A Week of Agony: A Consul Is Murdered
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they ever answer in kind—with twenty-five pounders, or with
one-hundred-pound shells like those British shells which the
Arabs later rained on the residential quarters? Would the
ribbon of blood running down the street into the gutter ever
be cleaned up?
If only the Arabs had known how desperate was the plight,
how thinly stretched the fighting lines, how sparsely manned
the defenses, how limited the ammunition and supplies of
gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, and electricity, how meager the
food and water, how weary the defenders. If only they had
known how close they came to piercing the New City defenses. One time the Legion counterattacked, leading with its
tanks, followed by a long line of armored cars and troops, determined to recapture the important Notre Dame de France
compound, a bulwark of the Jewish defense. The Jews fired
a few rounds with their one anti-tank Piat, which had been
hurriedly borrowed from another front, Then the overworked
gun jammed! The Jews girded for the inevitable hand-to-hand
fighting. The Legion commander became suspicious of the
Jews' silence. Suspecting a trap on the narrow streets, he ordered a retreat. The Jews rubbed their eyes at the miracle.
That the New City was still in Israeli hands was due to default by the Arabs, no less than the prowess of the Jews; and
to what I firmly believe was divine intervention on scores of
occasions. If the Arabs had seized the initiative from the first
day and captured the strategic buildings, the outcome would
have been far different. The British contributed to the Arab
fiasco. They thought that the Legion, boasting British generalship and superior armor, would not only overrun the New
City, 'WBW6