Haifa dozen Israeli jets came hawking in down the length of the valley but they were called off because of the closeness of the battle, and went away to the east without contributing. They spun off over Jordan jauntily knowing that they could fly unchallenged through the Arab sky.
The Israelis had caught the Arabs in a classic hold. Frantically the tanks in the rear of the column, those still sheltered from the main violence of the event, tried to back out. We could hear their tracks squealing even above the banging of the guns.
Those which were trapped were in a hopeless, escapeless net, a traffic jam with death. Fifteen were standing burning within a quarter of an hour, spitting and spewing flame like a series of squat smelting boilers. Their crews lay dead on the road or cooking inside the metal walls. One of the scout cars had run away towards Jerusalem using its speed to get out of the trap. But hardly had it gone than two of the Jewish jets which had been lurking and awaiting such a situation went after it like hunters after a fleeing rabbit. There was a section of rising road, about a mile away, which we could see from the window and we saw the planes diving on the scout car far off and saw the bright orange explosion as they dealt with it.
Some of the Jordanian tanks managed to force their way through or away from the battle. But those that were caught sat on the road and burned quietly while the guns ceased and the smoke moved away from the valley and the two highways. The birds settled surprisingly quickly again in the trees and houses. Nobody went near the road. The Jewish tanks remained in their ambush positions and there was a lot of laughing noise over the radio in the adjoining room.
Shoshana got up and went in there with Cumberland and Dov. Cumberland had remained outwardly unmoved by what he had witnessed. He jotted notes with his annoyingly stubby pencil. Dov was looking tired and carried his submachine-gun as though it were a dire burden. They talked to the observation officer who was now in high spirits, and then went over to the two soldiers manning the radio. After a few minutes they returned.
Shoshana whispered to me: 'Christopher, the road to Mount Scopus is ours again. We have just heard from the radio. We will go up there and I will show to you the most beautiful view in the world - our city of Jerusalem from this side.'
We took the jeep down the brittle hillside past a collection of dead goats, and to the road. Dov was driving now and he took it quickly past the tanks. There was a strong smell of cooking meat which I knew was the burned men trapped within the metal skins. The Israeli soldiers were probing about the gutted vehicles and even Shoshana was subdued as we went by them and headed along the beckoning road to the south.
"That, I imagine, is what they call the crucial engagement of the war,' I said to Dov. Cumberland had returned to Jerusalem in his jeep to send his words to America. He had kissed Shoshana hurriedly on the cheek before he left and she had accepted the goodbye with no change of expression, merely wishing him Shalom and sending him on his journey.
'We have the Old City completely surrounded now,' said Dov. 'I think anyway. The Police School and the American Colony, the Mount of Olives, and Mount Scopus, and on the other side all the Government House area. The Arabs have lost out.'
He was wrong because there was still the Garden of Gethsemane. And we were going in that direction.
But first, on the road, we came across the Arab with his two donkeys. He jerked along, riding one, the other at the end of a rope, just as we had seen him go by the road junction three-quarters of an hour before. The animals had their heads cast down and so did the Arab. He jolted on his journey, seeing nothing, hearing nothing and knowing only what he wanted to know. The men who had died in the fierce fifteen minutes a few miles back had not touched his life. He was at cautious peace.
The road seemed untouched by the war. We could see the smoke rising like a hedge above and around the Old City walls. It mixed with the deep morning blue of the sky and wandered among the fresh green cypresses. There were goats and mangy dogs and other animals by the side of the road but no people.
Then we swung close to the wall, around the sharp downward bend in the road, and immediately some concealed Arab machine guns near the shrine at the entrance to the Garden of Gethsemane opened fire. Dov suddenly turned the jeep off the road and ran up a red shale bank. It tipped almost on to its side and threw us out to the rough ground, but at the same moment made a shield between us and the ambush.
But they were not shooting at us. They had caught an Israeli infantry section in an elbow in the road and were lacing them with rapid fire. The Jewish soldiers were trying to get across the road out of the fine of fire, but they could not do it. Zoo Baby and Dov and O'Sullivan were immediately up on the side of the jeep shooting towards the entrenched Jordanians.
