IT WAS the year of the golden harvest in Palestine. The grain was fat, the yield twofold, and this was the way of Allah, Sheikh Ibrim declared to Yankel Chaimovitch. Did Yankel not recall the flight of storks that had alighted after the plague of locusts was gone, covering the fields as with a white abaya? The fields were rich from the droppings of the storks that had feasted for days on the crawling larvae of the locusts; such was the way of Allah.
And even though the Turkish military police came onto the fields and counted the sheaves, and even though the tax-gatherers watched the filling of the sacks on the threshing floor, and even after half the sacks had been delivered to them, there still came the merchants from Beirut with their leather pouches filled with gold coins hanging from their girdles, and after they weighed the napoleons into the farmer’s palm, and praised their Allah, even then a good farmer still could send a few wagonloads to Meir Dizingoff’s committee for distribution to the needy, let the price not be thought of, and still put away stores in the ground, for who knew how long the war would continue and what would yet have to be endured. Far into each night Yankel and the boys labored at their digging and their carrying and their hiding away.
A second time they had attacked the Suez and been driven off; British warships standing in the canal itself had shelled and routed the Turks and Germans too, until they fled in disorder, staggering back over the wastes in the August heat, strewing their belongings all over the Sinai, casting away their rifles and their bandoliers of bullets, leaving broken wagons, dead mules and dead horses in their wake.
For the moment, as the summer ended and Rosh Hashanah approached, the war seemed to be in a pause, a molach ruminating, digesting all it had engorged, gazing about for other chunks of mankind to swallow. There was even a moment in the pause when the members of the Shomer gathered in Gilboa, and despite all that had befallen and in some ways because of it, young men flocked to be accepted. There was a new need everywhere for watchmen; from the defeat in Sinai gaunt, wild-eyed deserters were roaming about alone or in small groups. Every village needed redoubled protection.
With the ranks replenished, Shimshoni at last succeeded in his plan for the new settlement at the northern edge of the land, at the foot of the Hermon. Though there were no funds to buy his dreamed-of flocks of sheep, though the Zionist office was closed and Dr. Lubin exiled to Constantinople, the members voted for his kvutsa to go up. In the last moment Shimshoni appealed to the Baron’s agent, Samuelson, who had long lived in the northern district, in Rosh Pina. The elderly manager took the task on himself, and went to a neighboring sheikh with whom he had had many dealings. The needed gold was dug out from its jar beneath the courtyard. “Do not concern yourself, my old friend. You will pay the gold back when you have it,” and on Succoth, Shimshoni’s settlers went up with their tents and their wagons and their new-bought flock and their friends to help in the Aliyah, Leah and Rahel among them—how could they fail to take part in such an event? Just as they had gone out years before, from HaKeren to settle Gilboa, so they went now from Gilboa to settle Har Tsafon.
It was as in the early days, cooking on stones, singing in the sundown, tramping a wild hora far into the night: “If not now, then when, then when!” and in the dawn opening one’s eyes to the breath-taking vista from the springs of Dan down the wide flat vale of the upper Jordan, to the hazy mirror of the Huleh swampland, and beyond to the Kinnereth. Here all lay in peace.
From Dan to Beersheba now, the Shomer reached to guard the land, as they constantly repeated to each other in an elation of wonderment—they were actually making these words come true. And it was toward Beersheba that Leah now was called.
The moment had come when arms could be obtained in considerable quantity.
From the further reaches of the Sinai, Bedouin were appearing with three, four rifles under their cloaks, picked up where deserters had flung them. In the Tel Aviv Gymnasia group with whom Rahel was in contact, Eli, the lad who had spent last summer working in Kvutsa HaKeren, put her in touch with a dashing young man named Dov who, as a paymaster for the Turks, moved freely in the southern region. Dov could act as their eyes in the field, he could deal with the Bedouin. What was needed was a safe place, as far south as possible, to which the weapons could be brought. A girls’ farm in one of the southernmost villages, Gedera perhaps, would serve the purpose. And also serve to gather in the chalutzoth who were out of work in the area, and to grow produce for the Jews of Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
Though older, the village with its facing rows of settlers’ dwellings reminded Leah of Mishkan Yaacov; she and her girls could occupy an abandoned house at the far end, and the house, too, with its pair of rooms, was of the same pattern as at home, and as in most of the settlements. All but a few broken chairs the settler had carted away; behind the house stretched his modest grove, with last season’s oranges still hanging shriveled on the trees.
Soon she had collected her girls, even a few who had stayed with her ever since Tiberias; Zipporah returned—how could Leah refuse to accept her? And presently the dwelling with its rows of cots along the walls and its window sills loaded with flowerpots looked like every one of Leah’s habitations.
Menahem himself had come down to help deal with Dov’s Bedouin, meeting them wherever indicated, driving a wagon filled with straw. At first the price was high—-a camel for a rifle. Where could such sums be obtained? But Rahel hurried busily back and forth approaching notables in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, and Eli and his Herzlia Gymnasia group with their excellent family connections, set themselves to the task of gathering funds. Presently, as various Bedouin tribes began to compete with each other in offering arms, the prices went down, as low even as a few loaves of bread for a gun. Each week Motke the shomer from Petach Tikvah would come for the goods, driving off with a hidden wagon bottom stuffed with rifles, pistols, grenades, and munitions, to be stored in his attic. Sometimes Rahel, sometimes Leah, rode with him, sitting on the straw.
Once at Leah’s kvutsa itself, there appeared a Bedouin who grinningly produced, from under his black abaya, two rifles of an unfamiliar sort. They were British. The Turks had withdrawn from the lower Sinai wastes, and the British had crossed the canal and were slowly extending their line toward El Arish.
Gidon’s regiment, the London Fusiliers, was after all not among those who had crossed, for, with its small contingent of Zion volunteers, the regiment had been ordered home for refurbishment and redeployment.
Gidon Chaimovitch lay on his pallet among the rows of men breathing each other’s breath in the iron hold of the troopship, wearing his lifesaver harness, and feeling a final loss of will; he was being carried, carried further and further from his place and purpose in life.
But Herscheleh still had breath to debate, and argued that this corridor to England might still be the best way to their purpose in Palestine, for, like the Jews who left Egypt with Moshe Rabenu, “we have only forty years of wandering before us.”
Who could fathom the ways of history? A dozen years before, after the death of Theodor Herzl, a young Russian Zionist named Chaim Weizmann, a research chemist by profession, had as though by choice moved himself to Manchester, where chemical dyes, his specialty, were important in the weaving industry. Even in Manchester he had incessantly worked for his cause, explaining Zionism to prominent Englishmen, such as the editor of the newspaper, and among those who had listened, several were now in places of power.
