O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [69]
“Problems?” he then suggested. Mahmoud answered this query.
“Not specifically against the English, although in the south your soldiers are making Britain no friends.”
“They want to go home, I know, and I badly want to send them. They’re sick at heart and far from home, particularly the Anzacs. You heard of the barracks mutiny back in Sussex? A ‘soldier’s strike’ they’re calling it, if you can believe it. Bad show, that. What else?”
“You have spoken with Joshua,” Mahmoud replied. “You know what I know, that trouble is coming; you know what Joshua thinks, that it is a planned trouble.”
“Do you agree with Joshua?” Allenby asked.
“Someone wants the country, yes.”
“Who?”
Mahmoud gave him that curious sideways movement of the head that is the Arabic equivalent of the French shrug, and did not answer.
“Who?” Allenby repeated, this time with the threat of command in his voice. Mahmoud’s back went suddenly straight.
“My general, you know better than I who it could be. I am a creature of the ground, and know only what moves on my own patch of earth, while you see all the land from Dan to Beersheva, and on into the Sinai. I sincerely hope that you know more than I, or we are all lost.”
Allenby seemed to waver on the brink of letting loose with a display of his famous temper, and I felt us all shrink within ourselves; then he relented. He even laughed. “Very well, Mr Hazr, from the point of view of a lowly ground dweller, who do you see coordinating these incidents?”
“A Turk,” Mahmoud answered promptly. “It stinks of Turkish methods.”
Plumbury’s sleek head nodded in agreement.
“Hoping to take back the country while our attention is elsewhere?” Allenby said, though it was not a question. “That would be the easiest time, when it was not expected.”
“And when the soldiers are weary of fighting and the English people sick unto death of war. This country is in a state of confusion, the ideal setting for a tyrant to take hold. Or a fanatic.”
“It would be nearly impossible to convince the British people to support a new war way out here, that is certain,” Allenby agreed. “Even Whitehall would be loath to make the move up from a military occupation to all-out war. Still, no matter who started it, or why, the situation is beginning to gain its own momentum, and our task is to nip it in the bud, to kill it now, in a tight operation, not in six months. Or in six years on another battlefield.” He sat forward, and my awareness of his size, which had lessened somewhat under the influence of porcelain cups and crustless sandwiches, flooded back. “This land has been fought over for thousands of years. A sea of blood has already gone into this soil. I do not intend,” he said forcefully, “to supervise another bloodletting. I believe we have the opportunity to create a new thing in Israel: a land where neighbours are brothers, not enemies. I believe that if Weizmann and Feisal can agree, that if we can make a fair beginning, Christian, Jew, and Arab can live together. What we must have, however, is that fair beginning, and someone, some group, looks to be attempting to kill it in the early stages.” A look of vague embarrassment flickered across his face and he subsided into his chair. He continued gruffly, “I can’t be everywhere, putting out fires. If some man is setting them, I need help to catch him. I don’t know that you, Mr Holmes, Miss Russell, can do much; I realise you’re here for a brief time. But you two,” he continued, turning his hard gaze first on Mahmoud, then on Ali, “are supposed to be good at finding things out. Joshua tells me you are his best. Prove it.
“In one month, on either the ninth or the sixteenth of February, I intend to act as host to a meeting of representatives of the major faiths in Jerusalem. We will visit the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and then we will break bread together at Government House. I wish to have this problem cleared up by then. Do you understand me?” There was a gleam of threat in the general