by Herman Wouk
Barak started with the black-bordered list of Haganah soldiers fallen during the past week. In the placard beside it, the military governor announced reduced food and water rations; and in big scare letters, with many exclamation marks, he threatened stiff penalties for hoarding and profiteering. The rest were political placards, parties denouncing one another for cowardice and suicidal policy, and also a notice of a chamber music concert by the “Municipal Emergency Council for Culture.”
Marcus wryly laughed at the last one. “That’s refreshing. Culture, no matter what, hey? The whole goulash is very Israeli, isn’t it? Mainly politics, with lots of hot pepper.”
“In our politics, we can’t taste anything else.”
They got into a muddy command car parked behind Barak’s jeep, the only vehicles on the desolate street. Marcus said, “Let’s go to the King David Hotel first, see if we can scare up some brandy there.”
“The King David? It’s closed, sir. It was the British HQ.”
“I know, but there’s a skeleton staff now. Refueling stop. I was up all night.”
The hotel lobby was empty, the furniture sheeted. Barak managed to find a waiter in shirt sleeves, who with raised eyebrows brought Marcus a glassful of brandy, and a cup of tepid ersatz coffee for Barak. They drank out on the terrace. Smoke was rising above the walls of the Old City, and the rattle of small-arms fire echoed across the ravine.
“God, Jerusalem is so beautiful,” Marcus said. “And such a goddamned setup for a siege.”
“Since time immemorial,” said Barak. “Since Sennacherib. And I’ll never live anywhere else.”
“That Quarter in there”—Marcus pointed at the smoke with the hand holding his brandy glass—“is the Jewish Alamo. You’ve heard of the Alamo?”
“Texas,” said Barak. “The outpost that got massacred to the last man.”
“Right. At West Point we used to argue whether that stand was heroism or folly. The Alamo was militarily indefensible. So’s the Quarter. The boss man wants us to hang on for reasons of state, so that’s that. Let’s go.”
Staff officers of the various forces crowded the war room of Jerusalem Command. Marcus’s attack plan, as Barak translated it line by line at the map, brought glances among them, and coughs, and shufflings. One officer with a touch of gray in his hair remarked in careful English that the Haganah had long advocated exactly such an operation, but the other commands had dragged their feet. A Palmakh brigade leader protested in rapid Hebrew, an Irgun officer raised his voice to denounce the Haganah, and the meeting was spinning out of control when a woman soldier burst in with a scrawled despatch, and handed it to the Haganah commander. He read the Hebrew aloud in a choking voice. Total quiet. Drawn faces. Marcus looked to Barak for translation. “The Quarter is surrendering,” Barak said.
“Who has signed that despatch,” Marcus coolly inquired, “and what else does it say?”
Barak took the despatch and translated word for word. Motti Pinkus was reporting that a civilian delegation, with his reluctant permission, had asked the Red Cross this morning for the Arabs’ terms. Jerusalem Command’s failure to send help had gone on too long. A last-minute offer to parachute ammunition in was futile. “There is nobody left to use the ammunition.” A delegation would leave the Jewish Quarter under a white flag at 9:30 A.M. to meet Red Cross and Arabs at the Zion Gate.
Marcus glanced at his watch. “That’s in fifteen minutes.” An abrupt gesture at his map. “The relief of the Quarter is cancelled.”
“My post is on Mount Zion, Colonel,” said a stocky Palmakh officer. “You can watch this happen, if you want to.”
“I do,” said Marcus.
From the roof of a monastery, a grim group of officers and civilians watched the delegation, under a dirty white sheet borne on two poles, walk out of the Jewish Quarter toward the Zion Gate. Hermann Loeb was there at Barak’s elbow. “I stood on a hill, watching the people of Etzion getting slaughtered,” he murmured. “Now I watch this.”
Arab soldiers emerged from the shadows of Zion Gate, and led the delegation out of sight. The roof crowd dispersed like people at a funeral, with no smiles and few words. Marcus said to Barak as they descended deeply grooved stone steps, “Well, that’s it. This means we’re now probably racing a cease-fire. So both Latrun and the road are life-or-death urgencies, Zev. I’m flying back to Tel Aviv. You’ll remain here as my liaison with Jerusalem Command. Ride with me to the airstrip.”
