seventy-five miles per hour, but a second later we were at a standstill. We were all ready for it. But our passenger was not. He flew forwards and warmly embraced Freddy. The meeting of their skulls produced an interesting noise.
"Here you are," said Freddy.
"Actually I wanted to get out by that house over there."
"Certainly. Wait a moment," said Freddy politely.
"No! No! I’ll get out here!"
"Are you sure?" asked Freddy in a friendly tone.
"Yes. Completely. Thank you very much."
We laughed all the rest of the way.
The humor of the front was a cover for the reality, which was not in the least funny. The Negev was still cut off, and we knew that the fighting could start again at any moment. All our operations had been nothing more than preparations. At night we would set off, four or six of us, to check on the enemy lines. We crept past their positions, looking for their telephone cables, and tapped them if we found one.
* * *
Between these activities we had time to work through our impressions. We sat on the balcony of our "castle" and talked. Never before had we had the time to talk about serious matters: our relations with Army HQ, the point of the war, our plans for the time after...
11 August 1948
Jassir
After the war...
"If I am still alive at the end of the war ..." said Yaakov Malishewitz with the faint smile of a daydream spreading across his face. The eter-nal theme of the frontline soldier, like Erich Maria Remarque’s sol-diers sitting in their trenches on the Western Front, or the Desert Foxes of the Second World War. Today it is we who are sitting in an Arab house full of fleas, in a miserable, deserted village on the Southern Front.
"If I am still alive ..." with the stress on the "If." Like every front-line soldier, Yaakov is certain, absolutely certain, that nothing is going to happen to him, of all people. But his brain tells him that