Gates Of Fire Battle

[Mandy Geise]

tevenPressfield's vivid and exciting novel takes its title from the battle site of Thermopylae, or ''hot gates.'' It was there, in the summer of 480 B.C., at a narrow pass between the mountains and the sea, that a small force of Greeks, led by the Spartans, managed to delay for three days the advance of a vast army of Persian invaders. The Greek force might have been able to hold off the Persians altogether if a Greek traitor had not led the invading army through the mountains and blocked the defenders' retreat. Virtually all the Spartans were killed. The battle might never have been remembered had the Persians succeeded in conquering Greece. But afterward the Greeks defeated the Persians, first in a naval battle at Salamis, and then in a full-scale land battle at Plataea, near Thebes.

A generation later, in his history of the Persian wars, Herodotus recognized that the battle of Thermopylae had lasting symbolic significance. It showed the Greeks that they could resist the Persians, since the Spartans, though hopelessly outnumbered, inflicted significant damage on their enemies. They also realized that the Spartans, in refusing to flee, had behaved like the great hero Achilles. In the ''Iliad,'' he stayed to fight at Troy, though he knew he would surely die.

Herodotus describes the setting and the general course of the battle, but he does not offer his audience a sense of what it was like actually to have been in the fighting, or describe the special training it took to practice the Spartans' style of warfare. Homeric heroes fought one-on-one, and approached the scene of battle in horse-drawn chariots. But the Spartans fought in groups, marching toward the enemy in a line, with spears protruding beneath overlapping shields. Each man depended upon his neighbor for protection, and fought not as an individual but as part of a battle line.

In ''Gates of Fire,'' Steven Pressfield gives the reader a perspective no ancient historian offers, a soldier's-eye view. The story is told by a witness to the battle, a refugee who has lost his home because his countrymen could not defend it. He leaves his one surviving relative, a young woman not much older than himself, to go to Sparta, because he wants to learn how to be a soldier. He is treated harshly, but ultimately with respect for his endurance and determination. He participates in the Spartans' war exercises and serves as an attendant to one of their leaders. In the end he volunteers to stay with them in Thermopylae, even after he has been given permission to return home. He survives the battle, but only long enough to dictate his account to a Persian historian.

With remarkable clarity Pressfield conveys what it was like to live at a time when everyone was unprotected outside of his or her community, and men with property were required to defend their cities against attack. He shows how the Spartans' rigorous and brutal training practices succeeded in making them the best soldiers in Greece, who would 50 years later defeat their rivals, the Athenians, in the Peloponnesian War.

Pressfield pays close attention to the ancient sources, and successfully imagines just how it was that men who loved their families and their homeland were prepared, then as now, to die in order to protect them. He understands the ancient Greek notions of honor, the fear ''not of death, but worse, of faltering or failing, of somehow proving unworthy in this, the ultimate hour.'' But he does not try to idealize war; on his battlefields there is far more misery than glory. He describes the blood and stench of carnage, and tells what it is like to lose a hand or die of a spear wound.

But ''Gates of Fire'' also shows how in the face of death a camaraderie born of shared suffering keeps men going despite their fear. Reading this fine novel, it is not hard to understand why warfare has proved to be one of the most enduring subjects of literature.

Thermopylae (called The Gates of Fire by Mimir and The Hot Gates by Kratos) is a place in Greece. It is famous for the great Battle of Thermopylae. Thermopylae was mentioned once in God of War Ragnark.

Thermopylae is a mountain pass that is dominated by the coastal floodplain of the Serpeichos River and surrounded by forested mountains made of limestone. There is a sediment deposition from the river and travertine deposits from hot springs which has altered the landscape for a few thousand years.

The meaning of Thermopylae is "hot gates", which is a reference to the present hot springs in the area. According to Greek Mythology, it is also where the entrance to Hades/The Underworld is located. In one mythical Greek tale, Thermopylae's waters became very hot after the Greek hero Hercules tried to cleanse himself off the Hydra venom that is poisoning him.

Thermopylae was mentioned when Mimir tells Kratos that he had heard of a great battle in his homeland, though he didn't say Thermopylae's name but refers to it as The Gates of Fire while Kratos corrects him by calling the place The Hot Gates. When Mimir asks him if he had even there, the Spartan tells him that he hadn't been to Thermopylae. Mimir wonders if Kratos has saying it to which the Spartan reveals he regretted not dying there for many years, but no longer.

