Chapter I

In the Central Range of Western Palestine is an ancient Samaritan township, the Shechem of the Patriarchs. High set above shore-level, sheltered by mighty mountains on the North, East and South, looking down a wady beaten in by-gone days by the hoofs of the cavalry of Omri,--rutted by the silver and ivory chariot-wheels of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,--across low, undulant hill-ranges, to the twenty-mile distant sea.

High set above sea-level, it lies on the floor of a long, fish-shaped valley, between two towering limestone mountains. Distant a mile-and-a-half at their summits, their bases nearly meet. One is Ebal, the other Gerizim. They are the mounts by which the Chosen stood to receive blessings and cursings.

The Samaritan Temple, that place of sinister mysteries, once stood where are now great terebinth-trees, shading the ruins of an ancient fortress upon Mount Gerizim. The rock of their Place of Sacrifice shows its channelled surface above ground. To-day, a man standing with the wind at his back, upon the crown of Ebal or Gerizim and speaking loudly, would be heard at the summit of the opposite Mount, and in the streets of the town....

The town, upon which the towering limestone heads of Ebal and Gerizim and their fellows look down sternly, was in its heyday a place of wealth, where luxury and lust ran riot, and men and women walked in purple robes, or were carried in ivory litters; crowned with high jewelled head-dresses, dust of gold powder lying thick in the spiral curls of their jet black beards, and the frizzled waves or towering coils of richly-luxuriant hair. Now their ancient place of abiding is set about with ruinous stone mansions, girt with groves of waving palms, fig-trees, olives and mulberries. Mean dwellings crowd on narrow vaulted streets, under whose pavement you can hear the water rushing. For there is no lack of water in Shechem. The crowded mud Barracks behind the bazar has a well of pure water in its courtyard. So cheap is the element that no one grudges this solace to the prisoners of War.

Before the War the chief seat of the Turkish administration in Palestine, the old town boasted a population of some 25,000 souls. Thinned by conscription of the younger Jews, Samaritans, Arabs and native Syrian Christians, it might have contained some fifteen thousand, counting the garrison of Turkish infantry officered by monocled and braceleted Germans,--when the fortified area of Beersheba fell to the strategy of Allenby, and the routed left wing of the Fourth Army Corps of Djemal Pasha, with the formidable motor-driven siege-guns from the boasted stronghold fell back in rout and confusion upon the area of Shechem.

Some directing Teutonic mind ordained, weeks previous to the evacuation, that the Allied prisoners from the camps of Beersheba and its vicinity, packed on Railway cattle-trucks or Army motor-lorries,--should be transferred by railway to the town of Shechem. It was to be converted by German gold, forced labour and modern resources, into a stronghold of Ottoman power, against which the expeditionary army of Britain should expend itself in vain....

There are already British War prisoners in the mud-walled Barracks at Shechem, built round the courtyard containing the well. When on these hunger-gnawed, vermin-ridden men rolls the flood of human wretchedness from the camps of Beersheba and its neighbourhood,--they are to learn the bitter truth that there are grades in Misery.

For a squat, sandy, pale-eyed Lieutenant-General of Turkish gendarmerie, who acted as Commandant of the Beersheba prison-camps, now supersedes the tyrant who has ruled at Shechem. The inmates of the prisons there have been robbed, stripped, and beaten. They have slept in tattered blankets upon mud or stone floors,--lived on a daily quarter of a coarse brown loaf per soul--and a handful of beans in oil.... They have undergone insult, and occasionally kicks and blows, but Home parcels have occasionally reached them, and though pinched, they were not famished.... Now the parcels are looted or their contents rendered uneatable.... A loaf is shared amongst twenty men, the pannikin of boiled beans yields each a bare spoonful. Driven out at dawn by Turks with loaded hide-whips, to dig trenches south and east of the old fortifications,--make emplacements for Austro-German artillery, and lay down a system of interchangeable rails for the Krupp motor-guns,--they are herded back at night to the filthy pens where they are packed so closely that they cannot lie down to sleep without lying on each other. Whence in the mornings men suffocated by the press of the bodies of their comrades are taken out dead....

