Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ***

  Joseph Lishansky, Sarah Aaronsohn’s monocled friend and possibly her lover, was captured by the Turks and died bravely in an execution gown on a tripod and chair gallows in Damascus on 8 December 1917. Some seventy years after these events a photograph of him hanging there was on display at the Nili group museum in the Aaronsohn’s old house at Zichron Jacob.

  It is not certain how many other secret admirers Sarah Aaronsohn had other than the boy who grew up with the Druse. Lawrence dedicated The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his account of the desert war, to ‘SA’, above four verses of his only published poetry. The second verse reads:

  Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near

  and saw you waiting:

  When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me

  and took you apart: Into his quietness.

  Lawrence experts have been arguing for years about the identity of ‘SA’, and the Sarah Aaronsohn theory has been put up and shot down on the grounds that Lawrence was either totally homosexual or a masochistic celibate who, during his post-war seclusion, hired a young Scot to birch desire out of his bare backside. One theory is that ‘SA’ was a teenaged Arab boy called Dahoum, nicknamed ‘Sheik Ahmed’, with whom Lawrence lived in 1913 when he was part of the British Museum’s archaeological team working on the excavation at Carchemish, some sixty miles north of Aleppo. The expedition is thought to have provided cover for British Intelligence to observe the progress of the Berlin-Baghdad railway at the point of its greatest vulnerability, the bridge across the Euphrates.

  But Lawrence is known to have had affectionate relationships with women. As a young man he had even proposed marriage to a family friend called Janet Laurie who laughed it off. Perhaps, like many young homosexuals in those hopelessly intolerant times, he hoped that the right female might one day come along and ‘put him right’.

  He went to Cairo several times between June and September 1917 and Sarah Aaronsohn is known to have made a visit to Cairo that July and returned to Palestine. Sarah Aaronsohn did shoot herself with a pistol that was small enough to be concealed from her Turkish captors one of whom presumably pocketed it because it has never been recovered. Nor was Lawrence anti-Zionist. Like many of his Arab friends he thought Jewish money, energy and cleverness might well help develop the newly independent Arab nations. In 1919 only the Palestinian Arabs, whose land the Jews were moving into, were beginning to demur. Lawrence, who died of head injuries in the spring of 1935 after falling off his expensive 1000cc Brough motorcycle in an English country lane, never did reveal the identity of ‘SA’.

  Before the Turks kicked the chair away Lishansky’s last words are reputed to have been, ‘Long live the English Redeemers’. He was executed the day before General Shea and his Cockney territorials accepted the surrender of Jerusalem from the mayor, who approached the British waving a white bed-sheet he had borrowed from the hospital at the American Colony.

  ***

  The Bavarian aristocrat Kress von Kressenstein survived the war and wrote a boring book about the Palestine campaign, mostly devoted to complaints about Turkish logistics, particularly the railways. Archie Wavell, whom Ponting had sat next to in the makeshift officers’ mess at Beersheba the night before the charge at Huj, wrote a much better account. In The Palestine Campaign Wavell, who ended his career as a field marshal and Viceroy of India, mentions the effectiveness of the Entente’s Intelligence services.

  To his great disgust, and mainly due to a clerical error, Weidinger, the incipient Nazi and disciple of the arme blanche, was released from British internment in the late summer of 1918. He was part of a Red Cross-sponsored exchange of officer prisoners considered so badly crippled they were unlikely to be of any further military use. In fact, in the confusion of the last three months of the war, when the dizzy hopes raised by Ludendorff’s spring offensive were dashed and followed by a terrible autumn of humiliating retreat, he managed to wangle a job as a horse procurement officer. This was a thankless task, because the British naval blockade had made horsemeat a highly-valued substitute for Argentinean beef. But it did keep Weidinger on the active list, and to him that was all that mattered.

