Spies of Jerusalem by Colin Smith

Author:Colin Smith
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-09-08T23:00:00+00:00

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

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