Book the Fourth: THE PASSING

I

In the Central Range of Western Palestine is an ancient Samaritan township, the Shechem of the Patriarchs. High set above shore-level, sheltered by mighty mountains on the North, East and South, looking down a wady beaten in by-gone days by the hoofs of the cavalry of Omri,—rutted by the silver and ivory chariot-wheels of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,—across low, undulant hill-ranges, to the twenty-mile distant sea.

High set above sea-level, it lies on the floor of a long, fish-shaped valley, between two towering limestone mountains. Distant a mile-and-a-half at their summits, their bases nearly meet. One is Ebal, the other Gerizim. They are the mounts by which the Chosen stood to receive blessings and cursings.

The Samaritan Temple, that place of sinister mysteries, once stood where are now great terebinth-trees, shading the ruins of an ancient fortress upon Mount Gerizim. The rock of their Place of Sacrifice shows its channelled surface above ground. To-day, a man standing with the wind at his back, upon the crown of Ebal or Gerizim and speaking loudly, would be heard at the summit of the opposite Mount, and in the streets of the town....

The town, upon which the towering limestone heads of Ebal and Gerizim and their fellows look down sternly, was in its heyday a place of wealth, where luxury and lust ran riot, and men and women walked in purple robes, or were carried in ivory litters; crowned with high jewelled head-dresses, dust of gold powder lying thick in the spiral curls of their jet black beards, and the frizzled waves or towering coils of richly-luxuriant hair. Now their ancient place of abiding is set about with ruinous stone mansions, girt with groves of waving palms, fig-trees, olives and mulberries. Mean dwellings crowd on narrow vaulted streets, under whose pavement you can hear the water rushing. For there is no lack of water in Shechem. The crowded mud Barracks behind the bazar has a well of pure water in its courtyard. So cheap is the element that no one grudges this solace to the prisoners of War.

Before the War the chief seat of the Turkish administration in Palestine, the old town boasted a population of some 25,000 souls. Thinned by conscription of the younger Jews, Samaritans, Arabs and native Syrian Christians, it might have contained some fifteen thousand, counting the garrison of Turkish infantry officered by monocled and braceleted Germans,—when the fortified area of Beersheba fell to the strategy of Allenby, and the routed left wing of the Fourth Army Corps of Djemal Pasha, with the formidable motor-driven siege-guns from the boasted stronghold fell back in rout and confusion upon the area of Shechem.

Some directing Teutonic mind ordained, weeks previous to the evacuation, that the Allied prisoners from the camps of Beersheba and its vicinity, packed on Railway cattle-trucks or Army motor-lorries,—should be transferred by railway to the town of Shechem. It was to be converted by German gold, forced labour and modern resources, into a stronghold of Ottoman power, against which the expeditionary army of Britain should expend itself in vain....

There are already British War prisoners in the mud-walled Barracks at Shechem, built round the courtyard containing the well. When on these hunger-gnawed, vermin-ridden men rolls the flood of human wretchedness from the camps of Beersheba and its neighbourhood,—they are to learn the bitter truth that there are grades in Misery.

For a squat, sandy, pale-eyed Lieutenant-General of Turkish gendarmerie, who acted as Commandant of the Beersheba prison-camps, now supersedes the tyrant who has ruled at Shechem. The inmates of the prisons there have been robbed, stripped, and beaten. They have slept in tattered blankets upon mud or stone floors,—lived on a daily quarter of a coarse brown loaf per soul—and a handful of beans in oil.... They have undergone insult, and occasionally kicks and blows, but Home parcels have occasionally reached them, and though pinched, they were not famished.... Now the parcels are looted or their contents rendered uneatable.... A loaf is shared amongst twenty men, the pannikin of boiled beans yields each a bare spoonful. Driven out at dawn by Turks with loaded hide-whips, to dig trenches south and east of the old fortifications,—make emplacements for Austro-German artillery, and lay down a system of interchangeable rails for the Krupp motor-guns,—they are herded back at night to the filthy pens where they are packed so closely that they cannot lie down to sleep without lying on each other. Whence in the mornings men suffocated by the press of the bodies of their comrades are taken out dead....

These victims belong to the rank and file. Some officers are quartered in the old stone-built prison. Yet others live in Turkish Army tents in a barbed-wire enclosure at the eastern end of the town. A ramshackle hut serves as their mess, when they have anything to mess on. But they are not too crowded for decency, and sickness spares them. Presently the officers are drafted away, four only remaining,—and the congestion at the mud-built Barracks is somewhat relieved. But Hunger, Overcrowding and Dirt have bred Dysentery, septic skin-eruptions and Typhus Fever, and these claim their victims by the score.

The Hospital near the new Turkish Barracks by the Arsenal, staffed by the German Red Cross and the nurses and orderlies of the Red Crescent,—being crowded with Turkish and German wounded—cannot admit more than a few of the gravest cases of dysentery. The typhus patients are removed to the Hospital under the auspices of the Established Church of England Missionary Society, and another,—devotedly tended by the Catholic Sisters of the Cross. Helpers come from the Mission House of the Latin Patriarchate, who unweariedly give their services wherever there is need.... But desperate indeed would be the plight of the War prisoners—save that through the blizzard of misery raging through the mud Barracks—the courage and charity of one man shine like a steadfast star....

The man is a Catholic chaplain who has served with the Expeditionary Forces at Gallipoli; has been taken prisoner and kept for awhile in Hospital at Constantinople; has been drafted to Smyrna, and later, by such haphazard chance as governs the lives of prisoners, has been shifted to Beersheba, and thence to Shechem.

Unweariedly he alleviates, whilst sharing, the common misery. Shaking with fever, hunger-bitten to the bone, ragged as any scarecrow, red-eyed with sleeplessness, he moves from room to room distributing such poor comforts as are obtainable. Helping the convalescent, ministering to the sick, dispensing the Sacraments of the Mother Church to the Catholic dying—cheering those of other creeds with the words that are of God....

On a day in November, half-an-hour later than the morning prayer-call from the minaret of the Great Mosque that was once a Church of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre—you are to see Father Julian Forbis going his daily round.... The mud-walled courtyard is closed in on three sides by the mud-built Barracks, and on the fourth by a high wall topped by rusty iron spikes—a wall in which there is an archway closed by a double gate, flanked on either side by guard-rooms. Over the gateway is the office of the Turkish Commandant.

To-day the courtyard of the mud-built Barracks is full of sunshine and packed with prisoners. Lying, squatting or standing, the majority are squalid spectres on whose gaunt frames their foul and tattered clothing hangs baggily, though some are bloated like the corpses of men who have been long drowned. Though the assemblage is sprinkled with Roumanians, Syrians, Jews, Armenians and Arabs,—these last having a dungeon to themselves, of unutterable filthiness, the bulk are of the rank and file of Britain's Crusading Forces. Australians, Indians, New Zealanders, and British Territorials.... Actors, clerks, printers, shopwalkers and jockeys; farm-labourers, electricians, gardeners, photographers, bakers, University students,—representatives of every class and calling. One and all strung to endurance by the spirit that makes heroes of ordinary men....

The shadows of Ebal and Gerizim as yet fall westward. Their towering summits and those of the lesser mountains, and the minarets of the Great and the two smaller mosques look down into the dirty mud-walled court, baking in the rays of the early sun, though the November nights are chilly. Every stench the prison fosters seems intensified by the heat. The loud buzzing of millions of flies mingles in a bagpipe-drone with the noise of many voices, Eastern and European,—talking in half-a-dozen languages and a hundred dialects—and the hubbub has for its accompaniment the thudding of distant guns. From the southwest, where the 54th British Division is engaged with the enemy between the sea and Gaza. Nearer South, where a bitter struggle is being waged by British Cavalry, armoured cars, and the bombers and machine-gunners of the Royal Flying Corps, for the possession of Junction Station—the next point after the fall of Gaza, of tactical importance in Palestine. From the hills towards Hebron those enemy forces, who have previously retreated to this vantage, have descended into the Coastal Plain, to relieve the pressure and stiffen the resistance of their comrades by demonstrating a counter-attack. For if Junction Station, the key of the northern railway-system, with its vast dumps of rolling-stock, supplies, War-material and its camps of prisoners, shall fall into the hands of the British—Jerusalem will be cut off from communication save by Wireless with Turkey and Germany....

Day wears apace.... The winged hordes of Baal Zebub, like the humans whom they feast on, are making the most of the sunshine. Fat white maggots that will be flies presently,—and vermin still more loathsome—crawl in the dirty straw on which the prisoners are squatting or lying. Deep in the well the clear water shines like a huge blue eye, reflecting the shadowless heavens above.

A man hanging over, seems to stare in the water, apparently sheltering his eyes with both hands from the glare. He has the crowned wings of the R.F.C. on the shoulder of his ragged shirt of khaki flannel, and the clear water of the brimming well reflects the three chevrons and crown of a Flight Sergeant, tacked upon its tattered sleeve. Also the glittering lenses of a small pair of folding binoculars, cunningly concealed by the curve of their owner's hands.

"What be 'ee lookin' vor, Tom?" cautiously whispers a freckled trooper of Devon Yeomanry, digging a painfully sharp elbow in the airman's lean ribs.

Barney Mossam takes it on himself to answer,—being the accredited wit and jester of the knot gathered about the well. He is a little, broad-shouldered, bow-legged London Territorial, with a nose that has suffered in bouts of fisticuffs; a carroty head, a broad humorous grin, and a squint that points a joke. He speaks with the thick catarrhal snuffle of the East End. Even in khaki his type proclaims him of the Race of Costermongers.... Covent Garden Market is thick with Barneys, all alike as peas from the pod....

"Ticklebats, my flash top," says Barney winking, "kind you used to ketch a while back, wiv' a bottle tied on a string." He adds in a thick whisper directed at the ear of the absorbed Flight Sergeant, "Wot d'yer pipe, old Sky-gazer? Thinkin' it's abaht time we 'ad another look-in from ours affectionately the Two-Faced Nightingale?"

"Ay. Unless he happened to come in the night!" The cautious whisper of the reply only just reaches the ears for which it is intended....

