Meinertzhagen and Ponting arrived with the cleaners, human
and otherwise. The birds circled in the low thermals above the ambulances and
stretcher parties, especially over the far ridge where the Turkish dead were
thickly clustered.
‘Buzzards,’ said Meinertzhagen, pushing up the peak of his
solar topee and holding a hand over his eyes.
‘Long-legged
buzzards and a few Booted Eagles by the look of ’em.’
Ponting shuddered. ‘They disgust me.’
‘But why?
It’s their nature.’
The officers rode on in silence for a while after that, each
apparently lost in his own thoughts. They were freshly horsed on the tough
little Australian remounts that were known in that campaign as Walers because
they were bred in New South Wales. Now they walked their Walers down the ridge
behind which the Warwicks and Worcesters had assembled before making their
sudden appearance on the skyline to start their half-mile gallop towards the
Austrian seventy-fives.
The guns were hidden in a hollow in the enemy-held ridge, so
that as the English cavalry crossed the flat of the little valley they had
ridden into dead ground, where the gunners could no longer fire at them over
open sights. Instead, they had relied on air bursts and the covering fire provided
by the German machine-gunners and Turkish infantry dug in higher up behind them
who could see the Yeomanry coming all the way.
As they got nearer the Austrian battery Meinertzhagen and
Ponting saw bundles of khaki huddled together by the dead horses. Great clouds
of flies rose off human and animal cadavers alike, settling down again once
they were past.
They did not go down to the Skoda guns in the hollow right
away but rode to the left of them, up to the crest of the ridge where the
nationalities were intertwined. Further down the far slope the dead were
exclusively Turkish, for it was here that the English had run them through with
their long swords as they ran away.
Close to a Turkish corpse with a gaping back wound was an
open, red-covered book, also lying with its spine uppermost. Ponting dismounted
and picked it up, half-expecting it to be a Koran, which would have made a nice
keepsake. But it turned out to be in English. The Complete Letter-Writer for
Ladies and Gentlemen, he read, and he could see by flicking through the chapter
headings that it gave advice on how to conduct all kinds of correspondence:
business, social, family – even amorous. On the title page was an inscription
written in black ink in the large and precise style Ponting always thought of
as Working-Class Copperplate: ‘To our dearest son Walter, in the hope that he
might learn these lessons well and keep us informed of all his adventures. May
God keep you safe and sound until you return to
us.
Your
loving parents, Mr and Mrs Albert Calderwell.’
Ponting wondered what kind of self-improving Tommy Atkins
would take such a volume into battle with
him?
Written
in pencil in the inside front cover of the book was ‘Private W. Calderwell,
Warwickshire Yeomanry’. Underneath, inscribed in block capitals in a different,
darker pencil lead were the letters ‘B Squadron’.
Ponting,
who had a deductive mind, decided that Calderwell was probably one of a recent
draft of reinforcements who had not known which of his regiment’s squadrons he
would be joining until he arrived in Egypt.
It didn’t look as if the
poor boy had lasted long.
‘Interesting?’ asked Meinertzhagen.
‘It’s from one of ours,’ said Ponting, slipping the book
into a tunic pocket and remounting.
They turned around and went back to the top of the ridge
where, on the English side, the slaughter had only been exceeded by that which
had occurred around the Austrian artillery itself. The farriers were busy
putting down those horses that could not be persuaded to stand. A single bullet
wound, even several, was not always reason enough to kill a horse. Mules were
even tougher, but mules didn’t make charges.
A soldier with hair the colour of corn was crouched with his
rifle beside a brown horse lying on its side with its neck outstretched on the
ground. Every so often the head and neck would come up, the
mane
shake
enough to dislodge the flies, and then shudder down again. Above
the horse stood a farrier corporal holding what Ponting at first mistook for
some sort of outsize pistol and then realised was one of those captive bolt
devices they had started to use in abattoirs shortly before the start of the
war.
‘She’ll come round. I know she will,’ the corn-haired boy
was saying. Ponting saw that he was one of the very young ones, nineteen at the
most.