These victims belong to the rank and file. Some officers are quartered in the old stone-built prison. Yet others live in Turkish Army tents in a barbed-wire enclosure at the eastern end of the town. A ramshackle hut serves as their mess, when they have anything to mess on. But they are not too crowded for decency, and sickness spares them. Presently the officers are drafted away, four only remaining,--and the congestion at the mud-built Barracks is somewhat relieved. But Hunger, Overcrowding and Dirt have bred Dysentery, septic skin-eruptions and Typhus Fever, and these claim their victims by the score.

The Hospital near the new Turkish Barracks by the Arsenal, staffed by the German Red Cross and the nurses and orderlies of the Red Crescent,--being crowded with Turkish and German wounded--cannot admit more than a few of the gravest cases of dysentery. The typhus patients are removed to the Hospital under the auspices of the Established Church of England Missionary Society, and another,--devotedly tended by the Catholic Sisters of the Cross. Helpers come from the Mission House of the Latin Patriarchate, who unweariedly give their services wherever there is need.... But desperate indeed would be the plight of the War prisoners--save that through the blizzard of misery raging through the mud Barracks--the courage and charity of one man shine like a steadfast star....

The man is a Catholic chaplain who has served with the Expeditionary Forces at Gallipoli; has been taken prisoner and kept for awhile in Hospital at Constantinople; has been drafted to Smyrna, and later, by such haphazard chance as governs the lives of prisoners, has been shifted to Beersheba, and thence to Shechem.

Unweariedly he alleviates, whilst sharing, the common misery. Shaking with fever, hunger-bitten to the bone, ragged as any scarecrow, red-eyed with sleeplessness, he moves from room to room distributing such poor comforts as are obtainable. Helping the convalescent, ministering to the sick, dispensing the Sacraments of the Mother Church to the Catholic dying--cheering those of other creeds with the words that are of God....

On a day in November, half-an-hour later than the morning prayer-call from the minaret of the Great Mosque that was once a Church of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre--you are to see Father Julian Forbis going his daily round.... The mud-walled courtyard is closed in on three sides by the mud-built Barracks, and on the fourth by a high wall topped by rusty iron spikes--a wall in which there is an archway closed by a double gate, flanked on either side by guard-rooms. Over the gateway is the office of the Turkish Commandant.

To-day the courtyard of the mud-built Barracks is full of sunshine and packed with prisoners. Lying, squatting or standing, the majority are squalid spectres on whose gaunt frames their foul and tattered clothing hangs baggily, though some are bloated like the corpses of men who have been long drowned. Though the assemblage is sprinkled with Roumanians, Syrians, Jews, Armenians and Arabs,--these last having a dungeon to themselves, of unutterable filthiness, the bulk are of the rank and file of Britain's Crusading Forces. Australians, Indians, New Zealanders, and British Territorials.... Actors, clerks, printers, shopwalkers and jockeys; farm-labourers, electricians, gardeners, photographers, bakers, University students,--representatives of every class and calling. One and all strung to endurance by the spirit that makes heroes of ordinary men....

The shadows of Ebal and Gerizim as yet fall westward. Their towering summits and those of the lesser mountains, and the minarets of the Great and the two smaller mosques look down into the dirty mud-walled court, baking in the rays of the early sun, though the November nights are chilly. Every stench the prison fosters seems intensified by the heat. The loud buzzing of millions of flies mingles in a bagpipe-drone with the noise of many voices, Eastern and European,--talking in half-a-dozen languages and a hundred dialects--and the hubbub has for its accompaniment the thudding of distant guns. From the southwest, where the 54th British Division is engaged with the enemy between the sea and Gaza. Nearer South, where a bitter struggle is being waged by British Cavalry, armoured cars, and the bombers and machine-gunners of the Royal Flying Corps, for the possession of Junction Station--the next point after the fall of Gaza, of tactical importance in Palestine. From the hills towards Hebron those enemy forces, who have previously retreated to this vantage, have descended into the Coastal Plain, to relieve the pressure and stiffen the resistance of their comrades by demonstrating a counter-attack. For if Junction Station, the key of the northern railway-system, with its vast dumps of rolling-stock, supplies, War-material and its camps of prisoners, shall fall into the hands of the British--Jerusalem will be cut off from communication save by Wireless with Turkey and Germany....

