Authors: Lesley Thomas
A military policeman farther down the road directed us to the house where the correspondents had assembled. Despite the shelling he was standing in the centre of the thoroughfare with that fireproof look of policemen everywhere. He was briskly directing three jeeps carrying long-nosed bazookas into a concealed turning, his hands flapping the signals. He paused when O'Sullivan approached him, smiled and pointed the direction.
The house had been previously fortified by the troops as part of the defences at the Mandelbaum Gate, which until that time had been the accepted crossing point between Jewish and Arab Jerusalem. Pilgrims and people with special passes used to go through that way from one country to another with the United Nations soldiers keeping a watch.
The house had not been used for ordinary living for a long time. We went into a cavernous, whitewashed downstairs room, empty except for a disabled table against the wall at one end. There were perhaps fifteen men in khaki Army fatigues in there and two other women wearing the same sort of clothes. Some of the men looked too old to be preparing to go into a fight. They had cameras and torches and a couple had portable typewriters. Since they were mostly Jews there was a lot of arguing going on, apparently about the distribution of some armbands with the word 'Press' in Hebrew, English, and prudently in Arabic. Several of the men and one of the women greeted Shoshana, but briefly and Shoshana said the other woman knew her but never spoke to her because of professional jealousy.
A squashed, fussy, Army major came through the crowd and came to us near the door. He spoke to Shoshana, whom he at once recognized, and then, having looked at me with some doubt, ushered both of us into a smaller room where a clean selection of fatigue uniforms was lying across a table, the jackets and the trousers joined and stretched out stiffly like steamrollered men. The officer said something else in Hebrew and left us, closing the door.
Shoshana began to take off her clothes. 'We have come too late for the briefing,' she said, supporting herself with one hand on the table. I remained standing there, not moving, looking at her. She realized this and stopped with her trousers around her brown knees. Her white pants were a stretched triangle.
She bent towards me. 'Christopher, I love you, too,' she said kissing me. 'With all trueness,
mottek.'
She motioned towards the battledress dungarees. 'You must dress too,' she said. 'If you still want to be with me. I told the officer that you are a British journalist. I was afraid he would want to see your papers, but he trusts me.' She laughed. 'You are all over with earth and dust. You do not look like a piano player.'
'That is possibly because I am not a piano player,' I corrected a little huffily. 'I'm a concert pianist.'
'That is how I meant,' she smiled. I moved over and put two fingers tenderly on the fatty rise of her bust. She put her fingers across mine and pressed them into her flesh watching me carefully while she did it. Then she pulled the battle fatigue jacket about her and buttoned it. I had some trouble with my buckles because the last time I did this it was with British infantry webbing. Eventually we were ready and we tied our 'Press' armbands like stewards preparing for a cross-country marathon. Then she kissed me and said: 'Good luck to us, Christopher.'
'Good luck to us,
mottek,''
I repeated. She smiled at the word. 'It means sweetness,' she said.
We walked out into the bare room. Half the men had gone. The place was shaking with the afternoon gunfire, plaster crumbled in small pieces from the wall. The fussy major approached us as we were joining O'Sullivan, Zoo Baby and Dov.
First he spoke in Hebrew and then stopped as Shoshana said something to him and changed to English for my benefit.
'As you have been delayed for the briefing,' he said carefully, 'I will again do it. The armoured column and the ground soldiers, the supporters, you understand... yes, the support troops... are moving into the positions for attacking. I show you.' There was a map spread on the leaning table and he took a ruler and traced a circle around the back of the Old City. He was sweating heavily in his uniform. 'We go both sides, like the classic German pincer attack of the last war,' he said. 'From here, where we are at the Mandelbaum and from farther north at Latrun we shall attack the high ground between Jerusalem and Ramallah where is the big radio station. We wish - for the reasons of our troops surrounded there - to get to the hospital at Mount Scopus, to cut the road - here - between Jerusalem and Ramallah, and to occupy all this area, the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, Augusta Victoria, and right down to Herod's Gate. It is through Herod's Gate that our paratroops will be breaking into the Old City.'
He paused. Some of the other journalists were going out of the low door now, waving nervous goodbyes to the few
remaining.
One man laughed and came back for the camera he had left behind.
The major returned to us: 'Difficulties there will be. We expect them. The Police School near the Ramallah Road junction. That will be one difficulty. The Arab Legion are there. You remember the Arab Legion of Glubb Pasha, sir?' He aimed the question directly at me.
'Not personally,' I said. 'Are they a good team ?'
'Very good,' he answered missing, as they always did, the joke. 'That will be a bad place for casualties.'
'Latrun,' said the girl. 'That is a bad place also.'
He nodded. 'A bad place. Last time we left fourteen hundred dead in the fields there. The British gave also Latrun to the Arabs before they left.
'The area between here and Mount Scopus is mined and there are many ... holes ...' He hesitated and said something in Hebrew to Shoshana. It was Dov who translated. 'There are heavy mines and many trenches, bunkers and that sort of defence,' Dov said turning to me.
'Trenches, that is correct,' agreed the major. 'There will be much difficulty. Please do not move too much forward into the battle area. Telephones for the correspondents are in the farther room there. I shall be here in this position to help you. I shall be in this house all the time.' He smiled and said: 'Thank God.'
