The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  She heard her own voice. It sounded shrill.

  They were just past the Scottish hospital on the narrow lane alongside the lake. Nahum guided the horse into a copse, a place they had often strolled to from the girls’ farm. The beast lowered his head to browse among the crevices in the rocky soil.

  On Nahum’s cheeks, tears were slowly brimming down. Shula too felt tears coming, and drew in a sniffle. After the kiss—not like anything before, not like with Gottfried, but a meeting of two beings, uncertain, certain, pledging their whole lives, questioning, unquestioning, a man pledging himself, not a man testing his masculine power—oh, now she knew—Shula said, “Dear one, I want to tell you—”

  “No, no, you don’t need to—”

  “I want to.”

  It was all finished and it was all—all so small. “Nahum, believe me. Nothing really happened. I’m so glad at least of that.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I need to. It wasn’t—just now when they fought—it wasn’t as if it could come back, I knew it was really finished. But if it had been he who fell—”

  “I still might have lost you.”

  A sharp breath overtook her. Could it be true? How much more of a person, a man, he was, than she had yet realized. It was good that your man should understand you better than you did yourself. “I might have lost you for a long time,” Nahum amended. They drew back their heads and gazed at each other, not only loving, but measuring, probing, beginning to make their marriage. “Thou art not black, but golden, my Shulamith,” Nahum quoted, returning to their old game of long ago.

  “Thou hast hawk’s eyes, my dove,” Shula responded.

  20

  THE FIRST rains came, in Gallipoli as in Eretz, and they lay in mud. For weeks there were rumors that the whole bloody campaign was about to be abandoned, the troops withdrawn. Then, instead, a new regiment would be landed, a new assault attempted on Achi Baba.

  The Mule Corps shrank to its hard bones. Even the Irishman was carried away to be hospitalized, seized by some mysterious disease that had come back upon him from his campaigns in Africa.

  Josef commanded. Almost at once he assembled them and called for volunteers to become a fighting unit. The hard ones volunteered, enough for a full company. Soon the reply came down—they were more urgently needed as muleteers.

  Josef would not remain sitting at headquarters but rode out with the forward supply missions—he would yet find a chance for them to fight, of that Araleh was certain.

  In his head, Gidon wrote letters to those at home, sometimes at night, before sleep came, sometimes trudging alongside his mule. He found himself writing more to Mati than to Schmulik, especially if something happened that a boy would think of as real war.

  —Tonight we really became soldiers, and Josef Trumpeldor was wounded, but that didn’t stop him. We were taking ammuni- tion to a company of Australians who were the farthest up, on the slope of Achi Baba, the mountain I already told you about. Suddenly on our right we heard shooting and shouting—

  He broke off the imaginary letter. How could he explain the different ways a man felt? Just now he was lying in the dugout on straw-filled sacks over boards resting on large water-tins to keep them off the verminous ground; at least here, what with Araleh’s using half the unit’s supply of poison on their dugout alone, they had mostly got rid of the rats. Sometime perhaps he could tell all this—to Reuven? to Leah? Would he ever lie peacefully in bed with a wife, and let it all come out of himself? Sometimes in Gidon’s longing different girls appeared, sometimes Eliza’s friends —but she was much prettier than any of them, and with none of them had he felt at ease, with none of them had he felt “this could be she.”

  … So Josef, when they heard the shooting, had halted their squad, telling them to take up their rifles while he explored. They already knew. The Turks must be attempting one of their surprise sorties to overwhelm an outpost. Dropping their mule-leads, the men lifted their rifles from the packs. The animals, long ago used to gunfire and shells, stood untethered, immobile hulks, spectators, with their bared teeth gleaming now and again in screaming laughter while the muleteers plunged on the flank of the Turks who were themselves plunging down on an Australian gun emplacement.

  Cries, howling, only the language of curses in the dark helped to distinguish ally from enemy. Standing and shooting at blurs, Gidon heard Josef’s enraged cry close to him, in Russian, Pschakreff! He was hit. But, pushing Gidon aside, he plunged on into the Australian trench; Tuvia and a few more men added themselves, shooting over the parapet at the blurs. Finally no more shooting came toward them, and in the trench too it stopped. Only then Gidon saw three Turks huddled on their haunches against the trench wall, two of them cramped over their wounds. They had reached their objective as attackers, and were prisoners, if not dead.