Day wears apace.... The winged hordes of Baal Zebub, like the humans whom they feast on, are making the most of the sunshine. Fat white maggots that will be flies presently,--and vermin still more loathsome--crawl in the dirty straw on which the prisoners are squatting or lying. Deep in the well the clear water shines like a huge blue eye, reflecting the shadowless heavens above.

A man hanging over, seems to stare in the water, apparently sheltering his eyes with both hands from the glare. He has the crowned wings of the R.F.C. on the shoulder of his ragged shirt of khaki flannel, and the clear water of the brimming well reflects the three chevrons and crown of a Flight Sergeant, tacked upon its tattered sleeve. Also the glittering lenses of a small pair of folding binoculars, cunningly concealed by the curve of their owner's hands.

"What be 'ee lookin' vor, Tom?" cautiously whispers a freckled trooper of Devon Yeomanry, digging a painfully sharp elbow in the airman's lean ribs.

Barney Mossam takes it on himself to answer,--being the accredited wit and jester of the knot gathered about the well. He is a little, broad-shouldered, bow-legged London Territorial, with a nose that has suffered in bouts of fisticuffs; a carroty head, a broad humorous grin, and a squint that points a joke. He speaks with the thick catarrhal snuffle of the East End. Even in khaki his type proclaims him of the Race of Costermongers.... Covent Garden Market is thick with Barneys, all alike as peas from the pod....

"Ticklebats, my flash top," says Barney winking, "kind you used to ketch a while back, wiv' a bottle tied on a string." He adds in a thick whisper directed at the ear of the absorbed Flight Sergeant, "Wot d'yer pipe, old Sky-gazer? Thinkin' it's abaht time we 'ad another look-in from ours affectionately the Two-Faced Nightingale?"

"Ay. Unless he happened to come in the night!" The cautious whisper of the reply only just reaches the ears for which it is intended....

"I 'eard a 'plane go singin' over 'ere 'bout twelve-thirty by my gold ticker," says Barney. "But she was one of them there seaplanes wiv' little canoes instid o' wheels. There ain't so many 'Un 'planes abaht as there used to!--an' Turkey 'planes is gittin' as rare as--as glass in the Strand an' Covent Garden Market--after the bloomin' Zepps and Super Goths 'as paid the usual mornin' call...." His thick whisper is barely audible even to the other: "Reckon that's why it pays Old Two-Face to play the double game. Wiv' a patent trick lever-switch--Gorblime 'im!--but 'e's clever! to cover the Union Jacks on 'is under-wings with Red Crescents when 'e tips the stud.... 'Wish _I_ 'ad a Turk face to pull over my reel one! Wouldn't take me long to 'op out of 'ere! Wonder if 'e 'as the syme dodge fitted on 'is top wings? Give one o' my last three fags--I would!--to find out 'oo 'e is!"

"He's not an Englishman, thank God! He's pretty nearly a black one. Dark as a Gyppo--or a Hindu. The other was white. Inside as well as out. _That's_ why he was murdered!" returns the Flight Sergeant in his wary whisper, without lowering his hands....

"Some blokes gits all the fun. 'Ow come you to see it, Sergeant?"

For once the Cockney's jest provokes no appreciative smile. The thin hands sheltering the prized binoculars shake.... The whispering voice shakes also--and its hurried sentences are punctuated by the thudding of those distant guns....