  After the armistice he returned to his parents’ home in Berlin. Along with some other young ex-officers in threadbare uniforms he learned that the greatest army the world had ever known had been stabbed in the back by the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Weidinger sometimes told his new friends about the Jewish journalist who had betrayed them – for he preferred this story to revelations of misconduct on the part of a brother-officer, however much he detested him. After all, Krag had died of wounds incurred fighting Allenby’s cavalry. He often wondered what had become of Shemsi, and was thinking of writing to the management of Fast’s Hotel to see whether they had heard anything of her when he died in the great influenza epidemic of 1919.

  The aristocratic Franz von Papen went on to hold high office. After the war he entered the Reichstag as a member of a centre Roman Catholic party and for six chaotic months he was the last Chancellor of Germany before Hitler was elected in January 1933. Von Papen, the great trimmer, then agreed to become Vice Chancellor, telling people that he would be a moderating influence.

  The Nazis murdered most of his friends but the Führer found his international status useful and he was sent abroad. He spent four years as ambassador to Austria, becoming redundant when, to the unbounded joy of most Austrians, the Nazis subsumed their country into the Reich in the Anschluss of 1938. For greater part of the 1939-45 conflict he was ambassador to Turkey, where he was able to renew his acquaintance with its ruler, Mustafa Kemal, who had decreed that Turks should adopt the Christian European system of surnames and declared his own to be Ataturk.

  Towards the end of the war von Papen put out some unofficial peace feelers to the Allies that might have cost him his life had Berlin discovered it. In 1946, to his utter astonishment, a German denazification court sentenced him to eight years in a labour camp, but he was released after three. In the memoirs he published in 1952 he claimed, with some justification that he had always strived to be a moderating influence on Hitler.

  Maeltzer, who blamed much of his ordeal on the same underlying anti-Semitism that had convicted Dreyfus, turned from being a contented assimilated Jew to a dedicated Zionist and permanent resident of Haifa. Over the years he became ambivalent about his own involvement with the Nili group making it plain that he was at least acquainted with some of its leading members. Shortly before his death at the age of eighty in 1954 he gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper which entirely glossed over the question of whether he had been rightly or wrongly accused, but concentrated instead on his extraordinary escape from the noose with the help of a hatpin left by a woman friend, whom he declined to name. The reporter put this down to some sort of old-world regard for a lady’s reputation. The truth of the matter was that Maeltzer could never be certain in his own mind whether Shemsi had dropped the pin intentionally.

  Maeltzer continued to write for any German language newspaper, Swiss or otherwise, who would take his copy. In the late Thirties he discovered there was a tremendous appetite in the National Socialist press for articles extolling Palestine as a solution to the Jewish question, the soil where a new breed of muscular Jew had taken root. They were even better received if they also attacked the British for betraying their promise to International Jewry by imposing immigration restrictions. In this respect Maeltzer made a trip to Zichron Jacob which, from a journalistic point of view, was particularly rewarding. He often started feature pieces with his visit to Sarah Aaronsohn’s grave, which was shaded by a young oak in the settlement’s well-kept cemetery there. Later a large stone was placed nearby to commemorate her brother Aaron, whose remains were in the English Channel.

  Maeltzer married late, at the age of fifty-two, a fortyish widow. She was a Greek Jewess from Salonika called Sarah who was staying with friends in Haifa with her two small daughters and son. A slim, high cheek-boned woman, who loo
ked a little like Shemsi, she bore him a son. She wanted to call him Benjamin, which was appropriate, but Maeltzer insisted on Jacob after his father.

  Apart from Hebrew, Jacob grew up to speak fluent German and Greek and passable English. He served in the Israeli-Arab wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967. During the 1973 conflict he was among a group of Beersheba based reserve officers assigned because of their language skills as escort officers to foreign war correspondents covering the Sinai front. On one trip the journalists included a young British photographer named Mace who said that an uncle of his, whom he described as a ‘horse soldier’, had fought in the area during the First World War. It was only then that Jacob himself remembered that this latest bloodletting was being played out on the forgotten Anglo-Turkish battlefields his own father had once reported on.

