The Hope

by Herman Wouk

  “I’m not a boy.”

  She raises her voice over the siren. “They tell a joke about yeshiva students in wartime, Paul. The bombardment starts and the head rabbi rushes into the beit medrash, yelling, ‘What’s the matter with you fellows? It’s war! Do something! Zug tillim! [Recite psalms!]’”

  “Ha! Not bad.”

  “If you really want to sign up I can tell you where to go.”

  The siren is dying down. The artillery thumps sound louder. All at once the Hamtana is over, and it’s war again! The first time she was a little girl, the second time she agonized over Yossi Nitzan in the paratroops. Now he is a senior armor officer, and even if she is hugging his son, she means to keep her thoughts off him. He can take care of himself, and if not, too bad, too bad! Yael’s husband is not her business, and there an end.

  When the car stops at her mother’s house, a paunchy little man with a stubbly beard, in a tin hat and a red armband, comes running up and waves a club at the Canadian, yelling.

  “What’s his problem, Shayna? My Hebrew’s not that good.”

  “That’s Chaim the air raid warden. He’s been dying for a war, now he’s happy.” She rattles back at Chaim, who walks off muttering.

  Paul says, “Okay, where do I go?”

  She tells him, adding, “Stay off the main avenues, Paul, there’ll be army traffic. The recruiting office is on the second floor, over the restaurant.”

  “Got you.” He drives off.

  The door of the Ezrakh’s airless flat, half below street level, is open. Shayna can see him at his table in shirt sleeves and a long talit katan, swaying over a small volume. The chant is not his usual Talmud singsong. The Ezrakh is reciting psalms. Shayna knows the Book of Psalms by heart, and in her mother’s flat she murmurs a few psalms, despite herself, for that unchangeable madcap soldier who is not her business, Don Kishote.

  37

  The Road to El Arish

  General Tal’s mission on this first day is, while destroying all enemy forces in the north that he can, to seize the tarred road along the Mediterranean coast running from Gaza toward El Arish. For after a single day’s fighting his “mailed fist” of tanks, as he likes to call it, will be like a giant mechanical toy that has run down, requiring a windup of fuel and ammunition from the supply train before it can fight on. But those “soft” machines cannot cross sand and scrub as the tanks do, so the road is a life-or-death first objective; the only way for rubber-tired supply vehicles to pass through the rocky wastes and high soft dunes, and the one safe path through the minefields.

  El Arish itself, the pretty Sinai capital town on the sea with strong defenses and a major airport, lies some forty miles from Tal’s jump-off point. Tal aims to crack the tough crust of the enemy’s border defenses, and exploit success in the direction of El Arish, but reaching it on Day One is not a realistic goal. The coast road is blocked by a series of defenses, starting near the border by the northern anchor of the Egyptian line, the Rafah junction, which is manned by an entire tank division; and this formidable hedgehog straddles the road with artillery, tank traps, trenches, and minefields, from the sea to impassably high dunes.

  Twenty miles beyond Rafah lies a second daunting barrier, the long gauntlet of the Jeradi Pass, many twisting miles of lofty dunes and broken terrain; a killing ground of yet more minefields, antitank guns, camouflaged tanks, and fortified trenches. Another ten miles beyond that is El Arish, but all along the way are still more strongpoints hardened up during the Hamtana.

  Tal’s force is the most powerful Israel can field. If it is stopped or thrown back the stunning air victory can still be vitiated, perhaps wasted, by a display of weakness on the ground in full view of the Arabs, the Russians, and a hostile United Nations. Pushing ever forward, he will get as far as he can toward El Arish, against all odds and at any cost.

  ***

  As Kishote stands in his half-track watching Ehud Elad’s Pattons rumble by in a long winding column, raising dust that veils the low sun, the sight both elates and worries him. A brave show they make, these American tanks clanking by for many minutes, manned by high-spirited helmeted kids in field green who have not yet seen battle. Sleek lines to that Patton. Low profile, smooth suspension, a great ride, a fast tank, but those gasoline engines are a bad fire hazard, and the Pattons are undergunned; they can’t stand and trade long-range punches with T-55s or Stalin-3s. They’ll have to do tricks to close in, or else catch them unawares. Still Ehud Elad has the nerve and the skill, if anyone does, for such extrahazardous maneuvers.