In London now, strategists weighed and planned the fate of various lands, including Palestine, after the war. One member of the War Cabinet, indeed, had concluded with a sigh that the only way to protect the canal on the Palestine side was “to take Palestine ourselves.” And then what should be done with it?
Annexation was too bald. And already secret schemes of partition of vast Middle East areas had been made with the French, with the Russians, agreements for areas of control, areas of influence, in the cutting up of the Ottoman Empire. Only the question of the Holy Land had not really yet been settled. Its allocation was vague. Now that the moment for its conquest was come, why not, after all, help the Jews to return to their ancient homeland, and through them, keep a hand on the area? The new Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was a lover of the Bible. Words of the ancient Hebrew prophets rolled from his tongue. The names of villages in Judea were as familiar to him as those of villages in Wales. And Lord Balfour, newly appointed Secretary of State, was one of the earliest to have been fascinated by the chemist Chaim Weizmann and his messianic dreams. And the adventurous Winston Churchill, too. All of them were taken with the sense of being as fingers on God’s hand, in the final mystery of this Biblical cause. And it could be a highly useful maneuver, too. Why not set the Jews on the other side of Suez? What other people could be as energetic, resourceful, and loyal to the power that brought them back to their land?
There was also a Russian-Jewish firebrand, Vladimir Jabotinsky, come to London with his proposition for a Jewish fighting force; there was much to be said for that idea—Jews from all over the world would volunteer for it, thus binding themselves to the cause of England. And even Jews in enemy lands would be moved. Further, the millions of Jews of Russia and America would be so stirred, they would turn all their energy and influence to the cause, those in Russia to keep their country from falling out of the war, and those in America to bring their country into it. And just now, when the situation was strained and every ounce of help was needed!
Suddenly, in London, the campaign for a Jewish Palestine was making progress. An even greater vision appeared to the Middle East expert whose name was on the secret agreements with the French for dividing up the entire Levant. Sir Mark Sykes saw how not one but three submerged peoples could be awakened to help the Allies in a grand design of eventual self-rule: Judea for the Jews, Arabia for the Arabs, and Armenia for the Armenians—-whatever remained of them after the massacres. Urging this inspiring plan, Mark Sykes was everywhere, bringing people together, tugging at the powerful.
When the torpedo struck their troopship, Gidon knew he would live because they were in sight of the shore of Crete and he could swim it. But Herscheleh had disappeared and, rushing down into the hold to look for him, Gidon found his chaver clutching his diary of Gallipoli, which he had gone back to rescue. But like that time under shellfire in Gallipoli, a paralyzing fear had overtaken Herscheleh. Dragging him up on deck, Gidon found the ship immersed in British calm. A troop of nurses, in perfect order, was entering the first lifeboat. Men were at their gun stations firing at the sea. Others were drawn up at their boats. Herscheleh recovered. Yet, entering their lifeboat, he again was seized by panic, and lost his balance, his diary jumping out of his hands into the water. With a wail, he would have leaped after it. “Let it be the diary instead of you!” Tuvia cried, and tumbled Herscheleh into their boat.
That was the one adventure of the voyage; the last troop of the Zion Mule Corps arrived intact, merged into the London Twentieth Fusiliers, in England.
Though hardly more than a company, they were at least together in their own barrack, and anyhow the long brick building was better than a row of tents, or stinking holes in Gallipoli. But to be far away now in England, under the name of a London they had not even seen, sometimes made Gidon feel as though his true being had sunk like Herscheleh’s diary somewhere in the sea.
Not even Josef Trumpeldor had been there at the ship’s arrival, and Tuvia and Herscheleh had resumed their predictions, begun in Alexandria when Trumpeldor had departed for England, that they would never find Josef again; they would melt into the vast substance of the British army and find themselves shipped off to France to be gassed or blown apart as numerals in a foreign regiment.
The inured shrugged: what did it matter? And Gidon too at times sank into this peculiar soldierly indifference, this sense that you withdrew to a degree from living, from the exercise of will, in order to preserve yourself for the time when you might yet live. Perhaps it was something like the enduring of a long prison sentence.
Then on only the second day Josef found them. On both sides there was hearty, bluff rejoicing. So they’d had a spill in the water! Oh, yes, he had known, even though the movement of their troopship was of course a military secret and he was still outside the military—never mind—the efforts to establish the Jewish unit were progressing, and he would soon be with them again. He and Jabotinsky had secured an absolute promise from certain very high persons in the government that if they could present a list of a thousand Jews ready to volunteer for the Jewish regiment, the unit would be officially established. The campaign for volunteers had begun. So far, however, only a few hundred signatures had been obtained. Things were complicated. Interference and opposition came from strange, unexpected sources. From Jews themselves! Never mind. Jabotinsky had high connections and Chaim Weizmann was helping him with even higher connections. Now that the Zion men were here, as a nucleus, the campaign would really get under way.
At times, the peacefulness of the English countryside, even now, when Britain was deep in the war, aroused in Gidon a great swollen-hearted longing. When would his real life ever begin? This longing that came over him could even feel physically painful, as during moments when he might be walking with Herscheleh down one of the country lanes, between autumnal fields on which sheep were grazing, and not far off a farmer plowed behind a thick-necked Belgian percheron with heavy hocks—ah, what an animal, benign and powerful, a solid part of their clean British world with its compact moist soil. So painful was his longing then that Gidon would grow glum and cross at anything Herscheleh said, until they went less and less together on their walks.
Nor did they go often to the pubs. Gidon somehow could not find a link to the British in their pubs, and would mostly remain sitting in a corner with Herscheleh, Tuvia pulling hairs from his nose. Drinkers they had never become. Even in Gallipoli the Zion men’s alcohol had been traded off by Araleh for good things to eat.
The English villagers were friendly, as by some rule they had made for themselves to be friendly to foreign soldiers, but they were so careful not to intrude on you with personal questions that all human contact died out in games of darts or observations on the weather; “a bit of bad luck,” they would say if the war news was disastrous, or “jolly good” for a victory.
Here in England as in Egypt, Jewish families, learning of the presence of a group from Palestine, issued invitations for Sabbath Eve. But the feeling was not like in Alexandria. There, the Jews after all were not Egyptians but Jews. A wealthy Sephardi with his silent-footed black servitors was, in his home, still like a sojourner in Egypt. Here the British Jews were British; Gidon hardly felt a Jewishness among them. They had sons in the service, and intelligent well-educated daughters; those who invited the Zion boys were British Zionists, it was true, and they all devotedly read their weekly Jewish Chronicle, and they never failed to remind you that Theodor Herzl had received his very first public support from British Jewry when he arrived from Paris to lecture about his plan for a Jewish state. Yet Gidon somehow could not imagine these people or their children living in Eretz.