Five of the Israeli soldiers were killed within two paces of each other, unable to get out of the corner. I could hear Zoo Baby yelling at me to get my hair down, not my head, I remember, and I realized that the Arabs could see me from their position.
Then Shoshana did the thing I thought women only did in Russia or in films. I had nightmares about it for months after. The dead Israeli soldiers had moved her to a sudden screaming rage. She was crying out in Hebrew, so loud that it was audible over the gunfire.
It was a rage, a madness. She sprang up from beside me. I made to catch her ankle as she went but she kicked backwards throwing the gritty earth in my face. From behind the jeep she ran into the open and then around the side of a crumbling wall and an extension of the bank on which we were caught. A sixth Israeli had reached our side of the road only to be shot down as he got to the gutter. Concealed by the jutting bank from the Jordanian position Shoshana reached out and pulled him to her like a fisherman hauling in a catch. I kept yelling at her, but the Arabs were now spraying the bank above my head and along from the jeep with intense fire and Dov told me to lie flat where I was.
Behind the jeep and with the bank for partial protection we were reasonably shielded from the position. Zoo Baby and O'Sullivan were firing methodically at the ambushers, but the Arabs were well under cover. Dov scrambled along to try to reach a ledge just above Shoshana, but the machine guns kept cutting into the bank with such ferocity that he would have died before he had gone two yards. I begged him not to go.
Shoshana had hauled the dead infantryman into a shallow vertical crevice in the rock. She was very near the Arab position and above it. I could see her as I lay by the jeep, before I put my face to the earth in sheer terror and fright for her. I was shouting stupid swear words at her and crying and vowing I would kill everybody in sight if she was killed. I could not understand what she was trying to do with the dead soldier until I looked up fearfully again and I saw her with the grenade in her hand. She let the soldier drop unceremoniously then and steadied herself to throw the grenade.
'The pin,' I gasped out loud to her, and then to Dov, who had heard me. 'Tell her about the pin.'
'She's been a soldier,' he yelled back. 'She's done it all.'
O'Sullivan was hit about this time. Only a nick in the shoulder, but he called out and then went on firing using language that would have shamed a pub at Cricklewood. Shoshana took the pin from the grenade, gauged the distance, and flung it beautifully. It waited and then blew up right inside the Arab position throwing earth and flame and smoke all about it. She killed three men with that little bomb. The Arabs stopped shooting and then began again, and then stopped for good as the three remaining men ran out under shelter and towards the covering vineyards of the Mount of Olives.
It stopped then with that awful suddenness of small battles. The guns ceased to hammer and the ears only remembered their din. There was some smoke, but that moved away with the minor breeze, leaving us behind the jeep looking across to the formation of dead men on the road and to Shoshana, trembling, yellow-faced, with her back to the rock, with the infantryman at her feet lying as though in sleep.
O'Sullivan was saying a catechism of soft swear words as he examined his shoulder. Zoo Baby, his eyes on Shoshana, sil
ently handed a field dressing to O'Sullivan who accepted it just as mutely. Shoshana, as though she had done something which now frightened her, moved, hunched like a cripple, from her place, stepped uncertainly over the dead Israeli and came lamely towards us.
'Never do that again,' I said stupidly to her as I folded my arms about her. Dov smiled and tutted and Zoo Baby laughed his fine laugh and said: 'Which training camp ?'
'At Hebron,' she replied with her face still in my shirt.
'They make you throw good, eh,' said Zoo Baby.
'And far,' she replied. Then she said quietly: 'Let us go to Mount Scopus. I want to see Jerusalem from there.'
The jeep was holed and useless now. But we took a lift from an Israeli infantry truck that had just come from the mopping up in the northern sector of Jerusalem. The driver, a cheerful young Latvian Jew who kept telling us that his mother only bathed every Friday as she used to do in Riga, took us to the south side of the Old City.
