Authors: Lesley Thomas
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.
She read it and the major stood by his toy machine, tubby and important. He nodded to us benignly as though we were meeting on some leisurely walk.
'You got out for some fresh air then ?' I said conversationally, but in the half-shout which we had all unconsciously adopted over the banging of the guns.
He missed the inference. 'There are much duties,' he said. 'We are winning everywhere in the war. Every Egyptian plane is destroyed, on the floor or in the air.'
I did not believe him then, although it turned out he was right. Some wounded were being brought up the road on stretchers to ambulances standing alongside some parking meters a little farther down. They seemed to be the same type of meter as they had in the Jewish sector, although I suppose the writing on them was bound to be different and the slot for the coin. I felt tempted to suggest that the major went down and gave his news to the dying, but I held off.
'Some English news I have also,' he said bowing to me.
I recalled that I was a supposed British correspondent, so I raised my chin in an interested attitude.
'We have destroyed many Hawker Hunters of the Jordanian Air Force,' he announced. 'Also the aeroplane of the British Air Attache in Amman.' He looked smugly at me. 'Are you not going to write that down ?' he asked me.
'My notebook is full,' I said. 'I'll try and remember it.'
'It was
destroyed'
he repeated looking at me closely.
'Was the attache" in it at the time ?'
'No, no. You do not comprehend. It was on the airport.' He waited. Shoshana stopped reading the square of paper and handed it to Zoo Baby. He and Dov read it together, muttering and gradually grinning, like two men checking a successful football coupon. The major had a last try: 'It was a ...' he checked a list. 'Yes, a Devon aeroplane.'
'Good English name,' I said. 'Devon. We call it Glorious Devon.'
'It is no longer glorious. It is destroyed.'
'No, the place.' I sang for him,
'Devon, glorious Devon'.
Shoshana and the others looked at me quickly. I stopped. 'Cider apples, clotted cream, and that type of thing,' I added apologetically. 'And a prison.'
The major, understanding now, glared at me through the dusk. 'Jokes and jokes,' he muttered. Then with finality, "The Devon aircraft was
destroyed.'
He turned his motor-scooter like an errand boy and went up the hilly street hurriedly, and with no lights. We heard a dreadful squeal through the dusk and a concentrated confusion, sounding even above the noise of the guns. Hebrew and other voices were raised and the motor-scooter engine was running wild.
We ran back into the dark and after two hundred yards perceived the motor-scooter lying on its side, the engine having now choked itself, but with the wheels still spinning. Major de Groucy was sitting flatly on the cobbled road, blustering and holding his right leg and left ribs, his arms thrown about himself as though he were hugging his own body. At a short distance the ragged donkey we had seen pursued by the Arab children was also sitting down, inspecting its right foreleg with much the same injured expression as the Israeli major. It let out a small feeble bray and looked malevolently at de Groucy. I thought at the time that it might well burst into tears. In the shadows the Arab urchins were hiding with fear and laughter. Shoshana and Dov and Zoo Baby went forward to lift and comfort the major and O'Sullivan and I walked over and inspected the donkey, which obligingly held up its leg in the manner of someone making an insurance claim. Then it tumbled to its feet and jogged off towards its home in Jordan, or what had been Jordan until late that afternoon. O'Sullivan and I followed it for a couple of hundred yards and went behind a half-demolished Arab house to urinate and to laugh.