The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  In this moment Gidon felt a climax of joy. Simply to be part of this effort, this power, this vast conjoined construction made by man, was a fulfillment of life. And the joy was the greater because their own vessel had almost failed to arrive here to be part of this movement; but despite all they were here. What they had gone through—their first transport stranded on a mudbank, their frantic Irishman finding another vessel and, his frenzy infectious, wildly urging them on as they reloaded the mules in the dark, they must not miss the great attack, and overcoming every sly trick and accident of nature, here they were, they had arrived!

  And for this moment it no longer mattered that the strange mountainous point before them was not Mount Carmel but was called Gallipoli; it did not matter that this was no attack to free Eretz, that they would plunge into battle alongside Australians, Scottish troops, small men from India, and who knew what, to unlock a gate for this armada to proceed up the straits to Constantinople. During this high moment, Gidon forgot or perhaps surmounted his fate as a Jew, or even as a member of one side or the other in the Great War. He sensed himself only as a man satisfied to be included in an immeasurable effort that was in some way to turn the very direction of history, of that unknowable design, if it was a design, of which each man must be a part; and even if he were to die in what was happening here, even if the other side could by some incredible accident withstand all this accumulated power, or even more incredibly, destroy it and triumph, even then, Gidon felt, and he knew that all the men on all the ships and all the men in their fortifications in those rocks felt, as he did, a fulfillment of life in being here, and being ready.

  Now he understood what Josef had meant when he said that even in fighting for the Czar at the other end of the world against the Japanese, he had known he was fighting for the Jews. And now Gidon was certain that Josef had been right to declare that they must enroll even if only as mule drivers, rather than, as Jabotinsky had urged, to refuse to go. How he would write home of this, how he would tell it to Leah, to little Mati, to Schmulik—if his letters could but find a way to reach them!

  And then, in a first lull, the mountain stood before them unaltered. Smoke blotched it here and there but drifted clear. And fire-points flared—ah, they were firing back. But just as the mountain stood intact, the armada lay intact. At the prow of their own vessel the Irishman and Trumpeldor stood, each with field glasses to his eyes. One dared not yet ask for a look.

  Araleh had come up. Already in the embarkment of the mules in Alexandria, and last night again in the transfer to this vessel, he had been marked by the Irishman; when the Irishman couldn’t decide the best way to stack the water-tins, Araleh knew; he knew how to place the mules so their manure could be cleaned out most easily, and everywhere in the pandemonium, he was at hand.

  Now with that clear head of his and the quick eyes that were always learning something that “could one day be useful to us at home,” Araleh discerned the strategy of the great powers. For all that it was so vast, it was as simple as two dogs fighting. “What do they do?” he reminded Gidon. “They go for each other’s throat.” So the Turks had tried to make their kill at the Suez Canal and, shaking them off, the British in turn were striking at the straits to Constantinople. After seizing these overlooking heights so that their ships would be safe from bombardment, they would pierce through. They would thus meet their Russian allies coming from the Black Sea, Constantinople would fall, then with their joined might they could send armies sweeping downward through the heart of Turkey to Syria, while another British force came up from Egypt, trapping Djemal Pasha’s armies between them. Where? In Eretz itself, there to be ground to nothingness, and Eretz would be free!

  Gidon saw it really happening. In this incomprehensible war—as each man sees destiny revolving around his own life—it seemed that the entire design was centered around the farm on the Jordan, where the liberating forces from north and south must meet, and where he with the rest of Trumpeldor’s men of Zion, no longer muleteers but soldiers now, rushing down as part of this very force, would chase the last Turks from the yard of the Chaimovitch meshek!

  He wrested himself from the daydream. Though still in the outermost circle, their ship was edging closer to the land. In the clear morning light now, they could see the forward rim of their armada at the tongue’s edge of the peninsula, but from the heights directly above, from a massive ancient fortress, came a thousand points of fire, and from the mountain behind came puff-clouds of artillery; there were fire-streaks like streaked blood, and shells sending up geysers in the water, and now from the opposite side of the narrows came more blood-streaked cloudlets—German artillery, Herschel said, hurling shells over the neck of water onto the landing beach. The enemy had been ready for them.