"I've told you.... It's just a week since.... I was up in our room there," the speaker contemptuously jerks his ear towards an upper window of one of the Barrack buildings--"looking through this little Zeiss glass that magnifies by 20. (I've told you how I took it off a dead German airman at Huy.) ... And the Two-Faced Nightingale--hovering not more than four hundred feet above the Square in front of the big Khan,--was picking the place, damn him! where he'd settled to drop his despatch-bag. He switched his Red Crescents on over the Union Jacks--and the stunt brought the usual roar of laughter from the people. Every one was out to stare,--the streets as far as I could see, were packed, as well as the roofs.... Then he dropped his bag, plumb for the square,--swung round and steered Southward. And,--keeping the glasses focussed on them, I saw his white observer stand up, lean forward and touch him on the back. He looked round and his white teeth flashed in his face sort of spitefully.... The other fellow was handing him out cold truth in ladlefuls, shaking his fist and raving like mad. Then--it happened before you could wipe an eye! He--the pilot--cut out his engine--turned round, and I caught the glitter of a revolver in his hand. Then came the flash and the crack. And the white man buckled up in the bottom of his cockpit--and the Two-Faced Nightingale switched on and flew away South. And nothing was left on the blue sky but a puff of brown cordite."

"The murderin' dawg!" Barney carefully moves from the coping-stone of the well a burnt match, and a wisp of straw, that some eddying draught of the hot breeze might carry into the water. "No fear of 'im gittin' copped. This 'ere queer go wot we calls Life's more on the lines of a Drury Lyne Autumn Show than I twigged when I rallied up 'long o' my pals on Fust Nights outside the good old Gallery Entrance. On'y it's turned the wrong w'y raound. Vice gits all the limes from both wings, an' all the clappin' from the Pit an' Gallery. An' Virtue kips on the bare boards of a stinkin' Turkish barrack-room, or 'unkers in the stinkin' mud, and 'unts things wot 'ops and crawls." He goes on, talking to himself, for the airman, staring in the reflected patch of sky is suddenly absorbed to deafness. "S'trewth! Wherever it does pay--off of the boards of a Theayter--the 'Eroic Line don't go for nuts--not 'ere in Palestine!"

"Ye are richt! It pays nae better than it paid twa thousan' years agone. But which is it better to be on--the de'il's side--or the Lord's? I wuss to Him some voice frae Heaven wad speyk an' answer me! ..."

The utterance--unmistakably Scotch--breaks in several feet above the level of Barney's monologue. He looks up at a tall, gaunt, red-haired Scot in the Border bonnet and ragged khaki kilt, and badges of the Tweedburgh Regiment, and says with his characteristic wink:

"'Ullo, Corp'ral Govan! Thet you? ..."

"Nae ither that I ken...." He is quite young, but he moves like an old man, as he lets his long length slowly down on the mud beside the Cockney, unheeding the invitation to take a straw, and hugs his hairy knees. "Man! I wad gie the twa dirrty Turkish notes in ma pooch, an' a guid British florin to the back o' them, to be anither chap than Alec Govan the day. For I have seen what a man may scarce see, an' keep his brain frae madness--ay! an' his tongue from cryin' oot on God!" He rocks himself in silence, then says with a stifled groan: "Man! dinna gawp at me. Do ye no' ken I hae been wi' Ullathorne? ..."

"Ullathorne. That's your chum, ain't 'e? Wot abaht 'im?"

"Hae ye no' heird?" The long Scot stares at the Cockney wonderingly.

"Nuffin' but that 'e didn't come back last night wiv the workin'-party. 'As 'e turned up?"

