AS HE felt daylight coming, the world around Gidon began to reveal itself in stages. First, it moved in immense shadowy forms of blackness in which the man-made forms of the vessels were hardly distinguishable from the forms of nature; then the land-mass came away from the sky, detaching itself as a great blotch. A mountain was before them, higher than Mount Carmel; the shape rose like an enormous prow massively emerging from the graying dark of the sea. As luminosity came, the heights receded somewhat, and in the foreground appeared crags and ravines and boulders below the unapproachable mountain. But also with the light came the full sense of man-made power gathered on the sea before it.
What he had seen in the harbor of Alexandria that had so overwhelmed him had only been a segregated section of the immeasurably enormous engine here brought together into its wholeness. Spanning the narrowing sea from Europe to Asia, the armada began to glitter, to shine in the rising sunlight; it became one single, extended structure, from tugboat to the most towering of battleships, the new Queen. Even Herschel, who had started enumerating the vessels, the dreadnaughts, the destroyers, the minesweepers, left off and fell silent, for it was a sight each man had to draw into his own self.
Until this dawn they had been uncertain. They were far from the Palestine shore, but neither were they in the Adriatic. Now they saw they were at the mouth of the Dardanelles.
And from the whole of the armada, a massive burst of sound emerged, a battle roar. It came out of the vessels, it came out of the men, it came from Gidon himself, it came from the mules in the bowels of the vessel, and it culminated in a shuddering, concerted burst of cannon fire that must shatter even the mountain that they faced. From all around him Gidon saw streaks of red fire and bursts of smoke, and augmenting all this, in an ultimate wave of thunder, came something he had never seen before, a man-made cloud of airplanes.
In this moment Gidon felt a climax of joy. Simply to be part of this effort, this power, this vast conjoined construction made by man, was a fulfillment of life. And the joy was the greater because their own vessel had almost failed to arrive here to be part of this movement; but despite all they were here. What they had gone through—their first transport stranded on a mudbank, their frantic Irishman finding another vessel and, his frenzy infectious, wildly urging them on as they reloaded the mules in the dark, they must not miss the great attack, and overcoming every sly trick and accident of nature, here they were, they had arrived!
And for this moment it no longer mattered that the strange mountainous point before them was not Mount Carmel but was called Gallipoli; it did not matter that this was no attack to free Eretz, that they would plunge into battle alongside Australians, Scottish troops, small men from India, and who knew what, to unlock a gate for this armada to proceed up the straits to Constantinople. During this high moment, Gidon forgot or perhaps surmounted his fate as a Jew, or even as a member of one side or the other in the Great War. He sensed himself only as a man satisfied to be included in an immeasurable effort that was in some way to turn the very direction of history, of that unknowable design, if it was a design, of which each man must be a part; and even if he were to die in what was happening here, even if the other side could by some incredible accident withstand all this accumulated power, or even more incredibly, destroy it and triumph, even then, Gidon felt, and he knew that all the men on all the ships and all the men in their fortifications in those rocks felt, as he did, a fulfillment of life in being here, and being ready.
Now he understood what Josef had meant when he said that even in fighting for the Czar at the other end of the world against the Japanese, he had known he was fighting for the Jews. And now Gidon was certain that Josef had been right to declare that they must enroll even if only as mule drivers, rather than, as Jabotinsky had urged, to refuse to go. How he would write home of this, how he would tell it to Leah, to little Mati, to Schmulik—if his letters could but find a way to reach them!
And then, in a first lull, the mountain stood before them unaltered. Smoke blotched it here and there but drifted clear. And fire-points flared—ah, they were firing back. But just as the mountain stood intact, the armada lay intact. At the prow of their own vessel the Irishman and Trumpeldor stood, each with field glasses to his eyes. One dared not yet ask for a look.
Araleh had come up. Already in the embarkment of the mules in Alexandria, and last night again in the transfer to this vessel, he had been marked by the Irishman; when the Irishman couldn’t decide the best way to stack the water-tins, Araleh knew; he knew how to place the mules so their manure could be cleaned out most easily, and everywhere in the pandemonium, he was at hand.
Now with that clear head of his and the quick eyes that were always learning something that “could one day be useful to us at home,” Araleh discerned the strategy of the great powers. For all that it was so vast, it was as simple as two dogs fighting. “What do they do?” he reminded Gidon. “They go for each other’s throat.” So the Turks had tried to make their kill at the Suez Canal and, shaking them off, the British in turn were striking at the straits to Constantinople. After seizing these overlooking heights so that their ships would be safe from bombardment, they would pierce through. They would thus meet their Russian allies coming from the Black Sea, Constantinople would fall, then with their joined might they could send armies sweeping downward through the heart of Turkey to Syria, while another British force came up from Egypt, trapping Djemal Pasha’s armies between them. Where? In Eretz itself, there to be ground to nothingness, and Eretz would be free!
Gidon saw it really happening. In this incomprehensible war—as each man sees destiny revolving around his own life—it seemed that the entire design was centered around the farm on the Jordan, where the liberating forces from north and south must meet, and where he with the rest of Trumpeldor’s men of Zion, no longer muleteers but soldiers now, rushing down as part of this very force, would chase the last Turks from the yard of the Chaimovitch meshek!
