WITH THE TURKS IN PALESTINE

BY ALEXANDER AARONSOHN

To the editors of the Atlantic Monthly, to the
publishers, and to the many friends who have encouraged me, I am
and shall ever remain grateful

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

While Belgium is bleeding and hoping, while Poland suffers and
dreams of liberation, while Serbia is waiting for redemption, there
is a little country the soul of which is torn to pieces—a
little country that is so remote, so remote that her ardent sighs
cannot be heard.

It is the country of perpetual sacrifice, the country that saw
Abraham build the altar upon which he was ready to immolate his
only son, the country that Moses saw from a distance, stretching in
beauty and loveliness,—a land of promise never to be
attained,—the country that gave the world its symbols of soul
and spirit. Palestine!

No war correspondents, no Red Cross or relief committees have
gone to Palestine, because no actual fighting has taken place
there, and yet hundreds of thousands are suffering there that worst
of agonies, the agony of the spirit.

Those who have devoted their lives to show the world that
Palestine can be made again a country flowing with milk and honey,
those who have dreamed of reviving the spirit of the prophets and
the great teachers, are hanged and persecuted and exiled, their
dreams shattered, their holy places profaned, their work ruined.
Cut off from the world, with no bread to sustain the starving body,
the heavy boot of a barbarian soldiery trampling their very soul,
the dreamers of Palestine refuse to surrender, and amidst the clash
of guns and swords they are battling for the spirit with the
weapons of the spirit.

The time has not yet come to write the record of these battles,
nor even to attempt to render justice to the sublime heroes of
Palestine. This book is merely the story of some of the personal
experiences of one who has done less and suffered less than
thousands of his comrades.

WITH THE TURKS IN PALESTINE.

CHAPTER I

Thirty-five years ago, the impulse which has since been
organized as the Zionist Movement led my parents to leave their
homes in Roumania and emigrate to Palestine, where they joined a
number of other Jewish pioneers in founding Zicron-Jacob—a
little village lying just south of Mount Carmel, in that fertile
coastal region close to the ancient Plains of Armageddon.

Here I was born; my childhood was passed here in the peace and
harmony of this little agricultural community, with its whitewashed
stone houses huddled close together for protection against the
native Arabs who, at first, menaced the life of the new colony. The
village was far more suggestive of Switzerland than of the
conventional slovenly villages of the East, mud-built and filthy;
for while it was the purpose of our people, in returning to the
Holy Land, to foster the Jewish language and the social conditions
of the Old Testament as far as possible, there was nothing
retrograde in this movement. No time was lost in introducing
progressive methods of agriculture, and the climatological
experiments of other countries were observed and made use of in
developing the ample natural resources of the land.

Eucalyptus, imported from Australia, soon gave the shade of its
cool, healthful foliage where previously no trees had grown. In the
course of time dry farming (which some people consider a recent
discovery, but which in reality is as old as the Old Testament) was
introduced and extended with American agricultural implements;
blooded cattle were imported, and poultry-raising on a large scale
was undertaken with the aid of incubators—to the disgust of
the Arabs, who look on such usurpation of the hen’s functions as
against nature and sinful. Our people replaced the wretched native
trails with good roads, bordered by hedges of thorny acacia which,
in season, were covered with downy little yellow blossoms that
smelled sweeter than honey when the sun was on them.

More important than all these, a communistic village government
was established, in which both sexes enjoyed equal rights,
including that of suffrage—strange as this may seem to
persons who (when they think of the matter at all) form vague
conceptions of all the women-folk of Palestine as shut up in
harems.

A short experience with Turkish courts and Turkish justice
taught our people that they would have to establish a legal system
of their own; two collaborating judges were therefore
appointed—one to interpret the Mosaic law, another to temper
it with modern jurisprudence. All Jewish disputes were settled by
this court. Its effectiveness may be judged by the fact that the
Arabs, weary of Turkish venality,—as open and shameless as
anywhere in the world,—began in increasing numbers to bring
their difficulties to our tribunal. Jews are law-abiding people,
and life in those Palestine colonies tended to bring out the
fraternal qualities of our race; but it is interesting to note that
in over thirty years not one Jewish criminal case was reported from
forty-five villages.

Zicron-Jacob was a little town of one hundred and thirty
“fires”—so we call it—when, in 1910, on the advice of
my elder brother, who was head of the Jewish Experiment Station at
Athlit, an ancient town of the Crusaders, I left for America to
enter the service of the United States in the Department of
Agriculture. A few days after reaching this country I took out my
first naturalization papers and proceeded to Washington, where I
became part of that great government service whose beneficent
activity is too little known by Americans. Here I remained until
June, 1913, when I returned to Palestine with the object of taking
motion-pictures and stereopticon views. These I intended to use in
a lecturing tour for spreading the Zionist propaganda in the United
States.

During the years of my residence in America, I was able to
appreciate and judge in their right value the beauty and
inspiration of the life which my people led in the Holy Land. From
a distance, too, I saw better the need for organization among our
communities, and I determined to build up a fraternal union of the
young Jewish men all over the country.

Two months after my return from America, an event occurred which
gave impetus to these projects. The physician of our village, an
old man who had devoted his entire life to serving and healing the
people of Palestine, without distinction of race or religion, was
driving home one evening in his carriage from a neighboring
settlement. With him was a young girl of sixteen. In a deserted
place they were set upon by four armed Arabs, who beat the old man
to unconsciousness as he tried, in vain, to defend the girl from
the terrible fate which awaited her.

Night came on. Alarmed by the absence of the physician, we young
men rode out in search of him. We finally discovered what had
happened; and then and there, in the serene moonlight of that
Eastern night, with tragedy close at hand, I made my comrades take
oath on the honor of their sisters to organize themselves into a
strong society for the defense of the life and honor of our
villagers and of our people at large.

These details are, perhaps, useful for the better understanding
of the disturbances that came thick and fast when in August, 1914,
the war-madness broke out among the nations of Europe. The
repercussion was at once felt even in our remote corner of the
earth. Soon after the German invasion of Belgium the Turkish army
was mobilized and all citizens of the Empire between nineteen and
forty-five years were called to the colors. As the Young Turk
Constitution of 1909 provided that all Christians and Jews were
equally liable to military service, our young men knew that they,
too, would be called upon to make the common sacrifice. For the
most part, they were not unwilling to sustain the Turkish
Government. While the Constitution imposed on them the burden of
militarism, it had brought with it the compensation of freedom of
religion and equal rights; and we could not forget that for six
hundred years Turkey has held her gates wide open to the Jews who
fled from the Spanish Inquisition and similar ministrations of
other civilized countries.

Of course, we never dreamed that Turkey would do anything but
remain neutral. If we had had any idea of the turn things were
ultimately to take, we should have given a different greeting to
the mouchtar, or sheriff, who came to our village with the
list of mobilizable men to be called on for service. My own
position was a curious one. I had every intention of completing the
process of becoming an American citizen, which I had begun by
taking out “first papers.” In the eyes of the law, however, I was
still a Turkish subject, with no claim to American protection. This
was sneeringly pointed out to me by the American Consul at Haifa,
who happens to be a German; so there was no other course but to
surrender myself to the Turkish Government.

CHAPTER II

There was no question as to my eligibility for service. I was
young and strong and healthy—and even if I had not been, the
physical examination of Turkish recruits is a farce. The enlisting
officers have a theory of their own that no man is really unfit for
the army—a theory which has been fostered by the ingenious
devices of the Arabs to avoid conscription. To these wild people
the protracted discipline of military training is simply a
purgatory, and for weeks before the recruiting officers are due,
they dose themselves with powerful herbs and physics and fast, and
nurse sores into being, until they are in a really deplorable
condition. Some of them go so far as to cut off a finger or two.
The officers, however, have learned to see beyond these little
tricks, and few Arabs succeed in wriggling through their drag-net.
I have watched dozens of Arabs being brought in to the recruiting
office on camels or horses, so weak were they, and welcomed into
the service with a severe beating—the sick and the shammers
sharing the same fate. Thus it often happens that some of the new
recruits die after their first day of garrison life.

Together with twenty of my comrades, I presented myself at the
recruiting station at Acco (the St. Jean d’Acre of history). We had
been given to understand that, once our names were registered, we
should be allowed to return home to provide ourselves with money,
suitable clothing, and food, as well as to bid our families
good-bye. To our astonishment, however, we were marched off to the
Hân, or caravanserai, and locked into the great courtyard
with hundreds of dirty Arabs. Hour after hour passed; darkness
came, and finally we had to stretch ourselves on the ground and
make the best of a bad situation. It was a night of horrors. Few of
us had closed an eye when, at dawn, an officer appeared and ordered
us out of the Hân. From our total number about three hundred
(including four young men from our village and myself) were picked
out and told to make ready to start at once for Saffêd, a
town in the hills of northern Galilee near the Sea of Tiberias,
where our garrison was to be located. No attention was paid to our
requests that we be allowed to return to our homes for a final
visit. That same morning we were on our way to Saffêd—a
motley, disgruntled crew.

It was a four days’ march—four days of heat and dust and
physical suffering. The September sun smote us mercilessly as we
straggled along the miserable native trail, full of gullies and
loose stones. It would not have been so bad if we had been
adequately shod or clothed; but soon we found ourselves envying the
ragged Arabs as they trudged along barefoot, paying no heed to the
jagged flints. (Shoes, to the Arab, are articles for ceremonious
indoor use; when any serious walking is to be done, he takes them
off, slings them over his shoulder, and trusts to the horny soles
of his feet.)

To add to our troubles, the Turkish officers, with
characteristic fatalism, had made no commissary provision for us
whatever. Any food we 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 Saffêd.

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 Saffêd 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 the rice with our fingers. At first I was rather upset
by this sort of table manners, and for some time I ate with my eyes
fixed on my own portion, to avoid seeing the Arabs, who fill the
palms of their hands with rice, pat it into a ball and cram it into
their mouths just so, the bolus making a great lump in their lean
throats as it reluctantly descends.

