by Meyer Levin
Further, still further, into the barren narrowing chasm, as though they were filing into a deep open grave.
A single stunted tree stood out bleakly, mockingly, from the bed of the wady, and there, amazingly, a figure emerged, an English officer. In shelter against the chasm wall, his file of men waited to be relieved of the position.
Between those arriving and those leaving there passed hardly a word. Only, “How long?” a London Fusilier asked in his Russian-Jewish accent.
“Seven years,” a Scottish voice croaked.
That was for seven days, the longest that any man could endure in midsummer in this gehenna.
“Any action?”
“They let you die on your own, mahn.”
The ghouls filed away, some with bitter little smiles, not even of pity.
There were trenches of sorts, stone troughs, holes, Lewis gun emplacements. And still further up the wady the position petered away in last stretches of barbed wire, and then into a sulphurous marshland where the dregs from some upper watershed must have sunk festering under the dead mineral-sour earth, to bubble up in nauseous springs.
The ravine was called the Mellallah. It was an airtrap; the pulsing, oven-baked atmosphere they had breathed along the Jordan valley lay stuffed in this gorge like a stifling blanket around your head. Each movement of a man’s limbs seemed an effort against shackles. Each uttered word was against a weight of stone.
Slowly unpacking supplies from a donkey, Nathan Pekovsky stared before him. From nowhere a few flies had appeared, circling laboriously. Like some tired fairground ride grinding to a stop, the movement of the flies diminished, and then, from midair, the insects fell dead.
“Where men die like flies,” Pekovsky remarked.
But if flies could not live in the wady, mosquitoes managed. Soon, slapping was heard. Now Gidon recalled, in the line of Scotsmen they had replaced, the glittering unfocused eyes. Kadahat was here.
Other men had lived through it. For a week, for seven days like seven years, they would endure.
But at the end of the second week, no relief column had appeared. Already they had stayed in the Mellallah longer than any other troops during the heat.
A stray Bedouin appeared, as they had a way of doing, from nowhere—who knew, perhaps he was paid by the Turks to count the number of troops here. A cigarette? he asked, and then Gidon talked a bit with the passerby. No, he was not from here, but from up there—his head gestured, vaguely. In the months of heat, he said, no Bedu ever made camp in the Mellallah. No sheep, no dog, could live in this wady.
They had been dumped here and forgotten. They were the tail end of the army, holding a meaningless position.
Not so, the Irishman told them, they were the extended finger. Like every military man, he had to prove that his was the most strategic, the pivotal point, and he drew them patterns in the dust. From its juncture with the Jordan, where they had entered, the Mellallah forked at a forward angle several miles inward to the salty marshland. On the enemy side the ridge overlooked the Jordan, and directly across the Jordan was the high plateau of Rabat Ammon—need he remind them that Rabat Amnion was the ancient Biblical stronghold of the Ammonites? Today it was held by large Turkish forces. And they, the Jewish troops here, were like the advance guard of King David.
Even Nathan Pekovsky remembered his Bible well enough to recall the tale of Rabat Ammon and of the hapless cuckolded warrior sent to fight there. “Put him in the forefront of the battle that he may be cut down.” Whoever it was at headquarters among those British Bible-quoters, the anti-Semite had found just the spot for the Jewish battalion! On the opposite ridge above them were several thousand of the enemy, enough easily to annihilate the thinly strung-out men. The Turks had only to pour down between the widely-spaced emplacements of the London Fusiliers, and finish them off.
Against this possibility a constant watch must be kept. At one spot the wady-bed was wide, and in the middle a strange pillarlike formation rose to a height level with the top of the enemy side of the gorge. From this point the Turks could be well observed. Here Gidon one night took his turn on watch with Nathan Pekovsky.
During these weeks in the cursed Mellallah they had changed toward each other. In this barren chasm each man felt his flesh, his very self, akin to the elemental rock from which the winter torrents had ripped away any last leaf of a living organism. Here, on the days when no mail arrived, even Aviva receded from Gidon’s reality. And the family and the farm that lay so short a distance ahead were as absent to him as though they were in Iceland.