He wrested himself from the daydream. Though still in the outermost circle, their ship was edging closer to the land. In the clear morning light now, they could see the forward rim of their armada at the tongue’s edge of the peninsula, but from the heights directly above, from a massive ancient fortress, came a thousand points of fire, and from the mountain behind came puff-clouds of artillery; there were fire-streaks like streaked blood, and shells sending up geysers in the water, and now from the opposite side of the narrows came more blood-streaked cloudlets—German artillery, Herschel said, hurling shells over the neck of water onto the landing beach. The enemy had been ready for them.
In that neck of water the British armada was choked, the naval guns firing back at the fortifications on either side of the water, on the European and on the Asian shore, while all through the mouth of the narrows more ships rode the sea—transports, supply ships, vessels of every description, waiting their turn to approach the shell-splattered beach.
The Irishman had passed his fieldglasses to Araleh, and now they came to Gidon. As though instantly carried among them, he saw men leaping from a bark, clutching high their rifles, staggering to wade ashore, saw one of them contorting in midair like some acrobat and then floating face-down on the water, another soldier leaping over him, saw several men on the sand crawling like landcrabs, some with desperate speed scooping sand with their hands to make a barrier. Then, raising the binoculars somewhat, he saw a beautiful green apricot grove, still and peaceful in the morning sun, and still a bit higher, he saw wide fields of red poppies like those at home. Herschel took the glasses from him. Their ship was once more churning forward, and glancing over the side, Gidon saw a body floating by, an English soldier, face up, still clutching his rifle in his dead hand.
Then he saw Herschel’s face; Herschel was on the point of vomiting. And rising up in his own self, Gidon recognized the same fear as Herschel’s before the coming deathleap, and then secondly a more shameful fear, that his body would refuse the command, that perhaps it was all true that in Jews there lurked an absence of courage—that before this entire armada of British and Gurkhas and Somalis and men from every stock on earth, and under the wrath of the Irishman, Jews alone would falter, and a roar of mankind’s derision would arise to be echoed from the high mountain fortress where the Turk himself was watching them with his binoculars. Despite a kind of gratitude that they were still in the outer ranks of the armada, there came an impatience to try, life or death, and have it done with.
The exultant shouting from that early-dawn sight of their own vast assembled power, and then the cries of anger at the sudden fire opened against them had both been engulfed now in the indistinguishable uproar. Yet in that narrow segment of sky churning with crisscrossed streams of shells, bullets, shards and fragments, there even seemed to be single shells that knew their destination: see that landing barge filled with men—and the missile fell directly among them, so that even if one man lived below the heap of his torn comrades, he was carried down by their tangled weight to create his own death in the sea.
From the mountainhead—Achi Baba it was called—the fire came as though some ancient god need only spit at them. To the soldiers up there, it must be like the time he had waited behind his rocks by the cave and watched his enemy coming, holding their approach in his gunsight.
There were no barges for the mules. From the rail, the Irishman shouted down to every passing landing-vessel to come back for his mules, keeping up his pleading, his cajoling, as he ran along his shipside—they must get him ashore with his supplies. “I’ve got their water! Those men have no water!” But hardly a craft slowed, and when one did, it was only for an exchange of insults. Already the lighters returning from the beach had their bottoms covered with maimed and wounded, men who lay strangely motionless, with their eyes wide open to tell something, and it was after looking down into their eyes, as a barge passed close enough to scrape the side of their ship, that Gidon saw Herschel choke his mouth with his hand, and hurry to the opposite rail so as not to vomit on the dying.
In this slaughter that was to become a byword in history, a toehold had been secured on the sliver of beach, and at last came the debarkation of the transport unit, the mules and the men of Zion. A long series of lighters, lashed together, had by now been extended from the beachhead with a gangway of planks across them. From the beach itself they could hear men clamoring for water, and the Irishman charged the Zion men into a line across the planks, to hand on the tins, hurrying them so urgently that each hardly knew when he took his place under fire. And now each was fearfully watching his brothers, anxious that all the other Jews should stand well, and amazingly, they stood. Swinging the heavy tins from the man behind to the man before him, Gidon knew this elation. How had he ever doubted? Yet from all the derision in the training camps, the doubt had arisen in himself as to how they might withstand this moment.
The receiving arms ahead of him suddenly were not there. One of the Nissim had been suddenly taken by an uncontrollable trembling. A shell had hit the edge of the lighter on which he stood; it pitched, and he let his heavy water-tin drop.
Gidon caught and steadied him. Already Josef was there, nearly tumbling them all into the sea as he picked up the tin with a curse. Already the Irishman was calling from the beach. “Keep them moving! Don’t piss out on me!” Did he still doubt the Jews? They would be able to do it as well as anyone else.
But when the mules were led off, under the incessant shelling, lighters broke loose under their weight, animals plunged into the water, yanking their handlers with them, some of the boys still hanging onto the halters. Gidon found himself swimming, grasping the rope of a floundering beast.
It was bad enough for the soldiers to get ashore with their packs under that concentrated fire, but to manage with the mules as well seemed beyond possibility, what with the animals’ wrenching, biting, kicking, the screaming protests of the beasts rising above the scream of the shells. Laughable this would be, in the telling, after the war.
