Authors: Lesley Thomas
We waited for the return of Shoshana, Zoo Baby and Dov. They came back eventually jogging through the dark rubble. 'He is okay,' said Zoo Baby. 'He has gone back to the Press place.'
Dov was grinning: 'The donkey was a resistance terrorist,' he said.
'I think the incident was purely civil,' I returned. 'The first road accident in Israel-occupied Jordan. We saw history.'
Shoshana laughed too. I was surprised. 'How bad to crash with a donkey,' she said. Then she added: 'We have had great victories today. Already most of Sinai and Gaza is ours and we have finished all their aeroplanes.'
Zoo Baby said: 'And our tanks will soon be through the mines. This is the news we have.'
We went quickly through the leftovers of the battle. More wounded were being brought back now, the stretcher parties stumbling through the dark with the running orderlies and the hand-held plasma bottles beside some of them, the bottles held high as though in some ironic triumph. The ambulances were parked farther back, where the roads were clearer. Some of the men on the stretchers moved and had to be restrained, held down by the trotting orderlies, others lay patiently, and others lay dead.
The armoured column under Colonel Uri Ben-Ari had forced its snout deep into the Jordan positions to the immediate north of the Old City. The tanks, which had taken only four hours to reach the battle positions in Jerusalem from the base at Ramla, took another two hours to break through the mines and emplacements guarding the way to the dominating hills.
We met three journalists with an elderly Army officer and ran with them through the ground over which the battle had passed to the dining-room of a small hotel. A sign saying 'Savoy Hotel' hung desperately from one hook at the front. The garden was smothered under a hump of debris which had fallen from the upper floors of the hotel and there was a brave solitary pane of glass in what had been the windows of the dining-room. There was a smell of smoke about the place. Some of the tables were laid for dinner under a cloak of dust.
Pink flares hung over the steep ground, their gradual descent giving them long necks, like flamingoes. They lit the unremitting battle in patches, as did the light of the explosions, showing up suddenly tanks and men crawling over the stony slopes, fighting, falling and remaining felled. The noise was outrageous here. The air seemed solid with explosive sounds, but, strangely, the little sounds of battle could be heard, the whistles, the creaking of the tank tracks, the protests of strained engines, and even weak voices.
One of the journalists had obtained some cottonwool, and seeing all of us clutching our ears he considerately passed it around like someone distributing candyfloss. The nearest point of battle was about five or six hundred yards away, but within a moment it was only fifty feet. Almost casually an armoured troop carrier appeared outside the garden gate of the hotel and a dozen Jordanian soldiers jumped out. They had not seen us crouching behind the sill of the dining-room and were watching something approaching from our right. They turned into the garden and spread out in ambush positions immediately below us. I felt Shoshana, on one side of me, and Zoo Baby, on the other, both harden. No one moved, each of our faces, nine faces, five in our group and the elderly officer and the three journalists were turned on the backs of the Arab soldiers.
I wondered, almost idly, what they were doing there at all
since this was supposedly recently occupied Israeli territory. But I conceded that even the best invasions occasionally go
at the seams.
The elderly officer, who would have been more at home, I fancy, in an outfitter's shop, slid along the floor towards O'Sullivan, Dov and Zoo Baby. Only they were armed. He would have liked to push the remainder of us back into the room, but he feared the movement would alarm the Arabs.
Inside I could feel big puffs of my breath gradually filling my body. For the first time since we arrived in Jerusalem I began to feel afraid. I had been afraid in the desert when the planes were attacking us, but that was an urgent fear, a terror. Since then, even when Metzer was killed as he left the jeep, there had been some sort of hard calmness within me. But now it was fear again. Not fear for my own death, although that was some part of it, but fear for this situation, its sharpness, its silence, its isolation from the main battle. We were crouching and they were crouching. They were exposed a few yards ahead of us. It was like a frozen cameo, an illustration in a boy's adventure book. My fear was for the entire event, for us and strangely, no less for the hapless Arabs. It did not seem fair.
They were observing something coming up the road. Their twitching showed their excitement and their anticipation. The elderly officer had relayed instructions by signs to the three armed men with us. Zoo Baby looked as set and ready as he would be while waiting to break into a Sibelius symphony with his rolling drums, Dov looked, as always, quiet and studious, and O'Sullivan had that strange gaunt expression of the Irish when they're about to be involved in a fight, whether in bar or battlefield.
Over the more distant noise we could now hear a slow vehicle platoon truck coming up the road. But it was an armoured scout car which came first. The officer, standing up in the turret, came into our view over the top of the half-demolished garden wall. We could see his head and face and neck, travelling slowly, looking about him. He could only have been twenty yards from the waiting Jordanians. The ambushers crouched lower in unison, then came up a little as though they were on individual springs. The officer in the middle of the group touched the man on his left with his finger. The soldier pulled a grenade and bit the pin away with his teeth.
It was now. The elderly officer crouching by our window let out the most awesome croak.
'Esh!'
and the four Uzzi sub-machine-guns immediately went off next to my ear. My God they made a row. They quivered in the hands of the men about me, the spent shells jumping about like grasshoppers.
The man never threw the grenade. It ignited up in his hand and blew him to rags. Some of the dozen Arabs spun and fell, squirmed a bit, then rolled and were still. The officer was killed by the grenade explosion. Frantically the trapped Jordanians turned to open fire at us, and the bullets bit into the ceiling and smashed the last pane of glass left in the window. The Arab soldiers were jumping about like children playing on a sand pile. I could see them through a small, convenient slice of missing bricks as I lay flat against the wood blocks of the dining-room floor. I found I had my arm across Shoshana's head.
