— Perhaps, Colonel, I have availed myself of poetic license. But it’s quite justified to explain our captain’s enthusiasm when, on that morning of the first of November, he was approached by Mr. Mani, unshaven and wearing his black suit that was wrinkled from a sleepless night. Mani surveyed our captain, who had just finished circumambulating a horse and was now whistling to it in Scots while waiting for it to drop its turds; looked at the quaking interpreters making gargling noises with their tongues; observed the disheartened Bedouin, who were already resigned to the loss of their mounts; quietly took a few steps forward as his eyes bore into the uniforms, weapons, and bridles of the soldiers, who were the first Englishmen he had ever seen out of mufti; and then opened his mouth and in his best School-of-Bible Scots brogue translated for the captain with utter proficiency an entire discourse on equinology. Little wonder, then, that by late that afternoon Mr. Mani was already well tied to a commandeered horse with which he seemed to form a single creature, surrounded by British cavalry and in a place of honor beside the captain, who regarded him as his personal and heaven-sent savior. That evening in Beersheba he was brought to the house of the Turkish governor, above which the Union Jack was already flying; and there, sir, if I may be permitted a personal note, as I was going about my duty with the adjutants of the brigade, which included packing Turkish documents in boxes, identifying the dead, and covering the wounded so that they might finish dying quietly in the light of the desert sunset; there, among the shying-back horses, I caught my first glimpse of him, freshly untied from his mount: pale, exhausted, old-looking, treading on slivers of glass and empty Turkish cartridges that glowed in the waning sun as he climbed the steps to the governor’s house; unlike any Englishman, unlike any Jew, unlike any Arab or Turk, unlike anyone at all, even though he was more of a native than any of them. Was he already thinking of treachery?
— It was the first of November, sir — 1917, sir.
— Yes, Colonel.
— No, Colonel.
— Most certainly, Colonel.
— Not yet, sir. From that moment on he became the chief divisional interpreter, and since he could palaver a bit in Turkish too, he soon made himself indispensable. And yet, so he says, the thought of treachery had yet to sprout in him, for the cold, bare kernel that had worked its way into the dark, dry earth still lacked the stimulation of moisture.
— Yes, sir. That’s how he put it during one of his interrogation sessions. And that was why he didn’t reach for the British passport sewn into the lining of his coat, but rather sardonically told himself, “Aye, the foreigners have come to replace the foreigners.” His mind, sir, was not yet made up. He was still watching silently from the sidelines, trying to puzzle out our intentions. Gaza was ours; the breakthrough was a success; our butting bull, Sir Edmund, spurred the army on northward along the coast, through the fields of Philistia, over sand dunes and swamps, urging it on to Jerusalem in time to make a Christmas gift of the city to Lloyd George and John Bull, because London was famished for a victory that might help it get over the endless slaughter at Verdun, the war being now in its fourth outcomeless winter. Was this the moisture that made the kernel sprout?
— No, sir. At first he was the personal prisoner of the old Scotsman, who hid him in his trailer and ranged back and forth with him between Beersheba and Gaza, looking for his dream horse. By now, though, all of army intelligence had heard of him; and so they commandeered him from old Daggett and put him to work as a translator while the interpreters tagged after him to learn and to marvel; for he was indeed most wonderfully adept at it: the words seemed to translate themselves without even passing through his brain, changing languages in midair, changing grammar, changing intonation, so that the speaker felt that quite miraculously, the unknown language was coming out of his own throat… Meanwhile, the army flowed like a mighty river up the coast, crumbling the Turkish positions, which were as weak as the sand surrounding them, one after another; one after another, the villages surrendered too; and wherever they went, the military governors took Mani with them to translate their proclamations. Picture him if you can, sir, in our midst, a thin, quiet civilian with glasses and burning eyes; wrapped in his father’s already threadbare overcoat and still in shock from the sudden change; cut off from his son and household with no way of informing them of his whereabouts — and yet at the same time, getting to know his native land, even if he was tied to his horse, because he was still in the habit of falling off. There wasn’t a village too small or out-of-the-way for him to be brought to, sometimes no more than a few mud huts and tents; and there he would stand, a ruddy little civilian surrounded by officers with their riding crops under their arms, translating their proclamations of occupation and their instructions for curfews to a band of ignorant Arab darkies in peasant cloaks and head cloths — and mind you, doing it so fast that the translation was done before the words were out of the officer’s mouth, so that they seemed less a translation than a little speech cooked up on his own whose meaning no one could be sure of. In fact, sir, he might have been taken not so much for an interpreter as for a glum little commissar popping up out of the earth with a military escort to explain the war to the villagers. He would look out at all those Arab faces positively glowing with attention, straining to catch a whiff of the young Jew in his old overcoat surrounded by his train of Englishmen; if the village headsman had a question, he would answer quite firmly at once, adding “It doesn’t matter” to any officer wishing to know what had been asked; and if the officer insisted, “But be sure to tell them such-and-such,” he would reply, “I’ve told them all that’s necessary” and give the sign to move on; and off they went to the next village…
— Oh, but he was, sir, he was every bit the martinet. You would have thought the officers were actually afraid of him… at which point, on the twentieth of November, as Allenby was pushing east toward Jerusalem, he stepped into staff headquarters one night and discovered on the table a telegram from London with news of Lord Balfour’s declaration, which quite bowled him over…
— So I should think, sir. It was in the form of a short personal correspondence written by Lord Balfour himself. I’ve attached it to the brief, just for the record.
— Thrown for a loop by it, sir. He had never expected such a development, you see, and here he was, having been away from home for three weeks, and especially, from his son, whom he was terribly attached to, rolling helplessly along with the British juggernaut thundering across the Holy Land — and all of a sudden, here was this most wonderfully generous proclamation of intent that he had not at all foreseen, although in all fairness, no one else had either. He couldn’t sleep at night; the thought of returning to Jerusalem made his blood race; he rose from his bed and roamed about among the horses and the cannon; the rains had set in and cold winds blew; Allenby’s army crept slowly up into the mountains of Judea; his father’s old overcoat came apart and he was given an army greatcoat and high boots; and before he knew it, he was in the front lines, wearing a strange mishmash of mufti and field uniform, peering through binoculars at forward positions and utterly amazed by the thought that less than a month ago he had surreptitiously set out southward from his native city — and now here he was, about to reenter it from the west with the forces of the world’s greatest empire! On the sixth of December, Colonel, he found himself with the infantry in Nebi Samwil, where a fierce skirmish took place, gazing down upon Jerusalem, which struck him as frightfully small, frightfully stubborn and hostile. On the ninth, as you know, the city was taken, and two days later Sir Edmund entered it on foot with his columns behind him. The church bells clanged away; the city elders came out to greet him with bread and salt; our defendant marched into the city with the conquerors, one of a kind among the bagpipes and Aussie hats, peering feverishly at the onlookers; and then, near the Jaffa Gate, he right-faced all on his own and slipped away home, where he arrived as though after a hard day’s work and took straight to the quilts and the pillows with his son. For a week he didn’t leave the house; he had no friends to tell his adventures to, nor did he say much to his wife; mostly he stared at the windowpane, down which the rain ran in rivers, listening to the boom of the field artillery as Colonel Chatwood beat back a Turkish counterattack and pushed his front line to Ramallah.