Dark came. One man was lost, drowned; Tuvia had seen him hit, going down drowning—a Moroccan Jew from their quarter in Alexandria, and Gidon could not help his reaction, “Not one of ours from Eretz.”
Then an hour later the Moroccan was there on the beach; only wounded in the thigh, he had managed to swim. It became a great joke that their first dead was not dead, a good omen—at once Moshe the Moroccan was a man beloved.
As after some storm of creation, crates, tins, ammunition boxes lay flung about on the sand. A pair of Zion men had been dragooned into piling up stacks of explosives, only to have a shell fall as with a wild laugh, and mingle them with the wreckage—these dead were dead, a beginning. Again, Egyptian Jews, poor devils from the slums, not men from Eretz, not yet.
More boxes were being unloaded, and Araleh was running from one dumped disarray to another, trying to set order in the chaos; the mules had been led forward to a safer area that the Irishman had scouted out, behind a sheltering mound. There was even grass behind the sands, and the beasts fell to nibbling. But the rope coils for lengthening their tethers could not be found. Josef appeared, already mounted; he had led off his own steed first of all. Galloping away, he somewhere found a storemaster who had managed to set up his supplies, and in a burst of Russian-English, commandeered an enormous coil of rope. Only as Josef shouldered it did the Scottish storemaster notice that the strange-talking captain had a wooden arm. “What in blazes—who are you, man?” he roared, and the legend of Josef Trumpeldor was begun on Gallipoli.
Like the Irishman, he was everywhere at once, tethering mules, hammering tent stakes, and when a shell fell, provided it was close enough, he blasted out a Russian “pshakreff!”
A thought came to Gidon, and he remarked on it to Herscheleh. “He’s happy!”
“The vegetarian and pacifist,” said Herschel.
They had not yet even completed the debarkation when the first train of pack animals had to be loaded with water-tins and rations and led off into the pathless dark toward an exhausted fighting unit pinned along a gorge; the runner had just managed to fumble his way back through torn barbed-wire hillsides.
“The whole bloody mountain is covered with barbed wire and sniper dugouts,” he told them in a ghost of a voice, as he guided them uncertainly. “Oh, these Turkish devils knew exactly where we were going to land.”
“They knew, but we didn’t,” Herscheleh muttered with bravado. “Maybe they even know where we’re going to now, since we don’t.”
The Irishman himself had come along to lead their first mission. After a laborious hour they clambered down behind the runner into a dry wady, like those at home, the mules’ hooves unavoidably creating a rumble of cascading stones. How easily they could be picked off! Presently, something happened up front. “Halt” was passed in whispers along the lane. Then another order, “Turn back.” Gidon recognized the tread of the Irishman’s mount, then heard his blasphemy. That bloody fool messenger ought to be shot. What was urgently wanted was not rations but munitions. Return all the way back, offload, then reload.
And that was not the end of their first task in the war. In a blundering night that seemed to presage the whole campaign, this great campaign on which, in the words of the Admiral’s orders-of-the-day that the Irishman read out to them, the fate of the civilized world hinged, in this endless night, as they were again feeling their way through the gorge, there once more came a countermand. The heavy ammunition boxes must be taken down. “Leave them here.” And eerily there came a stumbling line of hauntedlooking soldiers, Australians, carrying wounded. Loading the wounded onto the mules, the Zion men picked their way back, only to be dispatched once more, dazed, after but a gulp of tea. They must keep working, night was the safest time. This trip was through still another wady, with shells crossing both ways over their heads. As they neared the guns at last, several mules stampeded in terror. One man fell, kicked in the belly by his own beast, a casualty to be derided, and another cried in Yiddish in a startled, indignant voice, “I am shot!” There he stood, still clutching the lead-rope of his mule. A piece of shrapnel had cut through Yitzik’s upper arm—he was one of those about whose bravery Gidon had worried, a yeshiva bocher from Jerusalem. In astonishment at himself, Yitzik kept repeating, “Nu? It didn’t kill me!” The blood came slowly: it was a flesh wound. Gidon bandaged it. “Your lad never let go of the rope!” the Irishman cried. He would report the lad for a medal, if someone would only spell his name.
So they went on until dawn, their strained eyes itching and red, at last falling on the earth, to sleep without hearing the shells exploding a dozen yards away.
In Gidon’s own squad, the deaths began on the third day, for with the incessant calls they had to go out in daylight too. As they passed under the leafage of an abandoned olive grove, a shell struck in the middle of the line; as though the troop itself were an exploded shell, the men burst away in all directions, letting go their mules—“They don’t care about medals already,” Herschel grunted. The beasts milled about, their side-boxes bumping the trees, they screamed, their teeth naked as in bleached dead skulls. On the path lay two muleteers, again from among the luckless Alexandrian boys who had been swept up in the enthusiasm around the Jewish unit and had volunteered. Some had soon regretted their action, and remained always close together, each accusing the other of having led him into this madness. The first casualty had been sheared across the neck by a flying fragment, and, instantly dead, lay, head askew. The other was pinned under his mule, his shrieks mingled with those of the animal that was sprawled with spilled entrails, its tail fouled, its legs still thrashing in spasms as it struggled to rise. Frantically Gidon strove to heave up the hindquarters of the beast so as to free the man. Where was help? He cast his eyes about—Herschel stood there but was rigid, terrified; then Tuvia hurried over with a broken-off branch of a tree that he used as a pry. But even as they worked, the boy’s shrieking gurgled downward and became a death rattle.
