Come To The War (19 page)

^{From the sky came the noise of jets again. This time it was a lofty noise, one plane fighting with another, very high. They trailed about the sky and I remembered how I, as a boy, used to watch battles like this from a field of gold stubble. Their whines floated down to us, and the coughing of their weapons.}

^{They were very close to each other, twisting like interesting insects in a bright blue bottle. Their sounds varied. The whine sometimes built into a howl, and they howled up there in their immense bowl of battle. Then they fell low over the desert and it was easy to distinguish the Israeli Mirage from the Egyptian fighter, but when they drove up into the sky again they became indistinguishable insects once more. They were fighting at this top altitude when one burst into colours like one of those trick photographs showing the opening of a flower. First yellow then red blossoms and eventually a slender stem of smoke as the aircraft began to fall from its high place.}

^{No one standing on the road said anything because it was
not possible to distinguish which plane was the victor. The
three musicians and Metzer were with us now. We stood in a
fixed group in the hot sun, fifty yards from the dead amphibian. It was like waiting for an important football result. Then the winning jet dropped behind the gracefully spiral
ling vanquished plane, following it down until they had both
descended low over the distant burnished hills. Then it was
the Mirage, curling in a victory roll, which came jubilantly
over the rising ground to our right, only a hundred feet from
the ground, flying across us in triumph. At the first sound
of it every one of us crouched, but then, as its friendly
shadow flew across us, we were on our feet again. The others
cheered like people at a sports meeting. I looked up, grateful
anyway, that we would not have to face more cannon fire, but then glanced again at the sadly burning amphibian and felt sick. I felt much more over the deaths of those youths
than I had over poor old Scheerer. It was almost as though
they had been persuaded and convinced of the joys of suicide.}

^{'We seem to be running out of transport today,' I said to O'Sullivan.}

^{'It's accident prone we are,' he agreed. 'Maybe there'll be an O'Connell Street bus along in a minute.'}

^{'Did you see how our pilot shot down the Arab?' said Shoshana coming to my side. 'The Mirage was superior, is it not so ?'}

^{'Oh certainly,' I agreed. 'The Mirage was the best.' I nodded at the amphibian. 'Shame really that thing couldn't fly. They might have had more of a chance.'}

^{She dropped her expression. Her face was covered with small cuts and bruises and Dov was tying some strips of Metzer's shirt around the flesh wound on her forearm. Mendel was receiving similar treatment for the minor wound in his calf. 'It is a war,' Shoshana shrugged. But she took her eyes away. 'We expect people to be killed.'}

^{'They were very young,' I said. I wasn't going to dispute with her.}

^{'Young people, babies, get killed in war,' she said.}

^{I felt very angry with her. I wanted to tell her what a lot of shit this was. The whole terrible situation and the way they talked about it as though it were some sort of pastime. But I did not. We stood together on the road, nine of us, and O'Sullivan said we ought to bury the three corpses if the fire burned through in time. I had not seen the bodies of the two youths on the machine gun and I did not want anything to do with them. I got the meaty cooking smell of Solen's body, but the flames were still all around and under the vehicle and it was no use taking more risks now.}

^{We walked back to the shelter of the rocks. The sun was at its top now and there were only thin bands of shade. Nobody had anything to drink. For the first time it occurred to me that we could be left in the desert for days. I said this to Zoo Baby.}

^{He shook his large head. 'No. No,' he said. 'The Mirage pilot. He will report. Somebody will come for us.'}

^{'Just think,' I said to Shoshana. 'If the Egyptians and the Jordanians do their thing about cutting Israel in half- as you said they might - we shall be the sole defence force for this part of the Negev. That should make them think twice.'}

^{She either let my humour pass or she did not understand it. Perhaps she could not be troubled to understand it. 'The most serious thing,' she said in her stern way, 'is not to know what is happening to our war. Being here is bad. If there was some way to contact Tel Aviv I would be able to send my report to my newspaper.'}

^{'I can see it,' I said. 'Graphic stuff it would be. Girl reporter in desert battle. They'd give you a rise next week.'}

^{'Arise? What is a rise?'}

^{'An increase in your wages, dear,' muttered O'Sullivan. He looked in an annoyed way at me. 'You could do the report of how the great English pianist was attacked by Egyptian planes. Now
that
would be a fine one.'}

^{'I only came for the publicity,' I said.}

^{He laughed. 'All right,' he agreed, the sharpness gone. 'It's not your war. But it's hers. Try to understand, Mister Hollings, if she doesn't win she might just as well cut her throat. And that goes for all of them. But especially her. You understand ?'}

^{"The brutal soldiery,' I said. "They're not always the best ambassadors.'}

^{Suddenly the Irishman stood up. 'Here's a chopper,' he said. "They've come to get us.'}

^{The noisy chop-chop of the helicopter sliced through the heavy noon air and it came around the corner of the rocks, flying very low, like an inquisitive dragonfly on an afternoon foray.}

^{It alighted delicately a hundred yards away, its rotors at first flailing the air and churning choking clouds of ochre dust from the desert floor. Then they slowed and died, hanging impotently above the machine like the broad, bladed leaves of a banana tree.}

^{Before they had ceased swinging two crouching figures dropped out of the machine's dark belly. They ran across the sand to us, two pale young men in battledress, one with an officer's epaulettes and an untidily hanging revolver. Two weeks before, I supposed, they were clerking in the Leumi Bank in Haifa.}

