by Herman Wouk
“You’re telling me,” Yadin persisted, “to march a new brigade of immigrant recruits against the Latrun fortifications? I won’t do it.”
“Who’s telling you to do that? Am I crazy? Of course not. Find an army battalion here, a company there, a few reserve platoons, mix some experienced soldiers in with them, and you’ll see, they’ll take Latrun.”
Colonel Yadin hesitated, pulling at his mustache and glancing at Barak, who kept a blank face. Then he got up and walked out.
The Prime Minister’s scowl relaxed, and he gestured to a chair. “Sit down, Wolfgang. No, it’s Zev now, isn’t it? Zev Barak. That’s very nice.” Politician’s memory, thought Barak, always surprising. “You know, I talked to your father last night. The connection to that motel in Long Island was terrible, but I mentioned that you were better. Zev, he says the UN is all agog over the instant recognition of Israel by President Truman, and they expect the Russians to follow suit tomorrow. It’s a new time! A new world! So, what happened to your arm?”
Barak baldly told him, and the Prime Minister sighed. “Yes, and now we’ve lost Kastel and that whole string of strongpoints. En brera, all our boys are needed at the fronts. But never mind, we’ll recapture those outposts after we take Latrun, and we’ll reopen that road once for all. So what will you do now?”
“Return to my company.”
“With that arm?”
“Sir, I can use a rifle, I’ve practiced.” Barak wiggled his free fingers. “I’m due for battalion command.”
Making a skeptical face, Ben Gurion pushed toward him a stack of mimeographs on his desk. “Have a look at these. You had experience with the British army. I want your opinion. And I’ll tell you what, Zev. For now you’ll report to the Red House once the doctors let you go, and you’ll help out in the old war room. They’re going crazy there.”
“Prime Minister”—the title sounded strange to Barak on his own lips—“I have my orders back to my battalion, and my medical clearance will come any day.”
The telephone rang. With a shrewd glance and a nod of dismissal Ben Gurion picked it up. “That’ll be all right. I have something important in mind for you.”
Going out, Barak riffled through the mimeographs, army manuals drafted by one Colonel Stone. This would be Ben Gurion’s American military adviser, Barak guessed, a West Point graduate, and according to army rumor, a Jew from Brooklyn who couldn’t speak Hebrew and knew bopkess (goat shit) about fighting Arabs.
***
That had been the start of it, and ten days later Barak still had no inkling of what the “something important” might be.
At the street counter of a tiny eating place off Ben Yehuda Boulevard, Barak’s father-in-law, an aproned portly Moroccan Jew with bristling jowls and a huge beaked nose, was sweatily dishing out food to the breakfast crowd, mainly soldiers on brief leave. “Wolfgang!” He hailed Barak with a wave of a fork. “Miriam, coffee for Wolfgang!” Nakhama’s mother, a kerchief on her head, took a simmering pot from the smoky grill, and with a tired smile poured coffee. She was a small shapeless drudging woman, but her mouth and her smile were like Nakhama’s, lovely and heartwarming. He sat down at the little table under his wedding picture, displayed here for four years and getting too sooty to make out: himself in snappy British uniform, grinning with a bridegroom’s pride, Nakhama in the plain dress of their hasty wedding, looking stunned.
He had been twenty then, Nakhama seventeen; they had known each other only a week or so, he was about to ship out to North Italy, and their blood was on fire. So Wolfgang Berkowitz, son of eminent Zionist socialists, had plunged on passionate impulse and married the daughter of Moroccan immigrants who ran a Ben Yehuda eating place. Four years and one child into the rushed match he had no regrets whatever, despite his parents’ lingering displeasure; but he wished his in-laws would drop the European “Wolfgang,” which they considered high-class. He had been Zev Barak for a while now, conforming to Ben Gurion’s preference for Hebraized names.
“Have you heard from Nakhama?” He raised his voice over the street noise and the chatter of customers. His wife and son had left Jerusalem in a crawling steel-shielded bus, in the last convoy to get out; and he had ensconced them in his parents’ home in the fancy section of Herzliyya.
His mother-in-law gave him an odd, guarded look. “You haven’t talked to her?”
“You know what the phones are like. I keep trying, but—”
“Can’t you find time to drive to Herzliyya? Twenty minutes?”
“Why, is something the matter?”
