by Colin Smith
***
‘Perhaps I’d better get help,’ she said.
It had become strangely quiet. Shemsi suddenly realised that there had not been any machine-gun fire for several minutes. For a short while there was an occasional rifle shot, but now that had stopped as well. Somewhere quite close a horse whinnied once. Then there was nothing, no sound at all apart from the droning of insects.
‘No, don’t go,’ said Krag, who was lying on his back. ‘I think all that can be done has been done for the moment. Thank you.’
The thanks unnerved her slightly – so out of character. She thought he looked white enough to be dying, though he appeared in no immediate danger of losing consciousness. Shemsi did not want to be alone with him if he died. She wished Weidinger was there.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Wonderful,’ said Krag. That was also out of character. It reminded her of Maeltzer’s little ironies in the death cell. She decided it was the kind of pose a certain type of man considered obligatory before a woman, and warmed to him for it.
At first there had been an awful lot of blood. It was all over her. On her dress, her hands, her face where she had wiped away the sweat. She had torn his tunic and shirt open, ripped great strips from her petticoat, folded the swabs of yellow cotton against the wounds, watched them turn a soggy red, torn some more and repeated the process. The last ones still showed traces of yellow.
She was still uncertain how badly hurt Krag was. He was right about the bullet hitting the cigarette case. She had removed it from the upper right pocket of his tunic and the silver-plated alloy was holed right through. ‘So now it’s a silver and tobacco bullet,’ he had gasped when she showed it him. ‘At least it must have slowed it down a bit. Look after it. It’ll make an interesting keepsake.’
One of the reasons it had taken her so long to slow the bleeding was that she had not immediately discovered that there were two wounds, about ten centimetres apart. The main wound was just below the right rib cage and there was a second one on the hip where she assumed the bullet must have come out. Now she had bandages on both, and the bleeding seemed to have subsided a little.
‘Do you enjoy playing nurse?’ he asked. Shemsi thought that sounded much more like the Krag she knew and was prepared to marry.
‘Am I playing?’
‘Oh please. I didn’t mean to be unkind. But we all play roles when we have to don’t we? Soldier, nurse, journalist, spy – even a poor widow is obliged to make certain accommodations.’
Shemsi chose to ignore that, which disappointed him – though it was what he had expected. ‘And do you play roles?’ she asked.
‘I suppose I do sometimes. Why not? Everybody else does.’
‘And what role are you playing now?’
‘I should have thought that was obvious. The wounded, perhaps dying, officer being a little philosophical in the presence of his lady love. A disciple of Stoic, I should say. I wish it were a more honourable wound. Does it count being shot by your own side?’
‘Will you tell me something?’
‘If I can.’
‘Why did you forge those messages in Maeltzer’s articles to his newspapers? Why didn’t you give Weidinger his journal? Have you destroyed it?’
‘All these questions, nurse. You mustn’t excite the patient, you know. Anyway, you know the answers to all of them, don’t you?’
‘Then why would I bother asking them?’
‘Because you have to be certain, you have to know.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘Let me ask you a question first. When I left you alone with Weidinger after it was plain we had become reconciled, what did you tell him?’
‘I told him that you had offered to marry me and that Maeltzer was no longer a problem between us because we had seen von Papen’s telegram to him and knew he was not going to hang.’
‘And what did you tell him about the diary?’
She looked briefly away from him as if she thought she had heard some movement outside. ‘I told him there was rivalry between you and von Papen and you didn’t want him to get his hands on it. It would have shown that you had not been quite as clever as the tribunal believed you had been.’
‘How clever of you. I’m sure he believed you.’
‘He did. Now tell me why you forged that evidence against Maeltzer?’
‘Weidinger believes that I did it solely to further my own career doesn’t he? The little popinjay thought that I was so jealous of his success with Kress, so determined to be the man who unmasked Daniel, that I would be willing to send an innocent man to the gallows, didn’t he? No spy keeps a diary. Isn’t that what he told you?’
