They run for their life, leaving field guns, PIATs, machine guns, and ammunition behind - and the dead.
* * *
The next morning the artillery along the whole front is quiet. Without understanding how it happened, everyone between Gal’on and Julis knows the tables have been turned. Something big has happened. Time for a moment’s pause. The units need a rest. There is not a single company that is still fit for battle. The people who are still alive need a break.
But the commander, who is just as tired as all the others, knows that this is not the time to take it easy. Now we have to attack, attack, attack. Give the enemy no rest, no chance to reorganize, to recover from that blow. The commander asks his battalion commanders. And they, ready to drop, answer: Yes!
Again they are bending over maps, marking, drawing, calculating. Fingers follow lines on the map and come to a halt at one point: BeitAffa.
The talks are over. Then the commander mentions a small detail: yes-terday, on the third day of the battle for Ibdis, members of the General Staff visited the front: General Yigael Yadin,2 the Chief of the Operations Department of the General Staff, and Israel Galilif the man whose name had been synonymous with the Haganah, who uttered the sentence that went down in history: "Your ranks are fairly thin. But your spirit fills the gaps. "
* * *
13 July, six o’clock in the evening. A company of infantry, which has been in action every night for the last five nights and which yesterday attacked Hill 105, gets ready for the attack on BeitAffa. The soldiers are making the last preparations.
Next to the battle HQ, near the front, two men are standing. One is blond, with a hooked nose and gray-blue eyes, and the other, his deputy, has brown hair, lively eyes, and an athletic build. They know their responsibility - the responsibility for the state on whose behalf they are at this place. For a short moment everything depends on them, on their command. They give the command: attack! And although this one engagement is not particularly important, it is a historic command. For, this night, the initiative on the southern front has come into Israeli hands - to remain there. The danger to the Israeli state from the largest and strongest Arab army has been deflected. Tel Aviv is no longer threatened.