"I 'eard a 'plane go singin' over 'ere 'bout twelve-thirty by my gold ticker," says Barney. "But she was one of them there seaplanes wiv' little canoes instid o' wheels. There ain't so many 'Un 'planes abaht as there used to!—an' Turkey 'planes is gittin' as rare as—as glass in the Strand an' Covent Garden Market—after the bloomin' Zepps and Super Goths 'as paid the usual mornin' call...." His thick whisper is barely audible even to the other: "Reckon that's why it pays Old Two-Face to play the double game. Wiv' a patent trick lever-switch—Gorblime 'im!—but 'e's clever! to cover the Union Jacks on 'is under-wings with Red Crescents when 'e tips the stud.... 'Wish I 'ad a Turk face to pull over my reel one! Wouldn't take me long to 'op out of 'ere! Wonder if 'e 'as the syme dodge fitted on 'is top wings? Give one o' my last three fags—I would!—to find out 'oo 'e is!"

"He's not an Englishman, thank God! He's pretty nearly a black one. Dark as a Gyppo—or a Hindu. The other was white. Inside as well as out. That's why he was murdered!" returns the Flight Sergeant in his wary whisper, without lowering his hands....

"Some blokes gits all the fun. 'Ow come you to see it, Sergeant?"

For once the Cockney's jest provokes no appreciative smile. The thin hands sheltering the prized binoculars shake.... The whispering voice shakes also—and its hurried sentences are punctuated by the thudding of those distant guns....

"I've told you.... It's just a week since.... I was up in our room there," the speaker contemptuously jerks his ear towards an upper window of one of the Barrack buildings—"looking through this little Zeiss glass that magnifies by 20. (I've told you how I took it off a dead German airman at Huy.) ... And the Two-Faced Nightingale—hovering not more than four hundred feet above the Square in front of the big Khan,—was picking the place, damn him! where he'd settled to drop his despatch-bag. He switched his Red Crescents on over the Union Jacks—and the stunt brought the usual roar of laughter from the people. Every one was out to stare,—the streets as far as I could see, were packed, as well as the roofs.... Then he dropped his bag, plumb for the square,—swung round and steered Southward. And,—keeping the glasses focussed on them, I saw his white observer stand up, lean forward and touch him on the back. He looked round and his white teeth flashed in his face sort of spitefully.... The other fellow was handing him out cold truth in ladlefuls, shaking his fist and raving like mad. Then—it happened before you could wipe an eye! He—the pilot—cut out his engine—turned round, and I caught the glitter of a revolver in his hand. Then came the flash and the crack. And the white man buckled up in the bottom of his cockpit—and the Two-Faced Nightingale switched on and flew away South. And nothing was left on the blue sky but a puff of brown cordite."

"The murderin' dawg!" Barney carefully moves from the coping-stone of the well a burnt match, and a wisp of straw, that some eddying draught of the hot breeze might carry into the water. "No fear of 'im gittin' copped. This 'ere queer go wot we calls Life's more on the lines of a Drury Lyne Autumn Show than I twigged when I rallied up 'long o' my pals on Fust Nights outside the good old Gallery Entrance. On'y it's turned the wrong w'y raound. Vice gits all the limes from both wings, an' all the clappin' from the Pit an' Gallery. An' Virtue kips on the bare boards of a stinkin' Turkish barrack-room, or 'unkers in the stinkin' mud, and 'unts things wot 'ops and crawls." He goes on, talking to himself, for the airman, staring in the reflected patch of sky is suddenly absorbed to deafness. "S'trewth! Wherever it does pay—off of the boards of a Theayter—the 'Eroic Line don't go for nuts—not 'ere in Palestine!"

"Ye are richt! It pays nae better than it paid twa thousan' years agone. But which is it better to be on—the de'il's side—or the Lord's? I wuss to Him some voice frae Heaven wad speyk an' answer me! ..."

The utterance—unmistakably Scotch—breaks in several feet above the level of Barney's monologue. He looks up at a tall, gaunt, red-haired Scot in the Border bonnet and ragged khaki kilt, and badges of the Tweedburgh Regiment, and says with his characteristic wink:

"'Ullo, Corp'ral Govan! Thet you? ..."

"Nae ither that I ken...." He is quite young, but he moves like an old man, as he lets his long length slowly down on the mud beside the Cockney, unheeding the invitation to take a straw, and hugs his hairy knees. "Man! I wad gie the twa dirrty Turkish notes in ma pooch, an' a guid British florin to the back o' them, to be anither chap than Alec Govan the day. For I have seen what a man may scarce see, an' keep his brain frae madness—ay! an' his tongue from cryin' oot on God!" He rocks himself in silence, then says with a stifled groan: "Man! dinna gawp at me. Do ye no' ken I hae been wi' Ullathorne? ..."

"Ullathorne. That's your chum, ain't 'e? Wot abaht 'im?"

"Hae ye no' heird?" The long Scot stares at the Cockney wonderingly.

"Nuffin' but that 'e didn't come back last night wiv the workin'-party. 'As 'e turned up?"

"Ay. They pitched him back intil oor room last nicht—a' the green rods had left o' him. Weel I kenned they would do their warst once they got their chance." There is foam on the livid lips. "They drove him oot wi' the rest o' us to the Defence Warks yesterday mornin', though he had the fever on him sair, an' couldna' stand alane.... Weel, weel I wat why!" He is shaking as though with ague. "An' he staggered an' reeled, an' knocked up against ane o' the sentries—an' Hamid Bey was standing by wi' some of his gang o' police.... By the grin on the pasty face of him, ye could tell he was oot for murder. An' he ordered Ullathorne a hundred strokes for brutally attackin' the man. They held us up an' made us watch whiles they laid on to him. O Christ Jesus! ... First on the feet, twenty-five strokes—then the back an' belly an' breist.... An' when he fainted an' lay for dead, they drove us oot wi' their whips an' left him lyin'; an' when we came back for the nicht-shift he was gane awa' from there.... In the mirk o' the nicht, as I hae said, they flung him in amang us,—nakit as a new-born wean—an' his raw flesh hangin' in strips. As though the butcher had stairted to collop him—an' changed his min' aboot it. A braw sicht for the mither that bore him, an' the lass he should hae wed!"

"Gorblime the bloody beasts!" says Barney, gulping. His coarse hand touches the thin arm in the tattered sleeve with the Corporal's stripes, and does it gently too. "Will Ullathorne live? They don't often live—our own chaps—do 'em?—though Turks seems some'ow diff'rent."

"He was deein' when they broucht him back, puir lad! I hae left him barely breathin'.... Father Forbis is wi' him noo.... Ullathorne is nae no Catholic, but the Father has the Gift o' the Word. Sune—sune he will be dead, my chum that I made at Gallipoli, the last o' the auld company left aiblins mysel'!"

No tears come to the burning grey eyes that stare into vacancy.

"A' nicht I held him i' my airms! His bluid is wet upo' me. An' I made a sang to sooth to him—we Govans aye had the bard's gift, they say, in the braw auld days. And when he is dead—for I promised him!—the haill Barracks shall hear't. The bonny sang o' the Christian men killed by the Turkish hound!"

"Look wide O! One o' them Mo'ammedan guards 'as got 'is ugly eye on you," urges Barney, apprehensive that the recklessness of grief may bring Govan the fate of his friend. "While there's life there's 'ope! ... Pre'aps Ullathorne might git round yit!"

But Govan shakes his haggard head:

"I doot—I doot it sairly. But what can be done Father Forbis will dae. He promised me he wouldna leave him as lang as there was breith i' him. An' Forbis aye keeps his word. Here he comes! Luik at's face..... Ullathorne has passed to his Maker!"

The Scot starts to his naked feet, and Barney Mossam sits up and salutes, as through an archway on the ground-floor of the sordid block of buildings opposite comes the figure of a tall, emaciated man, followed by a burly, slovenly Turkish soldier and a grotesque, hunchbacked shape,—recognisable only by the voluminous folds of the coarse biscuit-coloured veil that covers its head, and falls to the hem of its soiled blue cotton robe—as a Syrian peasant woman.

"Good morning, Mossam!" The intonations of the priest's voice, and the smile that curves the mouth hidden by the reddish-golden beard, and lights the sunken blue eyes, are very like Katharine's.... "You are up and about again! ..."

"Couldn't lay up in the lap o' luxury no longer, Father!" drolls the indomitable jester. "A man in my condition 'as to 'ave exercise to sweat the suet off 'is bones."

The bones show as though the tattered uniform hung on clothes-props. The priest glances at them compassionately, and then with gentle friendliness at the haggard faces that turn to him, as he picks his way delicately between the prone and squatting men.

"Move!" says the Turkish military guard in the greenish-yellow khaki served out to the Ottoman forces in the War with Serbia, a huge posta whose fez sits on the extreme summit of his pointed head like the red-paper-cap on a bottle of liquorice-powder,—who wears good boots stripped from a British prisoner: and who speaks a bastard mixture of bad Turkish and worse Arabic: "Haide git! Make way for the kassis and the woman! Imshi! Must ye be as the beasts?"

For a hyæna-like yell of joy has greeted the discovery that there are oranges in one, and almonds and walnuts in the other, of two heavy palm-fibre baskets carried by the misshapen, limping being who follows behind the priest. The wretched creature is one of those nondescript hangers-on that in the negligent East haunt such places of misery as the mud Barrack-prison,—gaining a meagre subsistence by washing the prisoners' tattered linen, running errands to the bâzâr,—boiling broth or carrying water for the sick and convalescent, and, when the guards can be bribed into acquiescence—washing and laying out the bodies of the dead.

Bundled in her soiled rags—shrouded in the voluminous veil that hides a face so disfigured by accident or disease, that no European who has glimpsed can think of it without a shudder, and Orientals express their abhorrence by spitting on the ground—the Mother of Ugliness—thus nicknamed by some coarse wit among her countrymen—passes without insult, ill-usage or outrage, where no other of her sex, unprotected by deformity and hideousness, could have escaped....

"Orangees. Glory be to God!—an' where did yer Reverence git thim?" asks the owner of the unmistakably Irish voice, stretching gaunt hands, shaking with fever, for one of the luscious golden globes.

"A friend brought them," briefly answers the priest, as he distributes the fruit and nuts generously on all sides.

"God bless the friend! ... An' that's yourself, I'm thinkin'," grunts the Irishman, driving his teeth deep into the juicy fruit.

"No, Sullivan, it was not I. You see the giver...."

"The Mother av' Ugliness, bedad! More power to her!" splutters Sullivan, as the priest points to the crooked shape swathed in its sordid veils.

"She has earned a prettier name here among us," says Father Forbis, looking round at the faces,—pinched and white, or livid, or fever-flushed, that crowd about him, and speaking with mild authority. "She shall be called henceforth The Mother of Kindness...."