Eventually, the ship came ashore near Kfar Vitkin, a few kilometers north of Tel Aviv. Men started to unload some of the arms, and on the shore, the former leaders of the Haganah (which had unsuccessfully hunted for Begin in order to turn him over to the British years earlier), now officers of the fledgling IDF, insisted that all the arms go to the IDF. Begin and his men insisted on sending some to the Irgun fighters. Begin saw it as a matter of saving Jerusalem and saving his men. Ben-Gurion and the IDF saw it as an insurrection, the Irgun insisting on its independence, refusing to be wrapped into the IDF.

There are not going to be two states and there are not going to be two armies. And Mr. Begin will not do whatever he feels like. We just need to decide whether to hand over power to Begin or to tell him to cease his separatist activities. If he does not give in, we shall open fire.

Begin had been in hiding for years prior to statehood, hiding from the British and those Jews would have happily turned him over to the British, so when rumors spread that Menachem Begin himself would soon be on the beach at Kfar Vitkin, the men who had served under his command but had never seen him in person left their units (remember, there was a cease-fire in place) to lay eyes on him. To Ben-Gurion, it seemed that they were abandoning their units and joining their former commander.

Today, seventy-three years to the day after Ben-Gurion ordered Rabin to sink the Altalena, and with Israel barely five weeks old, civil-war erupted but subsided, there are many possible takeaways. Here are just a few:

To get a sense of Israel, you have to imagine that some of the men who fought for George Washington or knew Paul Revere were still walking around the streets of Philadelphia. History has a very different weight here.

That David Ben-Gurion laid the foundation for this county is beyond doubt. Yet though he delighted in casting Begin as the terrorist and the radical, it was Begin, not Ben-Gurion (as Bruce Hoffman argues in Anonymous Soldiers) who got the British to leave. It was Begin, not Ben-Gurion or any other Labor party leader, who signed the first peace treaty with an Arab country. The country we have today, we have because of both Ben-Gurion and Begin, not despite either.

Sapir Ganz Eldar is a student at Shalem College, where I work. She comes from a settlement over the green line, is Orthodox, went to an all-girls religious high school, her father was opposed to her serving in the army (he wanted her to do National Service).... So we think we get the picture, right?

I have a distant cousin who lives in the Jezreel Valley in the north of Israel. In a few weeks, he\u2019ll be 99 years old, so we visit him as often as we can. A couple of years ago, when we went to visit, we brought him a copy of my biography of Menachem Begin.

He took the book, looked at it, made a face of disapproval, and asked, \u201CDid you know Begin?\u201D No, I admitted, I never met Begin. \u201CThen how did you write a book about him?\u201D, he asked more than a bit oppositionally. Well, I said, people still write biographies of Genghis Kahn and George Washington, don\u2019t they? He admitted that I had a point. But he still wasn\u2019t happy, and I wasn\u2019t sure why. \u201CSo, did you know Menachem Begin?\u201D, I asked him, anxious to change the subject and chiding him ever so gently.

Israel from the Inside is about, among other things, pointing to the sides of Israel less often seen outside its borders, so today, on the anniversary of the sinking of the Altalena, I want to try to upend both of those assumptions. The Altalena is the classic example of political violence initiated by the \u201Cleft\u201D, and related to the Altalena, far from the headlines, there are passionate and compelling voices calling for a very different future.

At two points in Israel\u2019s War of Independence, there were periods of cease-fire, during which neither side was allowed to import arms. Unbeknownst to Menachem Begin, who had led the Irgun (one of the underground paramilitary organizations in the period before Statehood), a fringe element of the Irgun based in the US had purchased a ship it named the Altalena (Altalena was Jabotinsky\u2019s nom de plume). The ship had sailed to France, was loaded with arms and some 940 immigrants headed to the new state; among their goals, they hoped that the arms would get to Begin and his Irgun men to help them defend Jerusalem (which ultimately fell to the Jordanians).

Begin knew nothing about the ship and found out about it only as it approached Israel\u2019s territorial waters. He ordered that the ship be told to turn around, but either because the wireless didn\u2019t work or because the captain ignored him (we don\u2019t know for sure), the ship continued to sail. Begin met with government officials, told them what had happened, and insisted that he had had no hand in sending the ship.

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