'Good luck to us, mottek,'' I repeated. She smiled at the word. 'It means sweetness,' she said.
We walked out into the bare room. Half the men had gone. The place was shaking with the afternoon gunfire, plaster crumbled in small pieces from the wall. The fussy major approached us as we were joining O'Sullivan, Zoo Baby and Dov.
First he spoke in Hebrew and then stopped as Shoshana said something to him and changed to English for my benefit.
'As you have been delayed for the briefing,' he said carefully, 'I will again do it. The armoured column and the ground soldiers, the supporters, you understand... yes, the support troops... are moving into the positions for attacking. I show you.' There was a map spread on the leaning table and he took a ruler and traced a circle around the back of the Old City. He was sweating heavily in his uniform. 'We go both sides, like the classic German pincer attack of the last war,' he said. 'From here, where we are at the Mandelbaum and from farther north at Latrun we shall attack the high ground between Jerusalem and Ramallah where is the big radio station. We wish - for the reasons of our troops surrounded there - to get to the hospital at Mount Scopus, to cut the road - here - between Jerusalem and Ramallah, and to occupy all this area, the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, Augusta Victoria, and right down to Herod's Gate. It is through Herod's Gate that our paratroops will be breaking into the Old City.'
He paused. Some of the other journalists were going out of the low door now, waving nervous goodbyes to the few remaining. One man laughed and came back for the camera he had left behind.
The major returned to us: 'Difficulties there will be. We expect them. The Police School near the Ramallah Road junction. That will be one difficulty. The Arab Legion are there. You remember the Arab Legion of Glubb Pasha, sir?' He aimed the question directly at me.
'Not personally,' I said. 'Are they a good team ?'
'Very good,' he answered missing, as they always did, the joke. 'That will be a bad place for casualties.'
'Latrun,' said the girl. 'That is a bad place also.'
He nodded. 'A bad place. Last time we left fourteen hundred dead in the fields there. The British gave also Latrun to the Arabs before they left.
'The area between here and Mount Scopus is mined and there are many ... holes ...' He hesitated and said something in Hebrew to Shoshana. It was Dov who translated. 'There are heavy mines and many trenches, bunkers and that sort of defence,' Dov said turning to me.
'Trenches, that is correct,' agreed the major. 'There will be much difficulty. Please do not move too much forward into the battle area. Telephones for the correspondents are in the farther room there. I shall be here in this position to help you. I shall be in this house all the time.' He smiled and said: 'Thank God.'
Dov asked him a question in Hebrew and received a laughing reply. Two telephones began ringing at once and the squat little major went towards the telephone room.
'First I must telephone to my office,' said Shoshana. 'I asked a man at the command post but he was very busy and it is possible did not do it. I will let them know I am in Jerusalem and they will be glad.'
Dov said to me as she walked away: 'You will have a travelling orchestra to accompany you. That is appropriate isn't it. We have asked where our Army units are located. It seems Zoo Baby should be at El Arish in the Gaza Strip and I should be in the Sinai.'
'Do you think they missed you ?'
'It is possible,' he smiled gently. 'But it seems we shall miss very little.'
We crouched at that moment because a shell landed in the vicinity and swayed the entire house like a ship in a hurricane. We could hear the tank tracks clanking up the road towards the lane. That threatening, ominous clank. The firing increased immediately and the air of the room was clouded with dust and falling plaster.
Zoo Baby looked up apprehensively. He sniffed at the gritty air. 'Outside is okay,' he concluded. 'I'll fight them outside. But me, I don't want the house to bury me.'
'It would be a big house that buried you,' answered Dov. He was very calm.
Shoshana came back eventually. 'Two reporters and two cameramen are here somewhere in Jerusalem from my paper but they are glad I am here too,' she said. Then she added with sweet seriousness: 'But the editor said I must not get killed and I must not let you get killed, Christopher. That is his order.'
'Mind you obey the order,' I said.