Josef now galloped in among them, roaring after the scattering men, “Hold onto the mules!” and swooping down to catch an abandoned lead-rope. The wounded mule he ended with a revolver shot in the head. Another shell meanwhile crashed among the trees, and again the men began to run. “Stand here!” he shouted in Russian. “Idiots! Where the first one fell is the safest place to stand.” In a burst of blasphemy he reminded them that after each shot the cannoneer moved his trajectory. The Turk couldn’t see them under the trees. Stand in the shellholes, misbegotten idiots!
The pattern of falling shells moved on, away from them. Slowly the men recovered their mules, and gathered near the fatal spot, most of them after one quick glance keeping their eyes elsewhere.
Josef mounted; they must move on and deliver their supplies. And now perhaps they would obey and keep their distance from each other. If those two boys had not bunched together, only one would have been hit.
Trumpeldor watched the line move past him, then followed, leaving Gidon and Herschel to load onto their mules from the packs of the slaughtered animals whatever water-tins had remained intact.
Finally they were ready. “Come on,” Gidon said, but Herschel stood as though paralyzed, even to his tongue. “Come on!”
But Herschel’s face contorted, oddly like that of a constipated man in a latrine, making a supreme effort. “I—I can’t do it,” burst out of him. “I can’t go on.” There was in his voice something of confoundment, of pleading, even an appeal to their comradeship. And as Gidon approached, Herschel burst out, his tongue completely loosened, “I’m afraid! I’m a coward. A Yiddle from Okup, a coward.” Now scathing snatches from Bialik’s poem came out of Herscheleh. “A cringing yeshiva bocher, that’s all I am! I can’t walk into fire, I can’t look at blood, I’m no hero from Port Arthur! When the pogromnicks came into the ghetto, I ran and hid in the cellar, I hid under my mother’s skirts—I can’t do all this, I tell you!” he ended in a sob.
“Herschel, are you finished? Now come on.”
The eyes looked into Gidon’s, earnestly, shamefully. “I tell you I want to. I can’t make my body do it. I’m a shitty Jewish coward and that’s all.”
“This happens to goyim too. We’ve already seen it.”
That was true. Had they not themselves seen Englishmen driven at pistol-point to jump out of the landing-boats onto the beach? “Come on, Herschel, you’ve already been through it. Come with me.”
Herschel made another effort, even a half-step, but then froze rigid, with a feeble smile, as though to say “You see, I tried.”
Just then Josef came back to find out what had happened to them. At a glance he understood. “Herschel,” he began with a voice of reason and even of compassion.
“I—I’m ashamed. I try. I can’t,” Herschel repeated with a wild look to Gidon as his witness.
In one movement their leader was off his horse and had collared him. “Zhid! Scum of the ghetto!” And he booted Herschel forward, the blast of his curses as powerful as his heel. Stumbling, recovering his balance, uttering a strange bleat as though some childhood devil were coming out of him, Herschel yanked at his mule and they moved on.
Remounting, Trumpeldor glanced at Gidon but said nothing. His face was still fixed in fury.
They had reached the front-line dugouts of the Australians and were unloading when a new bombardment began. With the others, Gidon and Herschel tumbled into the trench. Trumpeldor sat his horse, unmoving. “Get down! You! Take shelter!” a lieutenant screamed at him.
Josef turned his head. “A man can at least be as brave as his horse,” he replied.
The shells came from the dominating height, the great fortification called Achi Baba, never to be taken. A ferocious young Turkish commander was there, it was said, one called Mustafa Kemal, who led out his men directly into volleys of rifle fire whenever the British troops attempted to assault the approaches to his mountaintop. Behind bulwarks made of their own piled-up dead, Mustafa Kemal’s men would stop each attack.
From the fort itself the gunners could look down on the whole area, on every movement; only the narrowest ravines were comparatively safe.
Even the beach was bad, as bad as anywhere, open to the heavy guns on the heights; since the failure of the first waves of assault, still heavier German cannon had been added, making the mountain fortress impregnable. Weeks passed, with sallies, retreats, entrenchments. On the beaches the encampments were moved up closer under the cliffs, safer from the Turkish artillery. Making themselves shelters like troglodytes in caves and under rock ledges, burrowing deep into the ground, those who had survived the first assaults felt they knew now how best to manage. And the forward units, in a vast arc beneath the mountain, were also dug in; they would creep a bit further, a bit further upward on the wild slopes of the sub-mountains, digging holes and trenches, while from the fortress above them their enemies also crept a bit further, downward, extending the area of their fortifications, digging holes and trenches, stringing barbed wire on the rocky slopes.
On some days the Turks would suddenly come pouring out of their creases in the hillside, with bayonets fixed, and storm down upon those who besieged them, only to fall in heaps to their machine guns, and on other days the Senegalese, the Australians and New Zealanders, the Irish and Welsh—and Gidon learned to know each unit—would in turn hurl themselves upward to dislodge the Turks, and leave their bodies on the slopes, corpses that sometimes rolled heavily, lumpily downward until they caught on some shredded tree-stump, or fell back into their own trenches.