On the way Barak could scarcely concentrate on Marcus’s rapid instructions about defending Jerusalem. The Jewish Quarter gone! Motti Pinkus and all those worn-out young fighters in the night, marching off to captivity, if the Arabs weren’t already mowing them down, cutting their throats, as they had done after the white-flag surrender at Etzion. And that poor madcap Don Kishote, among them because he, Barak, had brought him in and left him there. That did not bear dwelling on.
When the command car returned him to his house and stopped behind his jeep, Zev Barak was as nearly sunk in despair as he had been since the State had been declared. Some of the wisest Zionist leaders had been against the Declaration. The American Secretary of State, General Marshall, had gravely warned Ben Gurion not to take the fateful plunge. Had Ben Gurion led the Jewish people, already decimated by the Nazi massacre, into its final suicidal mistake?
A soldier had crawled into the back seat of the jeep, and was curled up asleep. Nothing unusual about that, but when Barak went to wake him up, he was stupefied. Smeared with dirt, his face scratched and bloody, a small flashlight protruding from a pocket, there lay Don Kishote.
4
Flour for Jerusalem
Whether Don Kishote had ever really driven a garbage truck on Cyprus or not—and Barak knew he was given to offhand romancing—he was handling the jeep well enough as they rolled down the highway. In the past couple of days, ever since the rough crawl through the tunnels to the Old City, Barak’s wound had been flaring up inside the cast, and the aching and itching were maddening, so Kishote was at the wheel, and Barak was cradling the elbow in his other arm and trying not to think about it.
“Where are we going, sir?” Kishote inquired.
“Just watch what you’re doing,” Barak said irritably, squinting in the afternoon sun. “I’ll direct you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Except for army trucks there was very little traffic, and Kishote’s passing was risky but tolerable. Marcus had summoned Barak to join him at Hulda, for the second attack on Latrun; and instead of leaving Jerusalem in a Piper Cub, Barak had decided to go via the bypass and see what was happening there. The mule trains were already going, he knew, but no vehicles as yet.
“Kishote, for God’s sake!”
“Sorry, sir.” Kishote whipped the jeep back in line ahead of a tank truck, barely in time to let a lorry full of soldiers grind past the other way.
“No more of that. There’s no hurry. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.” An unabashed grin.
This youngster was an original, Barak thought. Certainly he did not lack brass or ingenuity. To lift a flashlight from a hospital under siege was not a saintly act (Kishote claimed he had “found it on the floor”), but it argued ruthless presence of mind; and he had clearly taken sharp note of Shayna’s route via the cistern that night, and had groped his way back. Barak thought he would make Kishote a squad leader in any company he led, and would move him up to platoon leader fast. If he did not get himself killed he might amount to something.
The sun had gone down when they halted in a pileup of parked trucks on the Hartuv road, at the start of the bypass. Here in the fading twilight stomping braying mules were being unloaded and their burdens stacked on the trucks, amid coarse yells and curses by drivers and loaders, and a considerable stink of mule droppings. “It’s not bad duty,” remarked a burly bewhiskered army driver to Barak. “These mule guys bring you cigarettes, sometimes a drop to drink—”
“Food for the kids,” said another. “Sardines,
cheese—”
A third put in, “Yes, down in Tel Aviv they’re living the life, all right, while we’re starving and getting shelled. And where’s Ben Gurion? Not in Jerusalem!”
As long as any light was left in the sky Kishote followed the downhill track of the bypass trodden by the mules, then switched on the low parking lights. The jeep careened and banged along, painfully jolting Barak’s elbow. They began to pass astonishing masses of clanking and snorting road machinery, strung out for a mile or more in clouds of dust under scarcely visible kerosene lamps. Heavily laden mules were plodding up the trail, also bellowing droves of cattle, kicking up dust so thick that Kishote sometimes had to stop, or wander off into the trackless wadi, bouncing over stones and crevices.
