Exodus - Leon Uris [163]
Ari was sound asleep in his tent.
“Ari ... come quickly.”
He threw off his blanket, grabbed his rifle, and ran after them to the south fields which were being terraced for grapevines. There was a gathering. Everyone turned silent as they saw Ari approach. He pushed through and stared at the ground. It was blood-spattered. Parts of a blue blouse were on the ground. A trail of blood led off to the hills. Ari looked from face to face. No one spoke.
“Dafna,” he whispered.
Two days later her body was dumped near their camp. Her ears, nose, and hands had been amputated. Her eyes had been gouged out. She had been raped over a hundred times.
No one saw Ari Ben Canaan weep or even raise his voice.
After Dafna’s murder he would disappear for hours at a time, returning chalky-faced and shaken. But he never displayed passion or hatred or even great anger. He never mentioned her name to anyone again. Ari accepted this tragedy in the same way that the Yishuv had learned to accept such things—not by being stirred to violence, but only by deepening his determination not to be thrown from the land. Ari Ben Canaan was all soldier. Half a dozen Arab villages near Ha Mishmar cringed and awaited a revenge attack—but it never came.
The Jews hung on at Ha Mishmar and at Tirat Tsvi and half a dozen other strategically placed settlements. The new tactic was hampering the Mufti’s revolt but not stopping it.
Into this hodgepodge came an English major named P. P. Malcolm.
Major P. P. Malcolm had been transferred to British intelligence in Jerusalem at the outbreak of the Mufti’s revolt. He was a loner. P.P. dressed sloppily and scorned military tradition. He thought protocol ridiculous. He was a man who could express his feelings openly and violently if need be, and he was also a man given to deep meditation for days on end, during which he might neither shave nor comb his hair. His periods of detachment came at odd times—even in the middle of the formal parades, which he hated and believed a waste of time. P. P. Malcolm had a tongue like a lash and never failed to startle those around him. He was eccentric and looked upon as an “off horse” by his fellow officers.
Physically P.P. was tall and thin and bony-faced and had a slight limp. He was, all told, everything that a British officer should not be.
When Malcolm arrived in Palestine he was pro-Arab because it was fashionable for the British officers to be pro-Arab. These sympathies did not last long. Within a short period of time P. P. Malcolm had turned into a fanatic Zionist.
Like most Christians who embrace Zionism, his brand was far more intense and rabid than a Jew’s. Malcolm learned Hebrew from a rabbi and spent every spare minute reading the Bible. He was certain it was in God’s scheme for the Jews to rise again as a nation. Malcolm made detailed studies of the Biblical military campaigns and of the tactics of Joshua, David, and especially Gideon, who was his personal idol. And finally—he became obsessed with the notion that his coming to Palestine had been divinely inspired.
He, P. P. Malcolm, had been chosen by God Himself to lead the children of Israel in their noble mission.
Malcolm drove around Palestine in a battered secondhand jalopy and he hiked on his gimpy leg where there were no roads. Malcolm visited every site of every battle of Biblical times to reconstruct the tactical events. Often Jew and Arab alike were stunned to see this strange creature limping along a road singing a Psalm at the top of his voice and oblivious to everything worldly.
It was often asked why the British command tolerated Malcolm. General Charles, the commander of Palestine, recognized quite simply that Malcolm was a genius and one of those rare types of military rebels who pops up every so often. Malcolm laughed at the British handbooks on war, had nothing but disdain for their strategy, and for the most part thought the entire British