He turns to the shrinking creature at his heels and repeats it in Arabic.

"Sidi!" the woman implores in muffled tones, trembling so that the folds of her coarse veils wave as though some vagrant breeze were stirring amongst them:

"I have spoken! By you and other British in this place—" He looks round sternly at the men, "the old name is forgotten. She is the Mother of Kindness.... Let all of you remember that!"

"We'll not forgit, yer Reverence! ..."

"Verra weel, Sirr! ..."

"Sure we'll remember, Boss! ..."

"A' right, Sir! ..."

"Han, Hâzrât! ..."

"Right O Father! ..."

"A'ay, Zur, for sure! ..."

"Yea, verily, it shall be as the Sahib orders!"

They answer him in a hundred voices, resonant bass, or cheery tenor, coarse and refined, illiterate or educated,—flavoured with the accent and in the dialect of every shire or county in the United Kingdom—every country of the Dominions Overseas. And standing in his ragged clothes, with a battered enamelled can of broth and another of barley-water dangling from one lean hand, while the other eases the heavy weight of a wallet of canvas, broad, slung about his thin shoulders, and containing such medicines and dressings as may be had—the Father surveys them smilingly—but with the spark in his blue eyes that they know can leap to flame....

You are to see him as a tall, emaciated man of twenty-nine or thirty, chalky-pale with famine and worn with lack of sleep. Eagle-featured, broad-browed, blue-eyed; with long, untrimmed hair and tangled beard of ruddy yellow-brown. Without the eight-pointed black metal star on the lapel of his tattered khaki jacket, or the wisp of Roman collar that still hangs about his neck, or the bartered Breviary and Office book that bulges a front tunic-pocket—a ragged strip of purple stole between its well-thumbed pages—you could not fail to recognise the Religious by vocation; the cultured priest, the man born to dominate, sway and rule.

"Haide! Let us go!" growls the Turkish guard, thrusting two oranges and a handful of nuts in a pocket of his soiled tunic, and kicking a man squatting in his path less viciously than as a matter of form.

And the little procession of the tall priest, the red-fezzed guard, and the bundle of soiled feminine clothing—brought up in the rear by Corporal Alec Govan, moves towards the ground-floor archway on the other side of the courtyard.

II

"Sirr!"

"You, Govan? ..." The priest glances back as he passes out of the sunshine and smells of the courtyard into the squalor and reek of the fetid passage, and the guard, kicking out a palm-wood stool from behind the heavy wooden-locked door, squats down upon it to crack and eat nuts....

"Ay, Sirr.... It is a' ower? ..."

The priest gravely bends his head, and the red light in Govan's eyes is momentarily quenched in bitter waters, as he goes on, gulping his agony down:

"I weel kent that was sae, or ye wad no' have left him. Did he no' speyk ane worr'd o' his mither, puir cratur!—or o' the lass he bude to marry—or o' me, his frien'—before he passed?"

"He spoke of one Friend—just at the last—even a better one than you were," says Father Forbis, gently touching the man's clenched hand. "He Who was scourged by Roman rods for poor Ullathorne and you, and all of us. Who died that we might live with Him for all eternity. Where Death cannot come—or cruelty—or suffering...."

"Ay, Sirr.... Ye are verra gude. We a' ken that o' ye!"

"And God is good," says the priest, "though Man may make men doubt it. Where are you going? ..."

"I am ganging back to Ullathorne. He maun be washed an' straikit an' berrit dacently. He maunna be pitched intil a hole like a doug!"

The priest shudders and his face contracts painfully.

"Very well. You shall have what little linen I can find, and all the help I can spare.... I must finish my rounds among the sick men now.... But, Govan! ..."

"Ay! ..."

"In the name of the old friendly days—" The thin but powerful white hand goes out and rests on the other's shoulder,—"when you and I—two long-legged lads—tickled trout in the Rushet and went rabbiting on the high moors—and made toffee over the stove in the harness-room at Kerr's Arbour—and for your own sake and the sakes of all here!—let me beg you not to provoke the evil man who has us in his power, by a rash display of the wrath and scorn that can do no good—to him!"

"Meanin' Ullathorne! I hear ye, Sirr." A strange smile shows on the grimly-set mouth, and the dour grey eyes sullenly shun the appeal of the blue ones. "Wi' your leave I will be ganging back to him the now.... He aye likit me to make queer sangs to sooth to him in the lang hoors when we lay in the trenches at Gallipoli. An' I hae a sang—the queerest ane o' a'—he wad fell like to hear! Guid day to ye, Sirr!"

He salutes, with the strange smile fixed upon his face, wheels about, and strides out of the fetid passage-way back into the sunshine, and the priest's heart sinks within him as he goes. Fresh furrows line his high, white brow, and anxiety deepens the caves about his eyes, as he says—speaking in Arabic to the bowed figure waiting humbly as a dog at the bottom of the broken staircase:

"He is mad with grief. God pity him! ... Follow, and give what aid thou canst, O Mother of Kindness!"

"If the Sidi would graciously—not call me by that name...."

The timid whisper barely reaches the ear it was meant for. They have moved farther down the murky, fetid passage-way, blocked at its entrance by the burly body of the nut-cracking Turkish guard. Father Forbis asks in surprise:

"Why not, when thou dost merit it? ..." And she answers:

"Sidi, in ugliness there is Protection! Could a woman—with two eyes and a whole face—instead of a half-one—dwell in this evil place one hour—and fare forth unharmed? ..." She makes as though to pull aside her veil with her dusky, slender fingers, but does not, and goes on in the same swift cautious undertone:

"True, there are British soldiers here, and nearly all that I have met were respecters of decent women! But when even the British soldiers are beaten and tortured—made the sport of devils in forms of men!—what can avail a woman better than to be hideous? Sidi,—if a Turk thrust forth a hand to pluck aside my veil, he—he!" she chuckles with a dry, clacking, mirthlessness, "see you—he retches and spits and curses—and does not do it again! Shâf—Shâf! ... See, O see!"

She pulls the veil ruthlessly from the left side of her hidden face and shows to the priest's pitying eyes the ruin it has concealed. The scar of an old burn puckers the olive-tinted temple and cheek that have caved where the bone has been shattered—the blinded eye has vanished under ridged folds of skin. The bridge of the nose—enough left of it to show that the feature has been of the curved Semitic type—has been ruthlessly shattered;—the upper lip, torn partly away, has healed into shapelessness.... He does not see the other side of the face—and the woman evinces no desire to show it. But the little ear, daintily formed and shaded by hair that is yet jet-black and silken—shows that the Mother of Ugliness may once have been beautiful....

"A gunshot wound—and a terrible one." He says it to himself ponderingly.

"Nay, Sidi. The weapon was a revolver."

"What say you? ..."

The priest starts. He has spoken his thought in his English tongue, and this Syrian woman has answered in her own. And it is the Arabic of the cultured classes, not the peasants' primitive speech. He looks at her, and she draws her veil over the poor ruined face that may once have been lovely and goes on speaking in her cultured Arabic:

"Verily, Sidi! A revolver-shot, fired so near that the muzzle touched the skin. There was little time—" She gives her dry, rustling chuckle. "Little time, and he wished to make sure. He did not mean to miss! ..."

"A heartless crime, O woman! But thou dost forgive the doer?"

"He was not mine enemy!" she says with her mirthless laugh.

"Thy lover.... And jealous.... Forgive him all the more for that having loved—he hurt thee in his frenzy. This was" (of course, the woman is old) "done many years ago?"

"Ay, Sidi! When I was young." Her laugh is like the crackling of burning brush.... "Three years ago—no longer! And he who did the thing was my brother, not my lover," says the flat, toneless voice from within the folds of the veil. "And jealous truly—but for his sister's honour. He dared not slay mine enemy—a Zabit of the Osmanli,—for that would have brought sword and fire and destruction upon our house. My lord understands? ..."

"Surely!"

"Therefore he gave me the wound thou seest—and thinking he had killed me,—he shot himself to escape death by torture and degradation. May God reward him a thousand-fold in the bosom of Abraham! ..."

The priest starts slightly:

"Thou art a Jewess?"

She is silent....

"Or perhaps a Samaritaness, like that woman of this city, who near two thousand years ago held drink to the parched lips of a Traveller beside Jacob's Well?"

"What I once was does not matter, but I am no Samaritaness!" There is something like resentment in the faded, toneless voice.

"Thou art Charity's very daughter to the sick ones in this prison. For one para that they give thee, they get ten piastres back. Dost thou think that I am blind?" Smiling, he shakes his finger at the Mother of Ugliness. She bows her head and answers, trembling like a reed in the wind:

"Nay, Sidi.... I have feared not! ... But for the love of Him Whom thou dost serve—seem to be blind a little longer! There is" (another spasm of trembling passes through her)—"There is no medicine for the wretched like helping Wretchedness! Here I am somewhat.... They do not shrink from me. Me whom the children in the streets hoot and run from!—at whose hidden face the women in the doorways spit and point their amulets, lest its influence blight before birth the unborn babe in the womb! And—were I driven from this place—" The faint voice is silent:

"Be it so, O Mother of Ugliness! Henceforth I am dumb as to thy virtues, and blind to the beauty of—thy deeds! Come—and I will give thee some linen for the swathing of that poor broken body that was a live man yesterday. What ails Thee, O woman? What dost thou fear? ..."

For the bowed figure crouches down, shaking as though with ague, a mere heap of sordid clothes on the filthy floor at his feet. A stifled voice falters out:

"Didst thou not hear the bugle? ... The gates—the gates are opening! ..."

They are, indeed, with a clanking of rusty iron bolts in stone groovings; with a turning out of the slovenly guard from the bare rooms flanking the high archway of the gate. With a stiff uprising of the lolling, nut-cracking posta at the doorway—a susurrous of fierce whispers—a nameless commotion of hate and fear and loathing unutterable—amongst the packed bodies of the prisoners squatting, standing, or lying on the beaten mud pavement of the prison courtyard....

"The Bey!" The thick whisper reaches the priest and the woman, flung over the shoulder of the Turk as he stands at attention in the doorway: "Hamid Bey Mutasarrif comes, bringing a Mushir of the Almanis to inspect the prisoners...." He adds, under his hurried breath: "Allah and the Prophet of Allah be with me, Hasan Ali—and deliver me from smitings this unpropitious day!"