Bluish moonlight lay over the bottom of the wady; no Turk would move down on such a night to attack. But aware that men were sitting on this isolated salt pillar in ceaseless watch, the Turks might expend a few artillery shells, and like a chance meteor one might fall upon them. Or would it be chance? Was even a meteor chance?
So speculated Nathan The Red. Gidon only half listened. Some men had a constant need for profound and philosophical explanations, as though this would silence the unanswerable absurdity of men’s doings in the world. When other men kept pondering, why should they be fighting here over these barren rocks, Gidon answered himself, Why not? A terrain of battle might as well be barren stone. All the better. Less was destroyed.
Still, Nathan philosophized, “Who are the Ottomans? Who are the British? Why do they drag themselves here with so much suffering? What am I doing here?”
To which Gidon had to answer, “You are a Jew.” —For us alone, he said to himself, this struggle has a direct meaning here.
“You believe in God? You believe the God of Abraham particularly wants us here?”
“I don’t know what God wants. But I want,” Gidon said. “And if some way there is a God, and he put this in me to want—it is the same.”
“If it were only that simple for me,” Nathan said. “All right, I am a simpleton. Even those books you gave me to read haven’t made me wiser.”
Nathan’s face, in the cold light that made everything look like stone, was graven into a tight-lipped ironic grin, the look that some men have when trying to hold in the pain of a wound. “You know, Gidon, it is somewhat because of you that I am here.”
He entered into a long recitation, partly the tale of his life, partly an argument with himself and over himself. Back and forth, a Jew, a worker, Karl Marx, exploitation, nationalism, internationalism and a word that Gidon had now and again heard, but never understood—dialectic. This time it meant for Nathan Pekovsky, he now saw, the war within himself as his desire swayed from one extreme to the other: to be a whole Jew or to be rid altogether of being a Jew.
What was a Jew but a relic of the distant past, an anachronism, an atavism, a victim of a primitive tribal religion that had taken such a grip on a certain Semitic clan that it held its group together right on into the modern enlightened world?
But there was also another term; Gidon had sometimes heard it, with half an ear, in discussions as far back as Reuven’s kvutsa, and again in that restaurant in Whitechapel: “historical imperative.” If you peered deeply enough into the machinery of history you could come to understand exactly how the wheels interlocked, and even how the machine, if correctly manipulated, would in the end bring mankind to the realization and control of justice on earth.
For Reuven’s friends, the idealists in the Poël Hatzaïr, this meant, first of all, that the Jews had to be brought back to Eretz, and there through a life of socialism and justice they would show the whole world how to live. The way it was written in the Prophets. And for Nathan’s Bolsheviks, it meant the same thing, except that only the workers and farmers of the whole world could bring it about.
The Zionists in Eretz and the Bolsheviki in Russia really only wanted the same thing, a world of social justice where ordinary people could no longer be hoodwinked into making war on each other. “And why am I fighting here, instead of fighting for the revolution in Russia?” Nathan demanded.
“You came here to make sure that the J
ewish land would also be part of the workers’ revolution,” Gidon reminded him. “That’s what you yourself told me when you joined us.”
Nathan laughed at the recollection.
“I remember even the first time we met, and I gave you a good smack in the teeth,” Gidon said.
And Nathan rejoined, “When a man argues most fiercely, you can know it is because the other side’s ideas also exist in him and he is shouting them down in himself. I will be honest, chaver Gidon. In London my crowd thought we really might be pushed into the Russian army. So I thought, in the British army I wouldn’t starve and freeze so much. You see I was too smart for my own good—that I would be burning here in this gehenna I was too stupid to foresee. I even thought, why fight in the Russian army where I would be despised by the moujiks as a Jew? and I didn’t realize that we would be despised by our British commanders just as brutally. That is why when the Russian army quit the war, and I saw what a fool I had been, I tried to get myself transferred to a labor battalion. Eh! I miscalculated the historical imperative, my friend…. And at heart I am really a pacifist. Like all Jews.”