Dov asked him a question in Hebrew and received a laughing reply. Two telephones began ringing at once and the squat little major went towards the telephone room.
'First I must telephone to my office,' said Shoshana. 'I asked a man at the command post but he was very busy and it is possible did not do it. I will let them know I am in Jerusalem and they will be glad.'
Dov said to me as she walked away: 'You will have a travelling orchestra to accompany you. That is appropriate isn't it. We have asked where our Army units are located. It seems Zoo Baby should be at El Arish in the Gaza Strip and I should be in the Sinai.'
'Do you think they missed you ?'
'It is possible,' he smiled gently. 'But it seems
we
shall miss very little.'
We crouched at that moment because a shell landed in the vicinity and swayed the entire house like a ship in a hurricane. We could hear the tank tracks clanking up the road towards the lane. That threatening, ominous clank. The firing increased immediately and the air of the room was clouded with dust and falling plaster.
Zoo Baby looked up apprehensively. He sniffed at the gritty air. 'Outside is okay,' he concluded. 'I'll fight them outside. But me, I don't want the house to bury me.'
'It would be a big house that buried you,' answered Dov. He was very calm.
Shoshana came back eventually. 'Two reporters and two cameramen are here somewhere in Jerusalem from my paper but they are glad I am here too,' she said. Then she added with sweet seriousness: 'But the editor said I must
not
get killed and I must
not
let you get killed, Christopher. That is his order.'
'Mind you obey the order,' I said.
She laughed spontaneously, because for once, she understood the joke, and gaily as though we were embarking on a fine treat. Dust continued to cascade from the ceiling and she shook it from her hair.
'We have good soldiers to protect us also,' she smiled patting Zoo Baby and Dov and smiling at the pensive O'Sul-livan. 'No Arab will get us.'
The little major came forward with some infantry steel helmets which he distributed. He gave me mine last.
There were no others in the place now. They had all gone out to observe the start of the advance and the battle. I said to Shoshana: 'I'm surprised your officer gave me a hat at all. I don't think he likes the British.'
'Many of us do not,' she said indicating that the remark was completely logical. 'My father and my brothers have killed English soldiers. And we remember what took place at Latrun. That is a terrible place, a fortress on a flat hill, by a monastery. Our best soldiers died in that place in nineteen forty-eight. We could not break the Arabs there. And Latrun was a present to the Arabs from the British.'
We moved towards the exit, going out into the sunshine battle. It was curiously like walking on to a concert platform with the lights and the haze. All the air was filled with dust and noise and filtered sun. There were some bright summer flowers at the door of the house, growing profusely, the dust of the battle already lying across their petals and their leaves. We could not see very much because we were deep in the lane leading from the house to the road where the tanks had been. But the air was choked and the banging of the guns made the ground and the walls shudder. Three jet fighters jumped across the small part of the sky visible to us, very low, passing along the length of the lane, then howling away.
'Jordanians,' said Dov.
'Hawker Hunters,' said O'Sullivan.
'British,' I said.
'Almost all the Jordanian Air Force is,' said Dov without rancour.
'We seem to be well represented all around,' I said. 'Your tanks are British aren't they ?'
'Centurions,' nodded Dov. 'Very good tanks.'
We were at the entrance to the lane now, leading out to the main road. The bulky tanks were still trundling through the dust. We were in single file, O'Sullivan first, then Dov, then Shoshana, then me, and finally Zoo Baby. We turned the corner and walked towards Jordan. From there, through the heated haze, I could see that we were well in time for the battle. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. I stepped over two dead soldiers half lying against a wall and I wondered if at that moment at Caesarea, in the distant north, Selma, as promised, was driving her ball from the first grassy tee.
Eleven
It was the time when the heat begins to diminish from the day in Jerusalem. It was frightening and strange going down that sloping street with tanks portioned out like a parade ahead of us, and quiet foot soldiers, walking steadily in front, behind us and beside us, moving to begin fighting the Arab Legionnaires. The leading tanks were embattled about half a mile away, where the ground began to rise again. They had entered Jordan and were several hundred yards beyond the border when they were delayed by the entrenched troops, and the hidden mines. I was not afraid, perhaps because Shoshana and the others showed no fear, only bemused by all the death happening about me. I could feel the sticky sweat and the dry dirt caked on my face like a mask. The steel helmet felt like an awkward basin. As I worked my face muscles I could feel the dried dirt cracking on my cheeks and forehead. Somehow my tongue was bleeding and I could taste the blood in my mouth. I wiped my hand across my lips and saw that it was streaked with orange. Only ten days before I had been playing to a polite and attentive audience at Cheltenham Spa.
An infantry officer jogged up the road, away from the advance, comically astride a portable motor-scooter. He was a big young man and it was his bulky battle kit, his Uzzi machine gun, and his lump of a helmet that made him look strange on the small vehicle. He saw our group of five and called in Hebrew, sweeping his arm to order us into a shallow enclave in the walls near the Mandelbaum Gate. We went into the space and immediately a platoon of staring troops, at the run, bayonets fixed, went by. They kept on running into Jordan and we could see them, where the road bore left, going through their own tanks and running on into the enemy. There was a terrible din; firing ahead, smoke, and then great flashing explosions that flung flame everywhere and tore huge holes in the view of the battle before us.