Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  The two Bengalis destroyed three tanks and forced the others into temporary retreat. Marshall was overwhelmed by the means with which they aimed the mortar. The phrases were extraordinary—“a grain of rice to that way; a finger to this way; a dogs bark; my sister’s gold bracelet forward.”

  The sky was filled with planes, with the white trails of surface-to-air missiles, with the noise of shells. Marshall heard the familiar sound of Israeli tank guns, and the familiar crack of Syrian artillery. It seemed insane for a halftrack and some infantry to hold the road against a column of two dozen or more enemy tanks—but they were doing it.

  Two Syrian tanks ripped around the corner and began to charge the ridge at full speed. The mortar was useless, and Marshall ordered the five rocket men out of the rocks. They aimed for a long moment and fired. Almost slowly, the rockets converged on the lead tank and blew it to pieces with a sound that echoed in the lungs of the Israelis. As the other tank pressed forward, Marshall shouted for them to reload. They didn’t have time, and the tank got to the beginning of the slope. But there it had to stop short because Baruch had put three mines on the road. The tank commander’s choice was to back off a little and machine-gun the mines, or try to fire on the halftrack. He chose the latter and, as expected, his gun would not lower enough. Only then did he back off, while his machine gunner sprayed the halftrack, in which Baruch and Chobandresh were crouched low. The machine gunner blew up the mines. Just as the tank started forward to confront the halftrack they hit it broadside with four rockets and it exploded in a muffled roar. The turret was knocked ajar.

  They had destroyed five tanks, the last of which blocked the road. However, Marshall was apprehensive of the tank columns infantry, who he knew would next be sent to attack his men—who were not armed, positioned, or numerous enough to resist even a platoon of good foot soldiers. And if it were not infantry, it would be an air strike, against which they would have no chance whatsoever. They scrambled for the halftrack and drove east toward the U.N. Zone.

  “Why here?” asked Baruch as he guided them down a wadi road.

  “No mines. We can come around on the Syrian flank.”

  Chobandresh began to giggle and continued until he was wild with laughter. The others soon joined in. “What’s funny, Chobandresh?” Marshall asked. Chobandresh tried to answer but was overtaken by a fit of giggles. Their encounter with the Syrians had been tense, fast, and lucky.

  “I tink it is funny,” he said, and then slapped his knee in the beginning of another fit, “...funny tat in tis little ring ... oh ... oh!” Whatever it was, he certainly thought that it was funny.

  They burst through dust and small stones. The motors roared. The Bengalis had turned out to be excellent, excellent soldiers. They had wonderful courage, and, once over the giggling fit, they looked ahead calmly and unflinchingly.

  25

  THEY SUCCEEDED neither in reaching one of the main Syrian columns nor in coming close, because the Syrian advance was protected on its flanks by heavily reinforced anti-tank positions against which they dared not move. Too weak and with too little fuel to swing into Syria itself and disrupt lines of supply and communication, they turned back to Fortress Six to pick up supplies.

  They were hungry and thirsty and, by evening, had lost the feeling of invulnerability which they had enjoyed for an hour or so after the tank battle. They understood from hoarse pleadings and confused orders coming over their radio that the Israelis were inflicting heavy losses on the attackers, but suffering many casualties themselves in their much smaller ranks. The Syrians had bypassed all but a few of the strongpoints, and, almost in the old Israeli style, were driving steadily toward the lip of the plateau.

  Fortress Six did not answer. When they first saw it in the distance, Marshall made Baruch stop the halftrack. “What is that?” he said. He jumped out and stood on a boulder. Lifting his binoculars, he saw through the dusk that the Syrian flag flew over the citadel into which he had wanted to retreat. They could not understand how Six had fallen so easily, or why it appeared not to be battered. They imagined their friends lying dead in a pile just outside the gates, their whitened flesh slit in a hundred places.