They were good Jews and most of them were observant, though still one did not feel it was the real thing like in Mea Shearim. They began their Sabbath Eve properly with a Kiddush and the blessing over the chaleh, and managed with their war rations to provide a Sabbath-like meal, mostly fish and boiled potatoes, yet a British Jew’s Friday evening display of Jewishness almost made Gidon feel a little surprised.
As Tuvia was a belligerent unbeliever, Gidon and Herscheleh usually went together, and they would dutifully recount their stories of Gallipoli; the Charge of the Zion Mule Brigade that stopped a Turkish surprise attack was their best. There was also the pathetic tale of the frightened Yitzik who in the end was posthumously awarded the D.S.O. for hanging onto the lead-rope even after two bullets had gone through his arm. (He had died of dysentery.)
Yet it was always still fairly early when they departed with a “Good Sabbath to you.” Sometimes they walked from the West End to Whitechapel, to the hangabouts of the other Jews, the ones the British Hebrews called “those fellows.” Thousands of young Russian Jews had got to England to escape the Czar’s armies.
Usually their British hosts would refer to “those fellows” in crisp but self-mastered disapproval, “They are beginning to present quite a problem to us.” But on one particular night their host had broken out in cold anger, for these “Russian draft-dodgers” (they were not referred to as Jews) had had the audacity to organize themselves into a society and had issued a broadside openly opposing induction into His Majesty’s armed forces! Inevitably, the public had reacted against all Jews, despite the above-average presence of British Jewish sons in the various services. In Leeds, the window of a kosher butcher shop had been smashed. “Really now, I believe we should confront these Russian immigrants with a plain choice: Join up or go back where you came from! The Czar would have them in uniform one, two, three—you can count on that.”
“What I don’t understand,” said the wife, “is how they can brazen it out in public. How can any man with an ounce of self-respect walk about in mufti while the sons of this land are fighting for him—that I can’t understand! And mind you, perhaps they have reasons to have no love of country where they came from—after all, they fled the land of pogroms, and I can understand that they might not want to fight for the Czar even though he happens to be our ally. But England has given them refuge, and for them to refuse to join up is disgraceful.”
“The worst of it is that most of them look like the common idea of the Jews, the unfortunate ghetto type, and that makes the problem all the more conspicuous.”
“I don’t blame those that hate them,” said the daughter. “I find it difficult to keep from hating them myself.” Her husband was at the front in France. Two sons of the family were also in the service; one of them had been gassed and was in hospital. “It’s a pity we Jews are judged by the example of such as them, and not by such as you,” the daughter said to Gidon and Herscheleh.
Yet, perversely enough, it was when he found himself among “them” that Gidon felt more at ease, more with his own kind. Not his own kind as he was today—these men were familiar to him from long ago, from before, from when he was a boy; they were still arguing in the same hotheaded way in Yiddish as when he had listened in Cherezinka, to Reuven and his friends in their endless dispute about the revolutzia. Whitechapel was filled with them, the street was in a constant turmoil of movement, of clusters forming and dissolving; the tea shops were packed with them, and everywhere you heard Yiddish and saw Yiddish papers.
When his own family had gone to Eretz, and other Jews had gone to America, large numbers had come here too. They were the schneiders, tailors working in clothing manufacture, and it was from among these immigrants that Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky expected to recruit their Jewish army. Only, as Herscheleh the Newspaper had at once sniffed out, everything in this respect was topsy-turvy—as could always be expected where Jews were involved. It was, Herscheleh said, like when they themselves had come to labor in Eretz only to find that the Jewish planters refused to use Jewish workers. The schneiders among whom recruits were being sought were exactly the ones who refused to fight.
To begin with, the schneiders of London answered you, had they wanted to fight for Zionism they would originally have gone to Palestine and not come here. “Why should we kill ourselves to make a Jewish nation if we are going to be like all other nations, with an army and capitalism and downtrodden workers?” If you answered that what the Jewish nation was going to be like was up to those who came there, and that your own brother and sister were part of a communa, they sneered at “Fourieristic idealism and romanticism that led nowhere.” Others, a bit less hostile to Zionism, declared themselves to be followers of Ahad Ha’am, who had come from Odessa and was right here in London preaching against nationhood.
First, the philosopher declared, came the creation of a center for Jewish life, of Jewish culture, of Jewish ideas. But the revolutionary schneiders went further. Nationhood was already a thing of the past. The triumph of the world proletariat would do away with nationalism, so there was no need for Jews belatedly to embrace it! But all these arguments were as nothing when you came to the anarchists, the pacifists, the Mensheviki and the Bolsheviki. They could talk even Herscheleh under the table. Many of them were followers of the firebrand of the great revolt in St. Petersburg in 1905, a Jew named Trotsky. Even Gidon remembered about him —how, after the uprising was crushed, Trotsky was put on trial by the Czar’s police, and the whole of Cherezinka had worried for this Jewish revolutionist—even the older, pious Jews who cursed him for an apicoiras, a godless renegade, had worried for him. Gidon remembered how all the boys in his Talmud Torah had cheered and rushed out into the street in their excitement when word came that Trotsky had escaped from Siberia. This same Trotsky was here in London, or he had just been here, who the devil knew, but he had many passionate followers among the schneiders, only waiting for him to give the signal for the international workers’ revolution. According to them, on one great day all soldiers everywhere on both sides of the war would drop their arms, refuse to kill their fellow-toilers, and that would be the end of it! So why, of all things, start a Jewish army?
The revolutionists had their gangs, too. Only a few weeks before the Zion company had arrived, indeed perhaps at the very time when Herscheleh and Gidon and the rest of the boys were struggling in the waters before Crete, a gang had appeared at a recruitment meeting called by Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky. Tomatoes and rotten eggs had flown, and rocks too, and the editor of Jabotinsky’s paper, a small, near-sighted Zionist, had had his glasses broken.
This at least, Tuvia declared, was something for the Zion boys to take care of. The toughies were known as Chicherin’s Boys, after a Russian revolutionist—not even a Jew—in exile here. Chicherin’s Boys came to Zionist meetings, thirty or forty in a gang, hooted, howled, started fights, and prevented speakers from being heard.
