single word of Arabic (none of us talked Turkish), despite the praiseworthy offorts of P.'s Egyptian soldier - servant to instruct him in that language. After breakfast we marched on past Tafas, the scene of the fighting of the previous day. Outside the village were the naked bodies of three or four Turkish soldiers, who had been found by the Arab inhabitants hiding in some outhouses that morning, and who had been summarily executed and their bodies stripped in revenge for the murders of women and children. One could scarcely blame the Tafas villagers, but, at the same time, there was something revolting in the sight of these Turks, naked and unburied, lying where they had fallen on the Deraa road. One, a boy who looked about seventeen, was actually in his death-agony as we rode up, and died just afterwards. A few hundred yards away was a listless sorrowful group of women of the place, mourning their dead offspring, and over everything there was an air of tragedy and hopelessness. Altogether a pitiable seene.

A mile or two farther on we heard that the Arab leaders and L. were in Deraa, where they had arrived just before the G.O.C. of of the British Cavalry Division, who was now there also. Just after this news reached us we came on an Indian cavalry pioquet, and then on a party of British motorcyclist orderlies, and finally on a British General and his Staff. The latter greeted

were

less cordiality than that with which we greeted them. To us they represented the outward sign of the accomplishment of our task and our own safety. To them we represented as embarrassing a situation as ever confronted a British General. Our column was an Allied column, composed in the main of Arabs with some French; we few British officers, so far as we were under anybody's orders, were directly under Allenby's G.H.Q.; the Arab leaders were being hailed by the hundreds and indeed thousands of desert Arabs and local inhabitants who pouring into Deraa, not only as military conquerors, but as political and national saviours; L. was looked upon as the direct representative of that far-off country whose support had assisted the freeing of Arabia, and the British General and his Staff were regarded as very incidental adjunots to that victory. Add to this the fact that there existed such a thing as a Sykes-Picot agreement, and that there was a town which obviously some one was soon going to capture, called Damascus, and you have a really complicated situation, which a British divisional General without previous instructions, already exhausted by days of continual fighting and pursuit, was hardly competent to unravel.

To order our buccaneers to quit the town of Deraa would probably result in armed eonfliot with the now wildly excited and exultant Arabs, and cer

There was one feature of Deraa which made us all very proud: in the station was a quantity of rolling-stook and at least two engines in good order, which, but for our last demolition on the Damasous line, would have carried hundreds, if not thousands, of Turks northwards, probably eventually to join Mustapha Kemal and add to present-day difficulties in Anatolia. Other rolling-stook had been similarly imprisoned west and south of Deraa.

That alone justified the high value which many of us have set, myself for example, in a certain green-benched chamber to which I have access, on the military achievements of the Arabs; and, after all, the success of our column, however much directed by British effort, was really and truly an Arab success. No sneers by Continental editors, no deprecatery references by British military authorities-though never by Lord Allenby-many of whom cannot understand because they would be incapable themselves of directing desert warfare, to L.'s "exaggerated ideas of Arab possibilities," can alter the fact that our column helped Allenby's victory and disorganised the Turkish

Whilst the British and Turkish authorities were conferring that morning, P. and I, with the sure instinct of old soldiers, had chosen the most substantial and cleanest building (it was a very relative term!) in Deraa for our lodg ing. Hastily surrounding it with sentries, baggage, and other impedimenta, we set a party of Egyptian soldiers to work to brush and scrub floors, passages, and walls, and soon Ahmed and P.'s servant were arranging our effects in a high, cool, whitewashed room that had apparently been a German officers' mess.

The next day was uneventful, but on the 30th L. came to tell us that he and Sherif Nasser and S. were leaving in a car for Damascus, to be followed by Prince Feisul, J., and Y. The Camel Corps and Gurkhas were to return to Palestine, and I was given the choice of going with them or accompanying L. I chose the former course, as my term of detachment from my own battalion was nearly up, and, confession of materialism

As the Sister went out of the ward she paused to look back, with the knob of the door in her hand.

"Boys," she said, in the voice that made babes of us all, "five minutes to get into bed." We knew that five minutes, no more and no less, it would be. The door closed behind her, the little pat noise of it putting a kind of full stop to her words.

Of thirty wounded men in the ward, twenty-two had been up for the day. We were the blest. But bliss was precarious. If we were not good, the Sister might keep us in bed in the morning. So we eagerly slipped off and folded our sooks and red ties and blue tunies and slacks. The shirt did not have to come off. A shirt by day, it was a nighty by night-a good plan, I can tell you, when any delay may oost dear. In five minutes, dead, the door opened; the Sister looked down the long ward.

I lay next but one to the door; so I saw what she saw. There were twenty-nine faces duly laid on their pillows, Some seven looked dull and bed-weary. Twenty-one others -I throw myself in, for I felt like it too-looked shiny and young with the glee that you feel when the life in you has taken heart to go on with a will, after a check. A twentyA twentyninth face, in the bed on my

right, was right, was a model in wax, awaiting only some one final touch of rigidity and refinement. Into the thirtieth bed, at the dim far end of the ward, a vast bulk, in a white shirt less vast, flew through the air from afar with astonishing momentum and dived in fear and shame under the blankets.

The Sister took it all in. A Sergeant-Major had been lost to the world when she turned out a girl. But not one to rule men wholly by terror. She went first to the wax-faced man on my right that always lay on his back with his eyes. open, scrutinising the ceiling. He turned his face a few degrees at the touch of her hand on his wrist and smiled a little. He had a great dignity then, the austere prestige of the dying, who are an esoteric patriciate, lifted above desire and fear and all quarrels.

The Sister went on to the far end of the ward where the meteoric giant had gone to earth under his blankets. His great shafts of limbs were convulsing them now, in his efforts to settle down for the night; the bed looked like a small linen bag with a large and terrified oat imprisoned in it and plunging. The plunging instantly stopped when the Sister began tucking in the disarranged elements of the bed.