wounded can be left in the field. That is our responsibility. And we are determined to carry out this task at any price.
The last trip. Two seriously wounded in the jeep. They groan with every bump. But the road is full of holes - it has been bombarded the whole night. It is a miracle that nothing has hap-pened to the jeep.
Will the ceasefire come into force at seven o’clock or not?
We are lying in the new trenches. Unbelievable tension in the air. For eleven days the brigade has faced the enemy alone. Half of our company dead or wounded. We have taken part in two, three, four actions in twenty-four hours. Every one of us knows that if the fighting continues, it is just a question of days before one is hit oneself. We wait for the start of the ceasefire like the accused waiting for the verdict: life or death.
I have been talking about this and that with Shalom Cohen. Neither of us was really concentrating. Both of us kept looking at the time. The hands move very slowly. There - it is five to seven.
Suddenly wild shooting begins in the south-east, from the direction of Karatiyya. Nobody says a word. We just listen. If we hadn’t been told about the ceasefire, we wouldn’t be suffering so cruelly. We had become fatalists, indifferent. It was long ago that we stopped thinking about tomorrow. Nobody talks about what might happen in three days - that is much too far off in the future. But the talk about the ceasefire has really thrown us. Will we get out of here alive and healthy? Even if only this one time? The disappointment was crushing. Suddenly Aryeh Spack appeared. He is beaming fit to burst. The report has just come over the radio that the ceasefire has come into force.
It is seven in the evening. The shooting that started five minutes ago has stopped. The artillery on the southern front is silent.
They crawl out of their trenches, and the sun smiles on them from the west. They blink in the sunlight, which they haven’t seen for eleven days. They are dirty, their eyes are reddened, their clothes are torn and they are dog tired.