The guard have turned out. They raggedly present arms, and Hasan Ali, and such others of his fellows as are on duty in the courtyard—or posted at the portals of the mud Barrack-buildings—shoulder their Sniders or more modern Remingtons with the smartness engendered of fear; as a squat, sandy officer of Turkish gendarmerie—topped with the ugly khaki compromise between the turban and the helmet—patented by Envey Bey in 1912—and adorned as to the epaulettes with the two stars, and as to the cuffs with the four longitudinal gold lace bands and the three diagonal gold bars of a Turkish Lieutenant General—walks with a tall, brick-faced—very much decorated German Staff officer, in amongst the stenches of the crowded prison-yard.

Several persons succeed these. Two German Staff officers of inferior rank to the first, evidently his aide, and a secretary, come swaggering and chatting behind their Chief. A bearded Turkish Surgeon Major, fat and apoplectic, in black gauze spectacles, waddles after—with a nondescript Greek person, evidently of the interpreter-class. And a half-company of Turkish mounted gendarmerie troop after, rather stragglingly. The big bushy-bearded, red-fezzed men, uniformed in old-time dark blue Hussar tunics, with orange and black facings, braided pantaloons and long shiny thigh-boots, are all well-armed with Winchester repeating-rifles, and carry big German Service revolvers in holsters at their belts.

There is a dull shuffling sound, mingled with thuds and stifled swearing, as the Turkish guards, with assiduous kicks, and blows of the rifle-butt, assist sitting or lying War prisoners to assume a perpendicular position; and herd their charges into rank right and left, leaving a central avenue down which the Bey and the visitors may pass. Holding his breath in an agony of suspense as he peers into the crowded courtyard over the broad shoulder of the soldier blocking the passage, the priest scans the faces that he knows for signs of coming storm. As the squat, pale-eyed, bow-legged Asiatic, uniformed in greenish khaki-drill, wearing with clownish awkwardness the wide-thighed riding-breeches, the belts, pouches, and gauntlets of russet leather, and the polished riding boots with silver spurs, that set off the tall soldierly figures of the Germans, steps with them across the threshold of the prison courtyard it seems to every prisoner that the very sunshine fails of its warmth, and the faint hot breeze blows cold....

The Bey looks about him with a pale oblique slyness, his cigarette elaborately poised between his thick gloved fingers, and says, speaking in Turkish, (which language the priest, held for months in durance vile at Constantinople and at Smyrna, has relieved the tedium of prison-life by studying, and fairly understands):

"Good-morning, my children!"

"Good-morning, O Bey! ... May Allah favour your Excellency," lustily chorus the postas. But at the sound of the hated voice the faces of the prisoners have darkened threateningly, and the silence that falls on the tainted enclosure is heavy as a pall.

"Your Excellency wished to inspect the British men before seeing the British officers. These guests of our Empire"—Hamid's leering smile and the glitter in his pale flat eyes show the Bey's enjoyment of his own sarcasm, and the stiff faces of the German general and his aides-de-camp and secretary exhibit a faint grin as he continues: "—these guests of our Empire are not at work to-day.... It is a holiday for them. They sit and chat and eat fruit," (his sharp glance has lighted on the scattered nutshells and orange-peel), "and smoke tobacco about the well in their courtyard. Your Excellency sees!—a capital well! ... Praise be to Allah for the blessing of pure water! Show the well to his Excellency.... Make room, O you there! ..."

A gap being made in the ragged ranks by postas with the rifle-butt, the brick-faced German general stalks to the low parapet of the sky-reflecting eye of clear water, and pronounces it in Turkish of the Prussian brand, to be an exceedingly good well. The Bey, pretending to look at it too, enriches the water with his chewed cigarette-end; and spits in it slyly behind the back of the German general—to the chuckling delight of his immediate following—and the more controlled amusement of the German aide-de-camp and secretary. As for the Greek interpreter and the fat be-goggled Surgeon Major, whose pharmacopæia is limited to Epsom Salts, pills of a rending nature, sulphur and iodine; who knows no disinfectant beyond chloride of lime, and never heard of sterilisation; whose surgical equipment is limited to a saw or two, some needles, a scalpel—all beyond words unclean!—lint made by Turkish ladies in secluded harems; sticking-plaster of the most adhesive kind, splints and First Aid bandages, these two parasites fairly wallow in enjoyment.

The dirty bit of buffoonery is such a success that Hamid Bey is about to repeat it, when a heavy blow upon some dense, non-reverberating surface arrests him in the act. He starts, and looks round for the offender. So do the German officers, though their hard eyes are expressionless, and their sunburned faces as blank as brown tiles. So do the parasites, so do the military police of the Bey's escort, and the postas of the guard. Then as the dull, pounding blow is repeated on the sill of a second-floor window of the mud wing facing the entrance-gates of the courtyard, every eye rolls up to there expectantly and men hold their breath.

Crash! ... The weapon falls again.... It is the leg of a wooden stool, gripped in a fist that is strong and hairy ... and a face—unmistakably a madman's now!—appears at the window above. And in the hush that falls upon the parched courtyard, a crazy voice begins to sing—the leg of the stool coming down with a terrific crash at the end of every line:

The storm has broken with a vengeance. But even the white-faced priest, peering over the unsteady shoulder of the scared Turkish soldier, is carried away by the tingling excitement of the thing. Knowing that the gates of Terror are burst open—and that Vengeance shall issue forth....

Upon the wild, discoloured face with the glaring eyes, all other eyes are glued expectantly, as through the rictus of a dreadful laugh that is stamped upon it by Insanity, it sings to the wild droning tune—to the accompaniment of the wooden club upon the crumbling window-sill—its rhymeless hymn of hate. Faces nearly as ghastly as the singer's appear at and crowd the windows of the Barracks. And in time to the crazy chant; the crazy buildings, the mud-walled and paved courtyard begin to shake with the measured stamping of the prisoners naked feet:

The place is thick with dust now; men's lungs are choked and oppressed by it.... They stamp—nothing can stop them stamping in time to the blows of the stool-leg on the window-sill of the room where lies the shapeless body of the comrade whom the asâyisi have beaten into pulp.

"What for the deil that killed Ted Ullathorne—"

* * * * * * *

The wild song breaks off here, as the madman ducks below the level of the window-sill—and a cry of rage goes up from a hundred throats as he rises again, with the disfigured body in his arms, its head lolling helplessly beneath his own.... Then—a German Army revolver cracks—and with blood pouring over the face that is still laughing dreadfully, Govan, with his awful burden, reels back into the room....

III

The voice of a German officer breaks in, giving a sharp order in Prussian-flavoured Turkish. There is a rush of zabtiehs and postas to the door of the building where the madman is.... As they jostle in the filthy entry, the boots of those who have got in first, thunder on its crazy stairs; and savage shouts and the tumult of a desperate struggle break out in the sordid room where Govan—bleeding from a bullet-wound in the head—but equal to a dozen men in the strength of his insanity—stands over the disfigured corpse laid out upon a dirty sack.

In the mud courtyard below, as Hamid Bey, with the German officers; his following and escort of police are retreating discreetly backwards to the vantage of the courtyard gate—a prisoner with a savage curse, dashes a handful of muddy orange-peel full in the livid face of Hamid. The Bey, smothered with filth and choking with rage, jerks his revolver from its holster, and promptly scatters the offender's brains.

Were the Bey unaccompanied, a volley from the Winchesters of his escort would silence for all time the rioters about him. But the German commander has previously informed him that on the morrow the War prisoners under his jurisdiction at Shechem will be deported for purposes of exchange....

Wild shouts, and British cheers break out.... Old War-slogans are heard again.... There is a furious rush of naked feet, but the Military Police and the postas of the guard beat back the unarmed mutineers with rifle-butts, and drive them back on either side, clubbing and kicking them. But less because of this the tumult is quelled than because a tall, ragged man with long tawny hair and beard has rushed from the archway of one of the Barrack buildings; and bringing, in this desperate hour, the authority of the priest to reinforce the influence of the friend and helper, exhorts, implores, commands the maddened prisoners to submit to the brutal authority they have no power to resist.

They are not cowed, but they obey. The clenched hands drop whatever missiles they have chanced to seize on,—their owners, in a storm of kicks, curses and blows with the rifle-butt, are herded back into the Barracks by their guards.

Barney, the jester, for once at a loss for a gag, huddles on a sack half-filled with straw on one of the wooden platforms,—six feet wide and two above the floor—a couple of which, running parallel, longitudinally divide each room. Divided into sections by upright planks, each section of platform accommodates or discommodes six War Prisoners. Perhaps Barney's room, and others on the upper floors are a thought less vile in flavour than these on the lower storeys. He smokes his last remaining fag, then whistles a dreary ragtime, staring through the barred window in front of him at the unbarred window of a room that is over the courtyard gate....

It is the window of the Commandant's office: the bare, seldom-used room where, on Sundays, as a signal favour,—the priest has been allowed to celebrate Mass and hold a Bible-class, and on rare occasions an impromptu smoking-concert has been given. It is full of Turkish postas in khaki, and the braided blue of the Osmanli gendarmerie. It is at first not possible to get a glimpse of what is going on inside, but in obedience to some order the window is cleared of the bodies blocking it.... Now it can be made out that the officers are Hamid Bey and the German general, seated with the secretary and aide at a table, before which—with two troopers of Mounted Police behind him, stands a tall, pale, emaciated man with long red-gold hair and beard.

The man seems to be answering a series of interrogations. He asserts, he denies emphatically, he pleads, but he does not cringe. Driven to silent frenzy by the difficulty of seeing, and the doubtfulness of the trend of the events that are taking place in the room over the gateway, Barney looks at his neighbour, the Sergeant of the R.F.C.

"Sergeant!"

"Eh?"

The Flight Sergeant's broad hands are sheltering his eyes as he lies on his stomach on the platform. The little folding binoculars that magnify by 20 are solving for their owner the problem of the Commandant's Room.

"D'yer pipe wot's goin' on? In the office over the gytew'y? Where 'Amid, blarst 'im! an' the two German orficers is settin' at the table and the Father standin' up in front? ..."

"Ay. They're playin' a scene out o' the Old Testament!" says the Flight Sergeant, with a sarcastic twitch of a muscle in his thin cheek.

"Wod'jer call it? ..." Barney breathes hard....

"The Scapegoat!"

"The 'ow much? ..."

"The Scapegoat. The beast the ancient Jews burdened with the sins of the congregation—and drove into the Wilderness every year. Only—the Padre's the Scapegoat—in this case."

"'Oo? ... Not Father Forbis?"