To all the forward positions of the Australians, the Gurkhas, the Londoners, the Jewish muleteers now made their regular rounds. They too had learned the skills of survival, and casualties were not as in the first days. The groves and fields, churned incessantly by shellfire, now bore only blackened remnants of trees, pieces of boots, and sometimes segments of men and beasts, left uncollected, in later years to give a golden harvest from this soil. All was bestenched in a heatening atmosphere of acrid gunpowder and putrid decay, and bottle flies thickened and swarmed from the dead upon the living, man and beast, bloated insects settling at messtime on each morsel of food to follow it into a man’s mouth.
The locked armies had reached a balance. It would take vast new forces on either side, as any soldier could see, to change this balance so that the defender might be overwhelmed, or the besieger driven back into the sea. Yet neither side would quite wait for this overwhelming force to accumulate; as fresh troops arrived, they were thrown, in some commander’s impatience for a victory, directly into an attack, they withered, and then the entrenchments were dug even deeper. From the trenches the men even dug tunnels reaching toward the enemy, crawling forward to explode him from below. Thus an enemy’s outpost line would be first gained, then lost to a counterattack.
On some nights, either the Turk or the attacker would crowd men into a forward trench, and at dawn hundreds of bayonet-points would rise to glitter like new grass, and suddenly the men would crawl out screaming their war cries, the Turks their Allah il Allah, and the Allies a multiple shriek, and the charge would carry itself sometimes even as far as a second or third trench, until machine guns ground it down; and again after the countercharge all would be restored, except that heaps of dead carpeted the few hundred yards between or lay before the lip of a trench, so that the machine guns had to be mounted up somewhat higher in order to get a free range toward the enemy.
Below, on the narrow shore, the carnage was less, though the Zion Mule Corps was halved now by wounds, by dysentery, by malaria. Yet, though exposed when they went on their delivery routes, the men were well settled in their dugouts by now, with capacious underground shelters for their mules, and in some locations connecting trenches wide enough to ride in.
Some of the troops they served were tireless diggers; the Gurkhas loved to dig wide and deep, and in their sector a man could ride atop his mule from one outpost to another without exposing his head above ground. When a lull came in the fighting, the muleteers would even begin singing as they rode their daily rounds, singing “Tipperary,” or teaching the Australians to sing “Yahalili.”
One Australian, using his shaving mirror, had fashioned himself a periscope, so that he did not have to lift his head up to aim his rifle, and now every soldier wanted one. This gave Araleh a thought. Herschel, it turned out, had once worked in an optometrist’s shop, and with him, Araleh set up the manufacture of an improved model, trading twenty of these to the Gurkhas in exchange for the digging of an entire underground shelter, comparatively clean and comfortable.
A cove had been found, supposedly out of reach of the enemy guns, and each day the men went down in small groups to bathe. It was not like bathing in the Kinnereth, but more like the sand beaches of Tel Aviv. And in the evenings, under a remaining olive tree that was somehow protected by the conformation of the mountain, tale-telling and singing would begin. Some distance away, under the “officers’ tree,” the Irishman with a few cronies could be seen playing cards and drinking. Among the muleteers, little groups had naturally formed, the Palestinians together, the Nissims in their own circle, the poor Jews of the mellah by themselves. But at times a whole mixture would happen, usually around an argument over strategy, or about the incredible blunders of the commander who guided the war from his island. Why had the mass of troops been landed here at the fingerpoint, to climb head on into annihilating fire, when any Jew could see that the main force, if landed at a northerly cove, could have circled behind Achi Baba and easily opened the road to Constantinople? —Or what was needed, Herscheleh declared, was what the Greeks had used in their great battle to capture Troy, not far from here on the Asian side of the bay, on those blue-green fields they had themselves seen when approaching Gallipoli. An enormous wooden horse the Greeks had left as a parting salute on the shore, then pretended to give up their siege and sail away homeward. But the horse was filled with soldiers.
One day, instead of the wooden horse, an iron fish was used, but it was the Germans who had taken to heart the ancient tale of these waters, for the iron fish was theirs. The huge British warships still sat arrogantly in the mouth of the Dardanelles, and even the Jewish muleteers heard echoes of the sudden, startling explosions, then watched with the unbelief of the entire Gallipoli expedition as two of their mighty protectors, the newest and greatest of naval structures, sank traceless in the sea of ancient military adventure.
The next day the fleet that had remained, reassuringly watchful, in an impregnable circle behind them, had vanished, and the troops on land were alone.
What was to happen? Were they to remain here without end, clinging to the lip of soil?
Slowly Gidon saw himself being drawn into this soldier’s life until he understood how men could even of their own accord live their entire lives in an army, comrades together—were it not for the rotten flies and the mosquitoes.