  —Only then—he was writing it to Mati again—Josef examined his wound. He had a bullet in his left shoulder, you could see it, and he sat still without a cry while an Australian dug it out with a clean knife point. After that Josef ordered us to round up the mules and led us on to deliver the munitions. That is a hero.

  Another tale he could tell Mati was how his own mule, Achi, also became a hero. —What! Mati would demand, pretending to be insulted that he had called a mule his brother, you called your mule Achi!—“Well, you can see I was thinking of you all the time.” And he would rough Mati’s hair. But perhaps it would be to his wife one night that he would relate how he had given Achi his name. They would be lying quietly side by side, and she would tenderly run her finger over the long scar high on his thigh, up there, where, as the fellows joked, it had “just missed.” “Aren’t you lucky?” she would say, and he would reply, “No, it’s you who are lucky!” and they would laugh together and perhaps begin all over again to prove it.

  It was a short time after Trumpeldor’s wound, and hurrying across an open stretch of what had once been an isolated farmyard, they came under shellfire. A splinter from the very first explosion had hit Gidon’s mule, and while the rest of the band dragged their animals to cover behind the ruins of the farmhouse, Gidon tried to undo the load of his beast, fallen thrashing to the ground. Suddenly the mule heaved around, biting at him savagely.

  “Leave him! Come away!” Herscheleh shouted. “Who do you think you are—Josef?”

  Nevertheless Gidon would not let go of the mule. Just as the strap came open and the heavy pack fell away, he felt a slash across his own thigh, one with the thigh-wound of the animal, who, now freed, reared up. Gidon’s thigh burned as though the searing iron still cut against it, but he pulled the mule across the splintered field to the shelter, and only then lay down to let Herscheleh tend his ragged cut.

  “It’s nothing, a deep scratch,” Gidon insisted. He was blood brothers thus with the beast, and named him Achi. He would keep this mule for his own. “For a week” the letter to Mati would say, “we were limping on the same side. It was a joke to see us together. Araleh said he couldn’t tell which was the mule.”

  Then he would tell Mati of Achi’s celebrated deed. “Because of Achi we are famous for The Charge of the Zion Mule Corps!” Achi had become very clever, much like the cow they had at home, Klugeh. He kept to Gidon like a dog and was uncanny in scenting the presence of the enemy. On another delivery night, they plodded through a wady, climbed a ridge and began their unload- ing. It was a flank position, not active and the outpost of men, thankful for human contact, made the usual jokes about what exquisite delicacies the Zion boys had brought them, surely stuffed partridge with fresh-baked cream puffs for dessert. They gave a hand with the munition boxes. Suddenly Achi lifted up his head, screamed, and leaped across the trench and over the sandbagged embankment, plunging down on the other side.

  —So you know what happened, Mati? From just where Achi ran into No Man’s Land, we heard men yelling for their lives—Turks—they had been sneaking up and were right near the trench. Achi smelled them. Everybody started shooting, all t
he mules got excited and stampeded after Achi, some of them with boxes tumbling off their backs. The Turks thought it was a whole cavalry charge! Then the English jumped out and chased them and even captured the Turkish trench. So we became famous. It was the biggest joke of the war. The charge of the Zion Mule Brigade. Only, we lost nine mules—they never came back. Except Achi. When I called him, he came, the only one. “Just like Klugeh,” Mati would say.

