ver it was, for another quarter of an hour. Successfully to cut your
own hair needs, I imagine, considerable agility and a complicated
arrangement of mirrors; and a pair of horse-clippers, the only alternative,
was a fearsome weapon in the hands of a man whose sole experience in the
hair-cutting profession was a murderous performance every morning with an
army razor.

Elsewhere on the western portion of the front there were one or two similar
small towns, but either they were out of bounds for sanitary reasons or
were negligible in the matter of amusement; the average native village
offered no inducement whatever for a visit. Even Ludd, which in the spring
and summer of 1918 became a mighty depot and the terminus of the Military
Railway for the time being, never rose to the dignity of a cinema. Like the
inhabitants of a certain country village in the North of England, if you
wanted distraction at Ludd you went to the station and watched the trains
shunt.

After the Turks had made the last of a series of costly but abortive
counter-attacks to regain Jerusalem and were finally and for ever driven
back, the city was placed strictly out of bounds until Borton Pasha and the
medical authorities had thoroughly purged it of all unpleasantness: the
Germans and Turks were extremely uncleanly in their habits. Later, when
this had been done, Desert Corps established a Rest Camp at Enab, about six
miles from Jerusalem, and from time to time organised parties to visit the
tombs and other holy places in the neighbourhood. As these were very well
arranged and were usually in charge of padres from the various
denominations they were much appreciated by the tired men coming up from
the Jordan Valley for a rest. It is no part of my purpose to take the
reader on a kind of personally conducted war-time tour of Jerusalem; the
guide books will supply him with all the information he wants. Besides, he
would inevitably be disappointed, unless his first glimpse of the Holy City
was from the summit of Nebi Samwil or, coming out of the Jordan Valley on a
moonlit night, he saw the shimmering radiance of the Mosque of Omar at the
top of Mount Moriah.

But the Rest Camp at Enab was strictly limited both in size and scope. It
was for the use of the mounted divisions only, and men went there chiefly
for a rest; amusement, such as could be had in the form of sight-seeing,
was of secondary importance. A more universal camp was at Beni Saleh, on
the coa