“Well, she’s all right.”
“And Noah? What about him?”
“He was sent home from the kindergarten for fighting.” Another peculiar side-glance. “You’d better go and see Nakhama, Wolfgang.”
A jeep pulled up at the curb and a yellow-haired girl in army fatigues leaped out, waving at him over soldiers clustered at the counter, and calling, “Zev! Zev!” This was Yael Luria, a Red House runner. More trouble.
“Now what the devil? Look,” he said to his mother-in-law, “if you talk to Nakhama tell her I was here and I’ve been trying to phone. My elbow’s better, I’m going day and night, and I’ll come to Herzliyya when I can.”
The response was a shrug over frying eggs and meat, and a muttered, “B’seder [Okay], Wolfgang,” as he went out.
“Yigal wants you to go to Latrun,” Yael Luria said, meaning Colonel Yadin. The underground custom of using first names for senior officers had not changed.
“What’s happening out there?”
“That’s just what Ben Gurion wants to know. He told Yigal to send you. At once.”
“I don’t have my gun, and I told my driver to get some sleep.”
“I’ll drive you, and I brought your gun.”
“Let’s go, then.”
He jumped into the jeep after the runner, whose lithe figure and long tossing hair were causing grins and nudges among the watching soldiers. Now here was a fetching creature of pedigree, he thought, whom his parents would have rejoiced to see him marry; Yael Luria of the Nahalal moshav, related to the Dayans. Perfect! Barak was keeping his distance from Yael, a charged-up eighteen-year-old whose firm jaw signalled her nature. He thought she might well get into trouble one of these days with a married officer, if not with him; but no doubt she could handle trouble. At any rate, she was a fast good driver, and she was handy with that Mauser in her lap. His own Czech pistol had been empty, but she had loaded it, and locked the tricky safety catch.
As the jeep sped out on the Jerusalem road, through orange-laden groves and empty shuttered Arab streets, the battle problem of the war starkly confronted Zev Barak: a strategic nightmare, this Israel, a lumpy strip of coastline with one forlorn finger of land stretching eastward up into the mountains to Jerusalem, some forty miles from the sea. In the distance beyond green farmlands, smoke was billowing up into the hazy sky. The far-off heavy thumps could only be the Arab Legion’s British guns. The Haganah had no such artillery.
How were those immigrant recruits reacting to the thunder of cannon? And to the heat, the heat? In the open jeep, the air was rushing past as though blown from a furnace. Even for the experienced fighters out there, slogging under a cruel white sun through the fields and the flies must be like North Africa at its worst; so what was it like for those bewildered refugees, on a battlefield for the first time in their lives, carrying heavy bayoneted rifles of half a dozen different makes? Only yesterday there had been a big sudden flap about water bottles, not nearly enough to go around. Raw recruits were out there with glass jars of water tied to their belts, going up against a strong fortification atop a steep hill!
They were paying for two generations of Zionist shortsightedness, Barak bitterly reflected, in leaving the hills and ridges in Arab hands. War meant communications, roads! Command of high ground over the roads! The Arabs had settled in the hills because of the malaria down on the lowlands, which the Zionist pioneers had drained and made healthy and
fruitful. Well and good, but the founding fathers had failed to think ahead. However harebrained this attack plan might be, Ben Gurion was right about one thing: if Jerusalem was to be part of the Jewish State—and how could it be otherwise?—Latrun had to fall.
Twenty miles along the highway the police fort and monastery of Latrun were in plain view, with clouds of artillery smoke puffing up and rolling over the brown walls. Outside the trees of the Hulda kibbutz, rows of dilapidated Tel Aviv busses stood empty, military transport for the Seventh Brigade. Jewish warmaking! Yael drove off the highway into the standing wheat, bumping and swerving toward the tent of the field headquarters, where they came on Sam Pasternak, a stocky captain in a sweated-through undershirt, shouting into a telephone, surrounded by arguing soldiers who poured perspiration, all in a swarm of loud-buzzing black flies.
“Zev, thank God!” Pasternak exclaimed, handing the phone to a fat female soldier whose hair hung down in sweat-soaked strings. “Keep trying, Dina.” He gave Barak a quick dank hug. They had been high school classmates in Tel Aviv, and had served together in a Gadna paramilitary youth unit. “Tel Aviv doesn’t answer, Zev, Jerusalem doesn’t answer, and Latrun is throwing down a shit rain of fire! It’s a total failure of intelligence! The whole Arab Legion must be up there! When did they sneak in? Why weren’t we told?”
