The bayonet belonged in their world—which, after all, contained the possibility of martyrdom though no chance of it had yet appeared. But while the boys hesitated before that unwavering point at the foot of the gangway the sentry’s companion gave them a broad grin and a wink, and with a jerk of the thumb dismissed them. His confidence was unshakeable as their own, and his friendly gesture intelligible; it pointed out that the bayonet was not really sharp steel but merely a wall, an unclimbable wall, around the stately park of empire. The irresistible force had met the immovable object.
‘And in the end there is no way out of that,’ Aviva said, ‘but to learn to hate.’
‘No, you can’t find parallels,’ Horsha went on. ‘There aren’t any. The British, as they were in 1919—yes, and later—had the art of making the rest of the world feel ashamed of impatience. That sentry—with his tiny private share of it—was quite enough for twenty-six crusaders.’
Thereafter the slow mass of bureaucracy crept over and engulfed them. Up and down that gangway, to them forbidden, passed the Egyptian police, the port authorities, the Italian consul and the agent of the line. From the conferences in the saloon the Italians emerged profane and glowering, the English unyielding and self-satisfied; and all of them combined to make the children appear in their own eyes young nuisances rather than young heroes. But never did it occur to them that they were unreasonable, or that their knightliness could be defeated. Hardest of all to bear was the young army captain, Mayne, who spoke in courtly French quite intelligible to the high school students, and merely seemed to be amused.
‘You didn’t mind the general,’ Mayne protested. ‘He was just as amused as I.’
‘We were good Polish citizens,’ Joseph answered. ‘We treated generals with respect. And he understood us. A man who isn’t a boy at heart can never become a general. Half his job is to persuade men that they are really having the marvellously exciting time they dreamed of when they were twelve.’
‘It wasn’t till much later,’ explained Aviva, ‘that we realised you had brought the general yourself.’
Well, of course, he had. And it was true that he had been amused—delighted was a better word—by the glorious folly of the pilgrimage. He was surprised to find himself most reluctant to have the children’s fire put out by a great wad of paper, or to return them to Italy. His sentries, as a precaution, were correct; as a solution, they were intolerable.
He persuaded the general to take the children off the ship and, pending a decision, to send them down the Suez Canal to a camp at Kantara. The old professional had been impressed by their quality—by their tremendous button-polishing capacity if they had any buttons. All the same, he insisted, some inexpensive method of returning them to Poland would have to be found. It was impossible to allow them into Palestine, utterly impossible.
‘He didn’t really mean us to go on then?’ Joseph asked.
‘He dithered. We both did. So you were always in command of your own destiny.’
It hadn’t felt like it. There the children were, just as on the Italian frontier, under the benevolent control of military; but this time nobody’s enthusiasm suggested that something was bound to happen. They were merely well looked after, and visited occasionally by the smiling Captain Mayne who told them to be patient as if he had never realised that a divine impatience was their inspiring force. The only contact with the world of their imagination was that they were living in tents on the edge of the desert.
And that hard, lion-coloured surface was all which separated them from Palestine? Couldn’t they walk there? Hadn’t all the conquerors of ancient history crossed the Sinai desert? In the grey of dawn, stealthily, an advance party set out with their water and the unexpended portion of the day’s rations. Their tents were outside the military cantonments. No one saw them leave but the prowling Egyptian children; sleepers and scavengers who rose from the dust and accompanied them, mocking, capering and gesticulating obscenely. The little column marched on unconcerned, following a straight course across packed sand and gravel never disturbed by the wheel-tracks of any of the armies which had cautiously hastened from Egypt into Syria. The palms of the Canal vanished over the horizon. The native children scuttled back to the safety of mud walls.
‘I am always surprised that you found us,’ Horsha said.
‘Oh, it wasn’t difficult! The trouble was that I had been away. So you had two days’ start, and the little wretches you left behind wouldn’t say a word. But I knew exactly what you would do. Didn’t I tell you that I, too, was very young then? You would march on Jerusalem by your compass.’