The thought came to Gidon that it was true of Reuven, but was it true of himself? He saw again the Zbeh crossing the river, riding toward him, and in his trigger finger he again felt the tension. What could a man answer? There were those who said Jews were not so much pacifists as cowards. For hundreds of years in Europe they had bowed their heads and hidden themselves from pogroms rather than fight.
“When we have to fight, we fight,” Gidon said. “But there are also peoples who simply like to fight. To the Bedouin, war is their soul. They attack you for nothing—because they like to fight.”
“But the Arabs who attacked your village that time—you say to steal and kill—didn’t they themselves believe they were fighting for their land?”
“The Zbeh? They came from over there—” he waved to across the Jordan. “This side was never their land. They attack the fellaheen the same way, for their cows and their horses.”
“And the fellaheen here? Hasn’t there been trouble since the beginning?”
—Small troubles. “A fight now and then—it’s not the same.”
“And you don’t think they care if this land becomes a Jewish nation?”
“Why? They’ll be better off with us than with the Turks.”
“Suppose they get the idea that Palestine should become an Arab nation?”
The words came as a half-surprise. Was Nathan taunting him? Or was Nathan Pekovsky after all a kind of a traitor to the Jews? “But why on earth?” Gidon replied. “Arabia is over there—” in those vast stretches on the other side of Jordan, where the Arabs had always been, from the time of Ishmael. There they had their Mecca. There Arab tribes were raiding the Turks. The British were arranging it all—the Arab chiefs would become kings over Arabia, and the Jews would have their nation in Palestine. All this seemed natural enough. And hadn’t the whole world approved the Balfour Declaration?
Nathan was silent. It came to Gidon, how much more difficult it was for Nathan with all his complicated ideas and doubts to be fighting here. Nathan’s mind sometimes went one way and his heart the other. The Jew in him had won out, but his mind wasn’t satisfied.
And it was just this that Nathan presently began to talk about, in the mood that was upon them. “You know, Gidon, I was married in England.”
“I didn’t know. You’re still married?”
“No. It lasted a year. With an English girl I met working in our shop. A shikseh.” His wry smile came as though to anticipate, “Now you will say of course.” And he added, with a half-laugh, “She wasn’t even a socialist.” And, as though Gidon had asked for more, “I said to myself, the hell with it all. The British are a good decent people—you know I admire them. The revolution seemed far away. All a man could do in this world was have his little family—as Voltaire wrote, cultivate his garden. Stay out of their imperialist war. A little garden in England.” He chortled. “Gidon, when she put up the Christmas tree, I felt ashamed of myself.”
“So you should have married an atheist.”
At this Nathan roared with laughter. “She was! An atheist like me! And she had put up the bloody Christmas tree! So here I am.”
He laughed so loud he would surely bring a Turkish cannonade onto their pillar.
With brooding eyes, eyes even of envy, the men watched the first malarials being moved out on camel slings. That same night, Gidon took a work party forward into the swamp, slipping beyond the last edge of barbed wire into no man’s land to dig a drainage ditch to help against the mosquitoes. And the following night, they dug on even further, until all at once Gidon glimpsed the form of a sentry. The man was leaning against the gully wall on the opposite side of the swamp. Gidon motioned his men to freeze. The sentry too was motionless—and staring at the form, Gidon realized the Turk was asleep, standing up. No wonder; nothing ever happened here. Tuvia was in the squad, and now he slowly crept over, sprang and seized the Turk, dragging him back a prisoner. The man’s outcry brought rifle-bursts, and a schneider fell in the mud. Tuvia, remorseful now over his heroism, managed to carry out the casualty. The schneider was wounded in the chest, who knew if he would live.
For a few days Gidon remained depressed. He had lost a man. It was their fourth week here, and the sense of suffocation was immeasurable. Another afternoon a schneider went mad. Leaping out of his hole, he tried wildly to clamber up the opposite wall of the ravine, uttering animal screams.
Six more malarials were evacuated.
