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“A few of the kibbutzim have been over-run or by-passed, but the main points are holding up. Jerusalem seems the toughest place. How long before the great powers step in and order a truce?”

David bit his lip. “I don’t know; but we mustn’t cede a lot of ground, for the arbiters are likely to work on the ‘finders-keepers’ principle when the truce does come.”

“David,” said Peterson, “I’m worried about the men from the mountains.”

He shrugged. Peterson wrinkled her nose aggrievedly and said:

“You yourself say that it would take over an hour to concentrate them in the field to help us… Are you confident we could hold out an hour under sudden attack?”

David threw her a keen look and grinned. “Good Lord, yes,” he said. “And we can count on Aaron…

Peterson shook her head doubtfully. “If they brought tanks and rushed our wretched perimeter…

David walked up and down. “They couldn’t; first we’d get a warning from Karam up at the mill. Then, if they did, we have a number of gentlemen among us who have dealt very efficiently with Tigers and Centurions and would certainly not be above doing in half a dozen tanks of an older pattern, which I believe is all they have…

“Well, it’s your war,” said Peterson. “Let me know if I can do any thinking for you.”

“I will,” he said with a grin. “Meanwhile, business as usual please.”

So it was that the community life of Ras Shamir appeared to continue with perfect normality; from the viewpoint of a watcher on those rosy cliffs above the valley, there would have been nothing untoward to report. The tractors went out as usual with their armed drivers of both sexes; from the sawmill came the whine and whir of the saws cutting up timber; a team of brawny Swedes, scythes in hand, cut a circular swathe in the green of a square field, moving steadily forward and round in a slow arc. The British had rumbled away from the mountain ravines. The valley, with its small communities of Jews, lay at the mercy of any invader strong enough to wrest it from them. Yet there was only silence, heat and the drowsy hum of bees among the clover.

David did not quit his observation post; he had food sent up to the roof from which he watched, his face turned now towards the northeast range. Once a solitary plane passed over them — a bi-plane; but they could not tell if it was a spotter sent by the Arab forces or the British. The sun was hot; the concrete floor of the look-out post was baking. From somewhere down among the green trees came the oddly reassuring sound of someone snoring, which made the sentries laugh.

The hours wore on, and still there was no sign from the guard post at the head springs, and no visible movement along the escarpment. Only once or twice they heard a new sound, an echoing, snarling sound of motors revving up. David’s face grew grave as he listened with his head on one side. The sentries stiffened at their posts, listening.

“What do you make of that?” said David, but he knew only too well. Tank engines!

For about half an hour they listened to that ominous roaring and rasping of invisible tanks moving about somewhere behind the rosy bluffs of the eastern chain. Finally the sound died away, as if swallowed by a ravine, and silence returned to the valley. But there was still no movement, nothing to be seen. Clouds began to form under the sun and its attenuated light began to change the green valley from emerald to rose-violet.

So much for the heliograph — it was out of action without sun. David thanked God for the kindly Macdonald’s gift of Verey lights and signal pistols. Up to now they signalled to the mountain kibbutzim only by torchlight — a clumsy method at best, and always with the danger of the Morse signals being miscoded or misread. Now at least they had naval flares, red, white and green, at their disposal.

Thinking these thoughts, he had turned his eyes to where the string of little white settlements dotted the mountains westward — kibbutzim with the half-joking nicknames that their inhabitants had earned for them — Brisbane, Brooklyn, Odessa, Calcutta, Warsaw, Glasgow…

Beside him he heard a gasp of horror. One of the sentries was peering through his heavy Zeiss night-glasses — peering in the direction of the head springs where the mill stood, their outpost.

“My God,” he said, “I can’t believe it.”

His hands were shaking so that he nearly dropped the glasses.

“What is it!” cried David sharply, snatching the instrument from him. He too turned the lenses on the northern corner where the Jordan, spinning out from the rock wall, fanned smoothly out into a wide green stream, pouring down the rich, lily-dappled meadows. Something was moving there on the river, something heavy which moved with a slow, halting rhythm — as if uncertain of its direction; something which turned slowly as it moved down towards them. He too caught his breath now as he focussed sharply on it…

The clumsy cross-beam of the water-mill must have been crudely sawn off to make a shape which was that of a Christian cross; there was a human figure crucified to it with bayonets. Naked, its side had been pierced so that blood dappled the white flesh and flowed down in a wave to its toes. It took some moments to realize that it was the body of Karam, and that the apparently beatific smile on the old man’s face was really a rictus of intense pain. It was impossible to tell if he were dead or not. Slowly, hoveringly, the heavy cross moved down towards Ras Shamir, grazing the banks of the Jordan, turning and spinning swiftly in its own eddies.

“Run,” said David in a voice choking with anger. “It must not reach the camp. Run I say!”

Hardly comprehending what or why, the two sentries followed the one who had himself seen the thing first. They dropped their guns and raced like hares across the fields towards the river, to head off this grim trophy of hate.

David gave a harsh sob. “They must have surprised them,” he said. “How could Towers allow… (Of course Towers knew nothing of it — it was Daud who lightened the boredom and loneliness of his illness with that original notion.)

David’s glasses swept the nearer reaches of the river where the three men, up to their waists in water, grappled with the cross and its body, steering it to land; then there was no time for any thought other than the kibbutz and its danger.

It was only when the first ripple of machine-gun fire fell like hail on the corrugated roofs that he gave a sigh of exultation, almost of relief. At long last the final decisive engagement was to take place. Though the kibbutz was now a hive of unfamiliar activity, nevertheless there was no suggestion of haste or panic as the kibbutzniks moved each to his appointed place in the shallow emplacements which the tractors had ploughed for them, and which they had surrounded with a shallow defensive field of barbed wire.

On the calm evening air, David could hear the voices of the section leaders as they ordered their files into position along the perimeter: women and men took their places in the front line, training their weapons. Down by the sawmill there came the clatter of machinery, and it was with a splendid roar that the farm tractors now crawled out to take their place in the defensive scheme. Upon each was mounted one of the cherished light machine guns bequeathed to them by the kindly Macdonald.

In all this activity, Grete played no part. She had been forced to accept, much against her will, the role of children’s warden. Indeed, she had come near to an acrimonious exchange with Anna over the business, so anxious had she been to share the front-line dangers of David and the men. But there were not enough guns to go around as it was, and Peterson herself had settled the argument abruptly by saying:

“There are so many more important things to do. Stop being childish and do as you’re told. Your place is with the children.”