‘C’mon, son, it
don’t
always work
first time with a rifle,’ said the corporal farrier, who had a blacksmith’s
forearms.
‘Fuck off or I might shoot you,’ the youth said quietly,
although not quietly enough for Ponting not to overhear him.
He thought for a moment that Meinertzhagen would see the
youth as another dreadful example of the callowness of these New Army civilian
volunteers, and have him awarded field punishment for insolence to a
non-commissioned officer.
But Meinertzhagen did not appear to have heard. He was
looking beyond them towards a truck parked on a dirt track about four hundred
yards from the Skoda guns. Next to the vehicle, which was of German
manufacture, was a horse-drawn British field ambulance. A man was being loaded
into the back of the ambulance on a stretcher, watched by a British officer and
a woman.
It was, of course, the woman who had attracted
Meinertzhagen’s attention. After the war, when he had polished it to one of
those anecdotes that neither bored nor gave away too much, Ponting used to say
that he would have been less surprised to see a Clapham omnibus than a female
at Huj.
From that distance she appeared to be European. She was
quite tall and was wearing a grubby white dress and a large straw hat. They
rode towards her. As they got closer they could see that most of the grubbiness
on the dress was blood – and fresh blood at that, because the heat soon dried
it brown. Ponting wondered why nobody was assisting her. Then he realised that
the blood was probably not her own.
Caesarea: March 1917
A prisoner was sobbing softly in one of the deeper cells.
The Moudir, the head of the Turkish gendarmerie in Caesarea,
was on the way out of the building with a little sack of grain in his hands
when he heard it. He paused for a moment to listen, but could not make out
whether the weeping came from the Christian Syrian boy whom he suspected of
being a deserter from one of the regiments on the Gaza front, or the wasted
and, to his mind, obviously syphilitic Armenian woman caught picking the
pockets of soldiers who had declined her services. He shrugged. It could wait.
He had his friends to attend to.
Years of convict labour had refurbished the dungeons and built
the pigeon loft for him amidst the overgrown ruins of King Louis IX’s coastal
fortress at Caesarea. It should have been a pleasant enough place, its palms
fanned by sea breezes and in summer full of the restful cool that only large
stone blocks and marble-tiled floors can bring. Yet, on the whole, men had
never been happy there for long.
Even by Crusader standards it had had an anguished history.
Before Louis there had been King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, Gautier of Avense and
Jean de Brieme. Sometimes the knights barely held it a year before it was back
in Muslim hands. Louis had lasted for fifteen, which was longer than any of
them.
His luck ran out in 1265, when it was successfully stormed
by Sultan Baybars. Perhaps Baybars sensed that the fortress was cursed, because
he had it pulled asunder in a manner that foreshadowed high explosive and
decreed that it should never be inhabited again. For this reason the Moudir
avoided spending a night there, though he was dismissive of the tales of
wailing djinns and spirits he heard from his Kurdish guards. As a young man he
had chased Kurdish bandits and he sometimes suspected that these mountain
people clung to beliefs that predated Islam, tales that both scared and
comforted them when the snow blocked their high passes and wolf packs roamed
the ridge lines.
He was a fat man, this Moudir, and he moved slowly towards
the jetty, the jellabea he always wore for his siesta flapping at his ankles,
his podgy feet squeezed into sandals which slapped along the flagged path. The
Crusaders had built the jetty too and, though it might have made a handy
beachhead for a Frankish sortie from Acre or Cyprus Baybars had not destroyed
it. Perhaps he sensed the Christians had had enough.
The Moudir scattered his grain, as he always did, at the
jetty's seaward end. On the horizon the sun was going down in a blaze of
copper-coloured clouds. Before it he could make out the dark silhouette of a
steamship sailing north and guessed it was one of the British or French
warships that were enforcing the Entente’s blockade of the Levantine coast all
the way from Latakia to Khan Yunis. A few gulls cried and wheeled, but there
was as yet no sign of his birds.