No other troops had been kept in the Mellallah even half as long. The Irishman rode back to the headquarters on the Auja to protest. “At least, for him—he can ride out of here,” the men grumbled. At the Auja the water was fresh and cool from the spring.
Who could say their long, unrelieved watch here was not spite?
The Irishman came back, called together his officers, and explained something. He had noticed troops thinned down all along the line, so perhaps indeed no replacements were available, as the commanders had said. Besides, there were careful, secret movements going on. He smelled a coming action. A master plan was being put into effect. He had noticed several signs of his old friend Allenby’s favorite strategy, the same tricks Allenby had used before the big attack on Jerusalem. The Irishman had seen a large camp of empty tents and learned that campfires were lighted there at night. There were even dummy supply dumps and false cavalry corrals with dummy horses to deceive aerial reconnaissance. Friends at headquarters had told him of troops making false marches and countermarches to stir up clouds of dust, more tricks for the enemy observation. At least the Fusiliers were lucky to escape the dust-making marches.
What could it all mean? Bluffing, to prevent an enemy attack on their thinned-out lines?
At least the deadly apathy was now broken. Heavy shells rode overhead toward the Turkish positions. The barrage even brought down deserters, exhausted, embittered men, who crept into the gully and surrendered.
Now, daring sallies were ordered, half a squad at a time, as far as the enemy outposts. In one of these a man fell, shot through the head, and trying to recover the body, another man was wounded. Both were London conscripts.
—He had known these fellows would prove themselves! the Irishman cried out, and sent back to headquarters a recommendation for decorations. The dead man was Yitzhak Zimmerman, a friend of Nathan’s, and one of the ten who had in Egypt tried to transfer to a labor battalion.
Heartening news came. The second battalion of Jews had arrived and was stationed behind them, on the Auja. The lucky ones. But merely to have them near canceled out the envy. And, besides, this surely meant real action after all this waiting. The 40th London Fusiliers were even commanded by a Jew—Colonel Margolies, born in Rehovot! His family had moved to Australia; there he had entered His Majesty’s forces, fought in France, become an officer, risen to colonel. A real one.
The day came when the Irishman galloped back from h
eadquarters in tremendous excitement and assembled his officers beneath the lone tree in the wady. He had been handed their objective! They were to capture a ford across the Jordan, several miles up from the mouth of the Mellallah. Who knew but what it was the same ford where Joshua and his men had made their crossing, to circle behind Jericho! But now the Hebrews would cross in the reverse direction and circle behind the Turkish army in Rabat Ammon!
Then it had come. The final battle to clear all Eretz of the Turk was here. They were in time to take part. Suddenly Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had been sent to deliver orations at recruitment meetings in the British half of the Yishuv, returned to his platoon. A final sign. Action.
The next morning a sudden troop of mounted officers appeared, and the astonishing word passed among the Jews that General Allenby himself had come to their Mellallah. Captains and lieutenants, buttoning their tunics, were hurrying to the Irishman’s tent. Even the most demoralized of the men began frantically to prepare for inspection. But just as suddenly the commanding general’s party rode back.
What had happened in the tent? Word filtered down. Jabotinsky himself confirmed it. —Can we trust the Jews to fight? the General had asked the Irishman.
The bastard anti-Semites!
“What did he answer?”
The Irishman had said he was now losing two hundred men a week from malaria, but if the battle took place while there was still a Jew left on his feet, that Jew would fight.
There were even a few who argued—after all, if the C-in-C himself on his busiest day, the eve of the attack, had come in person to make sure of them, they must be of some importance!
In the dusk they moved in file to the dry mouth of the Mellallah, and then along a ledge, parallel to the Jordan banks, northward. Behind them only the thinnest holding line had been left.
The attackers squatted in clusters and waited. Gidon, Herschel, Tuvia, Nathan, hardly said a word to each other. Gidon wished Herschel or Nathan would at least make some of their bitter jokes. So far this was no harder than a patrol, he told himself, no worse than the quick stabs they had made in the last week. He was an old veteran of war. He would not fail.