  They had enough fuel to reach the Israeli line west on the plateau, if they were to go straight through the Syrians. This seemed nearly impossible, but, saving a sudden Israeli counteradvance or coming upon a wrecked vehicle from which they could siphon gasoline, it was the only thing to do. Anyway, they wanted to make contact with another Israeli force, for they had been alone since they had peeled off from the column which left the steel gates of Six.

  Moving in darkness, much less fighting, was impossible with the equipment they had on the track they were to follow. So they pulled off the road into a ditch and waited for the light. They tried to sleep, and could do so only for a minute or two at a time. In the middle of the night a Syrian infantry patrol passed by, leading a tank. When the halftrack had been parked in the ditch it had tilted sideways until it had almost turned over, and they left the doors flung open. In darkness, the Syrian patrol thought that it was a wreck.

  When Marshall saw that nothing followed the dozen soldiers and the lone tank, he got everyone into the halftrack and started up the motor. After five minutes into which ten hours seemed to fit, they went forward, lights blazing. Coming upon the Syrians in a wide arena between two tels, they saw the tank turret slowly swing around. They honked their horn and yelled loudly. The Syrian turned on his floodlight to see if the vehicle approaching him were another Syrian. The floodlight would have blinded Marshall had he not turned off the head lamps of the halftrack and veered from the road onto the little plain. Coming up even with the tank, they fired their rockets in a broadside and hit it in several places. It banged open into a ball of orange flame, in the light of which Wilson shot the unsheltered infantry, but was killed by return fire directed at the flashes of the gun. He died before the others could wipe his blood from their sweaty faces.

  Pulling out in the glow of the burning tank, they jolted across the field to a spot where they could not be seen. There they buried Wilson in hard ground which seemed, as gasoline-fired light flickered across it, to be orange-colored. The other two Bengalis went to pieces, crying and sobbing, and it was particularly dreadful to shovel raw earth onto Wilson’s small upturned face, and then leave him in the suffocating ground. They marked the spot with a shovel and his helmet, and found a safer place, where they rested in expectation of dawn.

  They started moving with the light. On their radio they heard of preparations for defending the Daughters of Jacob Bridge, which spanned the Jordan at the base of the Golan. They certainly hadn’t enough gas to reach that far. Other Israeli units were fighting on the Heights not in a line, but in scattered pockets. The Air Force was all over the place. They saw many of its planes destroyed. Their picture was confused. But then they came upon a high hill which looked over everything. They had been trundling about on the northern flank of the Syrian Seventh Infantry Division and had never penetrated. The Syrian Third Armored Division had passed through the Seventh Infantry to press the attack. On the plain below, the patterns allowed Marshall to see that he and the others had been only on the fringes of battle. They saw Israeli tanks many miles away raising dust clouds in little wars of close maneuver. The Syrians were far to the west, but the Israelis had not stopped fighting around Kuneirra or Naffak, and in many other places downline. Marshall decided to head for Naffak and find an Israeli unit by the side of which they could fight. They had their second wind, and a cool breeze had washed over them when they came upon the overlook. Marshall turned to Baruch. “Do we have enough gas to get to Naffak?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We’ll try then. Chobandresh!”

  “Yes.”

  “Fire a mortar round.”

  “At what?”

  “Into the valley.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to say that we’re alive, for fun.”

  “What range?”
/>   “An elephant’s heart.”

  “It doesn’t go that far.”

  “A sheep’s heart.” Chobandresh adjusted the mortar, threw in a shell, and, a little later, they saw a white puff in the valley. But the sound was indistinguishable from the explosions and reports which filled the air, and which the night before had made the sky waxen and white. Somewhat optimistic, they began their drive for Naffak. Israel was still fighting on the Golan, and the Reserves had not yet come into play. When that happened, they thought, they would all take their holidays in Damascus.