It was a long tortuous nasty trip, and Barak had plenty of time to reflect on all this, and to worry that the prodigious road-building effort might well prove a pitiable aborted waste. Whatever Ben Gurion’s military failings, his political instincts were keen. King Abdullah of Transjordan had already announced he was interested in a truce! And why not? With the Old City in his hands and Jerusalem ringed by his Arab Legion, he was now the one clear winner in the war. The superpowers had long been pressing for a truce; and while the other Arab governments were so far making conflicting noises about it, plainly little time remained to save Jerusalem.
Off beyond the ridge that hid Latrun came intermittent cannon thumps, and when the dust thinned, the flash of explosions; artillery barrages before the attack. The Seventh Brigade did have some heavy guns now, also more armored vehicles, as well as flame-throwers and mortars. The immigrant recruits had been blooded in battle and had drilled hard for almost a week. So maybe this time it would work! But Marcus’s plan remained in essence a replay of the first failed operation, except for a diversionary attack at the rear of Latrun by a combat-worn Givati battalion pulled from the Egyptian front. Barak was going into this with less hope than foreboding. The command to attack “again, at once,” was a political decision, to be executed with whatever military means could be mustered.
At last the steep ascent at the other end loomed straight ahead, a sheer black cliff. A figure with a lamp approached through the swirling dust and growling bulldozers. “Is this Zev?”
“I’m Zev.”
“Okay, I’ll take the wheel.” The figure eased the jeep a few yards to the right, and stopped.
“Now what?” inquired Barak.
“Rega.” (“One moment.”) He vanished into very thick dust. Barak and Kishote sat and waited, coughing. Three dark figures approached. Two began banging at the front of the jeep. “You’ll be winched up,” said the one with the lamp. “No problem, just hang on. The main thing is—ah, there you go.”
With a jerk the jeep lunged forward, tilting sharply upward until the wheels barely touched ground. Overhead a cable screeched and scraped and a windlass whined, as they went up the rocky slope in bumpy joggles. Above the dust clouds there came in view a double line of moonlit men bending under large sacks, going down the serpentine turns of the trail. Some of them also carried guns, others dim lamps. The winch pulled the jeep to level ground, and shut off with a groan. Sam Pasternak stood by the cable drum, dust-caked and grinning. “How about that road, Zev? Progress, eh?”
“Amazing. The attack is on schedule?”
“Absolutely. Shin-hour is midnight. No change.” He gestured at the line of stooped figures. “I’m just checking on these fellows.”
“Flour?”
“Fifty-pound sacks. My idea. Two hundred men, two trips per man, ten tons of flour into Jerusalem per night, it’s something.”
“It’s great, Sam. Army or civilians?”
“Mostly civilians. Volunteers.”
“Kishote,” said Barak, “get on this line and carry flour. At sunrise go back to my flat and wait.”
“B’seder, sir.” The tone was woeful. “I volunteer.” Kishote climbed out of the jeep and trudged off to a queue at a truck, where flour sacks were being handed out.
“Could you see much of the road work down there?” Pasternak asked.
“Actually, what with the dark and the dust, not too much.”
“Well, it’s unbelievable! Five hundred road workers and stonecutters are hard at it, Zev, and every bulldozer and steamroller operator in the country! We’ve posted plenty of patrols, too, to keep out Arab snoopers. By my life, I’m convinced the Legion doesn’t yet suspect what’s going on.”
“How long before it’s ready for truck convoys?”
“Maybe a week. Possibly less.”
“Where’s Colonel Stone?”
“At Hulda, expecting you. Let’s go. I’ll drive.” Pasternak weaved through a clutter of trucks to a communications jeep where Yael Luria sat at the transmitter-receiver. She took her earphones off, and Pasternak shouted at her, “Follow us.”
She nodded and called to Barak, “Where’s your favorite idiot, Kishote?”
“Carrying flour to Jerusalem.”
She burst out laughing.
“Zev, what’s happening in the Quarter since it fell?” Pasternak inquired as he drove on. “We can’t get any dope here.”
“Well, in some ways that picture’s better than we hoped. They’re looting the houses, of course, and blowing up the synagogues. I was watching from Mount Zion, Sam, when the Hurva Synagogue went sky-high. By God, they used enough dynamite to blow up a pyramid! The ground shook under my feet like an earthquake, and—”
“Then in what way is it better, for God’s sake?”