In the course of that same morning we were allotted our
uniforms. The Turkish uniform, under indirect German influence, has
been greatly modified during the past five years. It is of
khaki—a greener khaki than that of the British army, and of
conventional European cut. Spiral puttees and good boots are
provided; the only peculiar feature is the headgear—a
curious, uncouth-looking combination of the turban and the German
helmet, devised by Enver Pasha to combine religion and
practicality, and called in his honor enverieh. (With
commendable thrift, Enver patented his invention, and it is rumored
that he has drawn a comfortable fortune from its sale.) An
excellent uniform it is, on the whole; but, to our disgust, we
found that in the great olive-drab pile to which we were led, there
was not a single new one. All were old, discarded, and dirty, and
the mere thought of putting on the clothes of some unknown Arab
legionary, who, perhaps, had died of cholera at Mecca or Yemen,
made me shudder. After some indecision, my friends and I finally
went up to one of the officers and offered to buy new
uniforms with the money we expected daily from our families. The
officer, scenting the chance for a little private profit, gave his
consent.

The days and weeks following were busy ones. From morning till
night, it was drill, drill, and again drill. We were divided into
groups of fifty, each of which was put in charge of a young
non-commissioned officer from the Military School of Constantinople
or Damascus, or of some Arab who had seen several years’ service.
These instructors had a hard time of it; the German military
system, which had only recently been introduced, was too much for
them. They kept mixing up the old and the new methods of training,
with the result that it was often hopeless to try and make out
their orders. Whole weeks were spent in grinding into the Arabs the
names of the different parts of the rifle; weeks more went to
teaching them to clean it—although it must be said that, once
they had mastered these technicalities, they were excellent shots.
Their efficiency would have been considerably greater if there had
been more target-shooting. From the very first, however, we felt
that there was a scarcity of ammunition. This shortage the
drill-masters, in a spirit of compensation, attempted to make up by
abundant severity. The whip of soft, flexible, stinging leather,
which seldom leaves the Turkish officer’s hand, was never idle.
This was not surprising, for the Arab is a cunning fellow, whose
only respect is for brute force. He exercises it himself on every
possible victim, and expects the same treatment from his
superiors.

So far as my comrades and I were concerned, I must admit that we
were generally treated kindly. We knew most of the drill-exercises
from the gymnastic training we had practiced since childhood, and
the officers realized that we were educated and came from
respectable families. The same was also true with regard to the
native Christians, most of whom can read and write and are of a
better class than the Mohammedans of the country. When Turkey threw
in her lot with the Germanic powers, the attitude toward the Jews
and Christians changed radically; but of this I shall speak
later.

It was a hard life we led while in training at Saffêd;
evening would find us dead tired, and little disposed for anything
but rest. As the tremendous light-play of the Eastern sunsets faded
away, we would gather in little groups in the courtyard of our
mosque—its minaret towering black against a turquoise
sky—and talk fitfully of the little happenings of the day,
while the Arabs murmured gutturally around us. Occasionally, one of
them would burst into a quavering, hot-blooded tribal love-song. It
happened that I was fairly well known among these natives through
my horse Kochba—of pure Maneghi-Sbeli blood—which I had
purchased from some Anazzi Bedouins who were encamped not far from
Aleppo: a swift and intelligent animal he was, winner of many
races, and in a land where a horse is considerably more valuable
than a wife, his ownership cast quite a glamour over me.

In the evenings, then, the Arabs would come up to chat. As they
speak seldom of their children, of their women-folk never, the
conversation was limited to generalities about the crops and the
weather, or to the recitation of never-ending tales of Abou-Zeid,
the famous hero of the Beni-Hilal, or of Antar the glorious.
Politics, of which they have amazing ideas, also came in for
discussion. Napoleon Bonaparte and Queen Victoria are still living
figures to them; but (significantly enough) they considered the
Kaiser king of all the kings of this world, with the exception of
the Sultan, whom they admitted to equality.

Seldom did an evening pass without a dance. As darkness fell,
the Arabs would gather in a great circle around one of their
comrades, who squatted on the ground with a bamboo flute; to a
weird minor music they would begin swaying and moving about while
some self-chosen poet among them would sing impromptu verses to the
flute obbligato. As a rule the themes were homely.

“To-morrow we shall eat rice and meat,” the singer would
wail.

“Yaha lili-amali” (my endeavor be granted), came the
full-throated response of all the others. The chorus was
tremendously effective. Sometimes the singer would indulge in
pointed personalities, with answering roars of laughter.

These dances lasted for hours, and as they progressed the men
gradually worked themselves up into a frenzy. I never failed to
wonder at these people, who, without the aid of alcohol, could
reproduce the various stages of intoxication. As I lay by and
watched the moon riding serenely above these frantic men and their
twisting black shadows, I reflected that they were just in the
condition when one word from a holy man would suffice to send them
off to wholesale murder and rapine.

It was my good fortune soon to be released from the noise and
dirt of the mosque. I had had experience with corruptible Turkish
officers; and one day, when barrack conditions became unendurable,
I went to the officer commanding our division—an old Arab
from Latakieh who had been called from retirement at the time of
the mobilization. He lived in a little tent near the mosque, where
I found him squatting on the floor, nodding drowsily over his
comfortable paunch. As he was an officer of the old régime,
I entered boldly, squatted beside him and told him my troubles. The
answer came with an enormous shrug of the shoulders.

“You are serving the Sultan. Hardship should be sweet!”

“I should be more fit to serve him if I got more sleep and
rest.”

He waved a fat hand about the tent.

“Look at me! Here I am, an officer of rank and”—shooting a
knowing look at me—”I have not even a nice blanket.”

“A crime! A crime!” I interrupted. “To think of it, when I, a
humble soldier, have dozens of them at home! I should be honored if
you would allow me—” My voice trailed off suggestively.

“How could you get one?” he asked.

“Oh, I have friends here in Saffêd but I must be
able to sleep in a nice place.”

“Of course; certainly. What would you suggest?”

“That hotel kept by the Jewish widow might do,” I replied.

More amenities were exchanged, the upshot of which was that my
four friends and I were given permission to sleep at the
inn—a humble place, but infinitely better than the mosque. It
was all perfectly simple.

CHAPTER III

So passed the days of our training, swiftly, monotonously, until
the fateful December morning when the news came like a thunderbolt
that Turkey was about to join hands with Germany. We had had
reports of the war—of a kind. Copies of telegrams from
Constantinople, printed in Arabic, were circulated among us, giving
accounts of endless German victories. These, however, we had
laughed at as fabrications of a Prussophile press agency, and in
our skepticism we had failed to give the Teutons credit for the
successes they had actually won. To us, born and bred in the East
as we were, the success of German propaganda in the Turkish Empire
could not come as an overwhelming surprise; but its fullness amazed
us.

It may be of timely interest to say a few words here regarding
this propaganda as I have seen it in Palestine, spreading under
strong and efficient organization for twenty years.

In order to realize her imperialistic dreams, Germany absolutely
needed Palestine. It was the key to the whole Oriental situation.
No mere coincidence brought the Kaiser to Damascus in November,
1898,—the same month that Kitchener, in London, was hailed as
Gordon’s avenger,—when he uttered his famous phrase at the
tomb of Saladin: “Tell the three hundred million Moslems of the
world that I am their friend!” We have all seen photographs of the
imperial figure, draped in an amazing burnous of his own designing
(above which the Prussian Pickelhaube rises supreme), as he
moved from point to point in this portentous visit: we may also
have seen Caran d’Ache’s celebrated cartoon (a subject of
diplomatic correspondence) representing this same imperial figure,
in its Oriental toggery, riding into Jerusalem on an ass.

The nations of Europe laughed at this visit and its transparent
purpose, but it was all part of the scheme which won for the
Germans the concessions for the Konia-Bagdad Railway, and made them
owners of the double valley of the Euphrates and Tigris. Through
branch lines projected through the firman, they are practically in
control of both the Syrian routes toward the Cypriotic
Mediterranean and the Lebanon valleys. They also control the three
Armenian routes of Cappadocia, the Black Sea, and the
trans-Caucasian branch of Urfa, Marach, and Mardine. (The fall of
Erzerum has altered conditions respecting this last.) They dominate
the Persian routes toward Tauris and Teheran as well; and last, but
not least, the Gulf branch of Zobeir. These railways delivered into
German hands the control of Persia, whence the road to India may be
made easy: through Syria lies the route to the Suez Canal and
Egypt, which was used in February, 1915, and will probably be used
again this year.

To make this Oriental dream a reality, the Germans have not
relied on their railway concessions alone. Their Government has
done everything in its power to encourage German colonization in
Palestine. Scattered all over the country are German mills that
half of the time have nothing to grind. German hotels have been
opened in places seldom frequented by tourists. German engineers
appeared in force, surveying, sounding, noting. All these colonists
held gatherings in the Arab villages, when the ignorant natives
were told of the greatness of Germany, of her good intentions, and
of the evil machinations of other powers. What I state here can be
corroborated by any one who knows Palestine and has lived in
it.

About the time when we first knew that Turkey would join the
Germanic powers came the news that the “Capitulations” had been
revoked. As is generally known, foreigners formerly enjoyed the
protection of their respective consuls. The Turkish Government,
under the terms of the so-called Capitulations, or agreements, had
no jurisdiction over an American, for instance, or a Frenchman, who
could not be arrested without the consent of his consul. In the
Ottoman Empire, where law and justice are not at a premium, such
protection was a wholesome and necessary policy.