This was always an anxious moment. He had never lost his
sense of wonder at their navigation. One day, he was convinced, the magic would
fail. Something would go wrong with that compass in their heads and the poor
little dears would be unable to find their way home to him. The very idea made
his throat dry and his eyes warm with tears.
He looked along the narrow silver highway the setting sun
had laid from the jetty to the Mediterranean horizon, shutting his left eye
completely and blinkering his other with his right hand. For a guilty moment he
wondered whether he should get some of those darkened spectacles the Germans
sometimes wore, as if Allah had not given them eyes strong enough to face the
day. But then, being infidels, perhaps He had not.
There was a shadow in the sun, and what was at first barely
a smudge, not much harder in outline than the puffs of smoke from the passing
ship, slowly became his flapping flock. As usual, they circled high above him,
the white ones in the lead, as if they needed to fix various landmarks before
committing themselves – in much the same way as the German airmen flew around
the country. After a couple of circuits they began to descend in slow spirals
which took them out over the sea again until the white-feathered leaders
dropped down onto the jetty and began bobbing away at their feed.
The Moudir threw some more grain into their midst and then
crouched among them, holding it in his hands, so that they pecked at his palm
and then grew bolder and flew up onto his forearms where he could feel the
strength of their talons as they sought a grip. ‘Come on my pretties,’ he said.
‘Come on.’
The lead pigeons had flown to the loft and then swooped
almost immediately back again, just as they always did. There were names for
the favourites. ‘Come on, Nur, come on, Fatima, you greedy little thing.’
The birds fluttered around him until all the grain was gone.
Once night began to close in, they retreated into their loft from which emerged
the sound of contented cooing.
Back in the ruins of the old keep, where the dungeons were,
the prisoner was still weeping. If it was the Armenian, he thought, it was
unnecessary because they would not have touched her yet. His Kurds did not like
beating women who were not related to them, not even whores. It offended their
dignity as men. He had had trouble before trying to get them to soften up some
female suspect with a touch of the bastinado. Perhaps she was not crying for
herself, but for others. He had heard reports that thousands of Armenians had
perished when they were driven out of the border areas with Russia along the
Caucasian front.
And quite right too.
They were a
menace these Christians, always willing to start trouble if the price was
right.
The Jews were no better either, at least not the Zionists,
who even offended their religious brethren with their strange notions of
settling and farming the land as if it was some virgin wilderness for the
taking. On the surface they were grateful and loyal citizens of the Ottoman
Empire. But when you visited their settlements, took a little bakshish from
them in order to make some minor matter to their liking, you could sense the
superiority, even contempt, behind the smiles and effusive thanks. Didn’t they
consider themselves the Chosen Race? And wasn’t this Palestine their promised
land? They even had their own flag. He had seen it. It was blue with a
star
of David, and below that a Hebrew word meaning ‘Zion’.
There were plenty of arms in those settlements too: Martini-Henrys,
Winchesters, even the odd Mauser which they should have given up at the start
of the war but which they claimed they needed to protect them from Arab
brigands.
They were not without a certain influence, these
Zionists,
there was no doubt about that. They had the ear of
the Germans for a start – of the Kaiser himself, some said.
So
many came from the German-speaking countries that it had become the first
language of the race.
The Moudir had witnessed the riots between the
Jews in Haifa just before the war when some of them wanted to open a school in
which instruction would be in German, while others thought it should be in French
or even Hebrew – the dead tongue of their faith, which some of the more
fanatical were trying to bring back to life. The Jews would use the Germans to
grab as much as they could in Palestine, he was sure of that.
And yet there were reports that some of the Zionists were
dealing with the English, because the English held Egypt and were the greatest
Christian power in the area. And the English would promise them anything
because they needed Jewish gold to feed their war machine. There was supposed
to be a lot of Jewish gold in the United States and those foolish Americans had
just declared war against Germany. Well let them! And let the English continue
to hammer on the gates of Palestine, and the Turks to pull them back by their
ears and slaughter them like sheep.