“Let me finish! Just before I left I met with the Red Cross woman. Nice gray-haired lady, Belgian. Her report was heartening, I tell you.”
There had been no massacre, Barak emphasized. The British officers of the Legion had seen to it that the civilians were evacuated unharmed to a nearby village, and that the surviving fighters were being treated strictly according to the Geneva Convention. The Legion commander was astounded, the woman said, at how few, how young, and how ill-armed the defenders were. She quoted him: “If we’d known, we’d have charged them with sticks and stones.”
“They’d better treat those kids well,” Pasternak growled. “We’ve got prisoners, too. A hell of a lot more than they have.”
“What’s Yael Luria doing here, Sam?”
“My signal sergeant got sick. I coopted Yael,” Pasternak said with a side-glance. “Smart kid. Quick on the uptake.”
“Too smart.”
“Did you see my father-in-law, by chance?”
“Yes, first thing. He’s running food supply up there like a true Yekke. Discipline! Befehl!”
“Hermann’s all right. Ruthie was the problem,” Pasternak said wryly. “Yekke wife.” Off in the Latrun direction came brilliant flashes, and after seconds the rolling crumps. “Zev, our new artillery teams are good. We’ve got a chance this time.”
***
So as not to lose his way in the choking fog of dust, Don Kishote kept his eye on the bobbing sack in front of him. His sack was loosely fastened, the shifting straps galled his shoulders, but the strain, the pouring sweat, the slow rhythmic plod, felt pretty good, at that. After all, he was carrying bread to besieged Jerusalem, behind a short stout grayhead, and how could he do less than such an old man? The road workers whom they passed cheered them on with rough jokes. At a water cart along the way he drank big tin cupfuls, all he wanted. Never, not even in the worst transit camp, had water tasted so sweet.
On foot he could see much more than he had from the jeep. A week ago all this had been scrubby wasteland, and now there was a real road; narrow, winding, broken by stony outcroppings, but still a discernible dirt road. Stonecutters were attacking the obstructions by lamplight, and bulldozers were shoving aside the debris. The road was being built like a tunnel from both ends, for the work was much further along near the descent than in the middle; and toward the end the track once again widened and levelled out, with steamrollers growling between heaps of stones along the sides. To reach the trucks the fl
our bearers had to pass through a herd of lowing cattle, and Kishote had stepped in so much mule and cow dung that he was resigned to each new slippery squish. His care was only not to fall down in it, as the man behind him did, with loud curses at the natural fact of shit.
After the long slow trudge of nearly two miles, the return march felt almost like dancing on air, so light and easy was progress without fifty pounds on his back. In no time at all, it seemed, he was frisking back up the trail at the other end. After eating and drinking their fill at an army field kitchen the bearers took on flour sacks again, and Kishote realized that his shoulders were rubbed raw, probably bloody, inside his uniform. But no complaints! Artillery was continuously thundering behind the black ridge, and the night sky was blazing yellow and red, so the second Latrun battle was on. He was enduring nothing compared to those fellows out there on the slopes of Latrun.
Early the next morning, so dirty and bedraggled as to be hardly recognizable, he was shambling along a Jerusalem street in the slant sunlight, utterly played out. Shayna almost dropped her brimming pail when she saw him. Was this really the bespectacled beanpole with the long serious face, who had stayed behind in the Quarter? “You! You’re alive! You’re not a prisoner!”
A tired prankish grin broke out on his face, where dust was streaked to mud by sweat. “Little Shayna,” he croaked. “What’s new?”
“Why are you so filthy? When did you get out of the Quarter, and how? I thought you were done for. Would you like a drink of water?”
“Definitely.”
She handed him the pail, and he lifted it to his lips.
“Phew!” she said. “Were you sleeping in a stable?”
“I guess I don’t smell so good.” He hoisted up the pail, lifted his face, and dumped the water all over himself, exclaiming, “Ahh! Good.” It was a blessed relief to his bloody shoulders.
“Eeek! Don’t do that! Stop! DON’T! You’re crazy! You’re a criminal! That was for my family!”