With the Arabs in Jerusalem
233
which had just been brought in. From then on I followed
Moustafa like a shadow.
It was dusk when we decided to call it a day. Arabs usually
retired from fighting after sundown, and expected the Jews to
do the same. The Jews, however, did the opposite. The
Haganah did its best work undeT cover of darkness. Sneaking
unseen upon the enemy, it combined daring with the element
of total surprise and usually succeeded in terrifying the Arabs.
Another advantage of night attack was that the darkness hid
the numbers of the woefully small—though superbly trained
—Jewish units. Under these conditions events proved that one
inspired Haganah commando was easily worth ten average
Arabs.
This was true here too. For by nightfall the Jews had captured the strategic heights of Katamon and our Holy Warriors had clambered into trucks and rolled back to Deir
Aboutor in the silence and gloom of defeat. Later, from Deir
Aboutor, we heard the muffled blasting of Jewish sappers as
they moved forward consolidating their positions. In the
Monastery of St. Simeon, Jews found instructions in German
as well as Arabic, a wholly reasonable discovery in view of
Iraq's history during World War II. (See Chapter XXII).
The following morning Moustafa took me aside.
"Artour," he said. "You remember Hamid Sharkaf?"
I remembered Hamid Sharkaf. I knew him as John Kenny,
a twenty-one-year-old boy from Glasgow, with red cheeks and
an ever present smile. Before he deserted from the British
army on the Arab promise of £15 a month, he had been attached to the Royal Engineers. His specialty was mine-laying
and demolition-bomb-making; he also taught the Arabs how
to use their British machine-guns. "Hamid Sharkaf" was the
name he had taken among the Arabs, after the fashion of many
of the British deserters.
"He is dead," Moustafa said, genuinely sorry.
"How did he die?"