Yet despite their anger at these hooligans, Gidon and Herscheleh were drawn to Whitechapel, to the cafes where you got tea in a glass instead of in a mug with milk, and where you could even get a piece of golden lokshen kugel, or a knish. Just the odor alone of these tea shops evoked a far earlier state of being, a homeyness that reached back to before their life in Eretz, that was in a childhood time of a bobeh, a zaydeh, in Cherezinka.
Soon enough they got into violent arguments. The schneiders were not too eager to pick up acquaintance with men in uniform, and at first Gidon and Herscheleh felt a ring of avoidance around them. Their Shield of David insignia had been replaced with the patch of the Twentieth London Fusiliers, but once, a tall, red-pocked fellow with glittering, knowing eyes, and a little sneer behind them, remarked, “You’re speaking Hebrew?”
And so it began. Not that the fellow could speak Hebrew—only, he said, a vestige from cheder, for luckily he had fled from there in time! But half in English, with Yiddish words—complete Yiddish phrases thrown in when the talk became heated—all the usual arguments came pouring upon them. No, chum, he wasn’t wearing any uniform, no, thank you. He was making them, and at good wages, too, but when it came to fighting, he was waiting for the capitalist powers to kill each other off, and preserving his strength for the great day. “On the barricades, I’ll fight! For the people, I’ll fight!” And there were twenty thousand like him here. Not only did they escape conscription, as foreign subjects, but cer- tain taxes they escaped as well, and where, he wanted to know, where did they and the Zion army people get their nerve, coming here and upsetting the applecart?
At first Gidon heard the words without anger, the way he might have listened to a singsong recitation in cheder—this revolutionist was even swaying back and forth like a yeshiva bocher. All this talk was the same as in Cherezinka, the Bundists with their world revolution against the Poale Zionists.
All the boys and even the girls had been in one youth movement or the other. And it was the old slogans of the Bundists that now came sputtering forth between forkfuls of kugel; in the years in Eretz, Gidon had forgotten them, so now the slogans had the ring of snatches of song from childhood: imperialism, world struggle, downtrodden masses, chauvinism, militarism, bourgeois bloodsuckers. “At home”—the fellow meant in Russia—“would you fight for the Czar? And here in England is it different? Czar, King, Kaiser, they’re all the same, even if they make war on each other, they’re allies against the common people, and anyway they’re all cousins, the lot of them. The English have to uphold Czar Nicholas and his whole band of parasites, his Rasputin, his Okhrana, his pogromists. You Zionists are a bunch of dupes. Allegiance to His Majesty’s Government! Tfoo! It’s against your royal highnesses, not for them, that we’ll offer our lives—may all of them choke on their own blood!”
And then the schneider began to fling questions, challenges at them, flinging out the answers as well before they could open their mouths. Who was Herzl? A lackey of the capitalist press, an assimilated bourgeois Jew who had himself escaped his people’s tribulations and who saw the Jews only as miserable scum, as a relief problem. “And even worse are your false socialists, your so-called Labor Zionists, your Borochovs with their mixed-up Marxism …”
Gidon was no great reader or theorist, but under the incessant outpouring he was becoming red-faced. Let Herscheleh answer, let them throw names of writers and books at each other, Kropotkin, Bucharin, Plekhanov, Das Kapital, Rome and Jerusalem. A circle of hangers-on kept growing behind the Bundist, grinning as he waved his long arms to emphasize each point he scored. “Lackeys, that’s what you are! Fighting the capitalist war against your own brothers in the international working class, bribed and bought because those clever ruling bastards allow a mere Jew to put on a uniform and get himself shot up for them. Jewish fighters! Actually you’re traitors to your class, a bloody bunch of moral cowards!”
At this, Gidon leaped up. “Shut your bloody trap!” he shouted, and got off one hard slap at the fellow’s mouth. For a second the fellow teetered in his chair, his arms flailing for balance. Herscheleh too had leaped up. It was no band of revolutionary toughs such as Chicherin’s Boys that they faced, but a circle of startled Jews, many with eyeglasses, a few fat-faced, but most with the thin-lipped look of the half-tubercular shop worker, the skeptic, the self-educated reader of books, the listener to discussions.
“Stop! Boys, please! Not by me! Not in my place!” the proprietress was begging, in Yiddish. To the Bundists she cried, “I begged you a thousand times, don’t quarrel with soldiers!” And to the muleteers, “I beg you, leave.”
Gidon and Herschel shouldered their way out, while imprecations rose behind them, “Catspaws! Traitors to the working class!” And then a surmounting shriek in Yiddish, “Shlemiels!”
From somewhere within himself a long unused reply spat out of Gidon. “Vantzen!”
Once outdoors, he agreed with Herscheleh, those vermin weren’t worth a bruised knuckle.—It was a long, long time, Gidon reflected, since he had been completely disgusted with Jews.
When they reached the barracks, a peculiar feeling came over him of returning to his own world, with the foul civilian world shut out. The smell of metal, oil, men, weapons and gear. The solid clean foulness of the soldiers’ own language, the familiar eternal cardplayers, and even the narrow cot. You knew where you were.
Tonight there was to be a big meeting in the hall above Goldwasser’s restaurant in the heart of Whitechapel, and, with a few dozen other muleteers, Gidon would attend in mufti.
Over the stairway entrance was a huge banner in English and Yiddish, with the name of Jabotinsky in high flame-tailed letters. The sidewalk was crowded; Jews were arriving, most of them on the elderly side, accompanied by their corpulent, corseted wives, hurrying eagerly as to a free show. “You’ve never heard Jabotinsky speak?” Gidon caught a lip-smacking voice. “Oho! A tongue of gold! If he wanted to sing in the opera he would become another Caruso!”
But already at the entrance disputes seethed. The stairs were half-blocked. Young men from the revolutionists’ table at Goldwasser’s, and a number of their girls—who, with their eyeglasses, all seemed to resemble Nadina of Gilboa—were pushing leaflets into everybody’s hand. “Militarists! Murderers!” he read. An arm yanked at him. “What do you want to go in there for, comrade?” Behind, a squat, middle-aged Yidl with a pointed beard cried in Yiddish, “Let me through! Hooligans!” “You can go, who stops you!” they laughed at him. “Such as you can join Trumpeldor’s army.”
All those pushing their way inside seemed to be above military age, good-hearted little shopkeepers, loyal Zionists, each of whom doubtless had the Keren Kayemeth’s blue collection box in his kitchen. But once in the hall, Gidon saw a scattering of younger faces, some looking serious. Perhaps there would be a number of undecided and from them perhaps a few would come forward to enlist. But there were other young men, with their smirk of impatient belligerence, sitting in twos and threes. Wherever these were clustered, Gidon and Tuvia placed a few of their own boys on the aisle. A reserve they kept in the rear.