The revoking of the Capitulations was a terrible blow to all the
Europeans, meaning, as it did, the practical abolition of all their
rights. Upon the Arabs it acted like an intoxicant. Every
boot-black or boatman felt that he was the equal of the accursed
Frank, who now had no consul to protect him; and abuses began
immediately. Moreover, as if by magic, the whole country became
Germanized. In all the mosques, Friday prayers were ended with an
invocation for the welfare of the Sultan and “Hadji Wilhelm.” The
significance of this lies in the fact that the title “Hadji” can be
properly applied only to a Moslem who has made the pilgrimage to
Mecca and kissed the sacred stone of the Kaaba. Instant death is
the penalty paid by any Christian who is found within that
enclosure: yet Wilhelm II, head of the Lutheran faith, stepped
forward as “Hadji Wilhelm.” His pictures were sold everywhere;
German officers appeared; and it seemed as if a wind of brutal
mastery were blowing.

The dominant figure of this movement in Palestine was, without
doubt, the German Consul at Haifa, Leutweld von Hardegg. He
traveled about the country, making speeches, and distributing
pamphlets in Arabic, in which it was elaborately proved that
Germans are not Christians, like the French or English, but that
they are descendants of the prophet Mohammed. Passages from the
Koran were quoted, prophesying the coming of the Kaiser as the
Savior of Islam.

CHAPTER IV

The news of the actual declaration of war by Turkey caused a
tremendous stir in our regiment. The prevailing feeling was one of
great restlessness and discontent. The Arabs made many bitter
remarks against Germany. “Why didn’t she help us against the
Italians during the war for Tripoli?” they said. “Now that she is
in trouble she is drawing us into the fight.” Their opinions,
however, soon underwent a change. In the first place, they came to
realize that Turkey had taken up arms against Russia; and Russia is
considered first and foremost the arch-enemy. German reports of
German successes also had a powerful effect on them. They began to
grow boastful, arrogant; and the sight of the plundering of
Europeans, Jews, and Christians convinced them that a very
desirable régime was setting in. Saffêd has a large
Jewish colony, and it was torment for me to have to witness the
outrages that my people suffered in the name of
“requisitioning.”

The final blow came one morning when all the Jewish and
Christian soldiers of our regiment were called out and told that
henceforth they were to serve in the taboor amlieh, or
working corps. The object of this action, plainly enough, was to
conciliate and flatter the Mohammedan population, and at the same
time to put the Jews and Christians, who for the most part favored
the cause of the Allies, in a position where they would be least
dangerous. We were disarmed; our uniforms were taken away, and we
became hard-driven “gangsters.” I shall never forget the
humiliation of that day when we, who, after all, were the
best-disciplined troops of the lot, were first herded to our work
of pushing wheelbarrows and handling spades, by grinning Arabs,
rifle on shoulder. We were set to building the road between
Saffêd and Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee—a link in
the military highway from Damascus to the coast, which would be
used for the movement of troops in case the railroad should be cut
off. It had no immediate strategic bearing on the attack against
Suez, however.

From six in the morning till seven at night we were hard at it,
except for one hour’s rest at noon. While we had money, it was
possible to get some slight relief by bribing our taskmasters; but
this soon came to an end, and we had to endure their brutality as
best we could. The wheelbarrows we used were the property of a
French company which, before the war, was undertaking a highway to
Beirut. No grease was provided for the wheels, so that there was a
maddening squeaking and squealing in addition to the difficulty of
pushing the barrows. One day I suggested to an inspection officer
that if the wheels were not greased the axles would be burned out.
He agreed with me and issued an order that the men were to provide
their own oil to lubricate the wheels!

I shall not dwell on the physical sufferings we underwent while
working on this road, for the reason that the conditions I have
described were prevalent over the whole country; and later, when I
had the opportunity to visit some construction camps in Samaria and
Judaea found that in comparison our lot had been a happy one. While
we were breaking stones and trundling squeaking wheelbarrows,
however, the most disquieting rumors began to drift in to us from
our home villages. Plundering had been going on in the name of
“requisitioning”; the country was full of soldiery whose capacity
for mischief-making was well known to us, and it was torture to
think of what might be happening in our peaceful homes where so few
men had been left for protection. All the barbed-wire fences, we
heard, had been torn up and sent north for the construction of
barricades. In a wild land like Palestine, where the native has no
respect for property, where fields and crops are always at the
mercy of marauders, the barbed-wire fence has been a tremendous
factor for civilization, and with these gone the Arabs were once
more free to sweep across the country unhindered, stealing and
destroying.

The situation grew more and more unbearable. One day a little
Christian soldier—a Nazarene—disappeared from the
ranks. We never saw him again, but we learned that his sister, a
very young girl, had been forcibly taken by a Turkish officer of
the Nazareth garrison. In Palestine, the dishonor of a girl can be
redeemed by blood alone. The young soldier had hunted for his
sister, found her in the barracks, and shot her; he then
surrendered himself to the military authorities, who undoubtedly
put him to death. He had not dared to kill the real
criminal,—the officer,—for he knew that this would not
only bring death to his family, but would call down terrible
suffering on all the Christians of Nazareth.

When I learned of this tragedy, I determined to get out of the
army and return to my village at all costs. Nine Turkish officers
out of ten can be bought, and I had reason to know that the officer
in command at Saffêd was not that tenth man. Now, according
to the law of the country, a man has the right to purchase
exemption from military service for a sum equivalent to two hundred
dollars. My case was different, for I was already enrolled; but
everything is possible in Turkey. I set to work, and in less than
two weeks I had bought half a dozen officers, ranging from corporal
to captain, and had obtained consent of the higher authorities to
my departure, provided I could get a physician’s certificate
declaring me unfit for service.

This was arranged in short order, although I am healthy-looking
and the doctor found some difficulty in hitting on an appropriate
ailment. Finally he decided that I had “too much
blood”—whatever that might mean. With his certificate in
hand, I paid the regular price of two hundred dollars from funds
which had been sent me by my family, and walked out of the barracks
a free man. My happiness was mingled with sadness at the thought of
leaving the comrades with whom I had suffered and hoped. The four
boys from my village were splendid. They felt that I was right in
going home to do what I could for the people, but when they kissed
me good-bye, in the Eastern fashion, the tears were running down
their cheeks; and they were all strong, brave fellows.

On my way back to Zicron-Jacob, I passed through the town of
Sheff’amr, where I got a foretaste of the conditions I was to find
at home. A Turkish soldier, sauntering along the street, helped
himself to fruit from the basket of an old vender, and went on
without offering to pay a farthing. When the old man ventured to
protest, the soldier turned like a flash and began beating him
mercilessly, knocking him down and battering him until he was
bruised, bleeding, and covered with the mud of the street. There
was a hubbub; a crowd formed, through which a Turkish officer
forced his way, demanding explanations. The soldier sketched the
situation in a few words, whereupon the officer, turning to the old
man, said impressively,—”If a soldier of the Sultan should
choose to heap filth on your head, it is for you to kiss his hand
in gratitude.”

CHAPTER V

When I finally reached Zicron-Jacob, I found rather a sad state
of affairs. Military law had been declared. No one was supposed to
be seen in the streets after sundown. The village was full of
soldiers, and civilians had to put up with all kinds of
ill-treatment. Moreover, our people were in a state of great
excitement because an order had recently come from the Turkish
authorities bidding them surrender whatever fire-arms or weapons
they had in their possession. A sinister command, this: we knew
that similar measures had been taken before the terrible Armenian
massacres, and we felt that some such fate might be in preparation
for our people. With the arms gone, the head men of the village
knew that our last hold over the Arabs, our last chance for defense
against sudden violence, would be gone, and they had refused to
give them up. A house-to-house search had been
made—fruitlessly, for our little arsenal was safely cached in
a field, beneath growing grain.

It was a tense, unpleasant situation. At any time the Turks
might decide to back up their demand by some of the violent methods
of which they are past masters. A family council was held in my
home, and it was decided to send my sister, a girl of twenty-three,
to some friends at the American Syrian Protestant College at
Beirut, so that we might be able to move freely without the
responsibility of having a girl at home, in a country where, as a
matter of course, the women-folk are seized and carried off before
a massacre. At Beirut we knew that there was an American
Consul-General, who kept in continual touch with the battleship
anchored in the harbor for the protection of American
interests.

My sister got away none too soon. One evening shortly after her
departure, when I was standing in the doorway of our house watching
the ever fresh miracle of the Eastern sunset, a Turkish officer
came riding down the street with about thirty cavalrymen. He called
me out and ordered me to follow him to the little village inn,
where he dismounted and led me to one of the inner rooms, his spurs
jingling loudly as we passed along the stone corridor.

I never knew whether I had been selected for this attention
because of my prominence as a leader of the Jewish young men or
simply because I had been standing conveniently in the doorway. The
officer closed the door and came straight to the point by asking me
where our store of arms was hidden. He was a big fellow, with the
handsome, cruel features usual enough in his class. There was no
open menace in his first question. When I refused to tell him, he
began wheedling and offering all sorts of favors if I would betray
my people. Then, all of a sudden, he whipped out a revolver and
stuck the muzzle right in my face. I felt the blood leave my heart,
but I was able to control myself and refuse his demand. The officer
was not easily discouraged; the hours I passed in that little room,
with its smoky kerosene lamp, were terrible ones. I realized,
however, how tremendously important the question of the arms was,
and strength was given me to hold out until the officer gave up in
disgust and let me go home.

My father, an old man, knew nothing of what had happened, but
the rest of my family were tremendously excited. I made light of
the whole affair, but I felt sure that this was only the beginning.
Sure enough, next morning—the Sabbath—the same officer
returned and put three of the leading elders of the village,
together with myself, under arrest. After another fruitless
inquisition at the hotel, we were handcuffed and started on foot
toward the prison, a day’s journey away. As our little procession
passed my home, my father, who was aged and feeble, came tottering
forward to say good-bye to me. A soldier pushed him roughly back;
he reeled, then fell full-length in the street before my eyes.