She laughed spontaneously, because for once, she understood the joke, and gaily as though we were embarking on a fine treat. Dust continued to cascade from the ceiling and she shook it from her hair.
'We have good soldiers to protect us also,' she smiled patting Zoo Baby and Dov and smiling at the pensive O'Sul-livan. 'No Arab will get us.'
The little major came forward with some infantry steel helmets which he distributed. He gave me mine last.
There were no others in the place now. They had all gone out to observe the start of the advance and the battle. I said to Shoshana: 'I'm surprised your officer gave me a hat at all. I don't think he likes the British.'
'Many of us do not,' she said indicating that the remark was completely logical. 'My father and my brothers have killed English soldiers. And we remember what took place at Latrun. That is a terrible place, a fortress on a flat hill, by a monastery. Our best soldiers died in that place in nineteen forty-eight. We could not break the Arabs there. And Latrun was a present to the Arabs from the British.'
We moved towards the exit, going out into the sunshine battle. It was curiously like walking on to a concert platform with the lights and the haze. All the air was filled with dust and noise and filtered sun. There were some bright summer flowers at the door of the house, growing profusely, the dust of the battle already lying across their petals and their leaves. We could not see very much because we were deep in the lane leading from the house to the road where the tanks had been. But the air was choked and the banging of the guns made the ground and the walls shudder. Three jet fighters jumped across the small part of the sky visible to us, very low, passing along the length of the lane, then howling away.
'Jordanians,' said Dov.
'Hawker Hunters,' said O'Sullivan.
'British,' I said.
'Almost all the Jordanian Air Force is,' said Dov without rancour.
'We seem to be well represented all around,' I said. 'Your tanks are British aren't they ?'
'Centurions,' nodded Dov. 'Very good tanks.'
We were at the entrance to the lane now, leading out to the main road. The bulky tanks were still trundling through the dust. We were in single file, O'Sullivan first, then Dov, then Shoshana, then me, and finally Zoo Baby. We turned the corner and walked towards Jordan. From there, through the heated haze, I could see that we were well in time for the battle. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. I stepped over two dead soldiers half lying against a wall and I wondered if at that moment at Caesarea, in the distant north, Selma, as promised, was driving her ball from the first grassy tee.
Eleven
It was the time when the heat begins to diminish from the day in Jerusalem. It was frightening and strange going down that sloping street with tanks portioned out like a parade ahead of us, and quiet foot soldiers, walking steadily in front, behind us and beside us, moving to begin fighting the Arab Legionnaires. The leading tanks were embattled about half a mile away, where the ground began to rise again. They had entered Jordan and were several hundred yards beyond the border when they were delayed by the entrenched troops, and the hidden mines. I was not afraid, perhaps because Shoshana and the others showed no fear, only bemused by all the death happening about me. I could feel the sticky sweat and the dry dirt caked on my face like a mask. The steel helmet felt like an awkward basin. As I worked my face muscles I could feel the dried dirt cracking on my cheeks and forehead. Somehow my tongue was bleeding and I could taste the blood in my mouth. I wiped my hand across my lips and saw that it was streaked with orange. Only ten days before I had been playing to a polite and attentive
audience at Cheltenham Spa.
An infantry officer jogged up the road, away from the advance, comically astride a portable motor-scooter. He was a big young man and it was his bulky battle kit, his Uzzi machine gun, and his lump of a helmet that made him look strange on the small vehicle. He saw our group of five and called in Hebrew, sweeping his arm to order us into a shallow enclave in the walls near the Mandelbaum Gate. We went into the space and immediately a platoon of staring troops, at the run, bayonets fixed, went by. They kept on running into Jordan and we could see them, where the road bore left, going through their own tanks and running on into the enemy. There was a terrible din; firing ahead, smoke, and then great flashing explosions that flung flame everywhere and tore huge holes in the view of the battle before us.
