Come To The War (28 page)

^{Shoshana, I now realized, had not wanted to go to the crest of the small rocky hill because it was a Jewish cemetery. We climbed a precarious set of steps cut into the side of the skull-shaped hill, and emerged above the city, looking out over the forehead of the rock.}

^{O'Sullivan said: 'Not exactly the place I would choose to watch a battle. Dear God, I thought religion did poorly enough in the Congo.'}

^{I said: 'Does it worry you that much?'}

^{'Well, shall we say I never fancied myself firing a machine gun from the Holy Father's balcony in Rome. And this is a damned sight worse, mister.' He crossed himself, sincerely if hurriedly. Shoshana was looking doubtfully at the Jewish tombstones standing up like bad teeth in the dark. 'It's not a good place,' she said to Dov. 'All these dead around.'}

^{She spoke as though there had not been enough dead all the past hours. As though the recent dead, the ones we had known and the strangers, were nothing, but that these old dead lying on top of this bald hill were different and important to her.}

^{Dov said: 'The searchlights have got the Police School again, see?'}

^{We stood on the crown of rock and watched the two big searchlight beams pin the walls of the school. It was like watching a gigantic cinema performance. The battle was bitter down there, the streets and alleys leading to the Police School were bursting with the orange light of fires. The tanks and the paratroops were edging forward through the diffused light and the clogging smoke. Explosions rebounded from the sector, echoed heavily against the walls of the Old City on one side and, indistinctly, against the Judean mountains on the other.}

^{There was some protection from the Old City wall afforded by a shoulder of rock between our observation point and the wall itself. I walked gingerly along the hard summit and wondered where the middle cross had been fixed. The rock curled almost at my feet and dropped down a hundred feet or more to the place where, afterwards, they built the bus station.}

^{The big noises of the heavier guns and the tanks now ceased and from the distance there came the playful crackle of the rifles and sub-machine-guns, the hollow cough of grenades. Small lights kept jumping up from the streets like the setting off of minor fireworks. More adult explosions were throwing sparks and flames to the Arab rooftops. All the fighting was confined in the holes and hideaways of the narrow streets. Then the Israeli jets would return and the long eyes of the searchlights would pick out the Police School. The advancing paratroopers would wait until the bombs and the cannon shells had gone into the walls of the school, and then rise and go forward again.}

^{'Street fighting,' said O'Sullivan. 'And God knows, there's no place that has streets like this. They're more like tunnels. It will take them hours to get through to the walls of that bloody school.' He sat down heavily and patted the rock by his backside. 'Now, just imagine, this might be the very place of the crucifixion of Our Lord,' he murmured.}

^{For another hour we watched. We could see the advance of the attacking troops by the progress of the fires and the firing. Just before the major attack on the Police School itself the Histadrut searchlights swung over the entire range of the smoking battlefield, running like white ghosts through a destroyed country, and finally, inevitably settled again on the walls they had left. Then the fighters came back, wheeling freely over the Arab slopes of Jerusalem, and firing their belching weapons at the emplacements of the legionnaires. There were fires growing within the school now and the walls were like Swiss cheese. We had one pair of field glasses - O'Sullivan's - between us, and we took them in turns.}

^{Through the glasses I saw the first Jews go in through the rubble of the school, scampering like spiders through the breaches. Yellow and orange flashes jerked into the sky from within the walls, the sharp sounds quickly following. Then everything quietened very suddenly. The searchlights yawned lazily, and the smoke drifted across the city. There were little eruptions, disturbances, but widely spaced. The guns in the south of the city had also lapsed. For the first time since the battle began there was no great noise in Jerusalem. Standing there on Calvary I could hear the city groan and cough through its smoke.}

^{At four o'clock the daylight began to seep back, smudging the hills and gradually touching the roofs of the city. It showed a hundred fires burning indolently among the ruins of Jerusalem's hem. Some paratroops returning with wounded from the battle of the Police School told Shoshana that forty of their men had been killed in the two hours of street fighting around the school and that more than a hundred dead Arab Legion soldiers had been counted. The lieutenant who told her said it with no great triumph over the conquest, nor over the deaths of his enemies, nor even emotion over the killing of his own friends. He merely reported it, level-voiced, and said that the Israelis were now pushing on to the American Colony and expected to capture the Ambassador Hotel before breakfast. He looked very tired and glad to drive his jeep away from the fighting.}

^{We remained at Golgotha until the daylight strengthened. The smoke was drifting from its many roots on the battlefield. Deep grey in the pale grey dawn it had an air of hopeless resignation about it that had nothing to do with the brilliant excitement of battle, nor the joy of conquest.}

^{The fighting was resumed to the north-east among the white box buildings and slender cypresses of the American Colony. Long puffs of smoke like trees themselves were standing up in the early daylight among the cypresses. The guns flashed paler in the growing day.}

^{Zoo Baby had gone back with the jeep to fetch some coffee and food. Dov and O'Sullivan remained on the forehead of rock watching the movements of the armies across the spread of city and lion-coloured hill. Shoshana touched my hand and we walked down from the steep, mysterious rock, and into the sheltered garden. Now, in the sombre fight, before the sun, I could see its simplicity and sense its peace. The paths were narrow, stepped and winding, hung with tendrils and flowers. In the far wall of rock was the stark open doorway of the Tomb where they say they laid Christ. We walked that way and I saw the saucer cut in the rock worn there in ancient days by a massive cheese of a stone.}

^{I looked in through the door, into the two chambers. Then I stepped in and Shoshana followed me. The low roof made me bend. There was an iron grille in there and stone beds, places for the dead of some far age. I touched the stone with my fingers. Some of the dust came off. It was close and uneasy for me, so I turned and touched Shoshana and we went out into the calm garden.}

