We didn’t see anything suspicious facing us and suddenly my friend Ari-nom-de-plume appeared and said he’d found hashish in the village below and put it in a sack and he was going down to Kiryat Anavim in the evening, and he’d take the sack, and come back, and I shouldn’t snitch on him because he’d make a lot of money from the hashish. Kushi saw him and knew how brave he was and ordered him to go down quickly and take a message to headquarters, and he wanted to be angry with him, but at that moment two of the Jerusalmites panicked and yelled that they wanted to go home, and he and I talked to them. They begged us to let them get out of there. I told them it was impossible. After a short period of sobbing they changed their minds, calmed down, and I fell asleep. After a quick nap I ate a little bread we’d found in the village and some delicious crushed olives and some carob pods from which we brewed tea. Just before morning Ari-nom-de-plume came back glowing and said that on the way to Kiryat Anavim he’d met some non-enlisted Jerusalemite on the fucking road and immediately realized that he was looking for bargains because he knew these types, and when the man heard he had some hashish he took out some money and gave it to him and ran down the hill to Pension Fefferman. Ari-nom-de-plume wanted to give me a few pounds in friendship, but I said that here in the war you’re either dead or crazy, and a lunatic doesn’t need money.
Suddenly we heard a shout, Fire! And a moment later, Ow! Somebody yelled, I’ve taken two bullets. He really had, we checked him out, one had hit him a millimeter from his right ear, and the second about a millimeter from the left one, but he was only scratched. We laughed, and then miraculously I took a bullet near my eye, it hurt a lot, burned, the round had apparently entered the pouch of skin that holds the eye, and the eye came loose and I held it in my hand, and since the bullet was perhaps almost spent it only scratched me, and the eye I was holding remained whole and I put it back into its socket, and a medic bandaged me.
The firing became more frequent and we said that the guy with two scratches by his ears would now hear better, and that I’d see better, and then we heard a roar. Then we heard something like a crawling sea, and emerging slowly from the roaring all hell broke loose. A human mass like locusts denuding the land climbed rapidly toward us. The black-and-red kaffiyehs stormed upward, skipping over the rocks. There were hundreds that jumped from the southern side of the mountain. We didn’t know where this big army had sprouted from and where it had hidden, and it was scary seeing it swarm like a band of apes climbing up rocks and shooting.
For a moment Kushi was as confused as us, and Haim K. had a panic attack and ran like a madman towards a sheikh’s tomb farther down the slope by the road, and he was fired at but the shots missed him, and Kushi sent a soldier to the command post with a message, and we started firing randomly at the attackers we could hardly see. They screamed Aleihum and Allahu Akbar, and Kushi laughed, and I thought we’re not getting out of here alive. Somebody started singing “Besame Mucho” in Arabic: “El bi mahrouf”, so we realized that this was the end of us.
We were some ten tired fighters by the mukhtar’s* house that was shrouded in olive trees, and there were hundreds in the horde charging at us from all directions, and we fire back and somehow manage not to fall asleep between the shots, and I see a magnificent kaffiyeh held in place with a golden akal and beneath it a man brandishing a sword, and Moshe yells, Look at that one, a real Rudolph Valentino! And the Buck Jones in the kaffiyeh shouts in English, Hello boys, and we don’t really understand why we’re being shouted at in English, and his men are firing at us and leaping, and Moshe hits Valentino just as he realizes he’s made a mistake and draws a pistol to shoot at us, and then the shit really hit the fan. Some of us are hit, time stands still, and there’s lots of shooting.
I didn’t understand why they hadn’t taken the village. They were many. Awake. They’d probably been drinking black coffee all night. We had little ammunition left. Then after a while we heard a call on the radio: We’re coming.
While we’re firing, a group of twenty-three guys under the command of Nahum Arieli arrives. They come running right into the firing. Nahum’s deputy orders us to withdraw and shouts, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them! The rocks shouted in pain. Carob pods were shed. Figs dropped. I’ll remember Shimon Alfassi who yelled, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them, all my life. Officers, the best soldiers in the brigade, of whom it was said of each and every one that one day he’d be the president of a state or a general, came to defend the seven or eight privates who were still alive, the shitheads who were retreating on orders.
The officers commanded by Nahum Arieli stood like a human avenue on both sides of the path, between charred buildings and amid an inferno of firing, and we passed between them as if on our way to the wedding canopy. Slowly, one after the other they were hit and fell and those left standing continued to cover us and at the same time went on firing at the attackers but also to die. With one eye I can see them shielding me as they fall like dominoes and I want to fire but I’m out of ammunition.
The black horde reached the upper slopes of the mountain by the sheikh’s house, and before they finished taking the mountain and killing the officers and us, they started brutalizing the bodies. Not all of us were fully dead and they began slashing the bleeding wounded with knives, and we’re running down the hill, not stopping, trying to fire at the slaughterers but unable to, and we reach the sheikh’s tomb down below, by the road to Jerusalem, and come under fire from the direction of Qaluniyya on the other side of the road, and suddenly we see that they’ve all halted. There’s a heavy silence. They stand over the bodies they’ve abused and start wailing. They’re standing over the line of bodies and they’re yelling and swaying like drunken dancers, and instead of taking the mountain that was already under their control, they suddenly became grief-stricken, we didn’t know what had happened to them, we saw our defenders who had been stabbed with daggers, bleeding and dying, and in their great victory the Arabs took flight between the bodies.
We’d already come down from the empty mountain, we’ve no idea what to do and our eyes are teary from the firing and we’re crawling, and then we reach Kiryat Anavim, and one of the officers there looks at the papers that one of us had taken from the pocket of Valentino with the kaffiyeh and the golden akal and says, Well I’ll be damned, it’s Abdel Khader al-Husseini. That elegant man had been the legendary commander of the Arab forces in the region since the 1930s and was the mufti’s cousin. That’s why, in great anguish at the man’s death, instead of taking the mountain that was already in their hands, they went back to Jerusalem to accompany their commander to his burial in a royal funeral attended by thousands.
Perhaps that moment, when we were all about to be killed and lose the most important hill strongpoint on the road to Jerusalem, in the war that Benny Marshak called the war for the six meters of the road leading to the city, perhaps it was that moment that changed the face of the war. We realized that you don’t leave a conquered village of strategic importance, and some guys from our battalion climbed the mountain quickly and blew up a few buildings. And now only Qaluniyya village was left, that most beautiful of the Land of Israel’s villages and the most pitiless, the village that controlled the seven bends of the road, where we had lost fighters and many of the convoys’ escorts. It was then decided, without too much thought, that a platoon should be left to guard the Castel. This was the second village, after our hilarious victory at Caesarea, which was taken in the war and became ours.