Back at camp, I was requested, with all due politeness, to accom-pany two battalion policemen - and the gates of the "Calabush"7 closed behind me.
In battalion jail
Intermezzo in the Calabush
In the memoirs of former prisoners one reads about that terrible moment: you enter the cell, the door slams behind you ... I had no such feelings of fear. When I entered the Calabush I was greeted with a cheer - from my comrades, who were in here for the same misdemeanor: absence without leave. Those who are used to sleeping in a soft bed, with clean bedclothes, won’t regard the Calabush as a high-class residence. But anyone who has slept in flea-infested Arab villages will find the Calabush a pleasant place to stay.
My "more experienced" comrades showed me around. Up on the wall was a long screed: "Here vegetate the prisoners of Zion: the mor-tar man Yitzhak P., the machine gunner Moshe A., the scout David M., the conquerors of Qubab, the heroes of Latrun, the liberators of Jerusalem..."
Time passes. We get hungry. The military policemen bring us food. We eat and drink and amuse ourselves at their expense. We call them military waiters.
We lie on our backs in contentment. After a few hours visiting Tel Aviv, you return in a good mood. Only if you spend two or three days there and find out what’s really going on, if you meet old friends who are making a military career for themselves behind the lines, then you come back in a bad mood, depressed and annoyed.
We belong to different units, but we are all veterans. Each one of us has lived through at least a dozen battles. And without noticing it, we begin to discuss strategy. There is hardly a better place than the Calabush for concentrated thinking. In the unit there is no time for such discussions.
It is late. We talk quietly so as not to disturb the sleeping guards. We cover a wide range of subjects and discuss the questions that really concern us. When will the war be over? Are we really doing