"Ay. They pitched him back intil oor room last nicht--a' the green rods had left o' him. Weel I kenned they would do their warst once they got their chance." There is foam on the livid lips. "They drove him oot wi' the rest o' us to the Defence Warks yesterday mornin', though he had the fever on him sair, an' couldna' stand alane.... Weel, weel I wat why!" He is shaking as though with ague. "An' he staggered an' reeled, an' knocked up against ane o' the sentries--an' Hamid Bey was standing by wi' some of his gang o' police.... By the grin on the pasty face of him, ye could tell he was oot for murder. An' he ordered Ullathorne a hundred strokes for brutally attackin' the man. They held us up an' made us watch whiles they laid on to him. O Christ Jesus! ... First on the feet, twenty-five strokes--then the back an' belly an' breist.... An' when he fainted an' lay for dead, they drove us oot wi' their whips an' left him lyin'; an' when we came back for the nicht-shift he was gane awa' from there.... In the mirk o' the nicht, as I hae said, they flung him in amang us,--nakit as a new-born wean--an' his raw flesh hangin' in strips. As though the butcher had stairted to collop him--an' changed his min' aboot it. A braw sicht for the mither that bore him, an' the lass he should hae wed!"

"Gorblime the bloody beasts!" says Barney, gulping. His coarse hand touches the thin arm in the tattered sleeve with the Corporal's stripes, and does it gently too. "Will Ullathorne live? They don't often live--our own chaps--do 'em?--though Turks seems some'ow diff'rent."

"He was deein' when they broucht him back, puir lad! I hae left him barely breathin'.... Father Forbis is wi' him noo.... Ullathorne is nae no Catholic, but the Father has the Gift o' the Word. Sune--sune he will be dead, my chum that I made at Gallipoli, the last o' the auld company left aiblins mysel'!"

No tears come to the burning grey eyes that stare into vacancy.

"A' nicht I held him i' my airms! His bluid is wet upo' me. An' I made a sang to sooth to him--we Govans aye had the bard's gift, they say, in the braw auld days. And when he is dead--for I promised him!--the haill Barracks shall hear't. The bonny sang o' the Christian men killed by the Turkish hound!"

"Look wide O! One o' them Mo'ammedan guards 'as got 'is ugly eye on you," urges Barney, apprehensive that the recklessness of grief may bring Govan the fate of his friend. "While there's life there's 'ope! ... Pre'aps Ullathorne might git round yit!"

But Govan shakes his haggard head:

"I doot--I doot it sairly. But what can be done Father Forbis will dae. He promised me he wouldna leave him as lang as there was breith i' him. An' Forbis aye keeps his word. Here he comes! Luik at's face..... Ullathorne has passed to his Maker!"

The Scot starts to his naked feet, and Barney Mossam sits up and salutes, as through an archway on the ground-floor of the sordid block of buildings opposite comes the figure of a tall, emaciated man, followed by a burly, slovenly Turkish soldier and a grotesque, hunchbacked shape,--recognisable only by the voluminous folds of the coarse biscuit-coloured veil that covers its head, and falls to the hem of its soiled blue cotton robe--as a Syrian peasant woman.

"Good morning, Mossam!" The intonations of the priest's voice, and the smile that curves the mouth hidden by the reddish-golden beard, and lights the sunken blue eyes, are very like Katharine's.... "You are up and about again! ..."

"Couldn't lay up in the lap o' luxury no longer, Father!" drolls the indomitable jester. "A man in my condition 'as to 'ave exercise to sweat the suet off 'is bones."

The bones show as though the tattered uniform hung on clothes-props. The priest glances at them compassionately, and then with gentle friendliness at the haggard faces that turn to him, as he picks his way delicately between the prone and squatting men.

"Move!" says the Turkish military guard in the greenish-yellow khaki served out to the Ottoman forces in the War with Serbia, a huge _posta_ whose fez sits on the extreme summit of his pointed head like the red-paper-cap on a bottle of liquorice-powder,--who wears good boots stripped from a British prisoner: and who speaks a bastard mixture of bad Turkish and worse Arabic: "_Haide git_! Make way for the _kassis_ and the woman! _Imshi_! Must ye be as the beasts?"

