f men from our village. In
the course of time their families began to get the most harrowing
messages from them. They were absolutely destitute, no wages being paid
them by the Turks; their clothes were dropping off them in rags; many
were sick. After much excited planning, it was decided to send another
man and myself down south on a sort of relief expedition, with a
substantial sum of money that had been raised with great difficulty by
our people. Through the influence of my brother at the Agricultural
Experiment Station, I got permission from the _mouchtar_ to leave
Zicron-Jacob, and about the middle of January, 1915, I set out for
Jerusalem.

To Western minds, the idea of the Holy City serving as a base for modern
military operations must be full of incongruities. And, as a matter of
fact, it _was_ an amazing sight to see the streets packed with
khaki-clad soldiers and hear the brooding silence of ancient walls
shattered by the crash of steel-shod army boots. Here, for the first
time, I saw the German officers--quantities of them. Strangely out of
place they looked, with their pink-and-whiteness that no amount of hot
sunshine could quite burn off. They wore the regular German officer's
uniform, except that the _Pickelhaube_ was replaced by a khaki
sun-helmet. I was struck by the youthfulness of them; many were nothing
but boys, and there were weak, dissolute faces in plenty--a fact that
was later explained when I heard that Palestine had been the
dumping-ground for young men of high family whose parents were anxious
to have them as far removed as possible from the danger zone. Fast's
Hotel was the great meeting-place in Jerusalem for these young bloods.
Every evening thirty or forty would foregather there to drink and talk
women and strategy. I well remember the evening when one of them--a
slender young Prussian with no back to his head, braceleted and
monocled--rose and announced, in the decisive tones that go with a
certain stage of intoxication: "What we ought to do is to hand over the
organization of this campaign to Thomas Cook & Sons!"

However, the German officers were by no means all incompetents. They
realized (I soon found out) that they had little hope of bringing a big
army through the Egyptian desert and making a successful campaign there.
Their object was to immobilize a great force of British troops around
the Canal, to keep the Mohammedan population in Palestine impressed with
Turkish power, and to