"Father Forbis right enough! 'Left—turn. Quick—march. Party—shon!'" mimics the Sergeant, as the high fair head and stern aquiline profile of the priest, with a zabtieh's fezzed head before, and another behind him,—passes across the field of vision limited by the frame of the window, and by the opening of a door an angle of light is thrown on the whitewashed office wall. "Now the sira-châwush is ordering out the Prison Guard escort.... It's all over.... They're taking him away! ..."

"Dismissed after interrygation.... That's all.... Cheero! In a minnit 'e'll come back through the yard-gyte an' go to 'is quarters as gay as a bloomin' bird...."

Barney defends his opinion with desperate optimism. But his heart is sinking leadenly and a lump is in his throat.

"All serene! Have it your own way. You'll see which is right of us!" The Sergeant cautiously raises himself up. "Do you hear the escort's looted British boots trampin' down the stairs? Now they'll either turn in here or march out at the Main Entrance. And if they do that, there'll be no Mass for the Catholics on Sunday morning—and no Prayers for the rest of us when Mass is through. And no one to get us the allowance from the Consul. And a dog's death for the sick, ay! and a dog's burial. There! ... Do you hear? ... That's the outside gate shutting..."

"Yus. O my Gawd! Shall we ever see 'im agyne?"

The inner gate of the Barrack courtyard has not opened. The sentries posted right and left of it maintain their position unmoved. But the groaning of rusty bolts in stone grooves, and the sound of the ponderous outer gate of the Main Entrance opening and slamming, falls, heavy as a clod of churchyard clay, on the hearts of many men.

For their priest, their helper, their counsellor and friend has gone from his place among them, and the blank he leaves is beyond mere words to express. And even worse than the sense of loss is the cruel uncertainty. Wondering, conjecturing, they lie on their verminous benches as the long hot Palestine day creeps to the sunset hour. The prayer-call from the mosques heralds no supper. Prisoners who resent massacre and villainous usage must, in the opinion of the Bey, have been too lavishly fed. The soldiers of the guard divide the beans in oil; and Barney Mossam, tightening his belt, is more than ever certain that Virtue, outside the walls of the T.R. Drury Lane—is not a game that pays....

The breeze freshens, the great bats come out to steal fruit, and the lesser ones to hunt moths and mosquitoes. Night suddenly unfolds her wings—and down comes the Dark. The jackals howl on the confines of the town, and the pariah dogs bay hideously. The Turkish equivalent for Lights Out! is sounded by the prison boruzan. Silver clear, the trumpets and bugles of the German-Turkish garrison challenge the echoes of Ebal and Gerizim. The radiant Hosts of Heaven come forth, and the moon, in her last quarter, hangs over the Hills of Gilead.

Sleep has come to the prisoners. The mud walls shake with their snoring. Only a few are wakeful. The Flight Sergeant is one of these. Towards the middle of the night a 'plane goes over Shechem:

"A raiding or reconnoitring hydro from some carrier in the Mediterranean? No! There's no rattling from the floats. It is a land machine...."

The airman leaves the crowded bench, and steals to the window. In the white effulgence of the moon all objects stand out clear. The German look-out with the telescope on the minaret of the Great Mosque of el Kebir.... The hooded searchlight with its dozing and waking guardians, on the balcony lower down.... A little figure moving on the ragged shoulder of Ebal.... A child? ... No! a woman—scrambling up from limestone terrace to terrace.... He forgets her, for, with the deep, vibrating song that he remembers—into the field of his vision swims The Two-Faced Nightingale....

At about a thousand feet up, she circles smoothly above Shechem. The search-ray from the balcony of the Great Mosque slashes at her viciously. Its fellow from the flank of Gerizim, leaps out, but sinks down again. Her pilot fires an orange light—and the scimitars of radiance from the Mosque and the Mount return to their scabbards; no strings of green rockets explore for the range of her—and no shells from the anti-aircraft guns in the Square of the Khan scream up at her winged shape....

As the biplane hovers against the jewel-bright blue of the Eastern night, the little Zeiss glasses tell their owner that her pilot has a native observer. A big Arab in a striped mantle, and headcloth bound by a rope.... Now her pilot fires a second orange light, drops his weighted despatch-bag, banks and climbs, launching at a dizzy height into a descent of sweeping spirals.... Evidently he is going to land somewhere in the neighbourhood of Shechem....

There is silence as the engine is cut out.... The big 'plane dives out of sight behind the shoulder of Ebal, where the lowest tiers of greyish-yellow limestone terraces are merged in the sandy, rolling plain....

The Flight Sergeant holds his breath and waits, his eyes glued to the binoculars. In a wonderfully short space of time the aëroplane, a powerful tractor biplane of D.H.6 type, climbs into his field of vision,—rises in wide, masterly spirals, banks, turns and flies away Westwards,—leaving the Flight Sergeant wondering with his chin upon the window-sill....

For the Two-Faced Nightingale has shed her observer, the big man in the striped Arab abâyi and roped kuffiyeh. Puzzled, the Flight Sergeant creeps noiselessly back to his place on the wooden platform, and lies awake, chewing the cud of mystery, for the rest of the long miserable night.

IV

Dawn brings surprise to him, and the other War prisoners of the Barracks. After the distribution of the morning half-brick of gritty black bread, they are given a second ration, and told to get ready, as they are all going away.

To this end they are presently mustered in the courtyard, carrying their various packs and bundles. Sick and well, unwashed, haggard, unshorn; on naked feet, or feet that are bandaged with the remnants of puttees. Some in tattered khaki tunics, others in cast-off German or Turkish jackets; many bareheaded, others covered with German military caps or broken sun-helmets,—as sorry a collection of scarecrows as Turco-German neglect and brutality can make of two hundred and twenty brave men.... A Turkish bimbashi of infantry, attended by a châwush, gravely pretends to inspect the French and British prisoners. In the name of his Empire he bids them farewell. Some try to raise a feeble cheer when both sets of big wooden gates are thrown open,—and they see a string of some half-dozen German motor-lorries waiting in the sunny road. Sick and well, they are marched forth under guard and packed into these vehicles,—those unable to stand being carried out by postas. Then, followed by some weeping wives, the Arabs, Jews and Armenians, chained neck to neck in double file,—are led away—a disconsolate procession, bound for no man knows where....

Even as they leave the foul place of their captivity, the Barracks is filled from wall to wall by an entering battalion of Turkish Reservist Rifles, part of a Brigade hastily summoned by Von Kressenstein from the Caucasus, to be launched on the journey to Mespot, and now brought down here. Swarthy, hairy men, armed with the old long Martini, some covered with the fez, others with the drill enverieh, some shod with sandals and leggings, others with German Army boots.

Thus, the Railway-line from Shechem not being available—it was extensively damaged a little while back by British bombing aircraft—and on the repair of it many of these War prisoners have bitterly toiled!—they are bumped over villainously bad roads to railhead at Nakr—en route for the fierce red city of Aleppo, where as they are now aware and Heaven knows how they have got the knowledge!—the sick and disabled are to be picked out for Exchange to England, via Smyrna—and the able-bodied (such as they are!) sent north to Belemkh, a station in the Taurus Mountains, headquarters for gangs of War prisoners working on the rails....

The villainous road that buckjumps through the tumbled Palestine landscape is crowded with Turkish Field, Horse, and Mountain Artillery, conjured back from Mesopotamia by Von Kressenstein, and rushing forward to the defence of Junction Station South. Battery after battery rolls by in the blinding dust; guns and waggons pulled, and riders carried by tough Anatolian horses, bitterly ill-used and evidently poorly fed. But not the roll of iron-shod wheels and the clatter of iron-shod hoofs, nor the roar of human voices talking in many Oriental dialects, nor the curses and jeers and viler things that are hurled at the prisoners in the jolting lorries, can shut out the savage, irregular thudding of Turkish Krupp 75 mms., Turkish Mountain Artillery, and machine-guns; and the steady, dogged slogging of British Royal Garrison Artillery motor-howitzers; British Field Artillery eighteen-pounders; and the clat-clat-clatter of Lewis machine-guns, waging bitter battle in the west and south....

At Nakr, where there is to be a delay of several hours, owing to the detrainment of forces from Mespot, they find a composite train of second and third-class compartments full of Turkish War Prisoner guards and their commanders, and horse-trucks, packed with British officers, waiting under steam for a German Staff Deputy Director of War Prisoners,—and a Controller of Transport,—who are going to Aleppo and thence to Smyrna to arrange the conditions of their exchange. The British officers are the recent captives of the stone-prison and the wired enclosure at Shechem. Very sunburnt are they:—very haggard, weary, thirsty, shabby and ill-shaven, and burdened with tattered valises and heterogeneous odds and ends of personal property, but bright of eye, elastic of bearing—full of the indomitable spirit that from the days of Agincourt and long before them—has been the birthright of their warlike race.

Crowding like schoolboys at the half-doors of the padlocked and guarded horse-trucks, they shout cheery greetings, salutations and scraps of information to the rank-and-file, clustered like swarming bees on the grilling stretch of platform beside the iron track....

"Hear the guns, W. and S.? Putting the wind up Djemal, aren't we?"

"Halloa! Mossam of B—— Company, my late Platoon! I've not seen you since I launched you with a note to the O.C. the water-camels at Rashid.... Have you got hold of a new song, or are you still denying relationship with Potsdam?"

"Aren't you Jollife, you chap with the Turkish fez and your eye in a sling? My Orderly in front of Gaza! What price that leg of roast goat with the skin and hair on? I'll bet you'd tuck into it quick enough now—if you got the chance!"

A graver, older officer leans out and calls to the soldiers:

"Can any of you men give us news of Father Forbis? We've been on the look-out for him since we heard we were to be moved."

"The Padre! ... Where's the Padre? ... What are you shaking your heads about? Damn you, you hairy brute! Why do you savage the man? ... What the hell has he done to you? ..."

Thus the ringing British voice, sharp and acrid with indignation. For Barney Mossam, screwing himself up to answer, has been clubbed by a posta's rifle-butt full in the mouth. He spits out blood and broken teeth, and grins pitiably; and for his sake and his comrades', the officers address them no more. Now the Turkish Station-Master and the German R.T.O. who is his master, appear on the platform, as the Deputy Director of War Prisoners and the Controller of Imperial Transport and their escorts arrive on the scene in German Army motor-cars. They board the dirty first-class compartment specially reserved for them. Their orderlies and servants stow away their luggage, the signal falls—and the train—with a non-commissioned officer on the platform of the corridor-car conveying the German officials—armed with binoculars and sharply on the look-out for British bomb-carrying aircraft, jolts over the warped, unevenly-laid metals for El Fuda Junction and Deraa, the first stages of its journey North....