  After the Pattons the Eighty-second Battalion’s Centurions come lumbering, distinctly British in the staid tall look of their cast-steel hulls and turrets. Those large cannons are more like it. Years ago tankists hated the Centurions; unfit for desert war, they complained, always sanding up, breaking down, throwing their tracks, and hot enough to cook crews alive. Israel Tal and senior officers like Gorodish, Elad, and Nitzan have enforced iron rules for maintenance and brute punishments for lapses. The Centurions now work well, and their crews are happy, even envied.

  Tal’s voice, icy and sharp, cuts through the babble on the command network in Kishote’s headphones.

  “Gorodish, what’s the holdup?”

  Voice of Gorodish, hoarse and harassed: “Narrow axis, many obstacles.”

  “Gorodish, break through! It’s only beginning!”

  “Acknowledged.”

  In its first half hour, Kishote perceives, the operation is already in disorder. As Tal predicted, little is going according to plan. The unblooded battalions are reported blundering about under fire in the crooked streets and blind alleys of the first villages they have come to. Built to confuse and hamper invading horsemen, these mazes evidently work just as well against tanks. Kishote can see in his binoculars a stalled clutter of Centurions, and he decides to do something about this. Why wait for orders from Gorodish?

  “Let’s go!” He holds up a flag to summon his small command group after his half-track. Weaving past dragon’s-teeth obstacles and zigzagging trenches, they drive through cultivated fields to the traffic jam of tanks outside the nearest village. Kishote sees no way to push past the vehicle jam-up. “Break through here,” he orders his driver, pointing at random to a mud wall. Make a surgical cut, he figures, and see what is going on inside there. With a surprised glance and a gold-toothed grin at him, the dark little Yemenite corporal guns the motor. Smash! In a shower of debris the half-track is inside a gloomy dead-end alleyway of low houses, choked with halted muttering Centurions.

  “To all the devils!” Kishote bellows at a tank captain, who stands in his turret, blinking at the dirt-covered lieutenant colonel bursting in at him. “Forward! Knock that house down!”

  The captain shouts something about orders not to harm civilians. Jumping out, pistol in hand, Kishote darts into the one-room house at the end of the alley, shabbily furnished and to all appearances empty, then runs out and angrily waves the huge tank forward. With a roar it crashes ahead, the house collapses, and sunshine shafts through the dust into the alley. The next tanks follow over the debris, puffing blue fumes in the sunlight, and the vehicles behind them start to move.

  Meantime, from the ongoing cacophony in his earphones, Yossi can hear that Tal and Gorodish are departing more and more from the plan as the battle unfolds, and the Centurion battalion assigned to hit Rafah junction is being diverted. “Gorodish, I am going on to Rafah,” he signals in code. Receiving no answer, he chooses to take this as enthusiastic approval. Outside the village he gathers up a company of Centurions assigned to him as a reserve force. Standing erect in the half-track, holding up a green flag, he shouts on his command net, “Aharai! [Follow me!]” and heads down a dusty track through the fields which lead to the highway.

  A quarter hour later he is signalling from the deserted Rafah railway station, a first key objective just inside the border between the Gaza Strip and Sinai. “Gorodish, I have captured the Vatican and await your orders.”


  Gorodish, faintly, through heavy static: “Kishote, you’re where? In the Vatican? Already?”

  “In the Vatican. I’ve secured it. All tanks operational. Casualties minimal. When the opposition saw us coming they jumped out of their trenches and ran off like mice into the desert.”

  “Acknowledged. Can you see any activity in the Rafah opening?”

  “Negative, dead quiet.”

  “That won’t last. Wait for me at Naples.”

  Soon Gorodish and Kishote, both dust-covered and perspiring, stand side by side under the water tower on a hill code-named Naples beyond the railroad station; the highest point in the Rafah Opening, a saucer of desert seven miles wide narrowing to the junction beyond. The whole area, bisected by the black strip of highway, is apparently quiet and abandoned. Gorodish sweeps an arm around at the panorama. “God knows what’s really out there, Yossi. Those damned Russians are the world’s best at camouflage.”

  “Well, we’ll soon see.”