  In that neck of water the British armada was choked, the naval guns firing back at the fortifications on either side of the water, on the European and on the Asian shore, while all through the mouth of the narrows more ships rode the sea—transports, supply ships, vessels of every description, waiting their turn to approach the shell-splattered beach.

  The Irishman had passed his fieldglasses to Araleh, and now they came to Gidon. As though instantly carried among them, he saw men leaping from a bark, clutching high their rifles, staggering to wade ashore, saw one of them contorting in midair like some acrobat and then floating face-down on the water, another soldier leaping over him, saw several men on the sand crawling like landcrabs, some with desperate speed scooping sand with their hands to make a barrier. Then, raising the binoculars somewhat, he saw a beautiful green apricot grove, still and peaceful in the morning sun, and still a bit higher, he saw wide fields of red poppies like those at home. Herschel took the glasses from him. Their ship was once more churning forward, and glancing over the side, Gidon saw a body floating by, an English soldier, face up, still clutching his rifle in his dead hand.

  Then he saw Herschel’s face; Herschel was on the point of vomiting. And rising up in his own self, Gidon recognized the same fear as Herschel’s before the coming deathleap, and then secondly a more shameful fear, that his body would refuse the command, that perhaps it was all true that in Jews there lurked an absence of courage—that before this entire armada of British and Gurkhas and Somalis and men from every stock on earth, and under the wrath of the Irishman, Jews alone would falter, and a roar of mankind’s derision would arise to be echoed from the high mountain fortress where the Turk himself was watching them with his binoculars. Despite a kind of gratitude that they were still in the outer ranks of the armada, there came an impatience to try, life or death, and have it done with.

  The exultant shouting from that early-dawn sight of their own vast assembled power, and then the cries of anger at the sudden fire opened against them had both been engulfed now in the indistinguishable uproar. Yet in that narrow segment of sky churning with crisscrossed streams of shells, bullets, shards and fragments, there even seemed to be single shells that knew their destination: see that landing barge filled with men—and the missile fell directly among them, so that even if one man lived below the heap of his torn comrades, he was carried down by their tangled weight to create his own death in the sea.

  From the mountainhead—Achi Baba it was called—the fire came as though some ancient god need only spit at them. To the soldiers up there, it must be like the time he had waited behind his rocks by the cave and watched his enemy coming, holding their approach in his gunsight.

  There were no barges for the mules. From the rail, the Irishman shouted down to every passing landing-vessel to come back for his mules, keeping up his pleading, his cajoling, as he ran along his shipside—they must get him ashore with his supplies. “I’ve got their water! Those men have no water!” But hardly a craft slowed, and when one did, it was only for an exchange of insults. Already the lighters returning from the beach had their bottoms covered with maimed and wounded, men who lay strangely motionless, with their eyes wide open to tell something, and it was after looking down into
their eyes, as a barge passed close enough to scrape the side of their ship, that Gidon saw Herschel choke his mouth with his hand, and hurry to the opposite rail so as not to vomit on the dying.

  In this slaughter that was to become a byword in history, a toehold had been secured on the sliver of beach, and at last came the debarkation of the transport unit, the mules and the men of Zion. A long series of lighters, lashed together, had by now been extended from the beachhead with a gangway of planks across them. From the beach itself they could hear men clamoring for water, and the Irishman charged the Zion men into a line across the planks, to hand on the tins, hurrying them so urgently that each hardly knew when he took his place under fire. And now each was fearfully watching his brothers, anxious that all the other Jews should stand well, and amazingly, they stood. Swinging the heavy tins from the man behind to the man before him, Gidon knew this elation. How had he ever doubted? Yet from all the derision in the training camps, the doubt had arisen in himself as to how they might withstand this moment.

  The receiving arms ahead of him suddenly were not there. One of the Nissim had been suddenly taken by an uncontrollable trembling. A shell had hit the edge of the lighter on which he stood; it pitched, and he let his heavy water-tin drop.

