"Good Thing, This Cease-Fire"

By the middle of last week, 791 Swedes, Finns, Irishmen and Austrians from the United Nations peace-keeping force in Cyprus had picked their way through heavily mined areas to positions between the Egyptian and Israeli armies along the Suez Canal. The first and most difficult objective of this vanguard of what is expected to be a 7,000-man United Nations Emergency Force was to locate the cease-fire line on the west bank of the Suez Canal. Last week TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin visited the U.N. forces and sent this report:

Just north of Great Bitter Lake, a U.N. station wagon drove up to a military police checkpoint. Vast clouds of dust, churned up by tank trailers, had all but obscured the "U.N." that had been painted on the once white vehicle. An Irish officer in a powder-blue beret shook his head. "How can we fix the lines as they were on Oct. 22 [the day of the first Security Council truce]? None of us were here then. We don't know where the parties were, and you can't believe either side. Our business now is to try to keep it from starting up again."

Before the war began, the captain had been stationed at one of the U.N. observer posts along the canal. "Now my post is mobile," he said with a grin. "We have six patrols moving up and down the canal." In the back of the vehicle were a couple of days' rations of food and water, and bedding for him and two fellow officers.

Fruit and Cologne. About 20 miles inside Egypt on a barren ridge, we passed an unshaven Israeli artillery sergeant sitting in a ditch eating sardines and fresh tomatoes. "Good thing, this cease-fire," he said. "Just so it doesn't cease." On a parallel road to the south, a grisly Israeli soldier flagged us down. The smell of corpses was heavy in the air. Just beyond us was Kilometer 101, where Israeli and Egyptian generals had met under the protective cloak of the U.N. An Israeli officer told us: "Both sides want this cease-fire to work. The other day an Egyptian general turned over to us some of his own men who had sneaked through our lines because he feared that the arrangements for supplying the Third Army would break down if he didn't."

Relations between the Israelis and the Egyptians at Kilometer 101 were described by a U.N. man as "good." At that point in the wilderness, the trucks carrying relief supplies for the remnant of the Third Army, which is surrounded on the east bank, move into Israeli-held territory. We saw an example of the little courtesies that hostile army officers sometimes allow one another when battles have ended. An Israeli officer passed out some fresh fruit; an Egyptian reciprocated with eau de cologne. The Egyptian told his Israeli counterpart: "Since no one really knows who won this war, the chances for peace are much better than ever." The Israeli nodded.

Sand-colored five-ton Egyptian trucks with relief supplies from Cairo for the Third Army lumbered past Kilometer 101 into Israeli-held territory in the direction of the city of Suez. The drivers were U.N. noncommissioned officers. About ten miles north of Suez, a truck with cartons of food and cigarettes had arrived at U.N. observation post Kilo--a collection of whitewashed shacks on the edge of the canal. There we talked with Vienna-born Joseph Nekhan, 27, a first lieutenant in an Austrian tank battalion who had been seconded to the U.N. Emergency Force. Below him, Egyptian soldiers in beige work clothes carried cartons from the trucks to a makeshift wharf. Israeli officers spot-checked the boxes for contraband by occasionally ripping open a package of sweets or a carton of cigarettes. The Egyptians then put the cartons on Russian-made amphibious tanks that churned slowly across the canal to the east side where they were unloaded. The process was slow and laborious.

"It's going much better now," said Nekhan. "When we came here on Sunday with the first truck, we were not sure how to make contact with the Egyptians across the canal. So we raised our U.N. flag, took a bullhorn and started calling them in English, Russian, German, Arabic and French. We got no response until we spoke in French. We shouted. This is the U.N. We have supplies to deliver. We have water for you.' When we said water in French we got a reply. That was the key word.

"My orders," said the lieutenant, "are to keep things going. Only if there is a dispute do I try to help. The other night there was some shooting near by from the Arab side. The Egyptians were disturbed because the Israelis kept shooting flares over the positions all night. We got them both to stop."

"Peace Boulevard." The mood was starkly different in Suez itself. The Israelis hold three quarters of the port city. The residential quarters remain in Egyptian hands, but the port, the oil refineries and the suburbs are occupied by Israeli troops. On all the main boulevards leading from Ismailia down into the port city, there was evidence of bitter fighting. Whole blocks of apartment buildings have been destroyed. Many of them still contained bodies. Part way down the main street, now nicknamed "Peace Boulevard," two burned-out Egyptian trucks blocked the road. On one side were Israeli troops, some of them carrying captured Russian-made Kalashnikov rifles. Twenty yards across the street were Egyptians, some of them with captured Uzi submachine guns from Israel. The troops on either side leered at one another but so far had made no move to shoot.

At a point exactly midway between the two sides in the street, U.N. observers had set up a table. "No one goes beyond this table except us," said a U.N. officer. Three Finnish soldiers wearing newly painted blue helmets and carrying Belgian FN rifles marched stiffly up and down. Overhead, an Israeli Mirage appeared and swiftly disappeared. Two Egyptian missiles fired and missed, leaving white puffs of smoke in the cloudless azure sky.

So far, the U.N. men have had little more to do than report violations and arrange "local agreements." Said the officer: "In one spot some Arabs tried to move forward, and the Israelis threatened to shoot. But the Arabs merely wanted to remove some dead bodies. When we explained it to the Israelis, they permitted it. We've been able to help Arab farmers get some stray cattle back across the lines. And we've caught local commanders trying to improve the lines. On the whole, both sides are cooperating."

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