  A platoon of Yossi’s Centurions is crawling along the road toward the junction as a probe. When it has gone less than a thousand yards the desert erupts all around them in flame, explosions, crimson tracers, and screaming shells. Not at all surprised, Yossi is relieved to see how the intense drilling of years has taken hold. The tanks scuttle to concealment behind folds in the ground or high green castor-oil plants and return a blaze of gunfire, aiming at the flashes of hidden guns, or at enemy tanks that have thrown off their camouflage nets and are popping up from cover.

  “They’re good boys,” shouts Gorodish over the racket. “Tell them to fall back, Yossi, the intelligence is right, that sandy ridge is where the main blocking force is.”

  As the patrol retreats without loss to the unit of Centurions at the foot of the hill, Kishote sweeps his binoculars clear around the horizon. Behind Naples, to the north, dust, smoke, and flashes from the continuing battle back in the Gaza villages; far, far off to the east, the rising dust plumes of Raful Eitan’s mechanized paratrooper brigade, striking straight across the desert from Israel toward the Rafah junction, their mission to capture and secure it with the support of Tal’s tanks; and seaward, just coming into view down the coast road, Ehud Elad’s Pattons, by God! More or less, the plan is working, after all.

  “Listen, Gorodish! Ehud and I together can smash through that junction,” Yossi says. “Send him with me and we’ll keep up the momentum.”

  “By your life, no. Leave an enemy pocket of this strength to our rear? We stick to the plan. Ehud’s battalion will attack and destroy this blocking force before we advance.”

  “And I?”

  “You’re my reserve here. If Ehud gets in trouble you’ll move when I order you.”

  Ehud Elad’s attack on the ridge follows doctrine: one company assaulting frontally to draw the fire, two companies hooking around to surprise and smash the enemy rear. Inevitably Elad is leading the frontal attack himself. As a rule this is discouraged in battalion commanders, but Gorodish has not argued; not with Ehud Elad. In Yossi’s binoculars there is Ehud, a diminutive figure edged with rainbow color, exposed as usual in the turret, leading a company of tanks up the sandy slope of the ridge. (Down, Elud, by your life, down!) All along the ridge enemy tanks and antitank guns are firing downward at the advancing Pattons and moving toward them. But the Egyptians cannot see behind them—and Yossi can, from his high vantage point—Elad’s other two companies, a line abreast of many more Pattons, crawling over the crest of the very high soft dunes on the seaward side behind the ridge.

  But Ehud’s tanks climbing in the frontal assault are being hit and flashing into flames… one, another, a third… the sight saddens and sickens Yossi. Almost, he can feel the heat of those sudden fires. After years of drills and war games, here is the real thing! Crewmen are scrambling out of the flaming tanks into fusillades from machine guns above, and hitting the ground fast, perhaps okay, perhaps wounded; but a few may be getting roasted alive inside, trapped in red-hot steel! As an armor instructor, and now as a deputy brigade commander, Yossi has ordered interminable drills and more drills in fire fighting and escape. He sometimes has awakened from a never-revealed claustrophobic nightmare in a pool of sweat, thankful to God that he is in a bed and not in a burning tank. In such dark hours he has regretted leaving the paratroops, but never by day. The more he knows the tanks, the more he believes that they decide Israel’s wars.

  When will those approaching Pattons open up? Close the range, yes, that’s doctrine! But Ehud’s group is taking so many hits, and if Ehud himself—

  ROAR! The entire line of Pattons coming over the dunes fires as one, making the shallow hills echo. All along the ridge Russian tanks spring into flame; eight, nine, eleven, stopped and smoking—what a blow! How that surprised enemy formation is falling apart, the unhurt tanks and self-propelled guns lurching here and there, some plunging down the hill, some sinking from sight, crewmen abandoning the burning tanks on the run! Again and again the rear Pattons fire as they come, hitting yet more tanks, while Ehud’s force still climbs the hill, machine-gunning the concealed soldiers who come leaping out of the trenches.

  Gorodish throws an arm around Kishote. “All right, it’s a rout! Get ready to go for the junction. God bless Ehud! What a lion! I can’t raise Raful, so I don’t know how he’s doing, but he’s coming, I can see that from here. When Ehud’s collected his wounded, he’ll follow you, and I’ll be with him.”

  “Understood.”

  “Once you start, Kishote, don’t stop. I’ll order some of those fellows to join you, and keep the rest in my reserve.”

  “Those fellows” are a long, long column of Centurions, just rolling in view from the break-in action to the north, an immensely cheering sight. “Go!”