Barak was staggered. He himself had routed to the Seventh Brigade, highest urgency, the intelligence that the Legion was back in Latrun in force. What kind of breakdown was this? He feigned a calm tone. “What’s happening?”
“Utter and complete balagan!1 That’s what’s happening! Shlomo’s doing his best, but we’re in heavy, heavy trouble.”
He gestured toward the brigade commander, a lean trim figure in khaki a hundred yards away on a high knoll, intently watching the battle through binoculars and issuing orders on a walkie-talkie. Barak had served with Shlomo Shamir in the British army; an able colonel who had accepted this command at Ben Gurion’s urging, and had agreed to the attack plan, which he considered premature, with considerable reluctance. Pasternak was his deputy.
“Where’s the armor, Sam?” By armor Barak meant a few trucks and vans shielded with “sandwiches,” wooden panels between steel sheets.
“Pinned down at the intersection. They can’t advance. Half the vehicles are knocked out, and they’ve got a lot of wounded and some dead.”
A bearded soldier in a torn bloody undershirt came running up, babbling wildly about water. Another officer led him away.
“What about that infantry battalion?” Barak persisted. “Those Cyprus immigrants?”
“Zev, we don’t know! They marched off singing in Yiddish, but we’ve been trying for half an hour now to raise them. Field communications are rotten, rotten!”
The flies were horrendous here. They were at Barak’s eyes, and each time he opened his mouth they were on his tongue, in his throat. “Listen, Sam, Yigal Yadin sent me to get a battle report at first hand.”
Pasternak jabbed a thumb toward Colonel Shamir. “There’s your man. Ask him.”
Not far from the colonel’s knoll was a “Napoleonchik,” a small old French artillery piece, standing silent with its crew sitting or lying around it, swatting at the flies. Barak stopped to ask the gun captain why he wasn’t fighting.
“No shells. They ordered me to start firing at dawn, so I did. I woke up the Arabs, and finished. It was insane.”
Barak borrowed his binoculars and saw red tracer bullets streaking down from Latrun. The answering fire from the field was scattered and feeble. Dimly through the dust he could see vehicles in flames, and men stumbling through the high wheat toward the rising ground. He hastened on to Colonel Shamir, who was peering through binoculars as his walkie-talkie squawked static. Shamir greeted him eagerly. “Zev! Any good news? Any reinforcements? I’ve been trying and trying to get through to Yigal for help! Doesn’t he realize what shape I’m in here?”
Reluctantly Barak told him that communications were not functioning, and that he had come for a report. The colonel gave Barak a curt workmanlike reading of the entire battlefield. The fight was not going well at all, he summed up, and the most obscure element was the status of the immigrant recruits; they were somewhere out there in the smoke and dust, but answering no signals. “Tell Yigal Yadin, for God’s sake, what I’ve just told you, Zev. I await orders and I’ll fight on while I can, but things are looking very bad.”
***
Back at the operations tent Zev Barak found Pasternak and the others staring at a lanky bespectacled dust-covered boy of sixteen or so, wearing a rusty British tin hat and mounted bareback on a muddy white mule. The animal was swishing its tail, shaking its ears, and stamping its hooves in a loud buzzing of flies, and the boy was flailing at the flies with a broom handle.
“Who is this idiot?” Barak asked Pasternak.
“Don Kishote, I guess,” said Pasternak. (He was pronouncing Quixote the Hebrew way, Key-shoat.) “He just now wandered in. Reenforcement!”
Gloomy as things were, Barak smiled. In a way the boy did indeed look a bit like the crazy old knight. “What do you want here, Don Kishote?” he snapped.
The Hebrew answer came in a decided Polish accent. “My father sent me from Haifa to find out how my brother was. They told me at the training camp that he went to Hulda. I didn’t know there was a battle.”
Pasternak said, “So, are you volunteering?”
“Why not? I’m eighteen. Give me a gun.”
Amid all the heat, loudspeaker static, and swarming flies, this comic relief was making the soldiers laugh. “And you came here from Haifa on a mule?” asked Barak, trying to sound stern.