Shoshana was told by a military policeman that the road to Mount Scopus was still not cleared. She argued that the radio had reported that Mount Scopus had been relieved and he told her to take no notice of the radio because if they were not Arabs up on the hills then he did not know why they were fighting so hard. Dov laughed quietly at Shoshana and Zoo Baby put his arm about her shoulder. She sulked. She was a strange girl.
The military policeman directed us down the cleared road to Government House where O'Sullivan could get his flesh wound properly dressed. Now that the danger had gone I only knew the great weariness that was on me. I had slept only minutes through the whole of the mad day and fiery night and into this next day. We left the truck and walked into Government House. The United Nations flag was lying rolled in a ball by the door.
O'Sullivan went to the dressing station, Shoshana was given a telephone to call her office in Tel Aviv and I stood with Zoo Baby and Dov washing away the dust with hot coffee. I could not be frightened any longer, nor did I care what happened to me in the future. All I wanted then was a niche, a hideaway, to sleep for a while until all the pantomime was through. I could hear somebody calling, for some reason in English, that the tanks had reached Ramallah in the north and that Radio Ramallah was playing Jewish songs.
'The next move,5 said Dov behind his coffee mug, 'will be the heights behind us, the Augusta Victoria area. Then the city will be surrounded.'
Zoo Baby said: 'Tomorrow we will pray at the Wailing Wall, you think?'
'Maybe tomorrow,' said Dov.
I was tired of them, their Wailing Wall, and their war. So I walked from the building into the hot sun and the disturbed dust. Feathers of surly smoke were hanging over the Mount of Olives and the sounds of the continuing conflict moved about the sacred hills. I was wondering where I could go to sleep for a while when I saw, through the trees below me, a house with cypresses in the garden, a neat white tower, and flying from a tower a brave Union Jack.
Sixteen
As I walked down the hill towards the house with its incongruous Union Jack I felt myself slumping with weariness. The battle in this part of the city was over and the people were beginning to move about the gaping streets. Jewish soldiers walked cautiously through the Arab places with that embarrassment peculiar to intruders. The Arabs kept their eyes down or their faces covered, except for the children who stood in little humps on the rubble and surveyed the conquerors with intense interest.
I went under torn trees, walked by military and civil vehicles hollowed and scarred by fire, and made detours around pyramids of debris. It seemed that the local population was attempting to occupy itself. One old man stood at the centre of a wrecked house hopefully but hopelessly sweeping with a broom.
When I was near Selma's house I looked across the valley to see if I could locate her other house in the Israeli sector. By working logically from the windmill at Yemin Moshe I fixed the general area but I was too fatigued to summon the concentration to pick out the single building among the other houses and the clustered trees.
Her Jordanian house was enclosed in its little garden, its small white turret giving it a minor regal distinction. The Union Jack that moved with sickly jerks in the small breeze was old and torn at the hems. There was a shell crater in the garden and the explosion had uprooted a family of tamarisk trees and thrown them against the windows of the house next door. All Selma's windows were smashed and against the portal of the open door was the ancient red racing bicycle which she had told me belonged to the postman.
I rang the bell politely and heard the muffled confusion that resulted within. The hall was two inches deep in battle dust and three apertures, like rough portholes, had been opened in the elegant wall to the right.
After a minute Selma herself came to the end of the passage, paused, and looked at me standing in the doorway.
'Did you get tired of the golf?' I asked.
'Sometimes you can't play alone very satisfactorily,' she said. She was holding on to the wall at her side and I could see she was crying. 'Oh, Christopher,' she said. 'I'm sorry about the mess the house is in.'
'Are you going to leave me at the door?' I asked.
She sniffed like a child. 'Please come in, darling. It's very strange but I thought somehow you would be here in Jerusalem.'
I walked towards her and she walked into my arms, lying tiredly against me. I could smell my mother's smell again. 'Yacob's dead,' she said. 'He was killed yesterday morning at El Arish.' She sniffed again. Her breasts were soft and pushed against me as though they needed me. 'He never knew about this house.'