Not all men would be suited to such a life, nor would he choose it for himself, yet with a kind of fright of something foredoomed he saw that, at need, he could endure it well enough. Herschel, though he had gained hold of himself and went out regularly without showing his fear, Gidon saw, suffered ever more deeply, instead of becoming inured. Herschel was not suited. And in Araleh he saw growing another kind of trouble. It grew slowly. First it was seen only on mail-days if he had no letter. Because his wife was in Alexandria and he could therefore receive letters from her, even frequently, Araleh had at first seemed the lucky one. Gidon, with the rest of the men from Eretz, was inured to receiving nothing, except that Saraleh occasionally wrote to him too, so that he would get a piece of mail. But the letters for Araleh in each mail delivery, Gidon saw, now only made him increasingly homesick, and if by chance a mail was skipped, he was even sicker. He would become taciturn; generally Araleh was a man who naturally said yes when asked for anything he could lay his hands on for you, but now he began to say no, for no reason. He wouldn’t trouble. Useless to remind him, “But, Araleh, today no one got letters from Alexandria, only the British home mail arrived.” He began to voice suspicions that the bloody anti-Semites in the British command in Alexandria were deliberately holding back mail for the Zion Mule Corps. Just as they had even tried to steal the saddles.
For a whole week he had received no mail, and he now was unapproachable. Araleh was certain something was wrong with Saraleh, or if not, then with their little Dudu. Gidon could not think what to say to this. Once, when he began to say that a week was nothing, that he hadn’t even heard a single word from home and didn’t dare write to them even in roundabout ways, Araleh broke out tersely, “You’re not married. You don’t have a child.”
That was so. But was it so entirely different? Often the terrible longing came over Gidon and he wrote letters in his head, to Mati, to Schmulik, about the comical moments of the war, about the ways of different kinds of men. And even as to Araleh’s terrible longing for Saraleh, Gidon sometimes found himself on the verge of saying that he understood, he understood what it was to long to have her near.
Then a letter did come, three letters together for Araleh, and things were only worse. For one letter said the child was fretful, Saraleh was sure it was the heat, but if it didn’t pass in a few days, she would take Dudu to the doctor. Saraleh had not put the days or the dates on her letters and Araleh could not tell which was written first. Perhaps the sickness letter was first and if she did not mention it in the others it was all nothing, all past. But also another letter said she had not yet received her allotment from the British. Not even the first allotment. She had not wanted to mention it to him, but she did not like to borrow more money from her father’s friend Musara.
Araleh was in a rage. He went directly to the Irishman, who declared he would at once see about the matter, there must be some bloody balls-up at headquarters and there was no excuse for it.
And then came the hardest period. Day after day, once more, a whole week and then into a second week, no mail came for Araleh. And meanwhile others received letters, even packages, from Alexandria. Could it even be revenge for his raising a row over the allotment? Or perhaps the worst had happened. If the child had died, Saraleh couldn’t bring herself to tell him. That was the only thing that would hold back Saraleh from writing to him.
He had to go back to Alexandria and find out. Not another day could he endure it. He was needed there, he felt it, he must go. Araleh put in a request for compassionate leave. In a week he could be back. There was even good reason to send him, mule replacements were needed, supplies.
Trumpeldor himself recommended the leave, with urgency. A whole day, two days, no reply from the island. And still no letter from Saraleh. Then came the reply: refused. Request of Sgt. Aryah Tchenstokover not granted at present. Nothing else. A message from a typewriting machine on an island back there. With numbers and initials and not even a name to curse at, but he knew the name, it came back from that anti-Semite, Col. Whitbury, he was certain. And he spat at their “Not granted.” He would show them, a Jew was not a wog to be kicked aside, to be squashed like a bug and flicked away. He would show them.
Gidon had never seen Araleh like this. A deep pitying misgiving came over him: see what happens if you are married and a soldier. He thought about those men whose lives were in soldiering, like the Irishman, like Josef too. Oh, there was much lively talk about the Irishman, a great one with the ladies; and Josef too, despite his arm or perhaps even because of it, women fell in love with him—Gidon had even wondered about Leah—and here on Gallipoli, Josef received packs of letters from women in love with him, especially two sisters in Alexandria. Yet both of these soldiering men, you could feel, lived their lives alone. It was true that many of the higher officers, Britishers of the upper class, even sons of the British nobility, usually had wives and families and homes back there in their England. But for those it was different. Such high and mighty persons, a man didn’t even have to try to understand. Only through this suffering of Araleh’s, Gidon understood some instinct in his own self that was holding him back from womankind, as though all he saw before him in his life for the present was war and soldiering, and therefore he must not let himself fall into such a situation, such a torment as Araleh’s. Over and over Araleh searched every word of that reply. “At present.”— When else did he need to go to Saraleh!
—But perhaps it did point to a reason, Gidon argued with him. The Mule Corps was depleted at present, not a man could be spared, the Irishman and Trumpeldor were even going back to get more men and mules, and probably that was why, just now—
So depressed was Araleh, he hadn’t even known they were going. Why, perhaps he could ask Josef to see Saraleh for him—
At once, Trumpeldor promised, carefully writing down Saraleh’s address and telling Araleh he would send back a message on the military wireless.