  As they drove south under a sky doodled by vapour trails, pausing to inspect incinerated tanks crewed by shrunken stick-men carved from charcoal, Mace spoke of his uncle’s war. Apparently there was a place called Huj where the old soldier, still an active man in his seventies, had vivid memories of charging an artillery battery sword in hand. Maps were consulted but nobody could find Huj in a land where Arab place names have often been changed to Hebrew ones. Captain Maeltzer suggested that it might be between the Jewish settlements of Nir’am and Gevim in the citrus groves just north of the Gaza strip, about ten miles south-east of the coastal town of Ashqelon.

  Between his military engagements Jacob trained as an architect, married twice, fathered three sons, established a successful practice in Tel Aviv and moved into a large house near the beach at Herzliya with bougainvillea vines on the walls and a grape trellis in the back yard. His youngest son served as a sergeant in a mobile artillery unit during the Israeli siege of West Beirut in 1982. He was among a number of young soldiers who disapproved of the war. When Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies massacred Palestinian civilians in the slum shanties of Sabra and Chatilla he participated in the huge ‘Peace Now’ demonstration in Tel Aviv which demanded withdrawal from Lebanon and a settlement with the Palestinians. Once he had completed his military service he left Israel and joined the growing colony of Israelis living in New York where Maeltzer’s grandson worked first as a freelance journalist then went into marketing.

  Among the Beirutis the Israelis were shelling in the summer of 1982 was Shemsi. On a bed in a corner of an apartment block’s basement car park near the Corniche she was dying at the age of ninety-six, surrounded by family and friends who had also taken shelter there.

  After the First World War Shemsi went to live with her brother in California, but in 1931 she returned to Beirut, then part of the French Mandate of Syria, to look after her sick mother. She never remarried or ever, as far as can be ascertained, talked about Krag. Despite the nationalist traditions in her family she was a convinced Francophile, and after the collapse of France in 1940 seemed to be a staunch supporter of the Vichy administration loyal to Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun. Over the years her dress sense improved and she remained a slim, elegant woman well into old age. She became on intimate terms with several middle-ranking French officers and is reputed to have had her last affair at the age of fifty-five with a tubby little colonel of ordnance who had risen from the ranks.

  Friends and relatives were therefore quite amazed when, in the summer if 1941, within weeks of the British victory over the Vichy forces and the occupation of Beirut, she should have found a job as an interpreter in the occupiers’ headquarters. She shrugged this off with the explanation that times were hard and it was a pity to waste the English she had acquired in California.

  During the Lebanese civil war she remained, like many other Christians, in the predominantly Muslim western half of the city. On her deathbed the sound of the Israeli guns might have taken her mind back to Huj, for she spoke some words in German, but nobody could understand what she was saying. When one of her nieces ventured upstairs to clear out her aunt’s apartment, with its shattered glass and shrapnel pocked walls, she discovered an old cigarette case with a hole in the middle. Its contents, when she could eventually get it open, were green with mould. She could not think what had possessed her aunt to keep such tat and threw it away.

  ***

  Meinertzhagen’s military career never recovered from his uncritical support of the Zionist cause. Allenby sacked him from his postwar job as Political Officer in Palestine, and he left the army altogether in 1925, having married four years previously. In the Second World War he served in the Home Guard. In his published diaries he claims to have fired his last shots in anger on behalf of the fledgling Jewish state, when the British were withdrawing from Palestine in 1948. According to Meinertzhagen, who would then have been seventy, he acquired rifle and fought with a British rearguard that had become embroiled with the Arabs around Jaffa.

  However, some of his diary entries probably need to be treated with caution. For instance, he writes that when he returned to England from Palestine in 1921 he had with him a large stock of the opium-laced cigarettes Allenby forbade him to use. These, he claims, he used to offer to loquacious and unsuspecting fellow-passengers on the railways, with the result that they invariably fell asleep. It is a good story, but it is unlikely, to say the least, that the amount of opium which could be introduced undetected into a single cigarette could achieve this. Meinertzhagen died on 17 June 1967, a few days after the Israelis had occupied the West Bank of the Jordan and all of the Sinai following the Arab rout in the Six-Day War.