An Arab horseman, stationary beside the track with two mounted companions, controlling his fiery dapple-grey mare with a master-hand upon her jingling bridle—resplendent with the gold and silver jewellery lavished on horse-furniture by the wealthier Bedwân, gravely salutes with his long lance tufted with sable ostrich feathers, as the composite train jolts out of Nakr. And the Deputy Director of War Prisoners and the Controller of Imperial Transport, sitting opposite one another in their dusty first-class compartment, with tall tumblers of Munich beer, (iced, in this land of dust and drouth) on a table fitted between them ... smoking the fat cigars of Hamburg and discussing German Military Supremacy and German World-politics—gravely finger the brims of their sun-helmets in recognition of the salute....

"Wer ist es! Who now, is that Arab? ..." asks the Controller, whose bulging, light-grey eyes are sharp-sighted behind their tinted glasses. "A personage of some consequence, by the gold embroidery on his burnus judging; the gold twist in his head-rope, the gold-hilted sword in his waist-cloth—and the also-with-precious-metal-enriched trappings of his Blauschimmel mare."

"He," the Deputy Director replies, "is one of the lesser Emirs of the Irregular Cavalry of the King of the Hedjaz, who—as the Herr General Controller knows,—secretly under British leadership—upon the City of Mecca seized in June and annexed Akaba in July."

"And is now wrecking trains on the Hedjaz Rail, containing German Ottoman forces, under the very noses of our Allied patrols,—blowing Turkish Railway-bridges with charges of nitro-glycerine sky-high—and in the North and East our rearguards harassing. Donnerwetter! Why is this rogue of an Arab not in fetters? What makes he, hanging about trains containing military officials of the Fatherland?"

"Because, Herr General, the Emir Fadl Anga and his followers are of those who the solid worth and philanthropic aims of Germany recognise, and scorn the windy emptiness and rapacious greed of England, the Great Swashbuckler.... They what we Germans have done for the Turkish Army also see—and are convinced that under similar auspices, Arabia, hand in hand with Egypt and India, might become a powerful and war-capable State. Emir Fadl Anga estimates the number of his party—headed by a nephew of the Mecca Sherif—as very considerable. 'They are many,' he in his Oriental hyperbole, says, 'as the stars of Heaven, or the Desert sands!' Also, information has by him been supplied, which, had the difference between German and Arabic clock-time at our Shechem Headquarters been better understood—might have resulted in a Handstreich very gratifying to Imperial Majesty at Berlin. The officer guilty of this so gross ignorance was brought to a drumhead Court Martial and degraded, the Herr General will be pleased to hear! However, the Emir's intentions were agreed to be excellent, and he has now brought us a basket of carrier-pigeons from his Chief, the nephew of the Sherif—and the Emir is to convey back with him of these birds a similar basket, trained at the Nazareth Headquarters of the Herr General-in-Chief, Liman von Sanders—as soon as the pigeon-master-Sergeant with them arrives.... Also, this is good beer! What does the Herr General say to another bottle?"

"Ja, ja. Mit Vergnügen. It is hellishly hot! ..."

The Emir Fadl Anga, ingenious purveyor of genuine but post-dated intelligence—salutes gravely, and wheels his dapple-grey about as the composite train bumps out of Nakr. A muscle in his lean, dark cheek jerks, and his thin lips under the Arab beard smile scornfully—as his glance falls on the rank-and-file of the War Prisoners—clustered on the platform beside the iron way....

They are hot, faint and weary under the bite of the sun, amidst this jumble of naked hills, on whose chalk and limestone knees they have driven elaborate systems of trenches for the enemy, under the lash of the loaded hide-whips. But Barney Mossam, with a split top-lip and a scarlet gap where several front teeth are missing, is making a gallant effort to buck the others. In the middle of a spirited rendering of "I HAVEN'T seen the Kaiser for a VERY long time. He's the leader of a German Band, an' he AIN'T no cousin of mine!"—breaks in the fierce interruption of an Arab voice, bitterly abusive:

"You—O you! Sons of farrâshes prostitute concubines!—silence that brother of howling apes!"

Thrusting his lance-butt in the embroidered leathern bucket, Fadl Anga leans low from his saddle—appears to pick up something, no doubt a pebble—rises erect, and hurls the missile savagely into the brown of the crowd of men. It hits Barney, who picks it up, and white teeth flash in the black beards of the other mounted Arabs, and a laugh goes up from the Turkish guards, who are smoking and chatting and eating water-melons, as the supposed emissary of the traitorous nephew of the Sherif of Mecca touches his mare with the sharp edge of the broad copper stirrup—and with a ringing shout of "Allah ho Akbar!" gallops down the rocky road towards Shechem, followed by his two companions, and leaving Barney Mossam gaping—with an embroidered Arab purse—heavy with Turkish silver coins, clutched in his hand....

Long before the composite train went jolting out of Nakr the keen grey eyes under the kuffiyeh of Fadl Anga—eyes less miserable now that by day and night sharp danger gives a spice to life, so empty void of Katharine—have assured their owner, Edward Yaill,—that Julian Forbis is not with the officers in the cattle-trucks any more than he is with the men clustered like swarming bees upon the grilling platform, beside the iron track.

V

The weather changes before dawn. Soggy clouds roll inland from the sea, hide the sky of Eastern azure, blot out the shining faces of the stars and invest the pale beauty of the Queen Planet of Night with the flowing sable veil of a recent War Widow. It has come on to rain—a slashing downpour of Palestinian intensity, under which the wadis speedily become shallow cataracts of khaki water—the trenches slashed in the terraced Judæan Hills, and manned by Turks, Germans, or British Crusaders—mere troughs of sandy or chalky mud.

Sangars ramparted with boulders may offer some practical assurance against shell-splinters or bullets, but against rain like this they offer no security. Bivouacs built of stones, and roofed with ground-sheets may in some degree keep out the rain, but they freely admit the cold. A Scotch mist, clammy, freezing and blinding in its damp opaqueness blankets the Hills of Ephraim, and broods over the Maritime Plain, as on the edge of one of the limestone terraces that fringe the robe of Mount Ebal,—a big, brawny Arab sits—nursing a badly-ricked ankle, and swearing in the fruitiest vernacular of his adopted land.

It is lucky for the Arab in the brown camel-hair shirt, striped abâyi and roped white linen head-cloth, that he has no audience but the scorpions and lizards sheltering from the slashing downpour under the grey-white boulders—as he rocks himself and nurses his ricked ankle—and curses his luck. Presently, as the Scotch mist lifts, and the plain is irradiated by the watery moonlight, he sets his teeth for an effort and crawls to where a bundle tied in native cloth, and a long, metal-tipped Arab walking-staff lie on the chalky, puddled plain where they fell when he dropped them from the machine at the beginning of the volplane, and screwed himself as the plain rushed up, to wait the throttling down of the engine—the long, smooth final glide—the flattening out following the pilot's raising of the lever—and the slight jarring impact of the thick-tyred wheels with the ground....

"Now jump!" the sharp, strident voice of the Egyptian called when the expected shock seemed imminent, and John Hazel set his teeth and jumped promptly. Aware even before he crashed to ground that the word had been given too soon. Even as he sprawled on the chalky plain, with all the wind knocked out of his body—the machine just missed landing on top of him. How he rolled out of the way of the thick squat wheels, and the steel framework of the under-carriage of the biplane, a powerful and heavy machine of D.H.6 type—he does not know now....

Sick, faint and shaken, he picked himself up, but not before Essenian, lithe as an acrobat, freed himself from the safety-belt, jumped out, adjusted the controls, and swung the big propeller. As the engine started he leaped back to his seat, looked round at Hazel, shouted "Good-bye!" and opening the throttle, raced over the plain, and rushed up into the air as though pursued by a fusillade of machine-gun bullets.

"Damn and blast the Egyptian beast!" John snarls, and, as the ricked joint rapidly swells to cricket-ball size, swears again, and thinks as he rubs it, "Might have guessed he was out for some treachery or other. Though how could I?—until he signalled to the enemy over Shechem by firing the Verey light, and gave away the whole show by dropping a message-bag! Making me swear before the start by all we Hazels hold most holy, never by word or sign to let out anything I might see him do. Consequently I'm his confederate—tarred with the same brush. And now I know he murdered Captain Usborn! It was his own revolver-bullet I showed him at the Club. If ever I get out of here I stand some chance of getting shot myself for being back at the Front on the quiet when I'm supposed to be on leave in Alex. But anyhow I hope I'll see Essenian Pasha get his dose of British lead before I do. Unless I get a chance to settle him myself. Wouldn't I let the beggar have it! Right in the neck—where Winnie wore the beads. But what a flier! Holy Smoke! what an A1. flier! Unless he's a devil, which I trend to believe!—there's not a man his match."

The rain that began at two a.m. by his wrist-watch (hidden under a broad band of untanned sheep-leather, laced on John's big wrist by a slender thong) shows no sign of abating. Fitfully and at intervals through the night, those guns in the west and south have held debate. Now they begin again with redoubled energy. John has seen as the D.H.6 travelled through the clear azure Palestine night, how the enemy's line has been thrust back from Gaza towards Jaffa. Now with a great blowing-up of Turco German ammunition-dumps, Junction Station,—key of the northern railway system—announces to the echoing hills the success of British arms.

"Good for us!" John chuckles, rather drearily—as the sullen sky in the south is illuminated by Aurora Borealis-like effects of orange, green and crimson—and Brock-like sheaves of flame spurt from the horizon to descend in gold and silver showers. "Djemal Pasha's Fourth Army Corps seems to be getting it rather badly. We're putting the breeze up Von Kressenstein, unless I much mistake...."

Even as John Hazel hugs the thought, the train containing Djemal Pasha's German Corps Commander is rushing towards Jerusalem. The Turco-German Army, broken in two, is retiring eastwards upon the Holy City and north-west through Ramleh towards Tul Keram. The brigades that rolled into Shechem overnight—rested and fed, are rolling out again. Fresh batteries from the Caucasus, diverted from Mesopotamia, new battalions of infantry of the Redif and Mustafiz, and brigades of irregular Cavalry from Kurdistan and Northern Albania, are swarming down to reinforce the Nizam and its Ikhtiât.