“I got the mule on the road”—a gesture over his shoulder—“back there.”
Colonel Shamir’s voice, loud and clear on the receiver: “Sam! Sam! Shlomo here.”
Pasternak seized the mike. “Sam here.”
“Sam, I’ve got that infantry commander at last. He says those recruits off the boats speak only Yiddish, his translator has fallen with heat stroke, and they don’t understand Hebrew orders. Shells are starting to drop among them, and they’re just milling round and round, and yelling, or advancing any old way, firing their rifles. It’s a total balagan!”
A soldier with a bloodily bandaged head spoke up. “Sam, it was just like that when we jumped off. They just kept bawling at each other, ‘Voss, voss, voss? Voss shreit err vi a meshugener? Voss tute men yetzt?’” (“What, what, what? Why is the officer screaming like a maniac? What do we do now?”)
“I speak Yiddish,” the boy on the mule said.
“Sam, come here.” Barak put his arm through Pasternak’s elbow and drew him away from the others. In a low voice he said, “Shlomo should call off this attack.”
“Call it off?” Haggard and pouring sweat, Sam Pasternak rubbed his chin with a pudgy hand. “Then how does he face Ben Gurion?”
“Listen, the brigade’s giving a good account of itself, so is Shlomo, but things have gone very wrong here, and—”
“God knows that’s true! I can’t begin to tell you, Zev. Half the ammunition never arrived, also—”
“Sam, this isn’t your day. Call it off. Save the brigade to fight again.”
A pause. Pasternak said, “Come with me.”
“Okay, I will.”
Shamir listened with a somber mien to the two young officers, sadly nodding. “Shall I try again to get through to Yadin, or Ben Gurion?”
Barak looked to Pasternak, who said at once, “Sir, you’re the man in the field. Just do it.”
“Very well.” Shamir spoke with abrupt decision. “First things first, Sam. Get those immigrants out of there.”
“Right. Let’s go, Zev.”
They hurried back to the tent, where Pasternak got on the field telephone and ordered the infantry commander to break off the attack, swing south to a hill outside the field of fire, regroup, and fall back on Hulda. He repeated the order several times, his voice rising in exasperat
ion, as Barak stood beside him with binoculars and told him that the recruits were still advancing.
“It’s the same damned thing,” Pasternak exclaimed to Barak. “The commander doesn’t know Yiddish, and they don’t know anything else. He can’t make them understand, no matter what—”
Barak suddenly shouted, “Hey! Don Kishote! Come back here! Where the devil are you going?”
But rider and mule were already beyond earshot, on the trot toward the dust clouds of the battlefield, the broom handle flogging the beast along. “That kid is stark mad,” exclaimed Pasternak.
Barak thought he must be. The chances of a mule surviving on a battlefield were zero, even assuming he could goad the beast into the zone of fire. What was the matter with this freakish Don Kishote?
***
Nothing was really the matter with Don Kishote, whose name was Joseph Blumenthal. The smoke, the sound of guns, the sight of battle attracted him, and he wanted to help out with his Yiddish, and perhaps find his brother. He passed soldiers lying moaning and bloody on crushed wheat stalks, and others gasping and wailing for water, and he rode on unperturbed. The strange mingled smells of gun smoke and ripening wheat were exciting, and to him the anguished men bleeding on the ground were almost like figures in a war movie. Of real war he knew little. He had seen warplanes overhead in Europe, he had suffered privation and brutality in refugee camps, but he had been through no bombardments. His father had moved the family from Poland to Rumania, then to Hungary and Italy, in flight from the ever-advancing Germans. Now here he was at a real battle. Wow!
Bizarre things can happen on battlefields, maddened areas of noise, confusion, and odd turns of luck, as well as sanguinary harm and death. This stripling on his mule (that is, a mule he had recently stolen) actually got through the high wheat to the rabble of Yiddish-shouting rifle-waving recruits and their battalion commander, who was bellowing into a bullhorn on a rise of ground, and gesturing toward a hill behind him. Bullets whizzed and whined in the air, shells were throwing up dirt with earsplitting explosions, some of the recruits were firing impotently at the fortress, and all was frantic disorder. Many men lay here and there on broken wheat stalks in clouds of flies, some bleeding, some trying to get up, most of them crying, “Vasser! Vasser! In Gott’s nommen, VASSER!”