Shoshana said conversationally: 'Israeli officers never order "forward" as any other army. Always they say "ach-arai" which means "follow me".'
My eyes were streaming from a fat cloud of smoke that suddenly billowed up the street and as I tried to answer her I got it in my throat also. I spluttered and coughed. I tried to tell her that this little bit of claptrap propaganda is thrown at every stranger in Israel and it's time they stopped it. Why do they always have to justify themselves? In every bloody army the officer goes first whether the order is 'forward' or 'follow me'. Because if he doesn't go, neither do the men. But the Jews love to get trade from these white-lie cliches. That's the trouble with being both literate and businesslike. I did not tell her then because the smoke made me vomit and when I'd finished I couldn't be bothered to open the matter again.
Zoo Baby regarded me anxiously. I wiped the sick from my mouth and looked at him with watering eyes.
'Something maybe you ate,' he said solicitously.
'Like smoke,' I said.
His face beamed with the beginning of his laugh and when he reached its fulfilment point he let it fully go, causing the wry young soldiers to stare at him as they continued marching towards the battle.
'The British!' bellowed Zoo Baby. 'My God! The British! Always they keep their jaw up, yes?'
'No,' I said. 'Their chin. It's their chin they keep up.'
'Exactly so,' he conceded. He peeped out into the road. The immediate area ahead seemed quieter. The battle had advanced half a mile. He glanced at O'Sullivan. The Irishman nodded as though he were ordering a second drink and we moved ahead. There was a tank slewed across the road after about three hundred yards, one of its tracks broken like a garter. Some engineers were working on it. The tank crew were standing impatiently in the road.
'Now that's a hell of a time to have a puncture,' commented O'Sullivan. Nobody laughed so he said: 'The boys will be going hard for Mount Scopus.' We had sheltered behind the metal walls of the tank and O'Sullivan began watching ahead through a pair of binoculars decently passed to him by the idle tank captain. Shoshana, taking out a notebook the size of a stamp, began to interview the tank crew. I don't think she was a very good interviewer. When she came to England to write about me she seemed slow, yet fussy, in the technique. She wrote notes about the tank crew and they told her how the fighting had been just a few minutes before. Someone had raised an Israeli flag on both sides of the Mandelbaum Gate denoting the first conquest of the invasion. One of the tank men wanted to embrace Shoshana and refused to answer questions until he was accommodated. Shoshana called across to his tank captain who shouted sternly at the soldier, who then lowered his arms and began meekly to answer her inquiries. When she had finished, and when his captain was watching the horizon through the glasses retrieved from O'Sullivan, the soldier grabbed Shoshana and gave her a full squeeze around the breasts which apparently satisfied him. I suppose he thought he might get shot down within the hour.
'Why is Mount Scopus so important ?' I asked Dov.
'Because we have soldiers besieged there, at the old Hebrew University,' he said.
'How did they get that far behind the Jordanians ?'
'The United Nations escorted them,' he smiled. 'It is an arrangement, since the 1948 armistice. It is occupied by just over a hundred Israeli soldiers who are taken out every two weeks. They guard the old university and the books and such things.
'Every two weeks the Arabs let them go through with a United Nations escort. It is one of those strange things. Just an arrangement, just part of the game.'
'So they've got to be reached before the Arabs get in,' I said.
'There are so few of them that the quicker there is a link-up the better,' said Dov.
'Are they armed? Did the Arabs let them through with guns?'
Zoo Baby grinned and answered for Dov: "They have a few little pop guns and other toys they have managed to smuggle. They will keep the Arabs away for a few moments or longer, maybe.'