For a hyæna-like yell of joy has greeted the discovery that there are oranges in one, and almonds and walnuts in the other, of two heavy palm-fibre baskets carried by the misshapen, limping being who follows behind the priest. The wretched creature is one of those nondescript hangers-on that in the negligent East haunt such places of misery as the mud Barrack-prison,--gaining a meagre subsistence by washing the prisoners' tattered linen, running errands to the _bâzâr_,--boiling broth or carrying water for the sick and convalescent, and, when the guards can be bribed into acquiescence--washing and laying out the bodies of the dead.

Bundled in her soiled rags--shrouded in the voluminous veil that hides a face so disfigured by accident or disease, that no European who has glimpsed can think of it without a shudder, and Orientals express their abhorrence by spitting on the ground--the Mother of Ugliness--thus nicknamed by some coarse wit among her countrymen--passes without insult, ill-usage or outrage, where no other of her sex, unprotected by deformity and hideousness, could have escaped....

"Orangees. Glory be to God!--an' where did yer Reverence git thim?" asks the owner of the unmistakably Irish voice, stretching gaunt hands, shaking with fever, for one of the luscious golden globes.

"A friend brought them," briefly answers the priest, as he distributes the fruit and nuts generously on all sides.

"God bless the friend! ... An' that's yourself, I'm thinkin'," grunts the Irishman, driving his teeth deep into the juicy fruit.

"No, Sullivan, it was not I. You see the giver...."

"The Mother av' Ugliness, bedad! More power to her!" splutters Sullivan, as the priest points to the crooked shape swathed in its sordid veils.

"She has earned a prettier name here among us," says Father Forbis, looking round at the faces,--pinched and white, or livid, or fever-flushed, that crowd about him, and speaking with mild authority. "She shall be called henceforth The Mother of Kindness...."

He turns to the shrinking creature at his heels and repeats it in Arabic.

"Sidi!" the woman implores in muffled tones, trembling so that the folds of her coarse veils wave as though some vagrant breeze were stirring amongst them:

"I have spoken! By you and other British in this place--" He looks round sternly at the men, "the old name is forgotten. She is the Mother of Kindness.... Let all of you remember that!"

"We'll not forgit, yer Reverence! ..."

"Verra weel, Sirr! ..."

"Sure we'll remember, Boss! ..."

"A' right, Sir! ..."

"_Han, Hâzrât!_ ..."

"Right O Father! ..."

"A'ay, Zur, for sure! ..."

"Yea, verily, it shall be as the Sahib orders!"

They answer him in a hundred voices, resonant bass, or cheery tenor, coarse and refined, illiterate or educated,--flavoured with the accent and in the dialect of every shire or county in the United Kingdom--every country of the Dominions Overseas. And standing in his ragged clothes, with a battered enamelled can of broth and another of barley-water dangling from one lean hand, while the other eases the heavy weight of a wallet of canvas, broad, slung about his thin shoulders, and containing such medicines and dressings as may be had--the Father surveys them smilingly--but with the spark in his blue eyes that they know can leap to flame....

You are to see him as a tall, emaciated man of twenty-nine or thirty, chalky-pale with famine and worn with lack of sleep. Eagle-featured, broad-browed, blue-eyed; with long, untrimmed hair and tangled beard of ruddy yellow-brown. Without the eight-pointed black metal star on the lapel of his tattered khaki jacket, or the wisp of Roman collar that still hangs about his neck, or the bartered Breviary and Office book that bulges a front tunic-pocket--a ragged strip of purple stole between its well-thumbed pages--you could not fail to recognise the Religious by vocation; the cultured priest, the man born to dominate, sway and rule.

"_Haide_! Let us go!" growls the Turkish guard, thrusting two oranges and a handful of nuts in a pocket of his soiled tunic, and kicking a man squatting in his path less viciously than as a matter of form.

And the little procession of the tall priest, the red-fezzed guard, and the bundle of soiled feminine clothing--brought up in the rear by Corporal Alec Govan, moves towards the ground-floor archway on the other side of the courtyard.