Dawn comes with cessation of the freezing, pelting rain and the sun glows fiery red through the curtain of leaden-coloured mists that yet hang over the Mediterranean. Wounded and stragglers on foot, German Army motor-lorries laden with escaping Teuton officers, begin to arrive at the Holy City. It is whispered in Jerusalem the Weary that the days of Ottoman rule in Palestine are numbered, that the German, Turkish and Austrian officials and residents are even now preparing to quit the town. And indeed German depots are hurriedly emptied; sugar sold as cheap as the dirt that is in it—long held-up flour and cereals disposed of in haste. From the high towers of the City and from the Mount of Olives one can see the roads that are muddy now—and will be dusty presently, crowded with lorries, carts and pack-animals carrying fugitives with their baggage, munitions and essential stores, north to Shechem or east to Jericho....

John, unaware of this, yet senses great happenings, as he stands propped on his Arab staff, cursing the temporary uselessness of a man with a sprained ankle-joint. He must lie up somewhere until the anguish abates and the cricket-ball reduces. A hut—there are clusters of drab-white specks, indicating a village on the northern fringes of the stretch of plain—boulder-strewn, bush-dotted, thinly grassed, thick with tufts of mandrake and tall blue Campanulas, and knee-deep in growth of late-blooming, white and yellow asphodel—on which Essenian elected to come down.... Westwards towards the sea there are other, larger villages. South there is a broad defile, curving east between humpy limestone hills, leading, John knows, to the town of Shechem. Over him rises the huge and bulky Shape of Ebal, three thousand six hundred and ninety feet above sea-level. From terrace to terrace, a path winds up to her towering rounded crest between hedges of tamarisk, broad-leaved grey-green cactus, and prickly pear plentifully laden with knobby red fruit. On her summit the map has shown John the ruins of an ancient fortress. Near the top, on this, the west side—stands a little whitewashed cupola surmounting a wall of mud and stone encircling a Moslem well.

Water is there; and hidden away with his revolver and cartridges on John's big person, is a case of First Aid necessaries, a small flask of brandy and some meat-lozenges in case of need like this. He determines to crawl up to the place of the well, hide, and doctor himself for a day, or even two days until the sprain is reduced, and he can get about.

"Hard luck," he mutters to himself, "but there's no good in grousing.... Now buck up and help me—O all you Big Old Men!"

But the Big Old Men give no sign, and their descendant, shouldering his bundle (to bear out his role of Arab there ought to be a donkey or a woman to carry it), limps, leaning on his staff and sweating with pain, up the narrow pathway leading between the hedges of cactus and prickly pear.

Blood-red, the Sun rises over the distant horizon, the glittering drops upon the leaves, the drying puddles under John's naked, slippered feet are reddened by the reflection. From the broad, prickly leaves the wet begins to steam; the tufts of snapdragon, pink and crimson, white and yellow and orange; and the blue campanulas, growing in the tissues of the rock, stand gallantly upright, refreshed by the dampness; the lily-like asphodel exhales its delicate, characteristic smell.

There are goats on the Mount, John notices, presently. Their droppings are thick upon the path he climbs. He hears them bleating, and sees them, feeding under the ruins of the Fortress. Indeed, the next wind of the path brings him out upon a ledge where a heavy-uddered female is cropping the thyme that grows there, with a jet-black kid nuzzling at her side. If one could catch the mother, thinks John, the question of subsisting here for days would be easily settled. Prickly pears are eatable.... Goat's milk is good.... There were lots of milch-goats in the caves of Sheria, and modern Crusaders, dry with the drouth of battle, and as yet uncertain whether the enemy had not poisoned the wells—milked the goats into their tin hats and other receptacles, and drank and were mightily refreshed. If only—even as John licks his lips, the too-nimble dairy, skipping from ledge to ledge, recedes from view. Bleating, the little black kid scrambles after her—and the Moslem well near the summit of Ebal seems farther off than it did before.

John sees now a path, branching off to his right hand, which may lead to the hut or cave of the goatherd. He strikes out upon it, and makes some progress, until the curve of it, trending southwards, suddenly shows him a narrow road, deeply rutted with broad-tyred wheels, and pitted with hoof-prints, leading up the Mount from its base on the south-eastern side. The erect brown figure of a sentry—reduced by distance to the size of a doll—stands out against the background. A Turkish Artillery waggon is jolting up the steep roadway.... John hears the panting of the toiling horses, the creak of the straining rope traces, the jingle of chains and the cracking of the drivers' thick-lashed whips....

From behind a bush he now looks down into a sangar built of boulders, sheltered at one end with green tarpaulin and full of Turkish machine-guns. The tarpaulin quivers with the snores of sleeping gunners, whose legs project beyond it, and from a nest of camouflage lower down the mountain, the blunt nose of a howitzer snuffs at the sky.

Still farther south a Field battery of Krupps has been posted on the flank of Ebal; the whinnying of horses eager for their morning barley and forage comes from a hollow where the Turks have stabled their teams, the smell of some aromatic burning wood spices the air with sweetness. Blue smoke columns up from fires of hidden bivouacs. There are picquets along the foothills, and on the plain are outposts. The Mount—except on the west and north whence danger is not apprehended—has been converted into a veritable wasps' nest.

Holding his breath, John Hazel turns, and noiselessly retraces his footsteps between the cactus hedges and along the path to where it first branched off. As he sets his lame foot gingerly upon it, he encounters a veiled native woman, toiling upwards, who carries—not an excessive burden in this land of laden women—a bundle of canes, and an empty gourd, and has a coarse jar of red earthenware balanced on her head.

Perhaps the earthen Jar contains water, or milk, or laban, that mixture of excessively sour milk with finely-chopped mint, peculiar to Syria. The bare idea intensifies John's thirst.

"O my mother!" he begins in quite passable Arabic: "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate—"

"Ai—e!" The woman has started and dropped the gourd, and stands before him trembling, "What—what wouldst thou?"

"Somewhat to wet my throat. Thou lookest on a thirsty man. Hast thou, by any lucky chance, drink in the vessel?"

"The vessel is empty. See you, I have spoken truth!" She takes the jar from her veiled head and turns it upside down, and John's heart sinks to the bottom of his famished stomach. "May God relieve your need! ..."

"Allah favour thee! Black is my fortune. Thou seest," he thrusts out the swollen foot with the bulge at the side of the ankle-joint, "what evil has befallen me through a slip upon the Mountain side."

"It hurts thee? ..." He cannot see the hidden face, but in the faint voice there is a note of pity....

"Wallah! It hurts like very hell! Worse than the hurt is the lameness. Now hear! By the life of my head I say: If thou, being a woman, couldst help it somewhat! ... If thou knewest a place of shelter where I could lie and tend the hurt, and—and—have somewhat to eat and drink while it was mending, for this I would pay thee. By Allah! I am no beggar, I!"

The Fellaha thinks, while a little dusky hand holds the edges of her veil together. Then she says faintly:

"Ala râsi. I have—I know of a place of shelter. It is not very far from here. There thou couldst lie, it is a cave between two boulders and I would bring thee food and drink."

"Allah requite thee, O my sister! ..."

"Come, then, Sidi!" She returns her empty vessel to its place upon her head, with the deft, accustomed swing of the Eastern woman, and moves on before him, striking into another lateral path, a mere goat-track to the unpractised eye, that scores the mountain-side, running north. For perhaps a quarter of a mile her little bending figure hurries along and the tall Arab, leaning on his staff, hobbles painfully after. Where the cave between two boulders is—and less a cave than a hollow under a projecting ledge of nummulite limestone—he finds her waiting him....

"In here, Sidi!"

"Call me not Sidi! I am no person of degree." John thinks it well to try on the woman the story he has invented. "No person of degree am I. Only Ali Zaybak the Bedawi, a man who once had three camels, and ten sheep, and five goats, and a father and two brothers, and a wife also; and now has none; my brothers, my wife and two camels being killed and all the rest lost...."

"May the Dispenser of Mercies atone to thee, O Ali Zaybak!" says the thin faded voice from under the woman's veil. "How came about thy loss? From whom dost thou claim the blood-wreaks?"

"From the Inglizi, (English) the thrice-accursed ones! who came flying over our village—we dwelling in the Shadow of Allah in the caves of the Wadi Sheria—I and my brothers having bought exemption from service with the Army of the Osmanli (Turks) with the savings of all our lives."

"Ay, ay," the thin voice assents, bitterly. "Few and small were the gold and silver coins remaining on thy wife's head-tire, when the Dispensers of Exemption had signed thy card."

"Verily, Allah be my witness! and it is a black shame to take the money that was the woman's marriage-gift. We were then very poor—but we had the three camels and the sheep and the goats also—though the beasts were little and thin. Then came the War, rolling all about us—with marchings and counter-marchings of hosts of men—and we sent my brothers south so that they might sell to the Inglizi soldiers before Gaza, all the olives stored in old oil-tins, and all the oranges, and tobacco, and grape-treacle, and figs of last year, that the Almani and Osmanli had not taken away...." John cannot for the life of him restrain this vitriolic touch. "And they went, and made much money—the Inglizi being fools and wealthy, moreover—as all these sons of Sheitan are. This was in the month Shbât; and coming home my two brothers encountered Fate, in the person of a Commander of the Almani (Germans), who seized upon the young men—they being far from their native village and not having their warakas of Exemption on them—and sent them to dig trenches at the Bir-es Saba Works."

"A bitter tyranny the Most High beheld, and will avenge upon the doer!"

"Then there was fighting at the Wady Sheria—because having taken the strong place of Bir-es Saba, ay! and the ridges down to the sea, the British desired the Place of Good Wells." John is beginning to believe in Ali Zaybak, the Bedawi farmer, to the point of getting hot over that individual's fictitious woes.... "Came they—they came, and were as hornets about us, their killis bursting with stench, and smoke, and ruin—and their Devil-Birds fighting the Devil-Birds of the Almani, and driving them down out of the air. One dropped an egg of Eblis that killed two of our camels, and broke the leg of the third. My father cried out on Allah and fell face downwards.... So my wife cried out and fell, and when I went to lift them, lo!—they were dead.... Yet was there no wound on either.... Wallah! Upon neither was there a wound! ..."

"Well do I believe thee. I have seen Death come after that fashion many times since the beginning of this War. What more, O Ali Zaybak? ..."

"This,—that my goats and sheep being gone from me—for the Osmanli took them when they retired before the Inglizi—I have come to Shechem to seek my brothers, if haply they be alive and there! ..."

