Another is lying over there. Black face, mangled with knife cuts. Evidently one of those who did not run away, who made a last stand fighting with teeth and claws. What was it that made him prefer death to life? An order? His sense of honor?
There a young woman is lying. What is she doing here? Was she seeking pleasure, was she accompanying a young officer - and did she die because a bullet fired from a distance cannot distinguish between male and female? She looks lost among all the male corpses.
I turn my back on the dead. Five yards from here life is in full swing. Unshaved young men make jokes, examine captured
weapons, investigate the heavy Vickers. This Vickers, which caused many casualties in our own ranks, also saved many lives. When our comrades had just established themselves here and the Egyptian counter-attack began, an Egyptian prisoner showed our people how to use the weapon. And since there was plenty of ammunition, the heavy automatic weapon was immediately turned on its previous owners.
On the ground a booklet in Arabic. I try to decipher the title: Wasarat al-difa al-watani - the Art of War.
At a desk, in a world of words and ideas, perhaps war is an "art." Here it is brutal reality: life against life, fragments of steel that bore into living flesh, the whistle of approaching death, and foxholes for protection or for dying in.
On 22 October another ceasefire was announced. But we remained in our position atHuleiqat. We were sure that the enemy would violate the ceasefire to free his trapped forces.
In a brave and risky operation the enemy succeeded in escaping the siege without a fight. On a dark night their sappers laid wire nets over the soft sand of the beach at Beit Chanun. All their forces and their heavy weapons got out. Only along the road, between the police station of Iraq Suweidan and Iraq al-Manshiyya did a large unit of three thousand men remain behind, and held on without any chance of escape.
The losses of the big operation, which bore the name "the Ten Plagues, " were immense and particularly heavy in the ranks of the lower commanders. Brigade HQ gave the order for the course to be continued and speeded up.
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