  But of what there was to see when the sun rose, he need not tell. Of the dead spattered on the slope, two mules among them. A Turkish soldier with his dagger still in his mouth between his teeth, the point sticking out beyond his widespread mustache. And the captured trench on the opposite slope, a crease in the stony earth, that four times had changed hands. As the men labored once more to reverse the embankment, they found it compounded not only of sandbags but of corpses, shredded uniforms and patches of flesh and decayed limbs all mashed together. Nor could it be seen which had been Turks or Australians or Scotsmen. Within the captured trench a haze of heavily gorged green flies lifted only slowly before them as they moved through, coming down again behind them like a sluggish fluid. Under their feet was a squash of maggots and mud and latrine filth; the mouth could not take in even a gasp of this atmosphere—it was like a partly dissolved compound of all this corruption. The men put cloths over their faces, and what entered their nostrils through the cloths was in a state barely gaseous; not an odor, but an encompassing, all-penetrating foul sweetness. It was, Gidon remembered, like the living putrescence released in the Huleh when Fawzi’s hunting knife slit open the belly of the slain swine.

  How could you conquer an enemy who could subsist in this?

  The English lieutenant decided not to hold the trench; it was exposed to fire from the Turkish position above. Twice it had been lost. Unless a major drive was intended here, it was not worth holding, and everyone knew the campaign was nearly over. Let this be left to Kemal.

  They would be the last to be taken off, for their mules were needed to haul down cannon and to move what could be evacuated of supplies and stores.

  All night long, groups of men moved soundlessly down onto the beach, then waited, squatting in their formations. Entirely different this was from the fiery disorder of their landing here. Now there was order, each man was in his place, though in some of the units—like their own—hardly a third remained of those who had come ashore.

  A masterwork of evacuation, the generals said of it later, recounting the cleverness with which firing mechanisms had been widely deployed on the slope and actuated by water-drip devices the engineers had made so that all through the withdrawal guns went off, causing the Turks to believe that an attack was being prepared. In the end the English commanders talked themselves into believing that this last act of the terrible, protracted defeat had been a victory.

  To the end Gidon labored. Cavalry mounts were embarked, and even the best of the mules. But over a hundred animals remained tethered to their stakes, among them many that he had patched up. His own Achi he managed despite the scar to push onto the barge under the eyes of Trumpeldor himself.

  For the destruction of the imperfect animals, a squad of Gurkhas was borrowed; Gidon could not ask his men to do it. One by one the beasts fell. A few screamed and thrashed about, and to these Gidon himself, with his revolver, gave the coup de grace.

  He had to run, plunging through the water as the mule barge was churning, pulling away from the Gallipoli shore, for the shadowy sea was already nearly empty of other transports.

  Most were too weary to speculate what would be done with them now; Herscheleh argued that the Turks, freed from the battle for the Dardanelles, would certainly take their troops and send them sweeping down for a new attack on the Suez. And this move the British would be forced at once to forestall with their own attack on Palestine; thus at last the Zion men would be sent to fight in their own land. Not as mule-drivers this time. “No, as camel-drivers,” Araleh sneered.

  Josef sat pondering, breaking silence only to say that the unit must remain together. Whatever happened they must stay together. They had made a beginning, given a good account of themselves, and they must stay together.

  On the faces of the few Nissims that remained you could see that they only wanted to get out, and stay home.

  The answer as to their future was not slow in coming. Scarcely had they disembarked and reached camp when Josef received orders to disband the Zion Mule Corps. And now it even became clear that they had not fully been part of His Majesty’s Armed Forces but only some sort of service unit attached to the military, a shade higher than gyppos. So this was why, Araleh raged, Saraleh and the other wives had not ever received the family allotment for soldiers. Nevertheless he had been subjected to military discipline and punished! Oh, the cunningness of them. Never again would they use him, Araleh swore. He would use them.

  With the Nissims and the surviving boys of the mellah, it was well. They slipped off and went home. Some stopped to shake hands. Shaking hands with a man who had huddled against the side of a ravine with you waiting out a shelling—it was not unlike taking leave of the helpers from Yavneh and Tabor who had come when Mishkan Yaacov was under attack. But Gidon’s real comrades were those from Eretz, and, the last, they remained tightly together.

  “Don’t accept discharge, wait!” Trumpeldor half-ordered, half-pleaded. He was going to see a still higher commander, and he would go on to appeal to the highest. Discharged from the hospital, the Irishman appeared, wan, but on his feet, to accompany Josef in his search for a reprieve. Let the Mule Corps be disbanded, yes, but let the Zion men be enlisted as a full fighting unit. They had earned it.

