me naval men operating motor boats from this
point, and these sailors achieved a record on that melancholy waterway
at a level far below that at which any submarine, British or German,
ever rested.

CHAPTER XIX

THE TOUCH OF THE CIVILISING HAND

It is doubtful whether the population of any city within the zones of
war profited so much at the hands of the conqueror as Jerusalem. In
a little more than half a year a wondrous change was effected in the
condition of the people, and if it had been possible to search the
Oriental mind and to get a free and frank expression of opinion,
one would probably have found a universal thankfulness for General
Allenby's deliverance of the Holy City from the hands of the Turks.
And with good reason. The scourge of war so far as the British Army
was concerned left Jerusalem the Golden untouched. For the 50,000
people in the City the skilfully applied military pressure which
put an end to Turkish misgovernment was the beginning of an era
of happiness and contentment of which they had hitherto had no
conception. Justice was administered in accordance with British
ideals, every man enjoyed the profits of his industry, traders no
longer ran the gauntlet of extortionate officials, the old time
corruption was a thing of the past, public health was organised as far
as it could be on Western lines, and though in matters of sanitation
and personal cleanliness the inhabitants still had much to learn, the
appearance of the Holy City and its population vastly improved under
the touch of a civilising hand. Sights that offended more than one of
the senses on the day when General Allenby made his official entry had
disappeared, and peace and order reigned where previously had been but
misery, poverty, disease, and squalor.

One of the biggest blots upon the Turkish government of the City was
the total failure to provide an adequate water supply. What they
could not, or would not, do in their rule of four hundred years His
Majesty's Royal Engineers accomplished in a little more than two
months, and now for the first time in history every civilian in
Jerusalem can obtain as much pure mountain spring water as he wishes,
and for this water, as fresh and bright as any bubbling out of Welsh
hills, not a penny is charged. The picturesque, though usually
unclean, water carrier is passing into the limbo of forgotten things,
and his energies are being diverted into other channels. The germs
that swarm