It was a dismal departure. We were driven through the streets
shackled like criminals, and the women and children came out of the
houses and watched us in silence—their heads bowed, tears
running down their cheeks. They realized that for thirty-five years
these old men, my comrades, had been struggling and suffering for
their ideal—a regenerated Palestine; now, in the dusk of
their life, it seemed as if all their hopes and dreams were coming
to ruin. The oppressive tragedy of the situation settled down on me
more and more heavily as the day wore on and heat and fatigue told
on my companions. My feelings must have been written large on my
face, for one of them, a fine-looking patriarch, tried to give me
comfort by reminding me that we must not rely upon strength of
arms, and that our spirit could never be broken, no matter how
defenseless we were. Thus he, an old man, was encouraging me
instead of receiving help from my youth and enthusiasm.

At last we arrived at the prison and were locked into separate
cells. That same night we were tortured with the falagy, or
bastinado. The victim of this horrible punishment is trussed up,
arms and legs, and thrown on his knees; then, on the bare soles of
his feet a pliant green rod is brought down with all the force of a
soldier’s arm. The pain is exquisite; blood leaps out at the first
cut, and strong men usually faint after thirty or forty strokes.
Strange to say, the worst part of it is not the blow itself, but
the whistling of the rod through the air as it rushes to its mark.
The groans of my older comrades, whose gasps and prayers I could
hear through the walls of the cell, helped me bear the agony until
unconsciousness mercifully came to the rescue.

For several days more we were kept in the prison, sick and
broken with suffering. The second night, as I lay sleepless and
desperate on the strip of dirty matting that served as bed, I heard
a scratch-scratching at the grated slit of a window, and presently
a slender stick was inserted into the cell. I went over and shook
it; some one at the other end was holding it firm. And then, a
curious whispering sound began to come from the end of the stick. I
put my ear down, and caught the voice of one of the men from our
village. He had taken a long bamboo pole, pierced the joints, and
crept up behind a broken old wall close beneath my window. By means
of this primitive telephone we talked as long as we dared. I
assured him that we were still enduring, and urged him on no
account to give up the arms to the Turkish authorities—not
even if we had to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Finally, when it was found that torture and imprisonment would
not make us yield our secret, the Turks resorted to the final
test—the ordeal which we could not withstand. They announced
that on a certain date a number of our young girls would be carried
off and handed over to the officers, to be kept until the arms were
disclosed. We knew that they were capable of carrying out this
threat; we knew exactly what it meant. There was no alternative.
The people of our village had nothing to do but dig up the
treasured arms and, with broken hearts, hand them over to the
authorities.

And so the terrible news was brought to us one morning that we
were free. Personally, I felt much happier on the day I was put in
prison than when I was released. I had often wondered how our
people had been able to bear the rack and thumbscrew of the Spanish
Inquisition; but when my turn and my comrades’ came for torture, I
realized that the same spirit that helped our ancestors was working
in us also.

Now I knew that our suffering had been useless. Whenever the
Turkish authorities wished, the horrors of the Armenian massacres
would live again in Zicron-Jacob, and we should be powerless to
raise a hand to protect ourselves. As we came limping home through
the streets of our village, I caught sight of my own Smith &
Wesson revolver in the hands of a mere boy of fifteen—the son
of a well-known Arab outlaw. I realized then that the Turks had not
only taken our weapons, but had distributed them among the natives
in order to complete our humiliation. The blood rushed to my face.
I started forward to take the revolver away from the boy, but one
of the old men caught hold of my sleeve and held me back.

CHAPTER VI

I have already spoken of the so-called “requisitioning” that
took place among our people while I was working at Saffêd.
This, of course, really amounted to wholesale pillage. The hand of
the Turkish looters had fallen particularly heavy on carts and
draught animals. As the Arabs know little or nothing of carting,
hauling, or the management of horses and mules, the Turks, simply
enough, had “requisitioned” many of the owners—middle-aged or
elderly men—and forced them to go south to help along with
the tremendous preparations that were being made for the attack on
Suez. Among these were a number of 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 stir
up religious unrest among the natives in Egypt. It must be admitted
that in the first two of these purposes they have been
successful.

The Turks were less far-sighted. They believed firmly that they
were going to sweep the English off the face of the earth and enter
Cairo in triumph, and preparations for the march on Suez went on
with feverish enthusiasm. The ideas of the common soldiers on this
subject were amusing. Some of them declared that the Canal was to
be filled up by the sandbags which had been prepared in great
quantities. Others held that thousands of camels would be kept
without water for many days preceding the attack; then the thirsty
animals, when released, would rush into the Canal in such numbers
that the troops could march to victory over the packed masses of
drowned bodies.

The army operating against Suez numbered about one hundred and
fifty thousand men. Of these about twenty thousand were Anatolian
Turks—trained soldiers, splendid fighting material, as was
shown by their resistance at the Dardanelles. The rest were
Palestinian Arabs, and very inferior troops they were. The Arab as
a soldier is at once stupid and cunning: fierce when victory is on
his side, but unreliable when things go against him. In command of
the expedition was the famous Djemal Pasha, a Young Turk general of
tremendous energy, but possessing small ability to see beyond
details to the big, broad concepts of strategy. Although a great
friend of Enver Pasha, he looked with disfavor on the German
officers and, in particular, on Bach Pasha, the German Governor of
Jerusalem, with whom he had serious disagreements. This dislike of
the Germans was reflected among the lesser Turkish officers. Many
of these, after long years of service, found themselves
subordinated to young foreigners, who, in addition to arbitrary
promotion, received much higher salaries than the Turks. What is
more, they were paid in clinking gold, whereas the Turks, when paid
at all, got paper currency.

Beersheba, a prosperous town of the ancient province of Idumea,
was the southern base of operations for the advance on Suez. Some
of our villagers had been sent to this district, and, in searching
for them, I had the opportunity of seeing at least the taking-off
place of the expedition. Beyond this point no Jew or Christian was
allowed to pass, with the exception of the physicians, all of whom
were non-Mohammedans who had been forced into the army.

Beersheba was swarming with troops. They filled the town and
overflowed on to the sands outside, where a great tent-city grew
up. And everywhere that the Turkish soldiers went, disorganization
and inefficiency followed them. From all over the country the
finest camels had been “requisitioned” and sent down to Beersheba
until, at the time I was there, thousands and thousands of them
were collected in the neighborhood. Through the laziness and
stupidity of the Turkish commissariat officers, which no amount of
German efficiency could counteract, no adequate provision was made
for feeding them, and incredible numbers succumbed to starvation
and neglect. Their great carcasses dotted the sand in all
directions; it was only the wonderful antiseptic power of the
Eastern sun that held pestilence in check.

The soldiers themselves suffered much hardship. The crowding in
the tents was unspeakable; the water-supply was almost as
inadequate as the medical service, which consisted chiefly of
volunteer Red Crescent societies—among them a unit of twenty
German nurses sent by the American College at Beirut. Medical
supplies, such as they were, had been taken from the different
mission hospitals and pharmacies of Palestine—these
“requisitions” being made by officers who knew nothing of medical
requirements and simply scooped together everything in sight. As a
result, one of the army physicians told me that in Beersheba he had
opened some medical chests consigned to him and found, to his
horror, that they were full of microscopes and gynecological
instruments—for the care of wounded soldiers in the
desert!

Visits of British aeroplanes to Beersheba were common
occurrences. Long before the machine itself could be seen, its
whanging, resonant hum would come floating out of the blazing sky,
seemingly from everywhere at once. Soldiers rushed from their
tents, squinting up into the heavens until the speck was
discovered, swimming slowly through the air; then followed
wholesale firing at an impossible range until the officers forbade
it. True to the policy of avoiding all unnecessary harm to the
natives, these British aviators never dropped bombs on the town,
but—what was more dangerous from the Turkish point of
view—they would unload packages of pamphlets, printed in
Arabic, informing the natives that they were being deceived; that
the Allies were their only true friends; that the Germans were
merely making use of them to further their own schemes, etc. These
cleverly worded little tracts came showering down out of the sky,
and at first they were eagerly picked up. The Turkish commanders,
however, soon announced that any one found carrying them would pay
the death penalty. After that, when the little bundles dropped near
them, the natives would, run as if from high explosive bombs.

All things considered, it is wonderful that the Turkish
demonstration against the Canal came as near to fulfillment as it
did. Twenty thousand soldiers actually crossed the desert in six
days on scant rations, and with them they took two big guns, which
they dragged by hand when the mules dropped from thirst and
exhaustion. They also carried pontoons to be used in crossing the
Canal. Guns and pontoons are now at rest in the Museum at
Cairo.

Just what took place in the attack is known to very few. The
English have not seen fit to make public the details, and there was
little to be got from the demoralized soldiers who returned to
Beersheba. Piece by piece, however, I gathered that the attacking
party had come up to the Canal at dawn. Finding everything quiet,
they set about getting across, and had even launched a pontoon,
when the British, who were lying in wait, opened a terrific fire
from the farther bank, backed by armored locomotives and
aeroplanes. “It was as if the gates of Jehannum were opened and its
fires turned loose upon us,” one soldier told me.

The Turks succeeded in getting their guns into action for a very
short while. One of the men-of-war in the Canal was hit; several
houses in Ismaïlia suffered damage; but the invaders were soon
driven away in confusion, leaving perhaps two thousand prisoners in
the hands of the English. If the latter had chosen to do so, they
could have annihilated the Turkish forces then and there. The
ticklish state of mind of the Mohammedan population in Egypt,
however, has led them to adopt a policy of leniency and of keeping
to the defensive, which subsequent developments have more than
justified. It is characteristic of England’s faculty for holding
her colonies that batteries manned by Egyptians did the finest work
in defense of the Canal.

The reaction in Palestine after the defeat at Suez was
tremendous. Just before the attack, Djemal Pasha had sent out a
telegram announcing the overwhelming defeat of the British
vanguard, which had caused wild enthusiasm. Another later telegram
proclaimed that the Canal had been reached, British men-of-war
sunk, the Englishmen routed—with a loss to the Turks of five
men and two camels, “which were afterwards recovered.” “But,” added
the telegram, “a terrible sand-storm having arisen, the glorious
army takes it as the wish of Allah not to continue the attack, and
has therefore withdrawn in triumph.”

