I look at the time. It is ten minutes to four. At four Rachel will give me two injections. Another ten minutes. Six hundred seconds, six hundred rasping breaths from the man in the next bed.
Will this night never end?
Six minutes ... In six minutes a battle can be decided. Dozens of people can die and hundreds be wounded. The jeep assault on Position 125. This engagement, decisive for the whole front, lasted less than six minutes. In these six minutes Nino’s parents lost their purpose in life, and Pinchas was crippled forever. In these six min-utes the lives of countless families were thrown off course. You could write a book about it - about the lives of these families. You would have to tell their life stories twice: the first time, how life would have been if these six minutes had not happened, and then, what actually happened. The young woman in Damietta1 will not marry the fallen captain, Pinchas will never again be Israeli champion in long-dis-tance running, and no one will ever sing the songs that Nino would have composed had he not fallen. And with the passage of time his fiancee will forget that she almost married a composer.
In every report of a battle the losses are listed: weapons, ammuni-tion, dead, wounded. But who records the real losses? The music that is not composed, the books that are not written, the achievements that are never made, and the discoveries that remain undiscovered - and all because someone, before they could achieve something, was hit by a bullet worth a few pence?
We talk about geniuses like Beethoven, Shakespeare, or Pasteur. How many Beethovens are lying in the graves of Verdun? Are the bones of a Curie mouldering on the slopes of Monte Cassino? Did a