That was their route when Mayne and his hastily borrowed cavalrymen discovered them marching east-north-east through the midday heat, stumbling, their water gone, but still in good close order. They reckoned to cover another five miles of deadly emptiness before they collapsed.
No more resistance was possible for the general. There were two good reasons for that. One was the children’s determination. They could not be guarded night and day to prevent some further lunacy. The other was their chivalry. The beauty of the relationship between girls and boys was so obvious that it had never occurred to Mayne or his general that anyone could object to the proximity of their various tents. But there was no keeping out the chaplains and the welfare workers, and it was their business to protest.
The plaguing of the general increased and, like Pharaoh, he had no reasonable solution. He might have invented an excuse for putting one or two children on the new military railway to Haifa, but not twenty-six—for he was only the commander of a base. He would have had the politicians down on him, let alone Allenby’s Chief of Staff.
‘Did he put the blame on you?’ Aviva asked.
‘Only damned my eyes in a general way. There were no real reproaches. We were both emotionally affected by your spirit, you see. You had to go to Palestine. Had to go. That was why at last I gave you my promise that you should.’
It had been a knightly gathering, though the banners and shields were only there in the eye of imagination. The children were drawn up in the space between the tents and took oath, eager-eyed and solemn-faced, that they would not leave the camp without permission. And in his turn Mayne gave his word of honour that he would lead them to Palestine.
‘You were tremendously impressive,’ Horsha assured him. ‘You, the young Count of the Empire who had galloped up to our rescue!’
‘Then it was my turn to radiate a confidence I hadn’t got,’ Mayne answered. ‘I remember wondering how on earth I was going to keep my word.’
But the fact that he had given it was a third good reason for the general, who provided all that was in his power to provide—two lorries and rations, a week’s leave for the importunate Captain Mayne and a pass which would take the whole party to Palestine so long as no one questioned it. And he wrote privately to the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, for he could not think of anyone else to arrange the children’s reception.
‘We addressed him as Your Grace,’ said Mayne with a chuckle. ‘His rank, we reckoned, must be equivalent to an archbishop. And we told the general’s pet runner, who carried the letter, to be extra polite and mind his saluting.’
The still Canal had just ceased to reflect the stars when the two lorries drove down it towards the desert track. The children were the first band of illegal immigrants, although, as in all their journey, they had no thought of breaking any law. Where there was none, their spirit supplied it.
Mayne, the drivers and their mates caught the infection of romance. They felt themselves explorers, and would have deliberately supplied adventure if there had not been enough in reality. The crossing of deserts by motor vehicles was then too new to be taken for granted. The lorries on their solid tyres ponderously ground and bumped over irregularities of surface. Halts were frequent, and the running repairs of heavy complexity and doubtful value. The children were battered and bruised by the journey; but at night, wrapped in blankets on the sand, they abandoned themselves
utterly to sleep—sleep which all their lives, said Joseph and Aviva, they remembered for its quality of peace. The next day they would have conquered.
Of this they were so sure that Mayne, against his better judgement, resumed the journey with a single lorry; the other had to be abandoned to await a tow to workshops. But even springs and axles obeyed the children. The remaining truck crept stolidly north until, instead of lonely shepherds, they saw huts with men and women sitting idle after harvest at the doors. Patches of sparse stubble began to appear among the scrub and dry thorn.
Was it at last Palestine? Well, no one could say for certain. But it was decidedly not Egypt. Two hours later the lorry limped into an Arab village and approached a group of European colonists, deep-eyed and sunburned, who waited patiently and could not yet see what precious freight was packed on blankets under the canvas hood.
Again the children asked if they had come to Palestine, and this time, though maps and politicians might be unwilling to commit themselves, history had no doubt. Mayne could not remember what he answered. He was very anxious to hand over his charge and retreat into the desert before civilians and military could overwhelm him with embarrassing questions. Nor could he trust himself to speak, for long war and sacrifice and promise, children and place and the ancient sanctities of Jew and Christian were of profound emotional power.
‘You said,’ Aviva reminded him: ‘this is Beersheba. I must leave you now.’
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1981, 2014 by Geoffrey Household
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
978-1-5040-1044-3
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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