These reports hoodwinked the ignorant natives for a little
while, but when the stream of haggard soldiers, wounded and
exhausted, began pouring back from the south, they guessed what had
happened, and a fierce revulsion against the Germano-Turkish
régime set in. A few weeks before the advance on Suez, I was
in Jaffa, where the enthusiasm and excitement had been at
fever-pitch. Parades and celebrations of all kinds in anticipation
of the triumphal march into Egypt were taking place, and one day a
camel, a dog, and a bull, decorated respectively with the flags of
Russia, France, and England, were driven through the streets. The
poor animals were horribly maltreated by the natives, who rained
blows and flung filth upon them by way of giving concrete
expression to their contempt for the Allies. Mr. Glazebrook, the
American Consul at Jerusalem, happened to be with me in Jaffa that
day; and never shall I forget the expression of pain and disgust on
his face as he watched this melancholy little procession of
scapegoats hurrying along the street.

Now, however, all was changed. The Arabs, who take defeat badly,
turned against the authorities who had got them into such trouble.
Rumors circulated that Djemal Pasha had been bought by the English
and that the defeat at Suez had been planned by him, and persons
keeping an ear close to the ground began to hear mutterings of a
general massacre of Germans. In fact, things came within an ace of
a bloody outbreak. I knew some Germans in Jaffa and Haifa who
firmly believed that it was all over with them. In the defeated
army itself the Turkish officers gave vent to their hatred of the
Germans. Three German officers were shot by their Turkish comrades
during the retreat, and a fourth committed suicide. However, Djemal
Pasha succeeded in keeping order by means of stern repressive
methods and by the fear roused by his large body-guard of faithful
Anatolians.

We felt sure that the Turkish defeat would put a damper on the
arrogance of the soldiery. But even the Mohammedan population were
hoping that the Allies would push their victory and land troops in
Syria and Palestine; for though they hated the infidel, they loved
the Turk not at all, and the country was exhausted and the blockade
of the Mediterranean by the Allies prevented the import and export
of articles. The oranges were rotting on the trees because the
annual Liverpool market was closed to Palestine, and other crops
were in similar case. The country was short, too, of petroleum,
sugar, rice, and other supplies, and even of matches. We had to go
back to old customs and use flint and steel for fire, and we seldom
used our lamps. Money was scarce, too, and, Turkey having declared
a moratorium, cash was often unobtainable even by those who had
money in the banks, and much distress ensued.

As the defeated army was pouring in from the south, I decided to
leave Beersheba and go home. The roads and the fields were covered
with dead camels and horses and mules. Hundreds of soldiers were
straggling in disorder, many of them on leave but many deserting.
Soon after the defeat at the Canal several thousand soldiers
deserted, but an amnesty was declared and they returned to their
regiments.

When I arrived at Jerusalem I found the city filled with
soldiers. Djemal Pasha had just returned from the desert, and his
quarters were guarded by a battery of two field guns. Nobody knew
what to expect; some thought that the country would have a little
more freedom now that the soldiery had lost its braggadocio, while
others expected the lawlessness that attends disorganization. I
went to see Consul Glazebrook. He is a true American, a Southerner,
formerly a professor of theology at Princeton. He was most earnest
and devoted in behalf of the American citizens that came under his
care, rendering at Jerusalem the same sort of service that
Ambassador Morgenthau has rendered at Constantinople. He was
practically the only man who stood up for the poor, defenseless
people of the city. He received me kindly, and I told him what I
knew of conditions in the country, what I had heard among the
Arabs, and of my own fears and apprehensions. He was visibly
impressed and he advised me to see Captain Decker, of the U.S.S.
Tennessee, who was then in Jaffa, promising to write himself to the
captain of my proposed visit.

I went to Jaffa the same day and after two days’ delay succeeded
in seeing Captain Decker, with the further help of Mr. Glazebrook,
who took me with him. The police interfered and tried to keep me
from going aboard the ship, but after long discussions I was
permitted to take my place in the launch that the captain had sent
for the consul.

Captain Decker was interested in what I had to say, and at his
request I dictated my story to his stenographer. What became of my
report I do not know,—whether it was transmitted to the
Department of State or whether Captain Decker communicated with
Ambassador Morgenthau,—but at all events we soon began to see
certain reforms inaugurated in parts of the country, and these
reforms could have been effected only through pressure from
Constantinople. The presence of the two American cruisers in the
Mediterranean waters has without any doubt been instrumental in the
saving of many lives.

CHAPTER VII

While I was traveling in the south, another menace to our
people’s welfare had appeared: the locusts. From the Soudan they
came in tremendous hosts—black clouds of them that obscured
the sun. It seemed as if Nature had joined in the conspiracy
against us. These locusts were of the species known as the pilgrim,
or wandering, locust; for forty years they had not come to
Palestine, but now their visitation was like that of which the
prophet Joel speaks in the Old Testament. They came full-grown,
ripe for breeding; the ground was covered with the females digging
in the soil and depositing their egg-packets, and we knew that when
they hatched we should be overwhelmed, for there was not a foot of
ground in which these eggs were not to be found.

The menace was so great that even the military authorities were
obliged to take notice of it. They realized that if it were allowed
to fulfill itself, there would be famine in the land, and the army
would suffer with the rest. Djemal Pasha summoned my brother (the
President of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Athlit) and
intrusted him with the organization of a campaign against the
insects. It was a hard enough task. The Arabs are lazy, and
fatalistic besides; they cannot understand why men should attempt
to fight the Djesh Allah (“God’s Army”), as they call the
locusts. In addition, my brother was seriously handicapped by lack
of petroleum, galvanized iron, and other articles which could not
be obtained because of the Allies’ blockade.

In spite of these drawbacks, however, he attempted to work up a
scientific campaign. Djemal Pasha put some thousands of Arab
soldiers at his disposition, and these were set to work digging
trenches into which the hatching locusts were driven and destroyed.
This is the only means of coping with the situation: once the
locusts get their wings, nothing can be done with them. It was a
hopeless fight. Nothing short of the coöperation of every
farmer in the country could have won the day; and while the people
of the progressive Jewish villages struggled on to the
end,—men, women, and children working in the fields until
they were exhausted,—the Arab farmers sat by with folded
hands. The threats of the military authorities only stirred them to
half-hearted efforts. Finally, after two months of toil, the
campaign was given up and the locusts broke in waves over the
countryside, destroying everything. As the prophet Joel said, “The
field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new
wine is dried up, the oil languisheth…. The land is as the garden
of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.”

Not only was every green leaf devoured, but the very bark was
peeled from the trees, which stood out white and lifeless, like
skeletons. The fields were stripped to the ground, and the old men
of our villages, who had given their lives to cultivating these
gardens and vineyards, came out of the synagogues where they had
been praying and wailing, and looked on the ruin with dimmed eyes.
Nothing was spared. The insects, in their fierce hunger, tried to
engulf everything in their way. I have seen Arab babies, left by
their mothers in the shade of some tree, whose faces had been
devoured by the oncoming swarms of locusts before their screams had
been heard. I have seen the carcasses of animals hidden from sight
by the undulating, rustling blanket of insects. And in the face of
such a menace the Arabs remained inert. With their customary
fatalism they accepted the locust plague as a necessary evil. They
could not understand why we were so frantic to fight it. And as a
matter of fact, they really got a good deal out of the locusts, for
they loved to feast upon the female insects. They gathered piles of
them and threw them upon burning charcoal, then, squatting around
the fire, devoured the roasted insects with great gusto. I saw a
fourteen-year-old boy eat as many as a hundred at a sitting.

CHAPTER VIII

During the locust invasion my brother sent me on an inspection
tour to investigate the ravages of the insect in Syria. With an
official boyouroulton (passport) in my pocket, I was able to
travel all over the country without being interfered with by the
military authorities. I had an excellent opportunity to see what
was going on everywhere. The locusts had destroyed everything from
as far south as the Egyptian desert to the Lebanon Mountains on the
north; but the locust was not the only, nor the worst, plague that
the people had to complain of. The plundering under the name of
“military requisitions,” the despotic rule of the army officers,
and the general insecurity were even more desolating.

As I proceeded on my journey northward, I hoped to find
consolation and brighter prospects in the independent province of
the Lebanon. Few Americans know just what the Lebanon is. From the
repeated allusions in the Bible most people imagine it to be
nothing but a mountain. The truth is that a beautiful province of
about four thousand square miles bears that name. The population of
the Lebanon consists of a Christian sect called Maronites and the
Druses, the latter a people with a secret religion the esoteric
teachings of which are known only to the initiated, and never
divulged to outsiders. Both these peoples are sturdy, handsome
folk. Through the machinations of the Turks, whose policy is always
to “divide and rule,” the Maronites were continually fighting
against the Druses. In 1860 Turkish troops joined with the Druses
and fell upon the Maronites with wholesale massacres that spread as
far south as Damascus, where ten thousand Christians were killed in
two days.

The European powers were moved at last. Fifty warships were sent
to Beirut, and ten thousand French troops were landed in the
Lebanon, to create order. Under the pressure of the European powers
the Sublime Porte was forced to grant an autonomy for the province
of the Lebanon. The French, English, German, Russian, Austrian,
and, a year later, the Italian, Governments were signing the
guaranty of this autonomy.

Since then the Lebanon has had peace. The Governor of the
province must always be a Christian, but the General Council of the
Lebanon includes representatives of all the different races and
religions of the population. A wonderful development began with the
liberation from Turkish oppression. Macadamized roads were built
all over the province, agriculture was improved, and there was
complete safety for life and property. There is a proverb now in
Palestine and Syria which says, “In the Lebanon a virgin may travel
alone at midnight and be safe, and a purse of gold dropped in the
road at midday will never be stolen.” And the proverb told the
literal truth.

