turn back and find our earlier tire tracks. It is easy to lose your direc-tion in this desert. I look at the time: fifty minutes to sunrise.
"Meirke" Davidsohn, the Operations Chief of the brigade, is still sitting by the radio. Apparently the people at HQ are not sleeping tonight. He urges us on. Later we hear that they all remained in the radio room till the last moment - the company commander, the bat-talion commander, and all of the officers of the brigade.
We race past the Bedouin camp, without incident. Onward. We make a wide detour around the abandoned truck. We would dearly like to blow it up, but it is too late. It will fall into the hands of the Egyptians. A pity.
Finally we find the road. No ambush here either. Luckily for us the Egyptians are very reluctant to leave their positions during the night. Strange for an army that is not at all bad in other respects. A first sil-very line on the horizon. There are the two trucks that broke down first. Blow them up? No. They may be recoverable later. We load what we can into the jeeps, until we have almost no room to move. But here we are safe from surprises. When it gets light we are some-where near Zeita. We look at each other and can’t help laughing. We look as though we have been rolled in flour. Everything is covered in the white dust of the Negev - the jeeps, our weapons, ourselves.
We break into song. The tension is gone. We are filled with an exaggerated cheerfulness, almost hysteria. As we approach Gat we can see the jeep of the company commander coming toward us. We know what he must be feeling - some pride and great j oy: we are back without losses.
We stop singing. And the battle cry of the Foxes spreads across the plane. A strange, wild rendering of the foxes’ natural cry: "Heiii, Haiii...!"
After we got back I was given twenty-four hours special leave, to notify the parents ofjochanan Silbermann. Not a pleasant duty. It was the first time that I had been in contact with the relatives of one of our fallen. It shook me. And for the first time I thought about what would be the best way to grieve for the dead of this war. How would I want to be mourned if I were to die tomorrow? In tearful hysteria or through an active strug-glefor definite ideals?
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