  The noise of the halftrack was deafening, its color and weight mortal and earthlike. Marshall smelled the other soldiers near him. It was not pleasant, and he felt as if he and they were moles who had ventured into the light. They were frightened of fighting, frightened of the ripping steel, frightened of dying in blood-soaked dirt or burning to death in a slime of searing napalm. Then Marshall looked up and saw in infinitely intense blue two silver flecks tumbling and swooping. There were men in those shining, soundless, weightless spots—swaying in arcs of gravity and flight, fighting to kill, higher above the earth than effeminate clouds, surrounded by glass and steel and tailpipes burnished black by jets of fire. In the pines and thin air of the northern mountains, Marshall had thought that he was high.

  For many hours the halftrack crew had gone without food or sleep. It was hard to see because of the sweat. It wet their shirts and dripped down their bodies, but they pressed forward in a cloud of their own engine smoke. One of the soldiers had brought a towel, and made it a present to his commander so that Marshall could wipe dry his sunglasses, his binoculars, and the knobs of the radio.

  When Wilson was killed, the Bengalis had cried like babies. But then their courage had returned. Determination suddenly flooded the vibrating steel trap in which they rode. They lost themselves, and were refined from all they had known. Caught up dangerously in only one feeling and one idea, as they rode south toward the battle, they wished to die. But more than that they wanted to tear furiously into a Syrian column. It was the sleeplessness, the fumes, the lack of food, and the memory of Wilson’s blood spattering all over them. They were angry. And they pressed on.

  Marshall felt arising within him strength which he had not known, and was thankful. He thought that a man is like an ore, that difficulty and trial vaporize the earthly and the dross, and that in very hard times steel and gold and silver spring from the previously soft souls of the tried. He looked at the sleepless soldiers who had been driven from all corners of the world.

  “I don’t worry,” he said to them, “about the outcome of this war. We ourselves may die, it is true. But you know, and I know, that we are the earth’s sinew, rendered by force and death from almost every country, adept at paying any price. We hold on with shocking force, and we have stiff, leathern necks. We are now fighting ten times our number. They can burn us, and crush us, and slaughter our children, but we arise. Let them do what they will and say what they will. Let them come at night or in the day, in the winter, and in the dark. They can do anything they please, and we arise. Finally, we have come to enjoy this fight, and why shouldn’t we. We can last a hundred of these wars.

  “I want to find a Syrian column and attack it. We’ll help stop them on the Heights even before the rest of the Army arrives. I want to slow those bastards, just for the thing itself.”

  The rocket men laid out their shells. Chobandresh and Prithvi did the same. Marshall organized belts of ammunition for the gun he had inherited from Wilson. At noon, they closed on the Naffak road in the midst of a battle. “You know what to do,” Marshall said to Baruch. They were shaking. Their mouths were dry. But they were not unhappy.

  Half a dozen Israeli tanks were battling five times that number of Syrian tanks as steadily advancing Syrian infantry fired anti-tank missiles. A rolling barrage fell on both sides from the guns of both sides. Aircraft fought above to clear the skies, so that they could give fighter support. At stake was the Naffak road, or at least some miles of it.

  The halftrack sped toward the crossroads. Assuming that it would shelter behind them and lend its infantry to help counter the advancing Syrians, the Israeli tankists gave covering fire. But the tankists smiled when they saw what the halftrack did. It turned, for it had debts to pay, and drove left at the crossroads parallel to the Syrian column, firing from the row of rocket tubes menacing over its sides.

  The Syrians could not move their guns fast enough because it was a great surprise to them that the halftrack had come in their direction. The infantry fired on it, and Prithvi was blown out of the cockpit. Marshall swung around and sprayed the ridgeline, driving back the Syrian foot soldiers. The rockets found their marks, knocking out several tanks through which the halftrack careened wildly amidst newly angered Syrian armor swinging its cannon, and too close to get a target. The commanders emerged from closed hatches to get to their machine guns, but Marshall was in white heat, his reflexes were perfect, and he pivoted quickly from side to side forcing the Syrian gunners back into their turrets with his sustained fire.

  Now the Israeli tanks could move forward, and did. Their opposition was in panic, choked up in shrieking, clinking, metallic lines. The Israelis began their superior gunnery, but several Syrian tanks had escaped and were maneuvering on the sidelines for firing positions. “Baruch!” Marshall screamed above the gunfire. “That one over there.” He meant a lone T-54 in a good firing point, swiveling its gun toward the approaching Israeli Centurions.