When one crossed the boundary from Turkish Palestine into the
Lebanon province, what a change met his eyes!—peaceful and
prosperous villages, schools filled with children, immense
plantations of mulberry trees and olives, the slopes of the
mountains terraced with beautiful vineyards, a handsome and sturdy
population, police on every road to help the stranger, and young
girls and women with happy laugh and chatter working in the fields.
With a population of about six hundred thousand this province
exported annually two million dollars’ worth of raw silk,
silkworm-raising being a specialty of the Lebanon.

When autonomy was granted the Lebanon, French influence became
predominant among the Maronites and other Christians of the
province. French is spoken by almost all of them, and love for
France is a deep-rooted sentiment of the people. On the other hand,
the Druses feel the English influence. For the last sixty years
England has been the friend of the Druses, and they have not
forgotten it.

It may be worth while to tell in a few words the story of one
man who accomplished wonders in spreading the influence of his
country. Sir Richard Wood was born in London, a son of Catholic
parents. From his early boyhood he aspired to enter the diplomatic
service. The East attracted him strongly, and in order to learn
Arabic he went with another young Englishman to live in the
Lebanon. In Beirut they sought the hospitality of the Maronite
patriarch. For a few days they were treated with lavish
hospitality, and then the patriarch summoned them before him and
told them that they must leave the city within twenty-four hours.
The reason for their disgrace they discovered later. Not suspecting
that they were being put to the test, they had eaten meat on a
Friday, and this made the patriarch think that they were not true
Catholics, but were there as spies.

Leaving Beirut in haste, Wood and his friend sought shelter with
the Druses, who received them with open arms. For two years Wood
lived among the Druses, in the village of Obey. There he learned
Arabic and became thoroughly acquainted with the country and with
the ways of the Druses, and there he conceived the idea of winning
the Druses for England to counteract the influence of the French
Maronites. He went back to London, where he succeeded in impressing
his views upon the Foreign Office, and he returned to Syria charged
with a secret mission. Before long he persuaded the Druse
chieftains to address a petition to England asking for British
protection.

British protection was granted, and for over thirty years
Richard Wood, virtually single-handed, shaped the destiny of Syria.
It was he who broke the power of Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Mehemet
Ali; it was he who guided Admiral Stopford in the bombardment of
Beirut; it was he, again, who brought about the landing of English
troops in Syria in 1841; we find him afterwards in Damascus as
British Consul, and wherever he went he was always busy spreading
English power and prestige. He understood the East thoroughly and
felt that England must be strong in Syria if she wished to retain
her imperial power. It is very unfortunate that the policy of Sir
Richard Wood was not carried out by his nation.

It was with high hopes and expectations that I approached the
Lebanon. I was looking forward to the moment when I should find
myself among people who were free from the Turkish yoke, in a
country where I should be able to breathe freely for a few
hours.

But how great was my consternation, when, on entering the
Lebanon, I found on all the roads Turkish soldiers who stopped me
every minute to ask for my papers! Even then I could not realize
that the worst had happened. Of course, rumors of the Turkish
occupation of the Lebanon had reached us a few weeks before, but we
had not believed it, as we knew that Germany and Austria were among
those who guaranteed the autonomy of the Lebanon. It was true,
however; the scrap of paper that guaranteed the freedom of the
Lebanon had proved of no more value to the Lebanese than had that
other scrap of paper to Belgium. As I entered the beautiful village
of Ed-Damur, one of the most prosperous and enchanting places on
earth, I saw entire regiments of Turkish troops encamped in and
about the village.

While I was watering my horse, I tried to ask questions from a
few inhabitants. My fair hair and complexion and my khaki costume
made them take me for a German, and they barely answered me, but
when I addressed them in French their faces lit up. For the
Lebanon, for all it is thousands of miles away from France, is
nevertheless like a French province. For fifty years the French
language and French culture have taken hold of the Lebanon. No
Frenchman has more love for and faith in France than lie in the
hearts of the Lebanese Christians. They have never forgotten that
when massacres were threatening to wipe out all the Christians of
the Lebanon, ten thousand French soldiers swept over the mountains
to spread peace, life, and French gayety.

And when the poor people heard the language they loved, and when
they found out that I too was the son of an oppressed and ruined
community, all the sadness and bitterness of their hearts was told
me,—how the Turkish soldiers had spread over the beloved
mountains of Lebanon; how the strong, stalwart young Lebanese had
been taken away from the mountains and forced into the Turkish
army; how the girls and women were hiding in their homes, afraid to
be seen by the soldiers and their officers; how the chieftains were
imprisoned and even hanged; and how violence and pillage had spread
over the peaceful country.[Footnote: Since the above was written
the American press has chronicled many atrocities committed in the
Lebanon. The execution of leaders and the complete blockade of the
mountains by the Turkish authorities resulted in the starving of
eighty thousand Lebanese. The French Government has warned Turkey
through the American Ambassador that the Turks will be held
accountable for their deeds.]

I could not help wondering at the mistakes of the Allies. If
they had understood the situation in Palestine and Syria, how
differently this war might have eventuated! The Lebanon and Syria
would have raised a hundred thousand picked men, if the Allies had
landed in Palestine. The Lebanon would have fought for its
independence as heroically as did the Belgians. Even the Arab
population would have welcomed the Allies as liberators. But
alas!

With a saddened heart I pursued my journey into Beirut. My
coming was a joyful surprise to my sister. Many sad things had
happened since she had last seen me. During my imprisonment she had
suffered tortures, not knowing what would happen to me, and now
that she saw me alive she cried from happiness. She told me how
kindly she had been treated by President Bliss, of the Syrian
Protestant College, and of all the good things the college had
done.

What a blessing the college was for the people of Beirut! Many
unfortunate people were saved from prison and hardships through the
intervention of President Bliss. He never tired of rendering
service, wonderful personal service. But alas, even his influence
and power began to wane. The American prestige in the country was
broken, and the Turkish Government no longer respected the American
flag. An order issued from Constantinople demanded that the
official language of the college be Turkish instead of English, and
Turkish officers even dared to enter the college premises to search
for citizens belonging to the belligerent nations, without
troubling to ask permission from the American Consul.

CHAPTER IX

Beirut is a city of about two hundred thousand inhabitants, half
of whom are Christians and the rest Mohammedans and Jews. The pinch
of hunger was already felt there. Bread was to be had only on
tickets issued by the Government, and prices in general were
extremely high. The population were discontented and turbulent, and
every day thousands of women came before the governor’s residence
to cry and protest against the scarcity of bread.

The Allies’ warships often passed near the town, but the people
were not afraid of them, for it was known that the Allies had no
intention of bombarding the cities. Only once had a bombardment
taken place. Toward the end of March, 1915, a French warship
approached the bay of Haifa and landed an officer with a letter to
the commandant of that town giving notice of his intention to
bombard the German Consulate at 3 P.M. sharp. This was in
retaliation for the propaganda carried on by the consul, Leutweld
von Hardegg, and chiefly because of his desecration of the grave of
Bonaparte’s soldiers. The consul had time to pack up his archives
and valuables, and he left his house before three. The bombardment
began exactly at three. Fifteen shells were fired with a wonderful
precision. Not one house in the neighborhood of the consulate was
touched, but the consulate itself was a heap of ruins after a few
shells had struck it. The population was exceedingly calm. Only the
German colony was panic-stricken, and on every German house an
American flag was raised. It was rather humorous to see all the
Germans who were active in the Turkish army in one capacity or
another seek safety by means of this trick.

This bombardment had a sobering effect upon the Mohammedan
population. They saw that the Allies were not wholly ignorant of
what was going on in the country and that they could retaliate, and
safety for the non-Mohammedans increased accordingly.

In general Beirut was a rather quiet and safe place. The
presence of an American cruiser in the port had much to do with
that. The American sailors were allowed to come ashore three times
a week, and they spent their money lavishly. It was estimated that
Beirut was getting more than five thousand dollars a week out of
them. But the natives were especially impressed by the manliness
and quick action of the American boys. Frequently a few sailors
were involved in a street fight with scores of Arabs, and they
always held their own. In a short time the Americans became feared,
which in the Orient is equivalent to saying they were respected.
The Beirut people are famous for their fighting spirit, but this
spirit was not manifested after a few weeks of intimate
acquaintance with the American blue-jackets.

My inspection of the devastation caused by the locusts
completed, I returned home. The news that greeted me there was
alarming. I must narrate with some detail the events which finally
decided me to leave the country. About one hour’s ride on horseback
from our village lives a family of Turkish nobles, the head of
which was Sadik Pasha, brother of the famous Kiamil Pasha, several
times Grand Vizier of the Empire. Sadik, who had been exiled from
Constantinople, came to Palestine and bought great tracts of land
near my people. After his death his sons—good-for-nothing,
wild fellows—were forced to sell most of the estate—all
except one Fewzi Bey, who retained his part of the land and lived
on it. Here he collected a band of friends as worthless as himself
and gradually commenced a career of plundering and “frightfulness”
much like that of the robber barons of mediaeval Germany. Before
the outbreak of the war he confined his attentions chiefly to the
Arabs, whom he treated shamefully. He raided cattle and crops and
carried off girls and women in broad daylight. On one occasion he
stopped a wedding procession and carried off the young bride. Then
he seized the bridegroom, against whom he bore a grudge, and
subjected the poor Bedouin to the bastinado until he consented to
divorce his wife by pronouncing the words, “I divorce thee,” three
times in the presence of witnesses, according to Mohammedan custom.
This Bedouin was the grandson of the Sheikh Hilou, a holy man of
the region upon whose grave the Arabs are accustomed to make their
prayers. But we villagers of Zicron-Jacob had never submitted to
Fewzi Bey in any way; our young men were organized and armed, and
after a few encounters he let us alone.