  Gidon caught and steadied him. Already Josef was there, nearly tumbling them all into the sea as he picked up the tin with a curse. Already the Irishman was calling from the beach. “Keep them moving! Don’t piss out on me!” Did he still doubt the Jews? They would be able to do it as well as anyone else.

  But when the mules were led off, under the incessant shelling, lighters broke loose under their weight, animals plunged into the water, yanking their handlers with them, some of the boys still hanging onto the halters. Gidon found himself swimming, grasping the rope of a floundering beast.

  It was bad enough for the soldiers to get ashore with their packs under that concentrated fire, but to manage with the mules as well seemed beyond possibility, what with the animals’ wrenching, biting, kicking, the screaming protests of the beasts rising above the scream of the shells. Laughable this would be, in the telling, after the war.

  Dark came. One man was lost, drowned; Tuvia had seen him hit, going down drowning—a Moroccan Jew from their quarter in Alexandria, and Gidon could not help his reaction, “Not one of ours from Eretz.”

  Then an hour later the Moroccan was there on the beach; only wounded in the thigh, he had managed to swim. It became a great joke that their first dead was not dead, a good omen—at once Moshe the Moroccan was a man beloved.

  As after some storm of creation, crates, tins, ammunition boxes lay flung about on the sand. A pair of Zion men had been dragooned into piling up stacks of explosives, only to have a shell fall as with a wild laugh, and mingle them with the wreckage—these dead were dead, a beginning. Again, Egyptian Jews, poor devils from the slums, not men from Eretz, not yet.

  More boxes were being unloaded, and Araleh was running from one dumped disarray to another, trying to set order in the chaos; the mules had been led forward to a safer area that the Irishman had scouted out, behind a sheltering mound. There was even grass behind the sands, and the beasts fell to nibbling. But the rope coils for lengthening their tethers could not be found. Josef appeared, already mounted; he had led off his own steed first of all. Galloping away, he somewhere found a storemaster who had managed to set up his supplies, and in a burst of Russian-English, commandeered an enormous coil of rope. Only as Josef shouldered it did the Scottish storemaster notice that the strange-talking captain had a wooden arm. “What in blazes—who are you, man?” he roared, and the legend of Josef Trumpeldor was begun on Gallipoli.

  Like the Irishman, he was everywhere at once, tethering mules, hammering tent stakes, and when a shell fell, provided it was close enough, he blasted out a Russian “pshakreff!”

  A thought came to Gidon, and he remarked on it to Herscheleh. “He’s happy!”

  “The vegetarian and pacifist,” said Herschel.

  They had not yet even completed the debarkation when the first train of pack animals had to be loaded with water-tins and rations and led off into the pathless dark toward an exhausted fighting unit pinned along a gorge; the runner had just managed to fumble his way back through torn barbed-wire hillsides.

  “The whole bloody mountain is covered with barbed wire and sniper dugouts,” he told them in a ghost of a voice, as he guided them uncertainly. “Oh, these Turkish devils knew exactly where we were going to land.”

  “They knew, but we didn’t,” Herscheleh muttered with bravado. “Maybe they even know where we’re going to now, since we don’t.”

  The Irishman himself had come along to lead their first mission. After a laborious hour they clambered down behind the runner into a dry wady, like those at home, the mules’ hooves unavoidably creating a rumble of cascading stones. How easily they could be picked off! Presently, something happened up front. “Halt” was passed in whispers along the lane. Then another order, “Turn back.” Gidon recognized the tread of the Irishman’s mount, then heard his blasphemy. That bloody fool messenger ought to be shot. What was urgently wanted was not rations but munitions. Return all the way back, offload, then reload.