Josef Trumpeldor spoke first, after an introduction by an important British Jew, a member of Parliament, who called him “The Modern Maccabee.” In his military jacket, with an odd assortment of Russian and British insignia and decorations on his chest, and the Shield of David of the Zion Mule Corps on his cap, his artificial arm straight at his side and the other arm held just as stiffly, Josef was like a statue of himself. And just as nobly statuesque were the things he said, in English phrases he had memorized, delivered with a heavy Russian accent that brought sympathetic chuckles from the middle-aged. The good Jews gazed at him proudly, and here and there Gidon saw a girl with that moist, rapt look that Josef evoked in young women. Even the revolutionists sat quietly, as though their strategy was to let this one pass. Among them, Gidon’s eye caught sight of the tall talker of a few Fridays ago, the one he had given a good smack in the mouth. The glitter of recognition was returned to him, not marked with any promise of vengeance but with a pitying scorn.
A notion passed through Gidon’s mind. What if Josef, the real Josef, suddenly let go at them, the Josef of shellfire and the trenches, roaring a foul pschakreff and flinging a cannonade of soldiers’ curses at the fearful and cowardly, blasting them out, the way he had landed a good kick on Herscheleh the day he was frozen in fright? The thought made Gidon grin, and Herscheleh, beside him, demanded what was the joke.
Josef soon concluded, calling every man to arms, straight, soldierly, direct. “Jews, we have fought for every cause but our own! Numbers of our best men have died and are dying every day in every army in the world. At this moment they fire at each other from French and German trenches. But at last we can fight as Jews, for our own cause, for our own land! Can any man find anything worthier in life on this earth?”
There was applause, many of the older Jews gazing around with indignation at the young radicals who sat unresponding. Then a single, jeering voice rose up, “Go give them your other arm, chum!”
A shocked hall-wide gasp, a young woman’s voice crying “For shame!” a rumbling, and trouble might have broken out. Trumpeldor remained standing, rigid, livid, but Jabotinsky had leaped forward, his words chopping down in scathing strokes on such contemptible, worm-soft cowardice, like the flying strokes of a chopping knife on a noodle board, ripping the dough into slivers, and plop goes the lot into boiling water.
From all around the hall came sighs of pleasure as he gave it to them, the hooligans, the troublemakers, a disgrace to their people. Suddenly the orator pulled from his pocket a crumpled leaflet—theirs. Loudly, he read out their own slogan and argument, “‘Jews! Why Fight to Create a New Ghetto? At last, we Jews in democratic lands have attained equality, justice, an equal vote, an equal place in the schools. Why again separate ourselves as Jews? If fight we must, let us fight in the English Army as Englishmen, in the French Army as Frenchmen, yes, even in the German Army as loyal Germans.’ ” And then, without a shred of emphasis, the orator read out the signature, “‘The Society of Jewish Trade Un- ionists.’ ” As though startled, he read it again, “‘Jewish Trade Unionists.’ ” And in mock puzzlement, Jabotinsky reread a previous line, “‘Why again separate ourselves as Jews?’ ”
Oh, he had caught them! The hall rocked with glee over the master stroke.
“Perhaps,” the orator remarked when the laughter had at last gone down to a bubble, “perhaps this splendidly logical leaflet was written while standing on his head by that renowned upside-down philosopher, Moishe Kapayer!”
This set them off again.
And now in all solemnity Jabotinsky repeated, “Why separate ourselves as Jews?” and began to give the answer.
In Egypt a year ago when Gidon had crowded with the rest of the fellows from the deportation ship into an unused stable in the refugee compound to hear the famous journalist, he had listened to much of this same oration, but it was like music to hear it again. It swelled, it vibrated, it pierced. The devoted elderly Jews who had come to hear the great orator wept tears as he described Kishinev with the slaughtered laid out in rows in their shrouds, and they sighed with pride as he told how Jewish boys had revolted against the supine ways of the older generations, and secured weapons, and mounted guard in Homel, in Odessa, even in Kishinev itself. The listeners breathed deeply with naches as he told how Jewish members of the Shomer rode on their steeds, guarding the settlements in Palestine, and they sat erect with wonder and admiration as he declared how he himself had made a wrong judgment, how, in Egypt last year, he had refused to join Josef Trumpeldor when Jews were offered acceptance into the British army only as muleteers. But those very muleteers of Zion had become a symbol of valor in Gallipoli! Among your famous Scottish regiments and your famous Australians, and your famous Gurkhas—none of whom feared to ghettoize themselves in their national pride—there had arisen the name of the sons of Zion. The Shield of David on their caps had become among the most respected of emblems amongst the toughest of fighting men in the hardest of campaigns. And many were the men of Zion who had given more than their arm, their two arms—they had given their lives. And because of this, Jews were now to become a fighting brigade. Only by fighting and winning back their own land from the Turks would they overcome the age-old stigma of the ghetto. For what was a ghetto? A tolerated corner in a city that belonged to another people, in a foreign land. A land of your own, a city of your own, was no ghetto. Was London a ghetto to the Englishman? Simply this, then, was the object of Zionism, of the Jewish Brigade. Already the Jews were building their own city—Tel Aviv—in what would one day, by the grace of the remaining, mighty right arm of Josef Trumpeldor and of the men who joined with him in the coming battle—be their own land. By such courage would their own city one day stand in their own land.
The orator paused to allow the wild, joyous response free rein. Then he resumed: And who were these very British patriots who disdained to fight as Jews? There were two kinds: the social revolutionists, and the sons of the big capitalists. Strange bedfellows. What did they have in common?
First, let it not be imagined that all social revolutionaries were against the idea of a Jewish fighting force. On the contrary—the very originator of the fighting force was a social revolutionist, and he was present here on the platform—Josef Trumpeldor, Zionist and Communist, for such was his declared philosophy. The nucleus of the Jewish fighters in the Zion Corps were stalwart settlers from the kvutsoth and the cooperatives of Palestine, the only place in the world where true communism was being lived and practiced.
What then was the difference between pro-Zionist social revolutionaries, and anti-Zionist social revolutionaries? He didn’t have to tell them. Both kinds were here in the hall. One kind wanted to remain Jewish, right through and on after the world revolution, just as French revolutionaries wanted to remain French, Germans, German, and British, British. But the Jews, and perhaps only the Jews, had another type amongst them—those who wanted to disappear as what they were. They wanted to disappear as Jews. Internationalism for the sake of the world revolution was their excuse. All other nationals of course understood that internationalism was a union of nationalisms. What else? Only the Jews who hated being Jews wanted to disappear into the international revolution. They were, quite simply, ultra-assimilationists. Their argument really had nothing to do with the social revolution. This was simply an excuse. To their twisted souls, the cry that there would be a ghetto in Zion was, under the guise of idealism, a way out of being a Jew.
