port.

On February 24, 1917, Kut was wrested from the Turks again; on March 11
they lost Baghdad; on November 7 their Beersheba-Gaza front was
shattered, and Jerusalem fell on December 9.

Early next year Jericho was captured (February 21), a British column
from Baghdad reached the Caspian in August, and after a final,
victorious British offensive in Palestine the unholy alliance of Turkish
pan-Islamism and German _Kultur_ got its death-blow when Emir Feisal
galloped into Damascus.

The Turks had drawn the blade of _jihad_ from its pan-Islamic scabbard
in vain; its German trade-mark was plainly stamped on it. There had been
widespread organisation against us, and the serpent's eggs of sedition
and revolt had been hatched in centres scattered all over the eastern
hemisphere, but their venomous progeny had been crushed before they
became formidable.

As a world-force this band of pan-Islamism had failed because it had
been invoked by the wrong people for a wrong purpose. Such a movement
should at least have as its driving power some great spiritual crisis:
this Turco-German manifestation of it had its origin in self-interest,
and if successful would have immolated Arabia on the demoniac altar of
_Weltpolitik_. Seyid Muhammed er-Rashid Ridha, a descendant of the
Prophet and one of the greatest Arab theologians living, has voiced the
verdict of Islam on this unscrupulous and self-seeking adventure in a
trenchant article published in September, 1916. He showed up Enver and
his Unionist party as an atheist among atheists who had deprived the
Sultan of his rightful power and Islam of its religious head, and
contrasted their conduct with that of the British, who exempted the
Hejaz from the blockade enforced against the rest of the Ottoman Empire
until it became quite clear that the Turks were benefiting chiefly by
that exemption, and who, out of respect for the holy places of Islam,
refrained from making that country a theatre of war.

True to the Teutonic tradition, the movement had been laboriously
organised, but lacked psychic insight, for the Turk is too much of a
Tartar and too little of a Moslem to appreciate the Arab mind, and the
German ignored it, rooting with eager, guttural grunts among the
carefully cultivated religious prejudices of Islam like a hog hunting
truffles until whacked out of it by the irate cultivators.

The following incident may serve to illustrate their crude tactics. Soon
after the Turks came