One Arab was lying on his back, face enraged, firing at us between his outstretched knees. The fire coming from our windows was murderous, O'Sullivan, shooting with professional coolness and Dov and Zoo Baby with all the rabid enthusiasm of gifted amateurs. The officer's Uzzi had become jammed and he cursed it and banged it on the floor with the tetchy expression of an urban man with some dependable household implement which has suddenly become unusable.
Then the Israelis began shooting at us from the road. The five or six remaining Arabs had charged over the wall to be quickly dealt with by the patrol from the platoon truck. Then the scout car turned its machine gun on us and three grenades burst nastily in the hotel's front garden. The elderly officer looked up with a hurt expression and then fell back, with an acrobatic back flip, a difficult manoeuvre for a man of his age, and lay dead with a Jewish bullet in his front. It was hideous in the room. It was full of a terrible banging.
They were plastering it from all sides with their guns. I could hear the scout car straining to get over the rubble of the wall to get a better shot at us. O'Sullivan and the others, suddenly impotent, were lying on the floor. O'Sullivan was swearing, saying 'stupid bastards, stupid bastards,' all the time, and Zoo Baby's big backside stuck into the air. There is nothing more pitiful than a fat man, exposed to death, trying to flatten himself against the ground.
It was Dov who saved us. Yelling in Hebrew he motioned the others to join in. I have rarely learned anything so quickly.
'Atsor! Yise'elin! Atsor! Yise'elm!'
They stopped and then it was Shoshana who got up and began screaming abuse at them. The officer from the scout car came over wearing an understandably worried expression and his men were grouped shamefacedly above the debris of the wall. Some of the wooden lathes from the building had caught fire in the garden, just smouldering and a small spitting flame, and on his way over to us the officer stamped on the burning and screwed his foot over it, as though that would do some good to partly compensate for the harm he had committed.
I thought Shoshana was going to attack the young man with her fists. It was the first time I had ever seen her displeased with anything Jewish. Zoo Baby, his face covered with black sweat, restrained her with one big hand. O'Sullivan stood up and faced the officer. The young man looked ashamed. When he saw the body in the Israeli uniform lying behind us, he put his hands over his eyes as though to block it out. Shoshana was hissing under her breath like an angered cat. She spat out some words in Hebrew at the young man but he merely turned his back on her and spoke to O'Sullivan and eventually Dov since O'Sullivan's Hebrew was not always adequate. He then checked the dead officer's identity discs and noted their information. Tearing a page from a notepad he wrote his own rank, name and number and handed it to O'Sullivan. It was like motorists exchanging details after an accident. The young officer remained very calm. He saluted the man he had killed, and then saluted O'Sullivan and the rest of us.
He then went back to his men, who watched him with
some misgiving, and they drove off the way they had come.
O'Sullivan went over to look at the dead man. Two of the
journalists had flesh wounds and Shoshana dressed them
with the elderly officer's field dressing. I went over to look at
the body. He seemed composed, the annoyance of the jam
med gun had drifted from his face in death.
'Misfortune,' said O'Sullivan philosophically. 'I had an uncle once who was a footballer. Soccer international. And he put through his own goal when Eire was playing England and he never got over it.'
We turned abruptly as a movement disturbed the back of the room. A sickly-smiling Arab, a wasted little man in a long filthy robe, and wearing a fez, came around a door. He bore a tray of drinks; a polished tray and clean glasses, containing a variety of liquids, beer, scotch, arak, lime juice.
'Refreshments please,' he said in good English. He saw the dead man and stepped sedately around him. He offered the tray to Shoshana first and, after holding back, she took a lime juice. We all took a glass then, raised them to each other out of formal habit, and drank.
'Compliments of the Savoy Hotel, Jerusalem,' the Arab intoned. He collected the glasses from each of us when we had finished and padded away to the rear door again, stepping aside from the dead man as he went.
When he had gone, O'Sullivan grinned at me: 'There's a man who knows which side of the bread is the jam.'
'Perhaps he poisoned the lot,' I suggested.
Dov said: 'I doubt it. The Arab is well known for his hospitality.'
Twelve
Late in the day, that long Monday, a brigade of Israeli paratroops who had been waiting at an airfield in the north of the country to fall on the Egyptians at El Arish in Gaza, were moved to the Jerusalem area. They were commanded by Colonel Morechai Gur who, at first, was told that only one battalion would be going to the city to fight, but later that all his men would be required.
We saw them at the Biblical Zoo when we went back into the Israeli sector at nine o' clock. We went from the wrecked hotel, retracing our path into the Jewish sector, in a returning Army truck. The two mildly wounded journalists and their colleague and the body of the elderly officer were eventually left at the Press centre although Major de Groucy was reluctant to accept responsibility for the body. O'Sullivan told him that he would send someone for the dead man, so the elderly officer was covered with an overall, and left on a table in a small space behind the telephone room.
Shoshana remained at the Press house to write and telephone the report for her newspaper. Major de Groucy was not fussing any longer but striding about, his arm, his leg and his ribs bandaged from his collision with the donkey. Some of the correspondents came in sick, dirty and tired from the battle, the death of it still in their eyes, saw he was hurt and patted him understandingly.