Authors: Lesley Thomas
Our radio was mute now. None of the Israeli tanks were making a sound. Then the Arab commanders broke in over the wavelength and the soldiers in the next room smiled.
Dov said: 'The Arab tank captains believe they have reached the place first. They are congratulating themselves.'
Cumberland said: 'God, their intelligence service must be lousy. You'd think they would have been told.'
"They have been found wanting in a few directions these two days,' replied Dov. 'Their courage is good, but their intelligence and their leadership is not always so good. We sent infantry into this area first, before the tanks. They do not make a noise.'
I thought the Israelis would never shoot. They let the aching seconds go by and allowed the tanks to falter on. Then the Jewish commander's tank fired spitefully from a vineyard a hundred feet up the slope. The red tongue stuck out rudely and the shot knocked the turret half off the leading Jordanian. It hung open tike a clumsily raised salmon tin, and it stopped, astonished, on the road and began to roar voracious flames. Immediately the other ambushing guns opened fire making the deep walled valley tremble and the sky suddenly become full of smoke and wheeling birds.
It was like watching the slaughter of buffalo. The Jordanians, caught and confused, swivelled and swerved on the road, screwing about like heavy trapped animals. One of the little scout cars had turned lithely and was firing brave and rapid bazooka shots into one of the ambush positions. But he was open and exposed on the road. A well-calculated shell from a Jewish tank seemed to burrow beneath the vehicle and then flung it high into the sky like some magic car of a child's fantasy. It tipped and slewed and blew up as it collided with the hillside.
The Israeli guns were going like massive hammers. The noise was assaulting us high above it, rattling the windows of the house and then shattering them. The soldiers in the next room were shouting into the radio set transmitting the instructions of the observation officer. I thought how strange it was that a tubby, beetroot-faced man, who was absent-minded into the bargain, could command and wreak such destruction.
Haifa dozen Israeli jets came hawking in down the length of the valley but they were called off because of the closeness of the battle, and went away to the east without contributing. They spun off over Jordan jauntily knowing that they could fly unchallenged through the Arab sky.
The Israelis had caught the Arabs in a classic hold. Frantically the tanks in the rear of the column, those still sheltered from the main violence of the event, tried to back out. We could hear their tracks squealing even above the banging of the guns.
Those which were trapped were in a hopeless, escapeless net, a traffic jam with death. Fifteen were standing burning within a quarter of an hour, spitting and spewing flame like a series of squat smelting boilers. Their crews lay dead on the road or cooking inside the metal walls. One of the scout cars had run away towards Jerusalem using its speed to get out of the trap. But hardly had it gone than two of the Jewish jets which had been lurking and awaiting such a situation went after it like hunters after a fleeing rabbit. There was a section of rising road, about a mile away, which we could see from the window and we saw the planes diving on the scout car far off and saw the bright orange explosion as they dealt with it.
Some of the Jordanian tanks managed to force their way through or away from the battle. But those that were caught sat on the road and burned quietly while the guns ceased and the smoke moved away from the valley and the two highways. The birds settled surprisingly quickly again in the trees and houses. Nobody went near the road. The Jewish tanks remained in their ambush positions and there was a lot of laughing noise over the radio in the adjoining room.
Shoshana got up and went in there with Cumberland and Dov. Cumberland had remained outwardly unmoved by what he had witnessed. He jotted notes with his annoyingly stubby pencil. Dov was looking tired and carried his submachine-gun as though it were a dire burden. They talked to the observation officer who was now in high spirits, and then went over to the two soldiers manning the radio. After a few minutes they returned.
Shoshana whispered to me: 'Christopher, the road to Mount Scopus is ours again. We have just heard from the radio. We will go up there and I will show to you the most beautiful view in the world - our city of Jerusalem from this side.'
We took the jeep down the brittle hillside past a collection of dead goats, and to the road. Dov was driving now and he took it quickly past the tanks. There was a strong smell of cooking meat which I knew was the burned men trapped within the metal skins. The Israeli soldiers were probing about the gutted vehicles and even Shoshana was subdued as we went by them and headed along the beckoning road to the south.
"That, I imagine, is what they call the crucial engagement of the war,' I said to Dov. Cumberland had returned to Jerusalem in his jeep to send his words to America. He had kissed Shoshana hurriedly on the cheek before he left and she had accepted the goodbye with no change of expression, merely wishing him
Shalom
and sending him on his journey.
'We have the Old City completely surrounded now,' said Dov. 'I think anyway. The Police School and the American Colony, the Mount of Olives, and Mount Scopus, and on the other side all the Government House area. The Arabs have lost out.'
He was wrong because there was still the Garden of Gethsemane. And we were going in that direction.
But first, on the road, we came across the Arab with his two donkeys. He jerked along, riding one, the other at the end of a rope, just as we had seen him go by the road junction three-quarters of an hour before. The animals had their heads cast down and so did the Arab. He jolted on his journey, seeing nothing, hearing nothing and knowing only what he wanted to know. The men who had died in the fierce fifteen minutes a few miles back had not touched his life. He was at cautious peace.
The road seemed untouched by the war. We could see the smoke rising like a hedge above and around the Old City walls. It mixed with the deep morning blue of the sky and wandered among the fresh green cypresses. There were goats and mangy dogs and other animals by the side of the road but no people.