^{'Do you believe, Christopher?' she asked. She jumped lightly like a girl into the depression of an old wine press. She sat on the stones forming its side and looked at her marked and dirty face in a pocket mirror.}

^{'Not much,' I admitted. I climbed down and sat beside her. Abruptly the sun cleared the Judean Hills and flashed against the golden dome of the Temple of the Rock in the Old City, and then with brilliant arrogance lit the other domes and towers, and gave to the walls warmth and majestic fullness.}

^{'How do you give an answer like that?' she asked. She took my hand and laid it on her lap. I could feel the softness of her legs under the coarseness of the fatigue trousers. 'Not much.'}

^{'I don't think about it,' I said. 'I haven't come to any conclusions.'}

^{'But you are a Christian ?'}

^{'In name,' I replied. 'In not much else.'}

^{'Think,' she said. 'It is possible that this is the place where something special and sacred happened. Do you not feel anything?'}

^{I smiled at her. 'A bit chilly,' I said.}

^{She laughed. 'How much better it would be for you if you
did
believe, Christopher. Then this would be so much more for you, for your spirit'}

^{I leaned and kissed her. 'I wish it were like that,' I said.}

^{Shoshana made a face. 'It is more difficult being a Jew,' she said. 'At least the one that the Christians worship was in recent times - only two thousand years. When you consider our people, Moses and Aaron and David, they are all much further away, and God is more distant in history than that. It is more difficult than your faith.'}

^{'Do you believe ?' I retaliated.}

^{She shrugged. "The whole State is built upon religion, so it is difficult not to touch it. But I do not go to the synagogue, nor do many of my friends. One day at a time in Israel is sufficient. We take care of that, making sure we use every bit of it. Because there may be no more in stock. That is our religion now.'}

^{I said: 'Aren't you worried about your husband? He has been flying hasn't he ?'}

^{'I think of him,' she said. 'But I am not afraid for him. He is a soldier in the same manner as all these others. I am sure he does not fear for me.'}

^{She seemed to lose interest in the conversation. The rumble and roll of the battle was more profound now from the American Colony and the first full sunlight of the day was tinged with dust and wandering smoke. A military ambulance was stalled in the lane below and I could hear the driver shouting.}

^{'Will they not miss you in England?' Shoshana said, as though the thought had just occurred to her. 'Are you not supposed to be playing your piano somewhere ?'}

^{I grinned. 'I have a lot more to do than sit here in Jerusalem, in the middle of a war, if that's what you mean. I am supposed to be playing my piano, as you put it, at Bradford next week.'}

^{'Is that a nice city?' she asked innocently. Her whole body was relaxed now against a wall of stones and flowers. I could see how weary she was.}

^{'It's peaceful,' I said.}

^{"That is a good thing, I suppose,' she said, 'to be peaceful.'}

^Fifteen

^{Zoo Baby returned with the coffee and was followed by another jeep driven by one of the American correspondents in green fatigues with the 'Vietnam' flash. Two of his friends were killed later that day riding in the leading tank of an armoured column when the Israelis had ordered all correspondents should travel in one of the vehicles towards the rear of the advance. They would not listen.}

^{The American was moonfaced and overweight. His hair was falling out but he had the innocent cheerfulness of a boy. In the cool sunlight bis face had a yellow tinge. He should logically have been chewing gum but he was not. He had come back with Zoo Baby because he fancied Shoshana and knew that Zoo Baby was with her.}

^{'Joe Cumberland, Worldwide Wire Service,' he introduced himself when we had all gone down to the jeep and were drinking the coffee that Zoo Baby had brought. We were in the alley, deep and protective as a trench. The fighting was still growling to the north.}

^{'We got the Ambassador Hotel,' said Cumberland assertively. 'And the Holy Land Hotel, and the Tomb of Saints.' He made it sound like a game of Monopoly.}

^{I just caught it on the radio reports to the command centre,' he grinned. He had a big amiable front tooth cut away at an angle like a cheese. 'I'm going up to get a load of this ambush. Are you coming, miss ?'}

^{He was looking with frank juvenile lust at Shoshana. 'There is an ambush?' she asked.}

^{'Sure,' he said. 'The Israelis are going to ambush the Jordanian tanks.'}

^{'We didn't expect it to be the Sioux and the US Cavalry,' I said. I am occasionally jealous and it shows.}

^{Cumberland nodded without annoyance at me. 'Still,' he said easily, 'you never know who you're going to meet in a war. That's what I always say. And I've been to plenty, sir.'}

^{I hate Americans who call you 'Sir' too. 'Where have you been ?' I said. 'In the wars, I mean.'}

^{'Well Vietnam, of course.'}

^{'Of course,' I said.}

^{'And India and Pakistan. Congo, Aden and a few other little bitty ones. Worldwide always send Cumberland.' He grinned pleasantly and added, 'I guess they think Cumberland is expendable.' He glanced at me as though pleased at knowing that he had made the observation before I made it.}

^{"The ambush,' said Shoshana. 'Where is it, Mr Cumberland? I would like to go.' She said it as though it were an opera. 'Is this possible ?'}

^{'Sure,' he said. 'Why not? Let's all go.' He pulled a neat map case towards him and with professional economy had it quickly and logically spread. Shoshana climbed into the jeep beside him and looked across his arm. I watched her hair roll down and touch his arm. I casually lifted the hair with three fingers and placed it carefully around the back of her neck. She paid no attention. Nor did Cumberland.}