Oh, it was nothing new, even in social revolutionary circles this argument had been put forward at the very beginning, seventy-odd years ago. Karl Marx was a Jew who didn’t want to be a Jew, who hated it. He had been born into a converted family, yet found himself known as a Jew. And so, as a substitute for the Jewish Messiah, he invented the internationalist utopia. Virtually a co-founder with Marx and Engels of the whole Communist theory and theology was another Jew, Moses Hess. But in the midst of it all, this one had discovered for himself that he remained deeply a Jew, and had turned to the idea of the return of the Jews to Jerusalem—without ceasing to believe in socialism. Socialism was in no way contrary to national peoplehood. So much for the first group, the revolutionists.
And what of the second, the sons of high capitalism, likewise opposed to Zionism and the Jewish army? As with the socialists, so with the capitalists; this opposition hardly embraced all of them and it had nothing to do with their economic status or philosophy. Here in London you had one Rothschild who was a supporter of the Jewish army, and another Rothschild who put in its way every obstacle he could muster. It was not their capitalism that made such men anti-Zionist. It was, exactly as in their socialist enemies, the craving to disappear as Jews, to assimilate. The same hatred of their origin—an old, old phenomenon among us—Jewish anti-Semitism.
Let them assimilate, let them disappear. It could be done. Even with comparative ease. Human beings were amazingly adaptable. They could live without a sense of smell, they could lose their eyesight and live, they could live after half their internal organs were removed, and they could live without their souls. But as for him—he respected a thousand times more a man who honestly lost his limbs in battle than a poor wretch who wanted to cut out his own soul because in this brutal world he encountered imbeciles and wretched bullies who spat on Jews.
Oh, those sick souls! There was Lionel Rothschild using all his wealth and high connections to block the cause of the Jewish army. There was Sir Edwin Montagu screaming with rage against Zionism! Why, such goyim as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, Lord Balfour and General Smuts were better Zionists than these soul-sick Jews, nor did they need to have the reason for the creation of a Jewish army explained to them. “Our worst ene- mies come from amongst ourselves, those who are unknowingly victims of anti-Semitism, those Jews who want to cease to be Jews, who are fearful of being what they were created to be. They are so sick that like miauling infants they thrust away, they go into a fit of rage at the cure that is brought to them.”
His tone changed.
So much for the assimilationists. But there were others who held back from enlistment in the Jewish unit, and for a very comprehensible motive. They didn’t want to get killed. And even better, they didn’t want to kill.
With them he could reason, even materialistically. True, they had found themselves a haven here in London and been able to stay out of the war thus far. Perhaps they did not realize that British young men as well didn’t want to kill and didn’t want to be killed. But there were times when one’s choice was not entirely free. And their own choice too, he now had to inform them, would soon cease to be so free. For the Russian Ambassador to England, Count Nabokov, was being pressed from both the Russian and the British sides as to their status. The Czar was demanding that they be sent home as deserters. And the British were embarrassed to have their hospitable land used as an escape-ground by tens of thousands of men of fighting age who were the subjects of their Russian allies. As they all well knew, diplomatic talks on this unpleasant subject had been going on for some time. “But I myself have very recently spoken with Ambassador Nabokov and can report to you the unpleasant news that any day now you may be seized and shipped back to Russia.”
There arose a bitter murmur of anger, hostility, wariness, as though he were playing some kind of trick on them. Waiting until it had subsided, the speaker demanded now in the voice of a hard and practical bargainer, devoid of idealism: Was it better to be thrown into the half-starved, ill-equipped armies of the Czar, where men were cheaper than bullets, the cheapest of cannon fodder, and where in addition to everything else they would find themselves among their ancient, unchanged comrades, the illiterate anti-Semitic moujiks and Cossacks—was it better to be spat on and beaten up there, as Zhids, or was it better to volunteer here to fight together with fellow Jews, the men of Zion, for one’s own people, one’s own land?
Something flew through the air and spattered against the table. Amidst outcries, catcalls and screams, rotten vegetables pelted the platform. The speaker brushed muck off his shoulder. Trumpeldor had leaped up to protect him, but Jabotinsky did not budge. Gidon and Herschel plunged into their row and collared a pair of Chicherin’s Boys. The Zion squad from the rear of the hall had already pushed down the aisle.
No fight was offered. A dozen of the troublemakers were speedily ejected. People settled back in their seats; Jabotinsky resumed: “I appreciate the eloquent attempt at a counterargument …”
But the mood had been broken. When he ended and called for volunteers for the Jewish Brigade, scarcely twenty men, at least half of whom had been primed before the meeting, came forward toward the platform.
It was a dreary English winter. In the day, Gidon’s platoon were drilled as though they had never seen battle. Everything from the beginning, left turns and present arms and the strictest saluting. Leaping over barricades and climbing walls, marching with full pack, all with a double relentlessness.
After the wearying days, a few times they went to London to police the recruiting meetings. But it even seemed as though their numbers instead of growing were becoming smaller; one after another of the volunteers from the mellah, who had never really seemed part of their group but had perhaps joined as a way to get out of Egypt, now managed to have themselves transferred here and there where things appeared safe and easy. A few habitual complainers got themselves shifted, and so did a few good men who had become embittered over the lack of response of the Jews in England and now declared they were sick and tired of the whole idea of the unit—the Jews of the Diaspora weren’t worth it. Until only the hard core remained, scarcely more than eighty.
“It doesn’t matter,” Josef would repeat his famous phrase at every defection. It was even better, he said.
He had still not managed to get himself inducted. But he would come out every few days to tell of the progress being made. A full plan for the Jewish regiment had been submitted in writing to the War Ministry with the signed support of two cabinet members.
It was the worst time for Gidon. Even Herscheleh had deserted him, having at last picked up with some girl who worked in a nearby munitions factory. Herscheleh was always sneaking out on borrowed passes; the shikseh was married, her husband at the front, she didn’t dare be seen with a man—a foreigner was safer for her—and each time Herscheleh came back from her and described the shameless things this proper English girl had done, Gidon was plagued with images. A few times he went whoring, only to pick up a dose, as they said; cursing the world and the vileness of creation, cursing himself, he got caught in short-arm inspection and confined to barracks, and took out his bile on a squad of schneiders. For now he had been given a squad to train.
