Back in our lines the Colonel came out to congratulate us on the success of the venture but for the first time I found praise hard to swallow. I was nearly rude to him. When my brother officers wanted to celebrate my first mention in despatches I could hardly force myself to drink with them.
And so it went on. I got better and better at killing. In particular I was so good at the kind of raid I have described that I was taken away from my battalion and set to plan and lead raids further and deeper behind the enemy lines. I came back each time impatient of offers of leave and rest, asking only to be kept active and employed. I volunteered for every difficult and hazardous operation. For more than a year I was continuously engaged either on operations against the enemy or busy preparing them. I gave myself no time for anything except war, hoping thereby to escape from my shadows, but they were too adroit for me. After waking, in the midst of battle, in the faces of men fixing their bayonets behind a sand dune, in the mindless sound of the cry as they charged, in the sight of the enemy, caught in our concealed fire, wheeling like springbok, or at the sight of a peasant woman sitting with her child by the smouldering ruin of her home, right through the gateway of my deepest sleep and in the heart of my most tender dreams the shadows followed deftly swishing and fluttering their long skirts as they passed. I do not know where it would have ended if, despite all my resistances, I had not been suddenly ordered out of the desert and sent on a special mission to Palestine.
5 ‘The Day Far Spent’
I HAVE OFTEN been overawed in the silences of a sleepless night by the thought of the precision with which chance and circumstance work in human lives. They will contrive, for instance, that a person such as a Maori I knew should be born on the other side of the world just in time to meet a German bullet in his forehead thirty years later in a Libyan desert, while I, who was leading him, was delivered with as nice a calculation. But of the many imposing expositions I have witnessed of the working of these precision instruments of life none struck me as so subtle as those which took me to Palestine. I went against my will and yet no assignment could have fitted more neatly into the jig-saw pattern of my desperation than this posting to Palestine. I found myself stationed at a monastery called Imwash. The monks had moved out only a few days before to their parent monastery a mile or so back at a place called Latrun. There was still a smell as of frankincense and myrrh from their centuries of occupation hanging about the cool corridors and the grey stone halls when I moved in with my band of cut-throats.
For some weeks I and other men younger than I but with even older faces, taught these desperate characters the kind of killing and clandestine warfare in which we had become specialists. They were a strange lot, all with their own idea and aptitude for killing. For instance the best shot among them was a boy with a squint and a contortionist’s body who had had a Jewish father and an Arab mother and who aimed his gun with his right eye from his left shoulder. In him, as in them all, the normal proportions seemed inverted with a macabre logic to serve all the better their mission of death. In the mornings I marched them out and taught them how to handle explosives, lay booby traps, set time-fuses and delayed action bombs, together with unarmed combat and other tricks of silent killing. In the afternoons I lectured them out of my experience and tried to make their imaginations at home in the background against which they would have to do their work. At night I would take them out into the hills behind the monastery and play at stalking human game in the deep gullies, wadis, orchards of olives and fig trees on their terraced slopes. Usually between lectures and night manoeuvres I would march them out before sunset to watch the time-fuses and delayed charges that we had set in the morning, explode. The dust of the explosions would hang golden between us and the sinking sun in the still air. I had always thought our African high-veld light was the purest in the world. I was wrong. There is nothing so lovely as the autumnal evening light in Palestine. I remember on the first evening standing there apart from my soldiers looking beyond the dust to the olive trees, figs, vineyards and slender cypresses, feeling the explosions still reeling in my senses, and thinking that this was a strange way to treat a holy land. Once the feeling was sharpened almost unendurably by the sight of a lone gazelle, one of the loveliest of the lean buck of the Palestinian hills, startled by the sounds and leaping high on a crest of purple hill, just as Stompie had once done in the great plain behind the prehistoric hills at home. Oh, it was ever-present, this prick of memory which had been tempered like a surgeon’s needle in the general nightmare of betrayal in my being. I would be grateful, then, for the odd charge which had not exploded and the duty which compelled me to go and examine it, because, as Commanding Officer, it was I who had to execute this most dangerous of all tasks in our training mission.
One evening, so still and clear that the light standing brimful between the hills around us was like crystal water and the slight air of evening sent a faint but rhythmical tremble through it like the tail of a fish in a clear mountain pool, I was counting the explosions, thus, and felt almost relieved to find that one had failed. I was closing in on it fast when it went off and a rock the size of a rugger ball just missed my head. As the dust and shock cleared from my eyes I saw sitting on a boulder some two hundred yards away a civilian who had no business to be there at all. I went over to him quickly. He was a monk but despite his priest’s clothes I spoke to him sternly, so relieved was I to find an outlet for the mixed emotions of shock and chagrin within me. He was a tall, middle-aged man with a slight stoop, yellow hair that was closely cropped and a pair of fine blue eyes in a wide forehead. He was heavily bearded as well and as a result the only light in his face came from his eyes and brow.
He listened to me patiently and at the end said in English with a German accent: ‘I am sorry if I have done anything wrong, sir, and give you concern. But for many years now long before our superiors in Jerusalem handed over our monastery to the military for “thirty pieces of silver” I have come here every evening to look both at it and the view. You need not be afraid I’ll do anything stupid. I know all about explosives. I too have been a service man once. But I’ll not come here again if you forbid it.’
With that he turned as if to go to where the greater monastery sat snugly a mile away below a hill securely tucked in behind screens of flickering cypress, glistening olive trees and wide autumnal vineyards of gold. However, his manner had made such an impression on me that I asked in a more conciliatory tone: ‘You say you have been a service man too? How, when and where?’
He turned round at once and said slowly: ‘I was a German submarine officer in the ’14–’18 war.’
‘And in this?’ I asked beginning again to feel aggressive.
But he was impervious to the change of tone and said, ‘I became a monk in 1919 and have been here in the Holy Land ever since.’
He paused and we stood there looking at each other.
He broke out of the silence first and asked: ‘Do you think you could possibly tell me how the war is going?’
I started, willingly enough, to give him the latest war news without realizing that I was on the wrong track.
He interrupted me again, saying: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that war. I meant your war.’
‘And your country’s too,’ I answered sharply, thinking that, like many Germans, he was disclaiming responsibility for it.