ate had to be purchased by the roadside from our own funds, which were
scant enough to start with. The Arabs were in a terrible plight. Most of
them were penniless, and, as the pangs of hunger set in, they began
pillaging right and left from the little farms by the wayside. From
modest beginnings--poultry and vegetables--they progressed to larger
game, unhindered by the officers. Houses were entered, women insulted;
time and again I saw a stray horse, grazing by the roadside, seized by a
crowd of grinning Arabs, who piled on the poor beast's back until he was
almost crushed to earth, and rode off triumphantly, while their comrades
held back the weeping owner. The result of this sort of
"requisitioning," was that our band of recruits was followed by an
increasing throng of farmers--imploring, threatening, trying by hook or
by crook to win back the stolen goods. Little satisfaction did they get,
although some of them went with us as far as Saffed.

Our garrison town is not an inviting place, nor has it an inviting
reputation. Lord Kitchener himself had good reason to remember it. As a
young lieutenant of twenty-three, in the Royal Engineering Corps, he was
nearly killed there by a band of fanatical Arabs while surveying for the
Palestine Exploration Fund. Kitchener had a narrow escape of it (one of
his fellow officers was shot dead close by him), but he went calmly
ahead and completed his maps, splendid large-scale affairs which have
never since been equaled--and which are now in use by the Turkish and
German armies! However, though Saffed combines most of the unpleasant
characteristics of Palestine native towns, we welcomed the sight of it,
for we were used up by the march. An old deserted mosque was given us
for barracks; there, on the bare stone floor, in close-packed
promiscuity, too tired to react to filth and vermin, we spent our first
night as soldiers of the Sultan, while the milky moonlight streamed in
through every chink and aperture, and bats flitted round the vaulting
above the snoring carcasses of the recruits.

Next morning we were routed out at five. The black depths of the well in
the center of the mosque courtyard provided doubtful water for washing,
bathing, and drinking; then came breakfast,--our first government
meal,--consisting, simply enough, of boiled rice, which was ladled out
into tin wash-basins holding rations for ten men. In true Eastern
fashion we squatted down round the basin and dug into t