  Harassed by snipers and concealed antitank guns, Yossi’s Centurions make slogging progress toward the junction. The resistance is less than before, but by Soviet doctrine a second heavy defense zone surely still lies ahead. He sends a probing patrol to the crossroads, and calls to Gorodish for an artillery barrage on the enemy positions that open fire. Gorodish complies with a rain of shells from his mobile heavy guns. Then comes the signal Kishote is impatiently awaiting: “Advance through the junction!”

  He flags the signal, and his tanks begin to traverse the crossroads, where a large signpost bears two signs in Arabic and English: SHEIK ZWEID and EL ARISH. Eerie lack of opposition! No sound but the clank and rumble of the tanks on the pavement; has the barrage totally silenced the enemy?

  Not so. When nearly all the column has passed through the junction, a hurricane of gunfire breaks upon the rolling Centurions from all sides: from hills that look bare, from camouflaged trenches, from concealed guns, a storm of explosives, steel, lead, and flame bewildering in its power and volume, paralyzing in its sudden all-encompassing noise and blaze. Tanks and half-tracks are hit and on fire. One half-track overturns. Blackened crewmen, some with their clothes aflame, come boiling out of the stricken vehicles. There are crashing collisions. The column halts. Jumping to the top of his half-track, Kishote sees his force in disarray from end to end. The Centurions are distraught elephants turning to lumber here and there, their long guns moving up and down like nervous questing trunks.

  Yossi grasps his driver’s shoulder. “Take me to the top of that rise.”

  As the half-track jolts up a nearby slope Kishote is thinking that these boys are encountering war now, the thing itself, and that Tal’s entire attack perhaps teeters in the balance, at this unimpressive intersection of a dirt road and a tarred highway, in a waste of sand dunes weirdly sculptured by the Sinai winds. The Egyptians have held their fire to the right moment and now are letting fly with all they have. The Rafah junction is as crucial to them as to General Tal. Whatever happens next is up to Yossi’s force. For all he knows, it may mean the war.

  “All right, stop.” The rise in a bend of the junction gives him a view of the whole disordered column, and the tank crews see Lieutenant Colonel Nitzan standing a
top his half-track amid all the whistling, screeching, flaming shot and shell, holding up his command flag.

  “Okay, this is what we are trained for,” he speaks crisply and clearly into his helmet microphone. “The future of Israel now depends on us. This column will drive on. If the vehicle ahead of you is on fire, help extinguish it. If it can’t be done pick up its crew and go on. Leave no wounded behind. Resume formation. Resume the advance, maximum fire at all targets. We go through at all cost. Follow me.”

  Still braced erect in his half-track, which he puts into line behind the first three tanks, he watches his Centurions straighten up into a moving column and advance along the road in a heavy crisscrossing fire, taking hits, but also setting on fire guns and tanks that pop briefly out of concealment to shoot.

  Time ceases its usual flow in all-out combat, and he cannot say whether five minutes have passed or twenty. As the column proceeds down the road through the dunes and the volume of fire slackens, he calls for casualty and damage reports. Only then does he glance at his watch. Gorodish ordered him to move at 11:36. The minute hand is just passing 11:44. Eight minutes have gone by. He now leads a force of armor veterans. Behind are some wrecked smoking vehicles, and in them some dead.

  ***

  A road sign in English and Arabic reads SHEIKH ZWEID 2 KM when Kishote first spots the dust cloud of Elad’s Pattons coming up behind him on the sand. Ehud is on a parallel course more than a mile from his tracks, for otherwise if they get into melees with enemy tanks, Israelis may end up shooting at Israelis in the fog of desert combat, as actually happened in the KADESH campaign.

  And shortly Kishote does run into a company of giant Stalin-3s, guarding the road outside the fortified railway stop called Sheikh Zweid. It is a brief, fierce, wide-ranging fight in clouds of dust, and he is proud to see his newly blooded tankists nimbly scatter, take cover, spot shots for each other, and pick off the Egyptian tanks like target hulks in the Negev. When ten of these have been set afire, the crews of the rest climb out and flee into the dunes; Kishote counts eleven good tanks abandoned by the roadside, great haul for the armor corps! Only, finding crews won’t be easy. These Russian tanks are so cramped inside, their crews have to be almost midgets.