"Ay, but why seek them on the Mount of Cursing, and not within the town? ..."

Woman-like, she has put her little wasted, dusky finger on the weak spot in John's trumped-up story. Having done it, she goes on, as he racks his brain for a sufficiently-convincing figment:

"Thou wilt do this to-morrow, O Ali Zaybak the Bedawi, when the swelling of thy joint hath abated and thou art rested and fed. So creep in here between the stones—there is a sheepskin thou canst lie on—and in somewhat less than an hour I will come back to thee with food and drink."

"May Allah prolong thy years, O woman!" says John with the extravagant hyperbole and the sing-song inflection proper to Oriental gratitude. "May thy fortune be doubled upon thee, and, fair as thou art already, may the radiance of thy beauty out-dazzle the full moon!"

She gives a queer little rustling laugh behind the folds of her coarse, yellowish head-cloth.

"Sweet words, sweet words from a widower bereaved in Shbât! Belike," she cackles again, "thou hast come to the Mount of Cursing in search of another bride? Dost thou lust for the Unrevealed? See, then, O Ali Zaybak! what beauty hides behind this screen! ..."

And accompanying the words with a swift revealing movement, she whisks back the heavy veil from that mutilated left side....

"My God!" John very nearly exclaims, bleaching under his natural mahogany-colour, for a man old in War and hardened to the sight of wounded men may yet sicken at the sight of a woman mutilated like this. But he swallows the exclamation, and substitutes:

"I—am sorry! May Allah pity thee, poor soul! ..."

"And increase the wisdom of the Sidi! ..."

The Fellaha is re-veiled and between the pendent linen folds comes her little rustling whisper; chilling the blood of the pretended Ali Zaybak, under the now nearly vertical rays of the blazing Syrian sun....

"Who, desiring Secret Intelligence for his War-Chiefs of the British Army, ventures into the midst of the enemy, disguised as an Arab and alone! ..."

The words drop, coldly as lumps of hail, on the adventurous heart of the man. Discovered, and in the first hour by a Syrian peasant woman.... He forgets his pain, and drawn to his full height, fixes his black eyes threateningly upon her hidden face.

"What sayest thou? Hast thou no fear?"

"None—of a British officer, nor of a British soldier!"

The words, spoken in English with a Syrian-French accent, are such an unexpected shock, that John jolts temporarily back into his own adopted tongue:

"How the hell—ahem! How did you know—I'm—what you say I am?"

"Because" the voice is soft and refined, though it is thin and toneless: "Because—sir!—when I showed you my face—you did not—spit like a Mohammedan, or laugh like a German! And who"—the voice suggests the shadow of a mocking smile—"who but an Englishman would venture here—so ill-disguised and speaking such bad Arabic, and carry himself so confidently as almost to deceive me—in spite of the testimony of my two good ears—and my one very good eye."

The poor face she has shown to John is blind on that shattered left side. He knows a thrill of pity even as he asks:

"You won't give me away? ..."

"If 'give away' means to betray—no, I will not betray you!"

"Thanks. You're out Scouting on your own," says John, "unless I'm very much mistaken?" He adds still in English, as she lets this broad hint pass.... "Since we're to be pals of sorts, do you mind telling me your name? ..."

She gives her faint little whispering laugh.

"Ay, surely. It is Ummshni.... 'Mother Ugly' in your English tongue. In Arabic, 'Mother of Ugliness.' ...!"

"But—but I can't call you that! ..."

"You must. It is my name here. For you I have no other."

"Then shake hands, little Ummshni," John says promptly, and thrusts out his own huge, brown right hand.

"Need we?" She hesitates....

He says, encouragingly:

"Just once. To seal the bargain and show we're pals!"

"Once then...."

She hesitates an instant more. Now from enveloping folds, a small, shrunken, dusky hand steals out, and is engulfed in John's. And then a breathless cry, not loud, nor shrill, but terrible in its dire, agonised intensity bursts from the mouth of the distorted face that is mercifully hidden by the veil....

"God of my fathers! Who art thou?" The gasped-out words are once more Arabic. "From whence didst thou get the Ring of the House of Hazaël? ... Thy face, too.... It is the face of Eli! Thy voice.... Do not deny it! ... Thou art of the Blood! ..."

"Since you know it already I'll tip you the garden truth. I'm John Benn Hazel, old Eli's grandson from London. But who in the name of—wonder—are you? ..."

"Thy—thy unhappy Cousin Esther!" The words come stumblingly, between terrible, dry sobs.... "Oh, do not check me. Let me weep! I have not for so long! ..."

"Now by—the whole blooming, blessed row of Big Old Men, back to the Very Biggest!" John says between his teeth, as leaning on his heavy staff he stands staring blankly down at a little heaving bundle of coarse and common feminine drapery that crouches at his big sandalled feet amidst the short thyme-scented grass, "This is—this is the cherry in the cocktail! Just when I'd begun to think I wouldn't carry through—comes along the very sort of little woman to help me! This isn't Coincidence or anything like it. This is—just—Fate! ..."

"Help thee?" Her sobs have abated, she lifts up her bowed, head. "In what manner can I help thee? I can feed thee, tend thy hurt and hide thee. But there is something more than these.... Tell me what thou wouldst do? ..."

"Save a man!" No one is near, but he whispers it, stooping over the little figure. "A War Prisoner they've got here. Get him out—and get him away! ..."

"Yes—yes! Willingly will I help thee. Hath an Hazaël ever failed to answer to the Call of the Blood?" The little dusky hand clutches at his brawny wrist. She rises, and her eager breath mingles with his, and an eye diamond-bright, black as his own, flashes between her veils.... "What strength I have—what cunning and courage—are thine, to the threshold of Death and beyond it. But—but, John, my cousin! If I help thee to free thy man—thou must needs deliver mine."

"I'm not sweet on conditions—they're things that handicap. Who's your man?" The tone is decidedly gruff.

"He is an English officer.... There is no other in Shechem since the big German petrol lorries rolled out this morning. For the Turks have sent them all away ... I heard, to Aleppo."

"The hell you say! Forgive me, little Esther, but this is—pretty rough! For I'm here—bad Arabic and all—on the track of a British War Prisoner."

"Tell me his name," says the thin rustling voice, shaken still with emotion....

"Julian Forbis.... Father Julian Forbis," John answers, and she falters:

"O my cousin! in thine hour of need and mine the Most High, Blessed be He! hath verily sent thee. For—for—thy man and my man—are one! Come now to the secret place where I dwell alone with my sorrow. There we can talk freely—it is safer than here. Thy hand on my shoulder—what a big hand, like that of our grandfather Eli! ... Lean on thy staff, but on me too. I am stronger than thou wouldst dream...."

VI

The line held yesterday by the Turco-German forces has bent northwards at its western extremity, and southwards at its eastern end. Jaffa, the ancient Port of Jerusalem, has been occupied by Allenby's forces. Junction Station, the key of the north, now being in British hands, the enemy's Army, cut in two, has retired partly east into the mountains towards Jerusalem, and partly northwards along the Coastal Plain. The nearest line upon which its several portions can re-unite is the line Tul-Keram, Shechem. Reports from the Royal Flying Corps indicate the intention of Djemal Pasha and the other Corps Commanders to evacuate Jerusalem and withdraw to organise on the line Tul-Keram, Shechem.

It being vital to obtain a hold of this invaluable artery of thoroughfare, which traverses the Judæan range from north to south from Shechem to Jerusalem,—our Advance has wheeled to the right, and struck into the Hills with the object of wresting from the enemy the Jerusalem-Shechem Road.

At the eastern end of the long fish-shaped valley, whose sides are shagged with olive-woods and running with springs, and in which lies Shechem, is a grassy, level expanse in the shape of an isosceles triangle—one of its longer sides being the road that runs east and west past the new Turkish Barracks, the Arsenal and the Hospital—and the other the road that—north of this—passing the Mohammedan Cemetery and the ancient Tombs that are upon the fringe of the limestone robe of Ebal, runs into an ancient Roman road, that completing the shape of the isosceles, goes north along the eastern flank of Mount Ebal to the little hamlet of Sichar, and south to the Holy City,—leaving on the left a Mohammedan well that has been built over the Tomb of Joseph, and some quarter of a mile farther on, a hillock shaded by mulberries and figs, and covered with ruins, enclosing Bir Samariyeh, or the Samaritan Woman's Well.

The top of the triangular patch of waste ground ends at the very gate of Shechem, being lost in the great mounds of immemorial ashes, brought down in ancient days from the Temple on Mount Gerizim. Wild fig and mulberry, olive and tamarisk—and thickets of the zizyphus set with formidable thorns, that give the tree its name of Spina Christi—make a shabby jungle of the Ash Heaps, haunted by kites, crows and owls, pariah-dogs and jackals, who come to feast where the offal and refuse of the town are thrown. Here, too, lepers congregate; sick animals are thrust to die, dead ones are thrown to bleach and putrefy; and sometimes—even before the War—bodies of people robbed and murdered, or too destitute of friends to be given burial—huddle amongst the rank weeds and tangled undergrowth, or lie stark and dreadful, with blind eyes beaten by the lashing rains of Palestine, or staring at its pitiless sun.

When Allied War Prisoners first came to the town of Shechem, the isosceles triangle of waste ground—its shortest side indicated by the road that runs by the Tomb of Joseph towards the Well of the Samaritaness—was enclosed within a twelve-foot double fence of German barbed-wire, for the keeping of certain French and British officers, who declined to give parole. These lived in Turkish Army tents and messed in a ramshackle wooden hut near the eastern end of the enclosure; their rations, such as they were, being brought from the Turkish Barracks twice a day. Those officers who gave parole, causing less trouble to the authorities—were somewhat better treated, it may be allowed. The old stone prison near the Suk was alloted as their quarters. They were permitted to take exercise within certain bounds, even to visit the Latin Fathers, and the headquarters of the Protestant Mission, and better their diet by making purchases in the town bazar. To-day, Shechem, with her numerous mosques and her flat-brown roofs embowered in orange and pomegranate-trees—is bursting full of Turkish troops, and their German military masters; and destined ere long to rival Tul Keram as an Army H.Q. No British War Prisoners are left in her since the exodus of early morning, save four Berkshire and Devon Yeomen lying desperately sick at the Turkish Hospital—two London Territorials, and three Indian troopers in the charitable care of the Sœurs de la Sainte Croix....