselves or, at most, their immediate families.
For such people, Weidinger had long ago decided, no action was as spontaneous as it seemed; the poison phial was always hidden in the navel jewellery. He thought of how Shemsi had crouched by him and allowed him to hold her wrist when the battery started firing. He estimated that she had at least seven years on his twenty-three, and yet he had felt so protective towards her. What on earth, he asked himself, did Shemsi see in Krag? A man consumed by such venomous envy that he might even have manufactured all the evidence against Maeltzer for his own benefit. Once again he longed to have Shemsi confirm that this was what she really suspected; but this would have been hard enough when they were alone, impossible in front of Pichler, even though he was a friend.
As they drove into Huj they could see that the camp was being prepared for evacuation. Soldiers were slackening guy ropes or slinging haversacks and other boxes into the backs of carts and the few available lorries. When Weidinger and Pichler emerged from their cab they saw two German engineers running a line of electric cable from a clump of palms from which the sound of a pump engine could be heard, and guessed that the wells there were being prepared for demolition.
‘Another tactical withdrawal,’ muttered Pichler.
‘At least we’re not poisoning the water,’ said Weidinger, whose mind had not yet totally disengaged from its recent anti-Semitic reverie.
They walked towards a building with heavily sandbagged walls and a wireless aerial on its roof, which they judged to be headquarters. Shemsi trailed a couple of paces behind them, trying to ignore the incredulous stares of the soldiery. They were a few metres away when Krag emerged, saluted the Turkish sentry who had shuffled to attention and then descended the four steps that led from the narrow veranda to the street.
‘Major Krag!’ called Weidinger. He could hardly believe his eyes. He had never really expected to catch up with his quarry.
Krag wheeled and walked towards them. Shemsi and Pichler hung back as Weidinger went forward a few paces and saluted.
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Shouldn’t you be in more northerly climes by now?’ asked Krag, scarcely bothering to return the oberleutnant’s salute and showing not the slightest awareness of Shemsi’s presence.
‘Sir, Major von Papen sent me. He would like you to return Maeltzer’s diary. He sent you several telegrams asking for it, but it appears you didn’t receive them.’
‘Of course I received them,’ snapped Krag. ‘Unfortunately, we’ve got an offensive on our hands and for some unfathomable reason the English appear to have attacked us from the wrong direction. We have been rather busy and some things have had to take priority over others. I must write to Major von Papen and apologise for my discourtesy some time.’
He turned to Shemsi. ‘And to what do I owe this pleasure, Madame?’
‘Bureaucracy,’ she replied, with a coolness that quite startled Weidinger. ‘I need your signature to travel to Jaffa.’
‘Good heavens, you have come a long way for it. Couldn’t you have waited at Etline?’
‘Not really. It was difficult. I would have needed an escort, and Oberleutnant Weidinger was anxious to come down here.’
‘Ah yes. Still the young firebrand desperate for the sound of guns. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Weidinger, but yours has been a wasted journey – though I’m sure you’ve enjoyed some of the sights and sounds in your inimitable fashion. I have never seen any diary of Maeltzer’s. I can’t think what gave Major von Papen the impression that I had. I would have thought keeping a journal an odd occupation for a spy, even one posing as a journalist, although I suppose it could have been part of his camouflage. Kindly give Major von Papen my regards and tell him that if he finds any such diary I would be most interested to read it.’
Weidinger was trying to decide on a formula that would somehow convey to Krag that the diary’s existence and his possession of it were known facts without actually calling the man a liar, when he became aware of a kind of roaring sound behind him.
‘Liar! Liar! We’ve seen it, you idiot. You damn fool, we’ve seen it,’ shrieked a voice Weidinger had never heard before. ‘We saw it when your tent was blown over by the bombs at Etline. I picked it up. We both looked at it. We know it exists. Tell him, Weidinger; for God’s sake tell him. You have Maeltzer’s diary. Why don’t you admit it? What are you hiding?’
Weidinger turned to see that the Widow Shemsi had undergone a startling metamorphosis. Her face was contorted and she was streaming tears, her body visibly trembling. Behind her stood an embarrassed-looking Pichler, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders as if he expected at any second to have to restrain her from flying at Krag’s throat.
For a moment it seemed as if the intelligence officer was going to answer her question. ‘Nadia,’ he said – and to Weidinger this revelation of her given name, pronounced in a tone he had never heard Krag use before, spoke canyons of intimacy.
But then he seemed to rein himself in: ‘You go too far,’ he said, and abruptly turned away. For once he was white rather than yellow and Shemsi detected a tremor in his voice she did not altogether associate with anger.
She went as if to pursue him but Pichler held her back. ‘Let him go,’ said Weidinger. ‘Let him go and think about it. Perhaps he’ll talk to you later. I must send a message to Jerusalem.’
In the wireless room Weidinger found a German signaller as unshaven as himself bent over a Morse key, a forgotten cigarette slowly incinerating itself in a full ashtray beside him. A pile of messages waiting to be sent lay in a wooden tray. There were code books on the desk and a metal spike on which those despatches already sent were impaled.
As he entered the signaller was tapping out a message. He looked up and went on with what he was doing. Weidinger felt a flush of annoyance and for a moment was tempted to put the man’s cigarette out, although he knew it was nonsense to interrupt a Morse message or to expect the man to stand to attention for a visiting officer. Even when there wasn’t a flap on, telegraphists tended to be a breed apart.
When he had finished the signaller began to rise reluctantly to his feet but Weidinger waved him down.
‘I have an urgent message for Major von Papen in Jerusalem. He’s on the staff of General von Falkenhayn,’ he said, hurling the last name at him.
The man looked deeply unimpressed. ‘With respect, sir,’ he said, ‘they’re all urgent, every single one of them. I couldn’t give yours priority. And they all have to be sent by 11.00 hours, which is when we destroy the wireless – providi
ng the English don’t arrive before then. I’m on my own here. The other telegraphist was wounded in an air raid a week ago and the cipher clerk has been evacuated with dysentery. I have to do all the coding myself.’
‘What if you didn’t have to code it?’
‘Sir?’
‘What if you sent it in plain language?’
‘But, sir, I thought you said it was priority,’ said the telegraphist, his impudence rising to Weidinger’s desperation.
‘So it is,’ he said, somehow controlling his temper. ‘A man’s life might depend on it. But it’s a judicial rather than a military matter and if the English do pick it up just imagine the time they’re going to waste trying to decode it.’
The telegraphist sighed and slid over a message pad and a pencil. ‘It would help if you could keep it under ten words, sir,’ he said.
‘Certainly,’ grinned Weidinger, making large block capitals on the paper.
It was six: ‘MAJOR KRAG HAS DESTROYED MAELTZER’S DIARY.’
***
Ponting had just got back from breakfast – hard tack and sardines washed down with weak tea – when Meinertzhagen came over the field telephone.
‘It looks like Daniel’s in trouble,’ he said.
‘Was he able to get a message out?’
‘No. Wireless intercept an hour ago. They weren’t using his code name either.’
Ponting thought, ‘So they’ve told you who he is at last.’ But all he said was, ‘That was quick work.’
‘What was?’
‘On the cipher, sir.’
‘Ah, that’s the funny thing. It was plain language. All we had to do was translate it. Mind you, if I hadn’t recognised a name the brains would still be working on it now.’