So they departed, the Irishman wearing his finest uniform, the one that had been especially tailored in London. A few days passed. Araleh haunted the regimental message center—nothing. Now he was certain of the worst, Trumpeldor had not wanted the terrible news to come to him in a wireless. Guiltily, Gidon found himself staying away from the bunker they shared, he could no longer bear to listen over and over to Araleh’s imaginings as he tried to read what was meant by the void of silence. It was impossible that Josef had failed to carry out his promise; he was a man who never failed to do what he said he would do. Only two things could have happened, either Josef sent the message and it was held up, perhaps by that anti-Semitic devil, Col. Whitbury or—
Gidon even began to fear that Araleh was going out of his mind. Already Gidon had seen this happening in Dr. Ashkenazi, who had volunteered in Alexandria. As it came out that Gidon was half a veterinary, he had soon begun to help patch up wounded animals, and then, in a flood of casualties after a sudden Turkish attack, Dr. Ashkenazi had seized on Gidon when he came for medical supplies. A bombardment was under way; the doctor, as everyone knew, had been unable to master his trembling during shellfire—some people simply never got used to it. How much he had aged in these few weeks! Suddenly Gidon found the doctor begging him to help, the doctor couldn’t go on—the flies, they crawled into the wounds while he was operating—he had demanded sanitation supplies and they had not come—he was being undermined—and all at once he seized Gidon’s arm and began sobbing. The next day when Gidon returned from his rounds, Herschel bore the news that the doctor had collapsed, sobbing and stabbing at flies; he was being sent home to Egypt.
It was this moment that Araleh seized upon. In a single instant, everything was thought of and worked out. Gidon alone need know. Gidon must somehow arrange to carry him on the sick roster. In the confusion of the present situation, with the two commanders away and the doctor leaving, it could be managed. In a week Araleh would be back. Only the time to reach Alexandria, to run home, and he’d return on the next ship. The hospital ship carrying Dr. Ashkenazi was sailing direct for Alexandria, and Araleh would put on a Red Cross armband and accompany the doctor. He had already mastered the company clerk’s typewriter, he knew what forms to use, and during the mess hour, for a few cigarettes, the clerk’s dugout was his.
How could Gidon prevent him? If Gidon refused to take even a small part in the scheme, Araleh would try it anyway. To report his friend’s intention, even if to save him, was a thing a man could not do. And what if Araleh should be proved right in his worries? Though Gidon realized this was a kind of infection of fears, by now he at moments caught himself seeing, not little Dudu’s sick face but Saraleh’s in the pallor of death, her eyes calling to him piteously.
Together he and Araleh helped Dr. Ashkenazi onto the hospital ship where the commanding doctor with professional cheerfulness took him in charge. Then, just at what moment Gidon hadn’t even noticed, Araleh had slipped away, mingling somewhere with the masses of sick and wounded.
And indeed, as he told it later, he might well have carried off his entire scheme. He had managed the voyage, the debarkation, and had rushed home. Not Saraleh, not the child was there. An elderly couple from Petach Tikvah now was quartered in the room—but they knew where Saraleh was, she had gone to live with her father’s friends, and hurrying in a carriage to the Musaras, Araleh found her. Oh, what a surprise from heaven! she cried. She was well. Tiny Dudu threw her arms around her abba’s neck and wouldn’t let go to give her mother a chance. Every day she had written him! Saraleh said. And Trumpeldor had been here only the day before yesterday to inquire after her! Yes! Josef had come himself!
As it turned out, the loyal Trumpeldor, having first failed to find her at the old address, had meanwhile been hurried to Cairo to recruit new volunteers for the depleted Mule Corps. But nevertheless on the way back he had fulfilled his promise to Araleh, and sent the wireless. The anti-Semitic Col. Whitbury, seeing the message, had in an impulse of human kindness gone in person to hand it to the anxious husband, and, unable to find Sgt. Aryah Tchenstokover, had thus tripped open poor Araleh’s entire escapade. Here the colonel had come in person with the message in his hand, and all the while that bloody smart Jew had already carried out a scheme of desertion! Search orders were put on the wireless, and Araleh was picked up as he left the Musara house early in the morning. For one thing he thanked God, that Saraleh hadn’t seen his arrest. Nor would anyone listen, much less believe, when he said he was on his way to a ship to return of his own accord. Put in irons on the vessel, he was led off, on landing, shackled hand and foot, to be court-martialed. By the time Trumpeldor and the Irishman returned with a hundred mules and word of a hundred and twenty-five new recruits to follow as soon as they were trained, Araleh’s penalty had already been posted.
The deserter was to receive the lash, before the entire assembled Zion Mule Corps.
“You see, they consider us their equals,” Herschel found it in himself to jest. “Just like a British soldier, a Jew may receive the lash.”
Once before, the men had witnessed it, carried out before the entire regiment on a deserter, a Britisher, no less, found stowing away on a departing supply ship. All done in perfect parade order, the open square of men silent at attention, with only the cracking of the lash like an echo of shells from Achi Baba.
Already Trumpeldor had protested. He himself was at fault, he declared to the Irishman, for he had been slow in carrying out his promise to the man, and the added days without a message had aggravated Araleh’s fears. Besides, as it was perfectly clear that Araleh had intended to return at once, this was not a desertion, but only absence without leave.
