Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“I fought at Acre,” Eliav said.

“What happened?” Cullinane asked.

“You ever read about the fall of Acre in 1291?” Tabari asked. “That time it was Mamelukes attacking and Christians defending. But the Christians were broken into about ten different autonomous groups: Venetians, Genoese, Templars, Hospitallers … This time it was Jews attacking and Arabs defending, and we were broken into four thousand groups.”

“Four thousand?” Cullinane asked.

“Yes. I’m the only general in history to command four thousand one-man armies. We had Iraqi Arabs who had slipped in for the kill. We had Lebanese Arabs who had come down to open shops as soon as we had won. We had some Egyptians, some Jordanians, a lot of Syrians, a few Arabians. I had Falastinian Arabs from Jerusalem who wouldn’t speak to the Arabs from Haifa, and I must have had about three thousand valiant tigers whose sole ambition was to loot Jewish stores. They were willing for the other Arabs to fight the Jews, but their job was looting.”

“Was it that bad?” Cullinane asked.

“Worse. Because on the ground floor of the caravanserai there was a thin, ugly, mean-tempered Arab whose uncle knew the Grand Mufti, which gave him peculiar powers, even over me. He had the key to the ammunition depots in the Crusader vaults, and he refused to hand out a single cartridge unless his uncle said it was all right, and his uncle refused to act unless he felt that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem would approve prove. He drove me mad. I’d plead for more ammunition … a raiding party … two hundred men. He’d refuse to issue it. One day I thought: I’ll shoot that ugly bastard and take his key; but he must have guessed what I was thinking, because he warned me: ‘Don’t think that you can get the ammo by shooting me. Because I keep the key hidden.’”

“What happened to him?”

“When the Jews approached the city as if they intended to fight, he jumped into a sailboat and fled to Beirut.”

“The key?”

“He took it with him.”

• • •

The Arab push on the afternoon of May 6 would have ended the Jews had it been followed that evening by a house-to-house mop-up, but for some reason which Gottesmann could not understand, at dusk the Arabs halted their advance, providing the Jews with time to regroup. But it was apparent that the defenders could not hold out much longer, for Mem-Mem Bar-El was exhausted and Gottesmann was near to falling apart. His nerve was quite gone, and Ilana wondered if he could last another day. Of the small command group only Nissim Bagdadi was in good shape, and he seemed to be living off his fat.

That night the Palmach held a gloomy meeting in Ilana’s house and the plans discussed were those of a prostrated remnant, courageous enough to go through the final motions but lacking the energy to devise any tactics other than wait and hold; and as they talked in the midnight hours they heard frightening sounds coming out of the wadi below the cemetery, and Gottesmann shivered. If the Arabs were launching then-final push, he’d have to go but …

Then voices were heard, as if the red-capped Iraqis and the white-robed Lions of Aleppo were cheering one another on for the kill, and petite Vered grabbed her submachine gun and pushed open the door. Through the starlit night the voices grew stronger. They came from people singing, men … women. Now even Gottesmann could hear the words, the defiant words in the night:“From Metulla to the Negev,

From the desert to the sea,

Every boy is bearing arms,

Every girl is standing guard.”

It was Vered who spoke first. “There must be hundreds.” She dashed from the room. Bagdadi followed her and Bar-El, finding a strength he thought had vanished.

“Come on, Gottesmann,” Ilana cried.

“Ill wait.”

“All right.” She left him sitting there, staring at the open door, and hurried to overtake the excited Jews running down the narrow streets toward the cemetery, but at the corner of the Vodzher synagogue she stopped dead and stood alone in the night. “It’s a trap!” she said. “They’re Arabs, and when we’ve gone down to meet them the others will attack across the stairs.” On the spot she turned, lowered her rifle and sped alone to the vital sector, but when she got there, ready to fire, she found nothing; for any would-be invaders were paralyzed by the sounds rising from the wadi.

Two hundred Palmach troops arrived that critical night and leading them came Teddy Reich to add a new dimension to the Jewish effort. Wiry, alert and charged with that intense fire that came from knowing there was no alternative—“We capture Safad or we’re pushed step by step into the sea”—he characterized the impassioned Jewish command as it was to operate for the next eight months. Dressed in faded khakis, with hand grenades hanging from his webbed belt and a revolver convenient to his right hand, he somehow managed to handle with his one arm a small Shmeisser submachine gun. His left sleeve he kept neatly pinned at the shoulder. He was a short man and his tense body seemed to have been transmuted into rock, for when he assembled the local leaders it required only his appearance to reassure them. “We’ve come to do a job,” he said.

After brief introductions of his lieutenants—“Gabbai, Zuchanski, Geldzenberg, Peled, Mizrachi”—he marched out to a night reconnaissance of Safad.

“These are the stairs,” the Mem-Mem explained. “Up there the concrete police station.”

“How many Arabs inside?”

“About four hundred.”

“Machine guns?”

“At least thirty. Left by the English.”

He moved swiftly to the other end of the Jewish holdings and pointed to the ominous stone house, three stories high with a flat roof. “Defended the same way?” he asked.

“Yes,” Bar-El nodded.

He then returned to the middle of the line and stood for some time looking up at the menacing Crusader ruins dominating the entire town; then he climbed to the roof of a Jewish house to view the most forbidding of all the Arab installations, the great fortress on the mountain back of town, built solidly by the English and impregnable. It had thick walls, abundant food and a sure supply of water. Looming out of the night this fortress was foreboding in a special way. It seemed so powerful, so unassailable by ordinary men. Gottesmann, trying to control his nerves, thought he heard even Teddy Reich gasp when he saw the monstrous thing.

If Reich did suffer shock at seeing the Arab positions, he hid the fact. “Back to headquarters,” he snapped, and in the quiet hours of the night he held a commanders’ meeting that none who attended would ever forget. Taking a steep-sided bowl he inverted it on the wooden table and said, “Men, this is what we face. The flat part is the Crusader hill. The flanks of the hill are divided into six parts. The Arabs hold five of these parts. We hold one.” Gottesmann closed his eyes. Somewhere he had heard those words before: “Stone house … cement police station … Crusader ruins.” Once someone had shoved such a bowl across a table and the sound echoed in his ears … echoed. He was about to shout something when the incredible words of Teddy Reich struck him.

“So,” the one-armed German said, “that being the case, what we shall do, as promptly as possible …” The wiry commander stopped, looked directly at each of his lieutenants, focusing at last on Gottesmann, to whom he said, “We’ll move out every man, every woman, and capture those three strongholds.”

“Capture?” Bar-El gasped.

“Yes. Up the hill. Across the Arab road. And we’ll smother each of the three points.”

Even the men he had brought with him were astounded and for a moment no one spoke. Then Bar-El pointed to the area above the bowl. “And what about the fortress? Up there?”