  The Irishman assembled the remnants and made them a cheery speech. “Maybe some of them up there in the high command still don’t know you are fighters. Well, I am the one that ought to know … never a finer or braver group of men—of course we had our little troubles, there would be something wrong with you and with me if we didn’t, but the test is, would I take this command again? I’d jump at it! And not for the mules!”

  They cheered, but they knew it was over. Araleh had already got himself discharged and gone home to Saraleh. For the rest of them, there remained the crowded little hotel rooms, the cots in the refugee barracks where the same faces were still to be seen. It had become a way of life; a cheder had even been established there for the children.

  Only a handful still were kept in the army encampment, oddly enough because the mules had not been demobilized. The animals were needed for construction work. Staying on had become a mark of loyalty to Trumpeldor himself. Obsessed, he brought a new shred of hope every day. He had just received a letter, a telegram, a press cutting. Jabotinsky was making headway in London; even Chaim Weizmann, who could open the door and walk in on Lloyd George himself, was in favor of the plan for a Jewish fighting force. The bravery of the Zion Mule Corps men had been written about as far as Australia. And grim as it was to see the Allies now suffering setback after setback, Josef reminded his men that this heightened the need for every ounce of help, so that a Jewish unit must yet be accepted!

  At last Gidon received word from home, indeed from someone who had been in the house, who had seen the family. One morning when he was on duty at the camp headquarters, a military car drew up and let off a civilian. Watching from the window, Gidon was certain he knew the man. The young man was well, even elegantly dressed, and he approached with an air of importance, of urgency. Yes, it was Avshalom Feinberg from Chedera. Gidon had always seen him before in a keffiyah, galloping around on an Arab steed. A Son of Nimrod! Had Feinberg too been deported? Was he perhaps coming here belatedly to join the Mule Corps?

  The visitor had a pass to see Captain Trumpeldor. “But I know you,” he cried to Gidon—“You’re from Mishkan Yaacov—”

  “Gidon Chaimovitch.”

  “You’re related to a shomer—I saw you once with Menahem,” he said with excitement, as though in his mind wheels were con- necting and turning. �
�You’re the fellow in the big fight there—the one who stayed behind.”

  Trumpeldor was out on one of his missions to headquarters, Gidon told him. Then he would wait, Avshalom said; for Josef Trumpeldor he would wait, and he looked at his watch as a man who had all sorts of things to do. Then at full speed he began talking, explaining, inquiring about the men, the fighting, which were the best men, all as though he had something important in back of his mind. How had things been with the higher command? Yes, he knew, high up there were those who had no use for Jews, a nuisance, not worth all the trouble they made, certain ones said. A whole circle of them. Old Egypt hands. Arab lovers. He chuckled. But certain others understood that the Jews could be of great use, some of the British had an excellent sense of history, and particularly in the intelligence service—

  At last Gidon found a moment to interrupt; had Avshalom by chance heard anything of those at home?

  Heard? He had even seen them, he had not long ago been in Gidon’s own meshek, during the locust plague—

  Of the plague Gidon knew, but nothing of how Mishkan Yaacov had fared.

  “Pretty badly, terribly, like everywhere, but—Avshalom suddenly laughed. “Petticoat Lane!” he exclaimed. Gidon was puzzled. “Your father! Your sister, the big one, Leah! They saved the young lemon trees!”

  “Yes?”

  A sight! Avshalom related. Leah had got hold of every girl in the village, she had stripped the girls naked, and put their petticoats around the trees! Gidon too burst out laughing, his heart pounding with a strange joy, as if he were there at the triumphant feat.

  Of Eliza’s marriage, too, Avshalom told him. Not knowing of your own sister’s marriage! And to Fat Nahum! And she called herself Shulamith now! And Nahum was getting rich feeding geese to German officers—

  “Our geese!” Gidon cried, and he could have wept with homesickness, seeing Yaffaleh running away, out of sight, every time the Bagelmachers arrived to buy geese to be slaughtered for their pension.