Despite everything, recruits had dribbled in, a number out of genuine conviction, “real English” Jewish lads who were about to be called up and decided they might as well volunteer for the Jewish unit. But most of his squad fitted the typical picture of the sallow, thin-lipped, hollow-chested schneider. The Russian Embassy had indeed sent out registry forms to all the immigrants, and while their Chicherin instructed them to ignore this and sit it out, a certain few were coming to volunteer. Having come, they retained their own attitude. They were argumentative over every stupid regulation, and too often right. And though they had made up their minds to do a good job of soldiering once they were in, the schneiders were not militarily endowed. They tripped over their feet, while their fingers, so nimble on a sewing machine, became thick on a Lewis gun.
Or else they were overeager to obey precisely. In his own squad one day there arose what came to be renowned as the response of a true Jewish soldier. As Gidon marched his greenies, calling left, left, left, he noticed one of them half-hopping, half-stumbling. Halting the squad, he growled, “Don’t you know your right foot from your left?” To which the willing schneider replied, “You keep saying left, left, left—on my left foot alone, I’m trying, but I can’t march.”
Though he himself hated drill and saw no more use to it than they did, Gidon drilled them until their knees buckled. Indeed, he became the proverbial tough drill sergeant. One day when he heard a schneider call him anti-Semite under his breath, a little glow lighted in his heart. He had them! They were becoming soldiers. Their compressed, bitter little smile of Jewish resignation was turning into the soldier’s sneer of inurement. One night, when he saw a few of them meticulously cleaning their rifles on their own impulse, and exchanging advice about different oils, Gidon suddenly believed again that the whole plan would succeed.
On a cold sleety morning just after he had started training a new squad, an additional recruit arrived from London and was sent out to join them. The movement of the approaching soldier reminded Gidon of someone—head stuck forward, and a hasty step. It was the journalist himself! Jabotinsky had enlisted!
Before Gidon could even have a thought about it, the recruit halted before him and saluted, declaring, “Private Vladimir Jabotinsky reporting for duty, sir,” and the entire squad was agape. Already they were arguing over the event—Jabotinsky was doing it so as to give an example before the world. No, he himself was escaping deportation to Russia. No, they couldn’t deport him, he was a journalist. Then why join, when for the Jewish army he was more useful outside than as a simple soldier?
“You don’t salute a corporal,” was the first remark that broke out of Gidon. Then he barked the squad to attention. He sent the new man into the line. From Jabotinksy’s expressionless glance, Gidon knew he had handled it right.
Many times they had exchanged a few words. Once, as far back as the Alexandria days when the journalist had moved into the Mafrousi Barracks and was sitting around with some of the chevreh drinking tea, he had even asked Gidon a few questions about his family.
The drill continued. In no time it became clear that the new recruit was a case of bad coordination. Compared to the orator even the schneiders were born soldiers. He couldn’t adjust his stride, and he was so intent on catching orders that half the time he was ahead of the line in executing them. Finally, Gidon hit on the idea of sending him aside and assigning Herscheleh to get Jabotinsky started. But this too had a flaw. Herscheleh naturally tried to seize upon this opportunity to hold discussions, while Jabotinsky kept constantly calling his instructor back to instruction duty.—He certainly wasn’t going to be used as a common soldier in the war, Herscheleh would tell him, so there was no point in troubling themselves over punctilio. —No, Jabotinsky would insist, he wanted to be a correct soldier.
In the barracks a worshipful young Zionist who had a cot in the corner offered to give it over to the orator so that he would have a bit of privacy, but the famous one refused.
There were soon many jests. A special detail would have to be sent to fetch his mountains of mail. In the middle of drill a runner would appear with a message for Private Jabotinsky to call the Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Or perhaps Chaim Weizmann. In the end Gidon solved all the problems together by assigning the famous man to barracks duty. After sweeping out, he could sit and read, and write all his memoranda to the government.
Yet the presence of the orator made a change in Gidon. It was not, despite all the jokes on the subject, that he felt any self-importance in being the one who gave orders to Vladimir Jabotinsky. And it was only partly because a new feeling of interest had come into the barracks, with the bits of half-secret news that the leader let out after his visits to high offices in London, and with his caustic descriptions of the fantastic lengths to which certain highly placed “frightened Jews” would go to place obstacles in the way of the official creation of the Jewish Brigade. Nor did Gidon feel any particular quickening when Jabotinsky let it be known that this one or that one of great power had been won over to their cause. Gidon did not even share in the gloating when one morning Herscheleh came running with the London Times, reading out a leader in favor of the creation of a Jewish fighting unit. Fine and good; Gidon did not need the London Times to convince him.
What was it then, that was breaking through the apathy that had begun to engulf him? Gidon found himself really trying to unravel this. Was it because the enlistment of the orator somehow demonstrated, as some insisted, the “worthiness of the plain soldier?” —Like that old man Gordon in the kvutsa who made a whole philosophy about laboring with his hands on the soil? That wasn’t it, either.
He wasn’t a hero worshiper; it made Gidon feel uncomfortable when, after an impassioned speech in the city, Jews crowded around the orator and wanted to kiss his hands. Especially as he felt the orator rather liked it. There were even certain ideas that the leader didn’t often talk about to the crowds but that Gidon heard voiced in private now and again that vaguely troubled him. It was not only a Jewish army to fight for the Jewish land that was being raised, but see—in the entire Levant, what was to be found? Backward and primitive Arab tribes, scattered over vast areas as large as the whole of Europe. A Jewish nation would bring the Middle East into the modern world, it would reach out as in the days of Solomon, it could reach from the Euphrates to the Nile; Jewish brains and energy would draw upon the untouched resources of Mesopotamia, of Arabia—the vision was broad, ambitious—and what was wrong with having vision? Yet something in it rubbed Gidon the wrong way.
Then despite all this, just what had been brought alive in him by the leader’s presence as a soldier?
Perhaps it was the nearness, the spectacle of a man pressing on with ideas, projects that had simply risen up from within himself. Gidon could not quite think it out, but this was his feeling. That he had begun to go down under the sense that man was too small in himself, that a man ended pushed into this line or that by the enormous powers that ruled the world. But now the other feeling had come back, the feeling of personal worth. What was Vladimir Jabotinsky but a journalist who had come to the refugee barracks in Alexandria and been seized with an idea for a Jewish army? Even here he was still nothing but a soldier in a foreign army. Yet only because he had the will and was sure of his ideas, he was able to make the high ones listen, able to press forward even to the highest. Though Gidon never felt that within himself there was any great force of this kind, the nearness of it lifted him from apathy.
