true or so well told that I can see
the actors in it like figures in coloured costumes on a lighted stage.
It occurred during the last days of Turkish occupation, while the
English advance was still halted before Gaza, and heroically enduring
the slow death of desert warfare. There were German and Austrian
elements present in the garrison with the Turks, though the three
allies seem to have held strangely aloof from each other.
In the Austrian group there was an Austrian lady, "who had some dignity
or other," like Lord Lundy's grandmother. She was very beautiful,
very fashionable, somewhat frivolous, but with fits of Catholic devotion.
She had some very valuable Christian virtues, such as indiscriminate
charity for the poor and indiscriminate loathing for the Prussians.
She was a nurse; she was also a nuisance. One day she was driving
just outside the Jaffa Gate, when she saw one of those figures
which make the Holy City seem like the eternal crisis of an epic.
Such a man will enter the gate in the most ghastly rags as if
he were going to be crowned king in the city; with his head
lifted as if he saw apocalyptic stars in heaven, and a gesture at
which the towers might fall. This man was ragged beyond all that
moving rag-heap; he was as gaunt as a gallows tree, and the thing
he was uttering with arms held up to heaven was evidently a curse.
The lady sent an inquiry by her German servant, whom also I can see
in a vision, with his face of wood and his air of still trailing
all the heraldic trappings of the Holy Roman Empire. This ambassador
soon returned in state and said, "Your Serene High Sublimity
(or whatever it is), he says he is cursing the English." Her pity
and patriotism were alike moved; and she again sent the plenipotentiary
to discover why he cursed the English, or what tale of wrong or ruin
at English hands lay behind the large gestures of his despair.
A second time the wooden intermediary returned and said,
"Your Ecstatic Excellency (or whatever be the correct form),
he says he is cursing the English because they don't come."

There are a great many morals to this story, besides the general
truth to which it testifies; that the Turkish rule was not
popular even with Moslems, and that the German war was not
particularly popular even with Turks. When all deductions are
made for the patriot as a partisan, and his way of picking up
only what pleases him, it remains true that the English attack
was very