  Ponting’s job with his first merchant bank did not last long. Nor did the one after that, or the one after that. Sooner or later Ponting would always turn up at that crucial meeting just a little slurred, a little loud, often quite funny at first, and then he would say the wrong thing or, on one memorable occasion, nothing at all, having fallen asleep on arrival. Each time he would swear it was the last, hurl the offending bottle from desk drawer to waste-paper basket, and dictate a solemn letter of resignation to the membership secretary of his club. Some employers were more patient than others. All, in the end, reached the same decision.

  In 1936, after a messy divorce for which he was not entirely to blame, an old army chum who also knew Meinertzhagen offered him a job in Johannesburg selling insurance. He pointed out that the pay would not be marvellous but that the climate would help what was left of his lungs. He didn’t mention the drink. The friend knew Ponting’s problem and he made his offer with his eyes open. Besides, he drank himself. It worked out. Ponting still went on benders but as he got older his dry spells got longer. And if his health didn’t improve, at least it didn’t get worse.

  Twice a year he was required to visit Windhoek, the capital of what, until 1918, had been Germany’s colony in South West Africa, and later became a League of Nations territory mandated to the Union of South Africa. It was here, some forty years before, that the German army had all but wiped out the Herero tribe in a campaign that had caught the imagination of young officer cadets like Krag.

  Windhoek was still, despite a growing Afrikaaner population, a very German place. German was the native tongue of most of the white community. Its newspapers were in German, with stirring Gothic mastheads. Bronze memorials commemorated the deeds of the Imperial Army. The best hotel in town was called the Kaiser Wilhelm. The streets had German names. In 1938 there was a strong Nazi element, and its blond youth were full of blood and iron.

  Ponting had mixed feelings about the place. It was true there was this dark, worrying side. There were troops of ‘boy scouts’ who rambled in step, and even whistled the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ when they thought they could get away with it. There were newspaper editorials that obliquely equated the case for the Sudetenland with other ‘lost territories’. There were shopkeepers who somehow never heard English.

  Yet in some ways it was a refreshing change from Johannesburg. It was about a tenth the size but more prosperous looking. The beer was sharper, the streets cleaner. Jolly Bavarian bands played outside open-air cafés.
Its Lutheran churches were much more solid-looking than the shacks of the Dutch Reformed Church and even made Anglican Gothic appear whimsical. The whites were generally better-looking and there was a nicer class of whore, most of them mixed-race Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds from a little dorp called Rehoboth, who called themselves the Basters. And because it was so far away from Johannesburg, once the small amount of business on hand had been dealt with it was a bender town as far as Ponting was concerned.

  He usually ended his night having a few cleansing beers in one of the mud-walled bars behind the railway station where there was no electricity and the candles and the oil lamps lit up the faces of the Baster girls who sometimes looked as though they might have been painted by Rembrandt. In the autumn of 1938, at about the time of the Munich crisis, when the bands seemed to be playing louder than ever before, Ponting entered such a bar and saw Krag standing alone at the end of it. He recognised him instantly despite the white hair, the features creased by time and sun, the civilian linen jacket and the open-neck shirt over a frame that was as lean as ever.

  As far as Ponting was concerned the immediate effect was to sober him up. He sipped his drink, lit a cigarette, coughed, and ignored the young woman who came up and mechanically asked for ‘Just-one-beer, man.’ The girl went away. Krag had a bottle of brandy by him and was drinking it from a whisky glass. After a while, he became conscious of Ponting’s stare, gave him a brief glance and then looked away.

  ‘Don’t we know each other?’ asked Ponting.

  By way of reply Krag poured himself another drink.

  ‘In Palestine?’

  The German turned. ‘You were in Palestine?’ he said in English.

  ‘Yes. I was in Palestine. I was at Huj. You remember Huj? You were wounded.’ Ponting had this urge to pull his shirt away and reveal the purple scar he knew would be there.