After the mobilization, however, and the taking away of our
arms, this outlaw saw that his chance had come. He began to send
his men and his camels into our fields to harvest our crops and
carry them off. This pillage continued until the locusts
came—Fewzi, in the mean while, becoming so bold that he would
gallop through the streets of our village with his horsemen,
shooting right and left into the air and insulting old men and
women. He boasted—apparently with reason—that the
authorities at Haifa were powerless to touch him.

There was one hope left. Djemal Pasha had boasted that he had
introduced law and order; the country was under military rule; it
remained to see what he would say and do when the crimes of Fewzi
Bey were brought to his notice. Accordingly, armed with my
boyouroulton, or passport, of a locust-inspector, I rode to
Jerusalem, where I procured, through my brother, who was then in
favor, an interview with Djemal Pasha. He received me on the very
day of my arrival, and listened attentively while for a whole hour
I poured out the story of Fewzi Bey’s outrages. I put my whole
heart into the plea and wound up by asking if it was to the credit
of the progressive Young Turks to shelter feudal abuses of a bygone
age. Djemal seemed to be impressed. He sprang from his chair, began
walking up and down the room; then with a great dramatic gesture he
exclaimed, “Justice shall be rendered!” and assured me that a
commission of army officers would be sent at once to start an
investigation. I returned to Zicron-Jacob with high hopes.

Sure enough, a few days later Fewzi Bey was summoned to
Jerusalem; at the same time the “commission,” which had dwindled to
one single officer on secret mission, put in an appearance and
began to make inquiries among the natives. He got little
satisfaction at first, for they lived in mortal terror of the
outlaw; they grew bolder, however, when they learned his purpose.
Complaints and testimonies came pouring in, and in four days the
officer had the names of hundreds of witnesses, establishing no
less than fifty-two crimes of the most serious nature. Fewzi’s
friends and relatives, in the mean while, were doing their utmost
to stem the tide of accusations. The Kaimakam (lieutenant-governor)
of Haifa came in person to our village and threatened the elders
with all sorts of severities if they did not retract the charges
they had made. But they stood firm. Had not Djemal Pasha,
commander-in-chief of the armies in Palestine, given his word of
honor that we should have redress?

We were soon shown the depth of our naïveté in
fancying that justice could be done in Turkey by a Turk. Fewzi Bey
came back from Jerusalem, not in convict’s clothes, but in the
uniform of a Turkish officer! Djemal Pasha had commissioned him
commandant of the Moujahaddeen (religious militia) of the entire
region! It was bad enough to stand him as an outlaw; now we had to
submit to him as an officer. He came riding into our village daily,
ordering everybody about and picking me out for distinguished
spitefulness.

My position soon became unbearable. I was, of course, known as
the organizer of the young men’s union which for so long had put up
a spirited resistance to Fewzi; I was still looked upon as a leader
of the younger spirits, and I knew that sooner or later Fewzi would
try to make good his threat, often repeated, that he would “shoot
me like a dog.” It was hardly likely that an open attempt on my
life would be made. When Ambassador Morgenthau visited Palestine,
he had stayed in our village and given my family the evidence of
his sincere friendship. These things count in the East, and I soon
got the reputation of having influential friends. However, there
were other ways of disposing of me. One evening, about sunset,
while I was riding through a valley near our village, my horse
shied violently in passing a clump of bushes. I gave him the spur
and turned and rode toward the bushes just in time to see a
horseman dash out wildly with a rifle across his saddle. I kept the
incident to myself, but I was more cautious and kept my eyes open
wherever I went. One afternoon, a fortnight later, as I was riding
to Hedera, another Jewish village, two hours’ ride away, a shot was
fired from behind a sand-dune. The bullet burned a hole in the
lapel of my coat.

That night I had a long talk with my brother. There was no doubt
whatever in his mind that I should try to leave the country, while
I, on the contrary, could not bear to think of deserting my people
at the crisis of their fortunes. It was a beautiful night, such a
night, I think, as only Palestine can show, a white, serene,
moon-bathed night. The roar of the Mediterranean came out of the
stillness as if to remind us that help and salvation could come
only from the sea, the sea upon which scores of the warships of the
Allies were sailing back and forth. We had argued into the small
hours before I yielded to his persuasion.

CHAPTER X

It was all very well to decide to leave the country; to get
safely away was a different matter. There were two ways out. One of
these—the land route by Constantinople—could not be
considered. The other way was to board one of the American cruisers
which, by order of Ambassador Morgenthau, were empowered to assist
citizens of neutral countries to leave the Ottoman Empire. These
cruisers had already done wonderful rescue work for the Russian
Jews in Palestine, who, when war was declared, were to have been
sent to the Mesopotamian town of Urfa—there to suffer
massacre and outrage like the Armenians. This was prevented by Mr.
Morgenthau’s strenuous representations, with the result that these
Russian Jews were gathered together as in a great drag-net and
herded to Jaffa, amidst suffering unspeakable. There they were met
by the American cruisers which were to transport them to Egypt. Up
to the very moment when they set foot on the friendly warships they
were robbed and horribly abused by the Jaffa boatmen. The eternal
curse of the Wandering Jew! Driven from Russia, they come to seek
shelter in Turkey; Turkey then casts them from her under pretext
that they are loyal to Russia. Truly, the Jew lifts his eyes to the
mountains, asking the ancient and still unanswered question,
“Whence shall come my help?”

The Turkish Government later repented of its leniency in
allowing these Russian Jews to escape, and gave orders that only
neutrals should leave the country—and then only under certain
conditions. I was not a neutral; my first papers of American
citizenship were valueless to further my escape. I had heard,
however, that the United States cruiser Tennessee was to call at
Jaffa, and I determined to get aboard her by hook or by crook. One
evening, as soon as darkness had fallen, I bade a sorrowful
farewell to my people, and set off for Jaffa, traveling only by
night and taking out-of-the-way paths to avoid the pickets, for now
that the locust campaign was over, my boyouroulton was
useless. At dawn, two days later, I slipped into Jaffa by way of
the sand-dunes and went to the house of a friend whom I could trust
to help me in every possible way, and begged him to find me a
passport for a neutral. He set off in search and I waited all day
at his house, consumed with impatience and anxiety. At last, toward
evening, my friend returned, but the news he brought was not
cheering. He had found a passport, indeed, but his report of the
rigors of the inspection at the wharf was such as to make it clear
that the chances of my getting through on a false passport were
exceedingly slim, since I was well known in Jaffa. If I were caught
in such an undertaking, it might mean death for me and punishment
for the friends who had helped me.

Evidently this plan was not feasible. All that night I racked my
brain for a solution. Finally I decided to stake everything on what
appeared to be my only chance. The Tennessee was due on the next
day but one, early in the morning. I gave my friend the name of a
boatman who was under obligations to me and had sworn to be my
friend for life or death. Even under the circumstances I hesitated
to trust a Mohammedan, but it seemed the only thing to do; I had no
choice left. My friend brought the boatman, and I put my plan
before him, appealing to his daring and his sense of honor. I
wanted him to take me at midnight in his fishing-boat from an
isolated part of the coast and wait for the appearance of the
Tennessee; then, on her arrival, amid the scramble of boats full of
refugees, I was to jump aboard, while he would return with the
other boats. The poor fellow tried to remonstrate, pointing out the
dangers and what he called—rightly enough,
doubtless—the folly of the plan. I stuck to it, however,
making it clear that his part would be well paid for, and at last
he consented and we arranged a meeting-place behind the sand-dunes
by the shore.

I put a few personal belongings into a little suit-case and had
my friend give it to one of the refugees who was to sail on the
Tennessee. If I succeeded, I was to recover it when we reached
Egypt. The only thing I took with me was the paper which declared
my “intention of becoming an American citizen,” the “first paper.”
From this document I was determined not to part. I shall not tell
how I kept it on me, as the means I used may still be used by
others in concealing such papers and a disclosure of the secret
might bring disaster to them. Suffice it to say that I had the
paper with me and that no search would have brought it to
light.

Arrived next morning at the appointed place, I gave the signal
agreed upon, the whine of a jackal, and, after repeating it again
and again, I heard a very low and muffled answer. My boatman was
there! I had some fear that he might have betrayed me and that I
should presently see a soldier or policeman leap out of the little
boat, but my fears proved groundless, the man was faithful.

We rowed out quietly, our boat a little nutshell on the tossing
waves. But I was relieved; the elements did not frighten me; on the
contrary, I felt secure and refreshed in the midst of the sea. When
morning began to dawn, scores of little boats came out of the
harbor and circled about waiting for the cruiser. This was our
chance. I crouched in the bottom of our boat and to all appearances
my boatman was engaged merely in fishing. After I had lain there
over an hour with my heart beating like a drum and with small hopes
for the success of my undertaking, I heard at last the whistle of
the approaching cruiser followed by a Babel of mad shouting and
cursing among the boatmen. In the confusion I felt it safe to sit
up. No one paid the slightest attention to me. All were engaged in
a wild race to reach and mount the Tennessee’s ladder. I scrambled
up with the rest, and when, on the deck, an officer demanded my
passport, I put on a bold front and asked him to tell Captain
Decker that Mr. Aaronsohn wished to see him.

Ten minutes later I stood in the captain’s cabin. There I
unfolded my story, and wound up by asking him if, under the
circumstances, my “first papers” might not entitle me to
protection. As I spoke I could see the struggle that was going on
within him. When he answered it was to explain, with the utmost
kindness, that if he took me aboard his ship it would be to forfeit
his word of honor to the Turkish Government, his pledge to take
only citizens of neutral countries; that he could not consider me
an American on the strength of my first papers; and that any such
evasion might lead to serious complications for him and for his
Government. Well, there was nothing for me to do but to withdraw
and go back to Jaffa to face trial for an attempt to escape.