We were able to leave the shelter of the tank now and go farther. The infantry had now passed us by. The street was curiously empty except for smoke and battle litter. The tank behind which we had crouched, its track repaired, came trundling after us, like an anxious pet left behind. It had gone fifty yards down the street when a small anti-personnel mine blew up under its tracks and it slewed about once more and shuddered violently into the shuttered window of an Arab shop. The shutters fell and an enormous avalanche of rice tumbled out into the road. The shopkeeper must have piled it in sacks behind his blinds for protection. From the back of the splintered wood emerged the hysterical Jordanian, leaping about in his robes and wailing, his fear of the Israelis overcome by the disaster to his rice.
The tank commander, like a rabbit appearing from a hat, came out of the turret and dismally climbed to the ground. The second track of the vehicle was now broken, split by the small mine, and was lying flat on the ground like a dried tongue. He pushed his goggles to his forehead and began to swear in Hebrew, hands on hips, red under his tank-man's helmet. The Jew and the Arab, each bemoaning his own particular disaster, suddenly became aware of each other, stared with a kind of hostile sympathy, and then both turned and began wailing again. The captain ordered his men from the tank and sent one of them running back for the engineering crew who were working on another vehicle two hundred yards up the rise of the road.
The Arab brought out his wife and his children and between them, using scoops and hands, they began to shift the mountain of rice back into the area of the shop. They were still engaged like this when the engineers began working once more on the tank. The two groups went about their occupations busily one not caring about the other, nor looking their way, while the war moved on another half a mile.
The smoke immediately about us was clearing; the explosions and the fighting were climbing the opposite hill and were halfway to the top. After a while the ears ceased to be bludgeoned by the din and I looked about and realized fully that I was in Jordan as part of an occupying force.
The shops were different, closer, crumbling. The signs were in strange scrawls and the street names were scrawled the same, with sober English translations beneath them. We inevitably leave something behind.
There were fires burning ahead but the street seemed now undisturbed except for ambulances and stretcher parties coming back through the distant curtained smoke. The Star of David was flying from the knobs and pinnacles of some of the higher buildings showing the extent of the Jewish advance as readily as small flags on a battle map.
The daylight was drifting from the hills. Cypresses stood like dark quills, and buildings on the distant mounds, those uncovered by smoke, looked fat, dull, white and complacent on the fringes of the battle.
Where the fighting continued the smoke rose and the fires glowed. In our street the activity was local, the Arab shopkeeper and the Israeli engineers about their separate tasks, but working so closely that the rice sweepers frequently got in the way of the track repairers and the track repairers in the way of the rice sweepers. Some Arab children came up the street astonishingly chasing a donkey which clobbered on determinedly through the rubble and thin smoke at a sort of downcast and patient pace. The tank captain,
with the air of a man who can perceive nothing better to do, caught the donkey as it ran by and held it while the four ruffian children, hung in rags and alley dirt, held on to its tail and kicked it unmercifully around until they had it pointing in the return direction and moving down the cobbled street again. They ran along with it, shouting and beating it enthusiastically, until they vanished in the evening dimness and the curtained smoke.
Shoshana had watched the pantomime with us, unsmiling although everyone else laughed, especially when the tank captain caught the donkey. O'Sullivan was saying that he had often seen the same thing in Wexford. Shoshana turned on him and said incongruously: 'Why you laugh, I don't know. Arab children kicking a donkey. How funny!' Then childishly threatening: 'When we have won all this country - then you will laugh, Mister Border Guard. See how much bigger border you will have to guard then!'
She meant it and she said it so seriously, so idiotically, that we all laughed at her.
O'Sullivan said soothingly: 'If it is too much frontier we've got then maybe I'll borrow the donkey myself.'
It was very nearly dark over Jerusalem now, with the explosions, white, yellow, orange, red, blossoming like brief flowers on the slopes of battle. They bellowed like the fiercest thunder among the Judean Hills and the light of the conflict shone on the face of the darkened city, on its imperturbable walls and its aloof towers.
Major de Groucy, the fussy officer from the Press house, abruptly came bouncing down the street on a motor-scooter, skidded to a theatrical stop, and then handed a folded paper to Shoshana.
Come To The War Page 14