  And that was not the end of their first task in the war. In a blundering night that seemed to presage the whole campaign, this great campaign on which, in the words of the Admiral’s orders-of-the-day that the Irishman read out to them, the fate of the civilized world hinged, in this endless night, as they were again feeling their way through the gorge, there once more came a countermand. The heavy ammunition boxes must be taken down. “Leave them here.” And eerily there came a stumbling line of hauntedlooking soldiers, Australians, carrying wounded. Loading the wounded onto the mules, the Zion men picked their way back, only to be dispatched once more, dazed, after but a gulp of tea. They must keep working, night was the safest time. This trip was through still another wady, with shells crossing both ways over their heads. As they neared the guns at last, several mules stampeded in terror. One man fell, kicked in the belly by his own beast, a casualty to be derided, and another cried in Yiddish in a startled, indignant voice, “I am shot!” There he stood, still clutching the lead-rope of his mule. A piece of shrapnel had cut through Yitzik’s upper arm—he was one of those about whose bravery Gidon had worried, a yeshiva bocher from Jerusalem. In astonishment at himself, Yitzik kept repeating, “Nu? It didn’t kill me!” The blood came slowly: it was a flesh wound. Gidon bandaged it. “Your lad never let go of the rope!” the Irishman cried. He would report the lad for a medal, if someone would only spell his name.

  So they went on until dawn, their strained eyes itching and red, at last falling on the earth, to sleep without hearing the shells exploding a dozen yards away.

  In Gidon’s own squad, the deaths began on the third day, for with the incessant calls they had to go out in daylight too. As they passed under the leafage of an abandoned olive grove, a shell struck in the middle of the line; as though the troop itself were an exploded shell, the men burst away in all directions, letting go their mules—“They don’t care about medals already,” Herschel grunted. The beasts milled about, their side-boxes bumping the trees, they screamed, their teeth naked as in bleached dead skulls. On the path lay two muleteers, again from among the luckless Alexandrian boys who had been swept up in the enthusiasm around the Jewish unit and had volunteered. Some had soon regretted their action, and remained always close together, each accusing the other of having led him into this madness. The first casualty had been sheared across the neck by a flying fragment, and, instantly dead, lay, head askew. The other was pinned under his mule, his shrieks mingled with those of the animal that was sprawled with spilled entrails, its tail fouled, its legs still thrashing in spasms as it struggled to rise. Frantically Gidon strove to heave up the hindquarters of the beast so as to free the man. Where was help? He cast his eyes about—Herschel stood there but was rigid, terrified; then Tuvia hurried over with a broken-off branch o
f a tree that he used as a pry. But even as they worked, the boy’s shrieking gurgled downward and became a death rattle.

  Josef now galloped in among them, roaring after the scattering men, “Hold onto the mules!” and swooping down to catch an abandoned lead-rope. The wounded mule he ended with a revolver shot in the head. Another shell meanwhile crashed among the trees, and again the men began to run. “Stand here!” he shouted in Russian. “Idiots! Where the first one fell is the safest place to stand.” In a burst of blasphemy he reminded them that after each shot the cannoneer moved his trajectory. The Turk couldn’t see them under the trees. Stand in the shellholes, misbegotten idiots!

  The pattern of falling shells moved on, away from them. Slowly the men recovered their mules, and gathered near the fatal spot, most of them after one quick glance keeping their eyes elsewhere.

  Josef mounted; they must move on and deliver their supplies. And now perhaps they would obey and keep their distance from each other. If those two boys had not bunched together, only one would have been hit.

  Trumpeldor watched the line move past him, then followed, leaving Gidon and Herschel to load onto their mules from the packs of the slaughtered animals whatever water-tins had remained intact.

  Finally they were ready. “Come on,” Gidon said, but Herschel stood as though paralyzed, even to his tongue. “Come on!”

  But Herschel’s face contorted, oddly like that of a constipated man in a latrine, making a supreme effort. “I—I can’t do it,” burst out of him. “I can’t go on.” There was in his voice something of confoundment, of pleading, even an appeal to their comradeship. And as Gidon approached, Herschel burst out, his tongue completely loosened, “I’m afraid! I’m a coward. A Yiddle from Okup, a coward.” Now scathing snatches from Bialik’s poem came out of Herscheleh. “A cringing yeshiva bocher, that’s all I am! I can’t walk into fire, I can’t look at blood, I’m no hero from Port Arthur! When the pogromnicks came into the ghetto, I ran and hid in the cellar, I hid under my mother’s skirts—I can’t do all this, I tell you!” he ended in a sob.