...In truth, thirst, not Arabs, was our foe that day. I was delegated as a water-carrier with another fellow, lugging drink from a distant well for the diggers. The other fellow was a Holocaust survivor named Leopold Mahler, grand-nephew of the composer, and himself a violinist. Mahler was a craggy, disillusioned sort whose most cherished possession was his violin, which he carried strapped into a knapsack on his back.

With the mountainside cisterns contaminated, the nearest water was in an abandoned orchard a mile away. To get to it we had to run a snipers' gauntlet, up a steep zigzag path to the crest of the mountain, and then sprint down to the orchard on the other side. There, in the shade of the trees, was the well, its water murky but cool. We hauled it back in jerry cans, two to a man. And the only way to drink it was through a handkerchief so as not to swallow the bugs.

Clambering up the zigzag path on that late Friday afternoon, a sniper's bullet whistled past Mahler's face and sliced clean through a tree branch as thick as salami, just above his head. With a brittle crack, the severed bough struck his violin case so sharply it forced him to his knees. He looked up at me dazed. "My violin," he gulped. "It's shattered. I'm finished."

I GRABBED him by the shoulders and exhorted him to pull himself together. But he pushed me off, raised himself onto a rock, unstrapped the knapsack, and very gently pulled out his wooden violin case. It was cracked. Cautiously, he opened the lid and lifted out the instrument, turning it this way and that, sliding his eyes very slowly over every inch of it. To me, it looked as exquisite and delicate as a butterfly.

Mahler pursed his lips to blow off the grime, took the violin under his chin and, with closed eyes, meticulously tuned each string. Delicately he replaced the instrument, and returned the cracked case to the knapsack and strapped it onto his back. While so doing he said, "My violin is perfect. If I don't survive, give it to the Philharmonic."...