Doubtless that was Araleh’s intention, the Irishman agreed, but unfortunately that bastard Whitbury had caught him out, the sentence was passed and could not be revoked. As Trumpeldor pleaded on, exasperation appeared in the Irishman. “Admit you’re not the easiest race in the world to deal with! I took you on, and I don’t regret it—your men have turned into good soldiers, I’ll stand up for you on that score—I’ll stake my whole bloody career. But godammit, when you’re caught out, you’re caught out, and that’s the game; fair or not, you take the punishment.” No, the Irishman could not, would not go to Whitbury. If he were to make an issue of this incident, every damn previous nastiness would be thrown up again, from the Zion man who was caught profiteering on two bars of issue chocolate, to the blasted squad that had refused an order to lead their mules under fire. “I’ve taken care of these things in my own way, I know our boys and we all know there isn’t a unit on the beach where such things and worse haven’t happened, but damn it, Josef, we can’t ignore the fact that there are plenty of staff officers who are Jew-haters, and never wanted this unit to exist in the first place.”
That was precisely why, Josef insisted, Araleh’s sentence must be fought—it must be shown as an exaggerated punishment resulting from prejudice. The man would clearly have returned of his own accord.
“How can we prove it except by his word?”
“His word should be enough.”
“Forging orders. Deception and lying. The whole way. And you want me to insist on his word!”
“It’s my word too.”
The Irishman could no longer control himself. He too had been caught out, for his damned Jews. “It’s your bloody unbearable stubbornness! The stiff-necked people! I don’t wonder they would only give you a mule corps. That’s what you are—a race of mules.”
Their glares held like caught swords vibrating ungivingly. Then the Jew turned on his heel and marched out. From his tent Josef Trumpeldor sent his orderly with a letter resigning his commission and requesting to be severed from His Majesty’s Service. He had been insulted as a man and as a Jew.
The shouted, heated words had been heard and carried through the camp. At first there was only a depressed sense of fatedness, that even with the best of the goyim the inevitable moment came. And if a man like Josef took it so deeply as to resign, the quarrel was beyond repair. Angriest was Tuvia the Cement-head. The entire corps should mutiny and demand to be sent back to Alexandria. “What are we proving here anyway, shoveling muleshit out of the trenches? Let them get gyppos! That’s all they take us for!”
When the tale reached Araleh in the lockup, he sent word through the sentry: Tuvia and Gidon should come at once to the rear side where they could hear him.
They heard his voice through the wood. “Nothing must happen! You hear me?” Araleh’s voice was calm, as if all personal anger had been strained out. “If we fail here, it will be worse than if the Jews had not come at all. Listen, Gidon. Go to Josef and tell him I refuse to have anything done because of me. They caught me and I will take my punishment. You hear me?” And he continued. “Everyone, every last man, must assemble and march to Josef and ask him not to resign. You hear me?”
Slowly a different mood grew. Herschel proclaimed in a mock Talmudic singsong, “After all, what did the Irishman call us but mules? Don’t our own prophets call us mules in the scriptures? Are we not the stiff-necked people as he said? Is this an insult? The Irishman is already like one of ourselves, and if we can call ourselves mules, he also can call us mules—from him it is no insult.”
The entire unit stood in ranks outside Trumpeldor’s tent, while Tuvia, Gidon, and Nissim Abulafia from a leading Jewish family in Cairo went in to plead with him. As was his way in a discussion, the Captain listened without making any comment, only asking a few questions at the end. Turning to Gidon, he asked, “Gidon, did Araleh tell you from the first that he would come back?”
“With the first ship.”
And to Tuvia, “He insists on accepting the punishment?”
“He insists.”
Then came an interval of silence. Josef would probably send them away saying he would think it over, as was his habit. But when he spoke, he had already decided. “I will withdraw my resignation. I see that it was a personal reaction on my part and did not represent the will of the unit.” Rising, he went out with them to the men. They were altogether less than four hundred now, but standing assembled at attention they looked like many, an army.
From where he stood, just behind the hero, Gidon heard Josef’s caught breath as he saw his men, the full ranks, at attention. “You are right, chaverim, I’ll stay,” he said.
When the punishment took place, the men kept their eyes to the ground. It was all done to form. Col. Whitbury and his staff attended. The Irishman stood rigidly in his place, saluting their arrival. Even Josef. But the distance seemed further than usual between him and the other officers.
An English sergeant-major read off the charge and the verdict of the court-martial. Araleh was marched to the post, the blows were heard, but nothing from him.
With his eyes lowered, Gidon still saw it. As he saw the bared back of Araleh and the lash cutting the sunlight, he also felt some last thing being cut out of himself to make the Jew a soldier.
Araleh slumped over, but when the cords were undone, he did not fall. The regimental officers marched away. The Irishman gave his order. “Dismissed.” Only Herscheleh spoke; between his teeth he muttered, “The gentlemen.”
When he was returned, his back healed, Araleh was to the men the same Araleh who would always find a way to help a fellow get something he wanted, especially now if it needed a little cleverness against the British order of things. He liked, even, to tell of his adventure, of the part where he had outwitted them all, for in final account, had he not succeeded, had he not got home as he intended? The rest had been a stupid accident, and above all, he cautioned Gidon, Saraleh must never know of the punishment. There was an instant’s calculation, now, in every little action Araleh considered, as though he first measured it by his own particular measure. It went with a new word that answered for everything—“Ourselves!” Nothing else in the world could be trusted. No stranger, no politics, no power. In the end, as indeed they had always known, it would be “ourselves.”