When the girls in town read that we haven’t washed for two weeks, they find it romantic. If they could smell us, they would run away in disgust.
"And he smelleth the battle afar off..." it says in the Book of Job.2 Perhaps Job was once a soldier. Only someone with experience of the front could write such a pacifistic book. How else could he know that war stinks? The others see flashy uniforms in victory parades. That’s the way it has always been. The world hasn’t changed much since the days of Job.
"And he smelleth the battle afar off..."
* * *
The smell of powder, the king of the war smells, is a sweet perfume.
It is sometimes so prevalent that it covers whole areas: like at Ibdis and Negba. It is a loyal perfume that stays with you everywhere you are on the front. When this perfume reaches your nose, even if only on the shooting range, your nerves tense up and your stomach starts to contract.
When was the first time I met it? Perhaps it was when we fired thousands of rounds at the poor village of Dir Sumin, the first village we took by assault and whose inhabitants we expelled? No. I had smelt it already, two days before that action, on the shooting range, when we felt a rifle in our hands for the first time.
That was really a milestone in our lives. Our own rifle - the ulti-mate symbol for the reality of the "dream of generations." New rifles, well oiled, some of them still bearing the German swastika. The Czech factory had produced them for the Nazi army. It must have been a tremendous blow for the factory owner when Hitler killed himself before the rifles had been delivered and paid for.
Where did we hold our shooting practice? Up on the hill. The ground was covered in rifles, automatic weapons, and hand grenades. For the first time we really felt like soldiers. Squad after squad we were lined up to try out the new weapons, to feel them kick against our shoulders.
Israel, the company commander, who we met for the first time this morning, walked around showing us how to hold a rifle, how to aim. A good-looking young man he was, this Israel. A real soldier as if he had just jumped out of a recruiting poster. We, the green recruits, were very envious.