Then we swung close to the wall, around the sharp downward bend in the road, and immediately some concealed Arab machine guns near the shrine at the entrance to the Garden of Gethsemane opened fire. Dov suddenly turned the jeep off the road and ran up a red shale bank. It tipped almost on to its side and threw us out to the rough ground, but at the same moment made a shield between us and the ambush.
But they were not shooting at us. They had caught an Israeli infantry section in an elbow in the road and were lacing them with rapid fire. The Jewish soldiers were trying to get across the road out of the fine of fire, but they could not do it. Zoo Baby and Dov and O'Sullivan were immediately up on the side of the jeep shooting towards the entrenched Jordanians.
Five of the Israeli soldiers were killed within two paces of each other, unable to get out of the corner. I could hear Zoo Baby yelling at me to get my hair down, not my head, I remember, and I realized that the Arabs could see me from their position.
Then Shoshana did the thing I thought women only did in Russia or in films. I had nightmares about it for months after. The dead Israeli soldiers had moved her to a sudden screaming rage. She was crying out in Hebrew, so loud that it was audible over the gunfire.
It was a rage, a madness. She sprang up from beside me. I made to catch her ankle as she went but she kicked backwards throwing the gritty earth in my face. From behind the jeep she ran into the open and then around the side of a crumbling wall and an extension of the bank on which we were caught. A sixth Israeli had reached our side of the road only to be shot down as he got to the gutter. Concealed by the jutting bank from the Jordanian position Shoshana reached out and pulled him to her like a fisherman hauling in a catch. I kept yelling at her, but the Arabs were now spraying the bank above my head and along from the jeep with intense fire and Dov told me to lie flat where I was.
Behind the jeep and with the bank for partial protection we were reasonably shielded from the position. Zoo Baby and O'Sullivan were firing methodically at the ambushers, but the Arabs were well under cover. Dov scrambled along to try to reach a ledge just above Shoshana, but the machine guns kept cutting into the bank with such ferocity that he would have died before he had gone two yards. I begged him not to go.
Shoshana had hauled the dead infantryman into a shallow vertical crevice in the rock. She was very near the Arab position and above it. I could see her as I lay by the jeep, before I put my face to the earth in sheer terror and fright for her. I was shouting stupid swear words at her and crying and vowing I would kill everybody in sight if she was killed. I could not understand what she was trying to do with the dead soldier until I looked up fearfully again and I saw her with the grenade in her hand. She let the soldier drop unceremoniously then and steadied herself to throw the grenade.
'The pin,' I gasped out loud to her, and then to Dov, who had heard me. 'Tell her about the pin.'
'She's been a soldier,' he yelled back. 'She's done it all.'
O'Sullivan was hit about this time. Only a nick in the shoulder, but he called out and then went on firing using language that would have shamed a pub at Cricklewood. Shoshana took the pin from the grenade, gauged the distance, and flung it beautifully. It waited and then blew up right inside the Arab position throwing earth and flame and smoke all about it. She killed three men with that little bomb. The Arabs stopped shooting and then began again, and then stopped for good as the three remaining men ran out under shelter and towards the covering vineyards of the Mount of Olives.
It stopped then with that awful suddenness of small battles. The guns ceased to hammer and the ears only remembered their din. There was some smoke, but that moved away with the minor breeze, leaving us behind the jeep looking across to the formation of dead men on the road and to Shoshana, trembling, yellow-faced, with her back to the rock, with the infantryman at her feet lying as though in sleep.
O'Sullivan was saying a catechism of soft swear words as he examined his shoulder. Zoo Baby, his eyes on Shoshana, silently handed a field dressing to O'Sullivan who accepted it just as mutely. Shoshana, as though she had done something which now frightened her, moved, hunched like a cripple, from her place, stepped uncertainly over the dead Israeli and came lamely towards us.
'Never do that again,' I said stupidly to her as I folded my arms about her. Dov smiled and tutted and Zoo Baby laughed his fine laugh and said: 'Which training camp ?'
'At Hebron,' she replied with her face still in my shirt.
'They make you throw good, eh,' said Zoo Baby.
'And far,' she replied. Then she said quietly: 'Let us go to Mount Scopus. I want to see Jerusalem from there.'
The jeep was holed and useless now. But we took a lift
from an Israeli infantry truck that had just come from the
mopping up in the northern sector of Jerusalem. The driver,
a cheerful young Latvian Jew who kept telling us that his
mother only bathed every Friday as she used to do in Riga,
took us to the south side of the Old City.
Shoshana was told by a military policeman that the road to Mount Scopus was still not cleared. She argued that the radio had reported that Mount Scopus had been relieved and he told her to take no notice of the radio because if they were not Arabs up on the hills then he did not know why they were fighting so hard. Dov laughed quietly at Shoshana and Zoo Baby put his arm about her shoulder. She sulked. She was a strange girl.
The military policeman directed us down the cleared road to Government House where O'Sullivan could get his flesh wound properly dressed. Now that the danger had gone I only knew the great weariness that was on me. I had slept only minutes through the whole of the mad day and fiery night and into this next day. We left the truck and walked into Government House. The United Nations flag was lying rolled in a ball by the door.
O'Sullivan went to the dressing station, Shoshana was given a telephone to call her office in Tel Aviv and I stood with Zoo Baby and Dov washing away the dust with hot coffee. I could not be frightened any longer, nor did I care what happened to me in the future. All I wanted then was a niche, a hideaway, to sleep for a while until all the pantomime was through. I could hear somebody calling, for some reason in English, that the tanks had reached Ramallah in the north and that Radio Ramallah was playing Jewish songs.