‘Yes, that’s what he believes,’ she said softly.
‘And do you believe it?’
‘No. No, I don’t. Not for those reasons.’
‘Then why do you think I did it?’
‘I want you to tell me. Please.’
‘You know damn well why I did it. I did it to protect you.’
There was a long pause, the longest yet. Then she said, ‘To protect me?’
If Shemsi sounded astonished Krag chose to ignore it. He sat up slightly, leaning on his right hand. He was beginning to feel as if the whole of his torso had been kicked by a horse.
‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘And myself, I suppose. A staff officer should not bring his problems back to his lady’s rooms or leave his papers in places which an intelligent and curious eye might find too tempting. Why did you do it? Was it revenge for having to marry Major Shemsi to save your little brother’s neck? But you have always given me the impression you admired the man. Or did you compromise yourself with somebody in Beirut while your husband was away, perhaps one of those young English blades on leave from Cyprus, there to pick up a little Arabic and taste the wine? The English excel at blackmail.’
‘Erwin Krag,’ she said, a small, furious smile on her lips. ‘I don’t think you did it to protect me at all. I think you know very well that such protection is unnecessary in my case. I think you did it to protect yourself. If the English really do excel at blackmail you must have been a very good target. There you were in Constantinople for all those years and the more you got to know the Turks the more you loathed them. Their vanities and corruption, their spectacular incompetence, their brutality. Above all their brutality. Weren’t you disgusted by the way the Kaiser’s favourite Muslims were treating the Armenians? Perhaps you had an Armenian sweetheart?’
‘As a matter of fact I did have an Armenian friend,’ he said. ‘But she died of diphtheria, which was probably better than the death she might have suffered had she lived.’
Shemsi gave a sort of understanding nod, as if this had merely confirmed all that she had been saying. ‘And then time after time you were unfairly passed over for promotion,’ she went on. ‘And all the time you were attending diplomatic functions where you would rub shoulders with the French, the British, the Russians – even the Americans. And sooner or later, of course, you found a sympathetic ear, a shoulder to cry on, somebody who knew your true worth. And the more you talked, the more they wanted to listen. I should think it was very flattering. And then one day they asked you something and you said you couldn’t tell them because it was a secret and although you hated the Turks you would never betray your country. And they said, “But what if General Liman von Sanders found out about all the other things you’ve been telling us?” As you say, the English excel at blackmail. So you went on doing it.’
‘I must say,’ said Krag, ‘I shall always admire you. But sometimes you can be too clever. Don’t you think, Nadia, that you have just revealed a remarkable familiarity with the techniques of espionage?’ He was smiling, eyebrows raised, pressing the petticoat cloth on his wounds.
Before she could make any answer a shot was fired and an English voice said, ‘Come on out of it, Fritz.’
Krag slid out from beneath the trailer on his back and his captors immediately took in the blood and the makesh
ift bandages and helped him to his feet. Shemsi emerged on her stomach clutching the holed cigarette case and then stood blinking down the strong afternoon light, brushing the dust off her dress, quite unaware of how strange she looked in her blood-soaked clothing. ‘I told yow I could hear a bint talkin’,’ said Mace, who held in his left hand the pineapple grenade he had decided not to roll under the vehicle.
On page 143 of The Warwickshire Yeomanry in the Great War it is mentioned that among the captives at Huj was a Syrian woman, who is described as the wife of a captured officer. What the regimental historian failed to record are the words of one of the wounded captives to a perplexed young subaltern of the Gloucesters, the third Yeomanry regiment of Fifth Mounted Brigade who were relieving the ninety intact survivors of the charge. Thirty-six of the Warwickshire and Worcestershire yeomen were dead or dying and fifty-seven wounded.
Stretcher-bearers treated the casualties as they found them, regardless of nationality. Krag was lying with British shell dressings on his wounds, waiting for a place in one of the horse ambulances. Shemsi hovered over him, occasionally fanning flies from his face.