'You did not want him to know, did you ?' I said.
'No, it was better that he did not. He would have thought it treacherous.'
She motioned me into what had been a large and fine room. Now it was in chaos, laden with dust and piled with furniture, curtains, books and crockery. It looked like a stage-property department.
'I brought everything I could salvage in here,' she shrugged. 'My God, Christopher, I've been so bloody frightened.' She hung on to me again and she cried heavily. I lowered her on to a pile of rugs. 'No,' she said. 'We can sit more comfortably over there. Just move those pictures.'
We lifted the paintings from a beautiful kidney-shaped settee and sat on its velvet. It felt firm under my aching backside.
'Why did you come back to Jerusalem ?' she asked me.
'You may well ask. At the moment I'm supposed to be a war correspondent.'
'That girl,' she guessed unhappily. 'The one from the newspaper?'
'A woman's intuition,' I answered.
'Is it?'
'Yes, I'm with her,' I admitted. 'But, my God, I didn't think I'd get into the middle of things like this.'
'Look at your hands,' she said sadly taking them. 'How will you be able to play ?'
I won't,' I said. 'But I'm lucky to have hands. That's how 1 feel about it. I had decided to go to Tel Aviv, to try and get a plane out, and I changed my mind. Then the jeep I was to travel in got a direct hit from a shell from this side. That could have been me.'
I am glad you are safe and I'm glad you are here,' she said still cradling my hands. I have been trying to shelter some of the people around here. They are down in the cellar.'
'The postman left his bike at the door,' I said. 'Why didn't you play golf, Selma ?'
'You know it was just a joke,' she said. I was frightened as hell when it all happened. I had come back to Jerusalem and I couldn't get out again because of the military. So I stayed in the other house, in the basement, by myself. An Arab shell went straight into the bedroom. The one we were in. Then, when the fighting had passed I walked over here to this house. And look what's been done to this.'
'I thought that might happen,' I said. 'You got it from both sides. You shouldn't spread your assets so widely. You got across here without trouble ?'
She smiled tiredly: I put a nice quiet dress on, picked up my handbag and simply walked through it all,' she said. 'You've never seen such a mess, but I could have been str
olling down Bond Street for all anyone cared.'
'Jesus, I'm tired,' I said lolling full back against the settee. It was strange how at home I felt with her. She never worried me as Shoshana worried me. 'I've seen so many men killed in the past twenty-four hours.'
'That's wearying in itself,' she agreed sadly. 'Would you like a drink or some coffee? I can make some coffee. The drinks cabinet we would have to tunnel for.'
'Coffee is fine,' I agreed. 'Who have you got in the cellar?'
'Abdullah, the postman, two women from Hassan's house. You remember I told you about Hassan who used to let his goats feed in my garden. Poor old devil, God knows where he has gone.'
I sensed that she was hesitating. 'Anyone else?' I asked.
'How do you mean ?'
'Well, anyone else in the cellar.'
'No. There is no one else there,' she said. 'I'll get the coffee.'
She made it on a small stove in the adjoining room. There was a hatch, with one of its side pieces broken so that it seemed like a large fractured picture frame.
'You saw my Union Jack,' she called.
'Only you could have put that thing up in the middle of a war between the Jews and the Arabs. It's a wonder it wasn't the Rising Sun.'
I didn't have a Rising Sun,' she replied. 'I'm not patriotic, heaven knows, I've told you how I feel. But the Union Jack was handy.'
'A sort of flag of convenience,' I said.
'Quite. It was either that or the Greek flag. I told you, didn't I, that my mother and my stepfather used to fly them on their national days ?'
'Yes, you did. But why put it up now ? Were you hoping for some sort of immunity?'
'Something like that,' she admitted. I could hear her pouring the coffee. 'I had a mad thought that both sides might leave the house alone if that was flying above it.'
I looked about at the sad wreckage. 'Well, they didn't, did they,' I said. 'No respect these bloody little countries. I'm sorry about Yacob.'
Come To The War Page 20