When I reached the deck again I found it swarming with refugees,
many of whom knew me and came up to congratulate me on getting
away. I could only shake my head and with death in my heart descend
the Tennessee’s ladder. It did not matter now what boat I took. Any
boatman was eager enough to take me for a few cents. As I sat in
the boat, every stroke of the oars bringing me nearer to the shore
and to what I felt was inevitable captivity, a great bitterness
swelled my heart. I was tired, utterly tired of all the dangers and
trials I had been going through for the last months. From
depression I sank into despair and out of despair came, strange to
say, a great serenity, the serenity of despair.

On the quay I ran into Hassan Bey, commandant of the police, who
was superintending the embarkation of refugees. I knew him and he
knew me. Half an hour later I was in police headquarters under
examination by Hassan Bey. I was desperate, and answered him
recklessly. A seasick man is indifferent to shipwreck. This was the
substance of our conversation:—

“How did you get aboard the ship?”

“In a boat with some refugees. A woman hid me with her
skirts.”

“So you were trying to escape, were you?”

“If I had been, I shouldn’t have come back.”

“Then what did you do on the cruiser?”

“I went to talk to the captain, who is a friend of mine. My life
is in danger. Fewzi Bey is after me, and I wanted my friends in
America to know how justice is done in Palestine.”

“Who are your friends in America?”

“Men who could break you in a minute.”

“Do you know to whom you are speaking?”

“Yes, Hassan Bey. I am sick of persecution. I wish you would
hang me with your own hands as you hanged the young Christian; my
friends would have your life for mine.”

I wonder now how I dared to speak to him in this manner. But the
bluff carried. Hassan Bey looked at me curiously for a
moment—then smiled and offered me a cigarette, assuring me
that he believed me a loyal citizen, and declaring he felt deeply
hurt that I had not come to him for permission to visit the
cruiser. We parted with a profusion of Eastern compliments, and
that evening I started back to Zicron-Jacob.

CHAPTER XI

The failure of my attempt to leave the country only sharpened my
desire to make another trial. The danger of the enterprise tended
to reconcile me to deserting my family and comrades and seeking
safety for myself. As I racked my brain for a promising plan, a
letter came from my sister in Beirut with two pieces of news which
were responsible for my final escape. The American College was
shortly to close for the summer, and the U.S.S. Chester was to sail
for Alexandria with refugees aboard. Beirut is a four days’ trip
from our village, and roads are unsafe. It was out of the question
to permit my sister to come home alone, and it was impossible for
any of us to get leave to go after her; nor did we want to have her
at home in the unsettled condition of the country. I began
wondering if I could not possibly get to Beirut and get my sister
aboard the Chester, which offered, perhaps, the last opportunity to
go out with the refugees. It would be a difficult undertaking but
it might be our only chance and I quickly made up my mind to carry
it out if it were a possible thing. I had to act immediately; no
time was to be lost, for no one could tell how soon the Chester
might sail.

My last adventure had been entered upon with forebodings, but
now I felt that I should succeed. To us Orientals intuition speaks
in very audible tones and we are trained from childhood to listen
to its voice. It was with a feeling of confidence in the outcome,
therefore, that I bade this second good-bye to my family and
dearest friends. Solemn hours they were, these hours of farewell,
hours that needed few words. Then once more I slipped out into the
night to make my secret way to Beirut.

It was about midnight when I left home, dressed in a soldier’s
uniform and driving a donkey before me. I traveled only by night
and spent each day in hiding in some cave or narrow valley where I
could sleep with some measure of security. For food I had brought
bread, dried figs, and chocolate, and water was always to be found
in little springs and pools. In these clear, warm nights I used to
think of David, a fugitive and pursued by his enemies. How well I
could now understand his despairing cry: “How long wilt thou forget
me, O Lord? for ever?… How long shall mine enemy be exalted over
me?”

Five nights I journeyed, and at last one morning beautiful
Beirut appeared in the distance and I found myself in the forest of
pines that leads into the city. The fresh dawn was filled with the
balmy breath of the pines and all the odors of the Lebanon. Driving
my donkey before me, I boldly approached the first picket-house and
saluted the non-commissioned officer in military fashion. He
stopped me and asked whence I came and where I was going. I smiled
sweetly and replied that I was the orderly of a German officer who
was surveying the country a few hours to the south and that I was
going to Beirut for provisions. Then I lighted a cigarette and sat
down for a chat. After discussing politics and the war for a few
minutes, I jumped up, exclaiming that if I didn’t hurry I should be
late, and so took my departure. It was all so simple, and it
brought me safely to Beirut. My donkey, having served the purpose
for which I had brought him, was speedily abandoned, and I hurried
to a friend’s house, where I exchanged my uniform for the garb of a
civilian.

My sister was the most surprised person on earth when she saw me
walking into her room, and, when I told her that I wanted her to go
with me on the Chester, she thought me crazy, for she knew that
hundreds of persons were trying in vain to find means of leaving
the country and it seemed to her impossible that we, who were
Turkish subjects, could succeed in outwitting the authorities. Even
when I had explained my plans and she was willing to admit the
possibility of success, she still felt doubts as to whether it
would be right for her to leave the country while her friends were
left behind in danger. I assured her, however, that our family
would feel relieved to know that we were in safety and could come
back fresh and strong after the war to help in rebuilding the
country.

Having gained her consent, I still had the difficult problem of
ways and means before me. The Chester had orders to take citizens
of neutral countries only. Passports had to be examined by the
Turkish authorities and by the American Consul-General, who gave
the final permission to board the cruiser. How was I to pass this
double scrutiny? After long and arduous search, with the assistance
of several good friends, I at last discovered a man who was willing
to sell me the passports of a young couple belonging to a neutral
nation. I cannot go into particulars about this arrangement, of
course. Suffice it to say that my sister was to travel as my wife
and that we both had to disguise ourselves so as to answer the
descriptions on the passports. When I went to the American
Consulate-General to get the permit, I found the building crowded
with people of all nations,—Spanish and Greek and Dutch and
Swiss,—all waiting for the precious little papers that should
take them aboard the American cruiser, that haven of liberty and
safety. The Chester was to take all these people to Alexandria, and
those who had the means were to be charged fifty cents a day for
their food. From behind my dark goggles I recognized many a person
in disguise like myself and seeking escape. We never betrayed
recognition for fear of the spies who infested the place.

After securing my permit, I ran downstairs and straight to “my”
consul, whose dragoman I took along with me to the seraya,
or government building. Of course, the dragoman was well tipped and
he helped me considerably in hastening the examination I had to
undergo at the hands of the Turkish officials. All went well, and I
hurried back to my sister triumphant.

The Chester was to sail in two days, but while we were waiting,
the alarming news came that the American Consul had been advised
that the British Government refused to permit the landing of the
refugees in Egypt and that the departure of the Chester was
indefinitely postponed. With a sinking at my heart I rushed up to
the American Consulate for details and there learned that the
U.S.S. Des Moines was to sail in a few hours for Rhodes with
Italian and Greek refugees and that I could go on her if I wished.
In a few minutes I had my permit changed for the trip on the Des
Moines and I hurried home to my sister. We hastily got together the
few belongings we were to take with us, jumped into a carriage, and
drove to the harbor.

We had still another ordeal to go through. My sister was taken
into a private room and thoroughly searched; so was I. Nobody could
leave the country with more than twenty-five dollars in cash on his
person. Our baggage was carefully overhauled. No papers or books
could be taken. My sister’s Bible was looked upon with much
suspicion since it contained a map of ancient Canaan. I explained
that this was necessary for the orientation of our prayers and that
without it we could not tell in which direction to turn our faces
when praying! This seemed plausible to the Moslem examiners and
saved the Bible, the only book we now possess as a souvenir from
home. Now our passports were examined again and several questions
were asked. My sister was brave and self-possessed, cool and
unconcerned in manner, and at last the final signature was affixed
and we jumped into the little boat that was to take us out to the
ship.

At this moment a man approached, a dry-goods dealer of whom my
sister had made some purchases a few months before. He seemed to
recognize her and he asked her in German if she were not Miss
Aaronsohn. I felt my blood leave my face, and, looking him straight
in the eye, I whispered, “If you say one word more, you will be a
dead man; so help me God!” He must have felt that I meant exactly
what I said, for he walked off mumbling unintelligibly.

At last the boat got away, and five minutes later we were
mounting the side of the Des Moines. Throngs of refugees covered
the decks of the cruiser. Their faces showed tension and anxiety.
Their presence there seemed too good to be true, and all awaited
the moment when the ship should heave anchor. A Filipino sailor
showed us about, and as he spoke Italian, I told him I wanted to be
hidden somewhere till the ship got under way. I felt that even yet
we were not entirely safe. That my fears were justified I
discovered shortly, when from our hiding-place I saw the shopkeeper
approaching in a small boat with a Turkish officer. They looked
over all the refugees on the deck, but searched for us in vain.
After a half-hour more of uncomfortable tension the engines began
to sputter, the propellers revolved, and—we were safe!

The day was dying and a beautiful twilight softened the outlines
of the Lebanon and the houses of Beirut. The Mediterranean lay
quiet and peaceful around us, and the healthy, sturdy American
sailors gave a feeling of confidence. As the cruiser drew out of
the harbor, a great cry of farewell arose from the refugees on
board, a cry in which was mingled the relief of being free, anguish
at leaving behind parents and friends, fear and hope for the
future. A little later the sailors were lined up in arms to salute
the American flag when it was lowered for the night. Moved by a
powerful instinct of love and respect, all the refugees jumped to
their feet, the men bareheaded and the women with folded hands, and
in that moment I understood as I had never understood before the
real sacred meaning of a flag. To all those people standing in awe
about that piece of cloth bearing the stars and stripes America was
an incarnation of love universal, of freedom and salvation.

The cool Syrian night, our first night on the cruiser, was spent
in songs, hymns, and conversation. We were all too excited to
sleep. Friends discovered friends and tales of woe were exchanged,
stories of hardship, injustice, oppression, all of which ended with
mutual congratulations on escaping from the clutches of the
Turks.