Krag turned to the second lieutenant who had been landed with the problem of what to do about Shemsi. ‘I wish you to do something for me,’ he said in his workmanlike English.
The Gloucester nodded, thinking it might be something to do with the woman.
‘You must get a message to the senior intelligence officer at General Allenby’s headquarters,’ he ordered. ‘Tell him you have rescued Daniel.’
‘Oh yes. And who might Daniel be?’ inquired the subaltern who couldn’t make out whether he was dealing with natural Prussian arrogance or gross delirium.
‘They will understand,’ said Krag. ‘They will understand what I’m talking about, won’t they, Madame Shemsi?’
She didn’t say anything. She was staring at Meinertzhagen and Ponting, their red staff tabs easily visible, looking down on them from a spot where a young soldier had just persuaded a brown horse without a saddle to its feet.
6
Royal United Services Institute, Whitehall: 3 December 1921
***
The Adjutant General, a lean Scot who had spent the last two years of the war as head of Military Intelligence at the War Office, paused for the water glass. He was thinking of the night train to Folkestone and the comforts of Martello House and his Finnish wife, Aline.
His audience stirred slightly, sensing that he was getting to the end of his speech, and there was a final outbreak of coughing. One of the worst offenders was Ponting, who was seated in the third row next to his old boss. He looked at his watch. He had been looking forward to dinner with Meinertzhagen at the Army and Navy but he had this perfectly awful bloody cold coming on, a real ear, nose and throat job, and the old boy had gone on a bit longer than expected.
‘The truth is,’ said Lieutenant-General Sir George MacDonough as he put down his glass. ‘It is impossible to anticipate victory in war without being ready to take risks.’
He paused to inspect his audience, and here and there his gaze forced a nod of assent. A few of them were in uniform because they had come straight off duty at the War Office or, in a couple of cases, from regimental soldiering at Chelsea Barracks. Most, including the general and even some of the newspaper reporters, wore the kind of brogues and pinstripes or hairy tweeds that were the undress uniform of the British officer corps.
‘But all risks have to be logical,’ went on Sir George. ‘Someone looking from the sidelines, lacking knowledge about the situation, is likely to think that Allenby took unwarranted risks.’ (‘And so might you, if you’d been in Beersheba when we expected the cavalry to die of thirst,’ thought Ponting, who was sitting with his arms folded. He was shortly to leave the army for a job with a merchant bank with interests in the Middle East.)
‘That is not true,’ continued the general, who was now looking directly at Ponting and Meinertzhagen with what appeared to be a slight smile on his face. ‘Allenby knew with certainty from his Intelligence of all the preparations and all the movements of his enemy. All the enemy’s cards were revealed to him, and he could play his own hand with complete confidence.’
MacDonough paused just long enough to drop his voice to what was almost a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Gentlemen,’ he confided. ‘Under these conditions victory was certain before we ever began.’
***
Outside, strolling past the Guildhall in search of a cab, the cold air did wonders for Ponting’s tubes and supper no longer seemed such a bad idea. Besides, there were some questions he wanted to ask Meinertzhagen, questions it would have been quite improper to ask four years ago.
They were still improper now, but he was on the verge of a new career and this post-war world was such a different place. Secrets dating from before 11 November 1918 seemed to belong to another century. The Bolsheviks had shot, bayoneted and bludgeoned the Imperial Russian family out of existence in a cellar in Ekaterinburg and now their relatives among the remaining thrones of Europe all lived in terror of constitutional regicide. The Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires had disintegrated and a batch of unlikely republics had been hatched from the ruins. In Turkey itself Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli and the man who had relinquished command of the Seventh Army on the eve of Allenby’s offensive, had emerged as Commander-in-Chief and was preparing to smite the Greek occupiers and establish a nationalist government that would ensure the Sultan never returned.