Presently a whole new fever arose. All at once the newspapers were filled with dispatches about upheavals in St. Petersburg. The newest recruits coming from London brought in Russian and Yiddish papers, and the schneiders snatched them from each other’s hands; they became like excited monkeys in a cage, chattering without stop, hopping from one cot to another, starting arguments in the middle of the night, in the midst of drill, speculating, what was happening there in St. Petersburg? Was it the revolution at last?
Jabotinsky would be called away for days at a time; was he not after all a Russian journalist, an expert? It seemed his knowledge was needed in high places.
There were strikes in Russian arms factories, soldiers were said to be in mutiny, it was said the Duma had been dissolved, no, the Czar’s ministers were dismissed, the Czar had abdicated, no, he had withdrawn his abdication, the Czarevitch had been crowned, no, there was no Czar at all! And suddenly it was official, it was true; the Russian Czar had abdicated, there was a democratic government, and among the very first laws was one providing complete equality for Jews!
The schneiders paced the barracks, trapped here, cursing themselves for having only a few weeks ago bound themselves to this army—you could see that everything drew them to Russia, to the great events. But some of them already argued that the revolution was no revolution, it was only a movement of liberals and the bourgeoisie; everything would remain in the same hands, the hands of the aristocracy and the capitalists. And for proof—here was their new “revolutionary” government declaring that Russia would continue to fight the war alongside her allies, and with renewed vigor.
Jabotinsky came back from the city bringing Trumpeldor. First they tried to answer everybody’s questions, but then they sat in a corner with their heads together for hours. It was no secret that Josef had a new plan altogether. Why wait eternally for the mighty British to decide to permit the Jews to have an army? Instead, he would now go and raise a Jewish army in Russia! He must go to St. Petersburg. In the new government, he knew this one and that one. In the Duma and even in the Central Council, here was a Jew and there was a Jew, in the highest offices. If Josef did not know them, then Jabotinsky knew them. Everyone was flocking back to Russia from exile, from Switzerland, from here in England, even from America. Just now, Josef pointed out, another of the exiled leaders of the 1905 revolution, Pincus Rutenberg, had passed through London on the way back from America. From the very start, this Rutenberg had been with Jabotinsky in the idea of creating a Jewish army; he had even gone to America to spread the idea. In the new Russia he would have great influence. He was after all a veteran social fighter! With Rutenberg’s connections, Josef Trumpeldor was certain that he could quickly receive authorization from the new government. A hundred thousand Jews would answer the call overnight! For in Russia was the very heart of Zionism.
—Had he forgotten, Jabotinsky argued with Josef, while half the company hovered around them, had he forgotten that the Russian Zionist Congress itself only last year had passed a strong resolution against the formation of a Jewish army? And the journalist burst into a tirade, describing how his oldest, closest friends and supporters in the Russian Zionist movement had turned against him and shunned him. Precisely because of this he had then come back to England—
“But now it is all different! A year ago they were afraid. Now everything is changed!” The new Social Democratic government was sure to welcome Josef’s plan, for the Jews would bring new spirit into the war. He would lead ten divisions through the Caucasus and capture Constantinople for Russia! And then the Jewish army would sweep down through Syria into Palestine, while the British army came up from Egypt, and they would smash the remains of the Turko-German forces between them, a hammer and anvil. A hundred thousand Jewish soldiers would remain to become chalutzim, settle in the land and rebuild Palestine!
—A fine vision, but unfortunately Josef was being unrealistic, the journalist retorted. With a burst of quotations from Russian newspapers, from experts in London, from Bolsheviki and Mensheviki, he showed that the very cause of the Russian revolution was war-weariness. Entire army units were simply turning around and leaving the front. The Russian people were sick of the war, and if the Jews even attempted to revive a fighting spirit, they would be answered with pogroms such as had never been seen in the worst Czarist days. If the Kerensky government persisted in continuing the war, it was certain to fall.
Besides, where would Josef get his hundred thousand volunteers? Those Jews who were already in the Russian army would still be with their units as long as the army held together. And those who were already out of the army were certainly not going to go back in.
“They will! They will!” Josef cried. “For their own cause, they will fight!” At least in Russia there was a chance, a good chance, while here every obstruction had been placed in the way and the whole plan looked hopeless.
“No! We are on the verge of success!” Their plan was now already on the desk of the war minister himself, recommended for approval. The Irishman had already been alerted to command the first Jewish regiment. He would certainly commission Josef as second in command. While if Josef, instead, started off to Russia, even before he got to St. Petersburg the provisional government could fall apart. Kerensky had only the shakiest coalition behind him. And it was the Bolsheviki with their anti-war slogans who would topple him. And then Trumpeldor, arriving to call for a new war campaign, might find himself in a cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress, rather than in an army headquarters. Finally, did Josef really believe the British would make it possible for him to go to Russia at this juncture?
And there it was the soldier who came forward with a political answer. Why shouldn’t they? he demanded. On the contrary! If the British were worried that Russia might fall out of the war, they would welcome his proposal to awaken the millions of Russian Jews, inspiring them to win their own land. They would help keep Russia fighting.
“Ach, you are only hungry to go back to Russia and see the revolution. You’re still a Communist!” Jabotinsky cried, half exasperated, half in sympathy.
Long after their chief had again left for London, the men were still at it: What the Russian Social Democrats would do, what the Cadet party would do, what the Bolsheviki would do, if this, if that, what the English would do if this, if that. The devil take them all, Gidon thought. Why couldn’t Jews do what Jews had to do, and an end!
Then—hardly a week had passed—another great new thing. America! If Russia was falling out of the war, America was coming in! The sky had opened. With every Tommy in the camp you had to drink to the Yanks. The Hun was finished now for sure. Once the great giant from across the seas planted his feet in Flanders, it was all over for Fritz. It might still take a bit of a while for the Yanks to get over here, granted, but all that was needed now was to hang on, and it would be the Kaiser they’d be hanging, in Berlin!
In the new, excited discussions, the schneiders had already added an American Jewish army to their ranks. In their enthusiasm they saw enormous troopships filled with Jews already on the way across the Atlantic. Trumpeldor’s Russian Jewish army too was embarked, crossing the Black Sea, sailing through the Dardanelles, never mind about Gallipoli, the straits would be con- quered as he sailed toward Eretz Yisroel! And they themselves were afloat, crossing the Mediterranean on British war vessels. Converging, these invincible Jewish armies would march up to Jerusalem, and plant the flag of Zion atop the Wailing Wall.