^{They stopped, called out in Hebrew as though a trifle uncertain of us, and the second of the pair cocked the catch of his Uzzi. O'Sullivan called back in his outlandish Irish-Hebrew, and Shoshana corrected what he had said, shouting harshly at the men. It is a strange language. In conversation it is liquid, poetic, like Italian. But shouted it becomes hard, hoarse, not far from Germanic. That is how Shoshana sounded then. Although she had been hostile to me all through that long, stifling morning, she pointed at me as she called a second time to the helicopter men.}

^{'She's trading on your reputation,' muttered O'Sullivan with a smile. 'They're not anxious to take us to Jerusalem or even Beersheba because they say there's a war going on and they've got a lot to do. But the lady wants to get to Jerusalem to do her stuff for her paper so she's telling them how important and famous
you
are, and hoping that they'll take you. And if they take you they've got to take the rest of us.'}

^{The two young men had walked back towards the machine. When they were almost at the hatch of the helicopter again the officer wheeled about and beckoned us. He climbed into the cocoon of the thing and we trooped after him. He had taken notice of Shoshana's strategy, because he called me on first and I climbed up into the machine, was guided along to the tail end and pushed firmly down to the floor. The others came after, each popping up from the hatch like miners emerging from a coal gallery.}

^{We crouched in a bunch on the floor and Metzer began saying something to me when the engines turned the blades again and the frantic noise filled the close cabin. The hatch was kept open and the young officer knelt by it, looking at the red ground wheeling away as we flew. It veered spectacularly sideways and we fell against each other. I smiled at Shoshana and she smiled in return and nodded as though to thank me for the ride.}

^{Once we were away from the enclosing cliffs of the Negev, up into the wide sky, the sound of the blades diminished a little. But conversation had to be shouted. The Israeli officer glanced at the minor wounds of Mendel and Shoshana and then turned and curled his finger at me. I moved towards the open hatch and he pointed to the brown horizon. I felt Shoshana moving and she crouched close beside me because she had guessed what the young man was showing me.}

^{He was showing me the scene of battle, stretched across a great spread of the Sinai. It was miles away, but we were now at about two thousand feet and I could see. Smoke exploded in great distant puffs and then lazed across the sand dunes; there were bright buds of fire flowering against the yellow and the red of the land.}

^{The young man shouted in Hebrew into the back of the helicopter. Then he turned and translated quietly for my benefit: 'We are winning the war already. This morning almost all of the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed before it could even take off from the earth, you understand. We caught them, how do you say in England, with their knickers down ?'}

^{I was getting fed up with this. 'If that is so,' I said, 'we had a nasty experience with a couple of bare-arsed flies this morning.'}

^{'Flies?' he asked, not comprehending. Shoshana, not
understanding either, leaned forward to catch my words over
the noise of the rotor blades.}

^{O'Sullivan, who had moved up and was now looking out of the hatch to the distant battle, put his arm on mine. 'Forget it, Mister Hollings,' he said. "The jokes aren't appreciated. You're just here through bad luck. Okay, that's understood and is fine. But you're in this mess with the rest of us just now. So even if it's not your war, if I were you I'd temporarily adopt it. When you get to Eastbourne or wherever it is, then you can raise your two fingers in this direction.'}

^{Shoshana was doing her best to keep up with the conversation, but anything sly or idiomatic missed her. She shook her head. 'What is happening in Jerusalem ?' she asked in English. 'What about the fighting there ?'}

^{'One hour ago there was no fighting,' said the young man. He looked at her obviously sharing her regret. 'The Jordanians have started nothing, so we cannot go into the Old City. Maybe they will later. Maybe we shall have luck.'}

^{In ten minutes I saw Jerusalem again, yellow in the sunlight, gracing the hills, spreading into the long shadowed valleys; walls and towers and ramparts. The city of cities, so they say. The sun lay lovingly over it as though it were the favourite place on earth. The towers and domes cast shadows and the walls smaller shadows. As we dropped we heard gunfire from below and the young officer and Shoshana glanced at each other and smiled as though they had conceived and successfully carried out a conspiracy.}

^{"The guns,' she said, again in English which I suppose could only have been for my benefit.}

^{'I hear them,' he replied. He hung acrobatically over the hatch looking down on to the roofs of the streets. Pulling himself up he said: 'It looks very good down there today. It is a good day for a battle. Tomorrow, or perhaps upon the next day, we shall be at the Wailing Wall.'}

^Ten

^{The helicopter dawdled across Jerusalem, drifting west. There was hard firing in parts of the city below and smoke stood up like little grey trees on the wall and among the buildings. But we could see no men.}

^{An orange-coloured puff, like a bright dandelion clock, appeared almost alongside the aircraft, making us rock drunkenly to one side. Then another formed quite slowly and beautifully at its side.}

^{'They seem to be shooting at us,' I said, attempting to keep a traditional British calm in my voice, although God knows why.}

^{'Unless these are the fireworks of victory,' smiled the young officer. 'Perhaps it is that we have already won and we celebrate!' He rocked back on his heels by the open hatch laughing, well pleased at his joke in English. He seemed disappointed that I only managed a brief and cold smile.}