  Baruch was not one to brook nonsense. He drove the halftrack full speed at the T-54 and did not slow or veer. He crashed directly into it. The halftrack engine seemed to explode. The tank tread was cut, and the tank itself was pushed up against a face of basalt. Its gun could not turn to fire because it bumped against the side of the halftrack. The drive wheels squealed on the rock. The soldiers in the halftrack laughed.

  Another T-54 came toward them. Most jumped out in time, but two were still inside when the tank fired and the halftrack was destroyed. Marshall, three of the infantry, Chobandresh, and Baruch, ran into a cul de sac hewn from the rock as an ammunition dump. They assumed that the Syrian would not jeopardize himself by following them into such a narrow corner.

  He did. His noise was deafening even over the exploding artillery shells. He came toward them—not firing, though he could have. He wanted to crush them. Baruch and Chobandresh started to run to the side. Then he opened fire. Chobandresh fell, nearly cut in half. The tank passed over him. The others shouted. Marshall felt as if a bucking horse were inside him. “Hand grenades! Hand grenades!” he yelled. There were none. The tank rolled over the three infantrymen, and then over Baruch; they screamed high-pitched screams like birds crushed under wheels, and a sound arose from their smashed bones and flesh like that of cane crashing down in the field.

  Marshall was so frightened that his feet did not touch the ground, and he felt no body, no time—nothing but electric motion all about. The tank kept coming, and he found himself jangling against a steep rock wall. He drew his pistol and fired at the ports. One shot, another, another, and several in rapid succession. He was ready to leap in the air to avoid the oncoming steel. But then he heard what sounded like the repeated banging of a scepter held in a clenched angry fist. Again and again, it struck.

  Shells were failing in a walking barrage from the entrance of the canyon to its end. Marshall and the tank were frozen still as the explosions came closer, until one struck the tank directly, ripping it into a thousand pieces, throwing the armor plate about the rock chamber like chaff. Exploding over the mangled bodies, it roared upward and outward with great power, as if a surflike wave had burst into the cul de sac and finally taken hold of Marshall.

  MORNING AT HOSPITAL 10

  MARSHALL HAD lost consciousness before his arrival at Hospital 10. Forever, they said, and it seemed so as weeks passed and he did not awake. With many tubes and plastic hoses leading in and out, he was painful to see, and the doctors said that the
damage had been too severe, that he was not genuinely alive, that the wounds could not heal and would eventually drag him down completely and, in their view, mercifully. Until then, they had to keep him alive. The antiquated religious law of the state, a far cry from the wisdom of industrialized nations, forbade them the sensible measure of withdrawing support.

  But the slightly plump nurse with two sweaters, one of the many girl “angels” in the Army, did not quite agree. She thought that sometimes she saw him move, and that sometimes in dead of night she heard faint words as if from a distant past. She did not mind standing watch at the glass table in the center of the room, the table by this time almost staggering under many copies of Israeli magazines, National Geographic, and Paris Match. The doctors refused to take her seriously, for she was, after all, just a sweet freckled girl who spent her days buried in the enticing images of far-away places. But she genuinely believed, or hoped, that he would revive.

  By the end of October, only three soldiers remained in the high-ceilinged room near the sea. The others had died—attesting to the skill of the doctors, who had said that they would. They still did not know who Marshall was. The dental records office was unable to place him, and several slips of paper announcing this lay amid the magazines. Soon though, his family would come (as had many families of the missing) to look over the terminal ward. A score of fathers seeking their sons, and half that many distressed mothers and wives had been escorted past the bed in which Marshall lay. His family would arrive. There were only a certain number of missing, and the Army knew about this nameless one at Hospital 10. But it was difficult and complicated, because the war on the Syrian front was not over. Who had time for the missing? In striving to keep alive the living, commanders were too busy to pay heed to the dead and the dying.