Even in Britain it looked as if the Irish rebels were going to get their Free State if they were prepared to let Lloyd George save face by allowing the Crown to retain some nominal hold over it. The Kaiser was in exile in Holland, and Germany was in danger of either breaking up into its pre-Bismarckian parts at the mercy of wandering Freikorps, or of turning Communist. Allied troops occupied the Rhineland where the French were actively encouraging separatist tendencies among the natives. Meanwhile, Palestine had its first Jewish ruler since the Romans had overthrown the last of the Maccabees almost two thousand years before.
He was Sir Herbert Samuel, first High Commissioner of the new British Mandate granted by the League of Nations. Sir Herbert was a Zionist but after violent Arab riots he had been obliged to suspend the emigration of his co-religionists, mostly Russian and Polish Jews, to their promised land. The British army was trying to get Balfour’s famous declaration promising the Jews a homeland torn up, or at least rewritten. People like Allenby, who was now High Commissioner for Egypt and Sudan, felt it failed to live up to its second part. This was to respect the rights of the indigenous people, who were no longer called Syrians by the British but Palestinian Arabs in order to distinguish them from their brethren who lived in the new French Mandate of Syria, which included Damascus and Shemsi’s home town of Beirut.
Meinertzhagen was among the very few quite senior British officers to be pro-Zionist, and for this reason he had fallen out with the administration early on and was no longer serving in Palestine. Ponting, who did not share his views, suspected that they were part of his habitual contrariness, tinged with the genuine admiration they all felt for people like the Aaronsohns, whom Ponting regarded as in no way typical of the Jewish settlers. Meinertzhagen particularly enjoyed it when people assumed that he supported the Zionists because he was Jewish and delighted in giving in revealing his Viking ancestry and giving sharp little lectures on the foolishness of their anti-Semitism.
Ponting waited until after the meal, when they had both been loosened up by one of the last bottles of ‘08 claret on the premises and the prospect of a vintage port was looming. He lit up one of the cigarettes he still bought in batches of a thousand from the Mayfair tobacconist.
‘Well, you’re not going to tell me Daniel was a woman,’ he began. ‘Not after what his nibs said tonight.’ Ponting was a bit drunk, his normal tolerance for alcohol eroded by his cold perhaps. It made him willing enough to play the buffoon a bit, always a good ploy with his old boss because he could rarely resist sho
wing off.
‘Why not?’ said Meinertzhagen, resisting the temptation to add that he might not necessarily tell him anything. ‘Sarah Aaronsohn was a woman. Nurse Cavell was a woman. So, for that matter, was Mata Hari.’
‘Yes, but the quality of Daniel’s stuff. That sort of thing could only have come from somebody very close.’
‘Or somebody close to somebody very close,’ smiled Meinertzhagen, who was thoroughly enjoying himself.
‘Are you saying Daniel was that Syrian woman – Shemsi? I find that difficult to believe. Why would she do it? How on earth did we get hold of her?’
‘I didn’t say anything of the sort, but you shouldn’t exclude her just because she’s a woman. She had the opportunity and she had the motive. You remember the things she told us about herself once our learned friends from the Arab Bureau had tired of her.’
‘Do you mean that tale about being forced to marry an elderly Turkish officer in order to save her little brother’s neck? I never knew what to make of that.’
‘It was true. I got a French friend to make some inquiries in Beirut after the Armistice,’ said Meinertzhagen. ‘It all seemed to have happened the way she told it. The same with that journalist – what was his name? Maeltzer! He confirmed that she did leave him the hatpin just as she told us she did. And that saved his life, didn’t it? That and the fact that he was at least nominally a Swiss. My God, only the Turks would want to hang a Swiss in the middle of a world war. Even the Germans made sure he was released and safely hidden away just in case Djemal Pasha decided to have a final necktie party before we came in. Anyway, she certainly did him a favour. Did you know, by the way, that he has become a Zionist and is living in Haifa?’
