New Paths through Old Palestine

by Margaret Slattery

With the morning light, we began to see signs of life on the desert. Great masses of cacti, in clumps as tall as trees, with stems as thick as a man’s body, were growing but a few feet from our windows. Here, during the war, the enemy had hidden their machine guns, a refuge from which they might safely do their deadly work, practically certain that they could not be captured. Many a brave soldier of the Allies gave up his life in agony, caught in the cactus hedge to which the rush of battle had driven him, and many an heroic rescue of a comrade held by the cruel thorns took place on that desert plain. When the cactus growth cleared and the desert was unbroken we stared in amazement at what seemed to be a line of dark earth—a road made in the shifting sand. When we got nearer we found it to be strips of chicken wire. This wire was the solution of a problem that at first threatened to tie up all the plans of Headquarters, for the heavy artillery and the loaded motor lorries, sinking deep into the sand, made progress impossible. The wire road was the result of the ingenuity of some of the men in the ranks. As the fine and coarse net used alternately pressed down upon the sand it gave the resistance that enabled the great guns and loads of supplies to pass over places otherwise uncrossable. When they had passed, soldiers rolled up the wire, loaded it on the camels to be used again over some hard stretch ahead. The war over, it lay there rusting in the sand.

Again and again, as one crossed the battlefields of Palestine, he saw evidences of the triumph of man’s mind over earth’s obstacles. Nothing was too ordinary, too commonplace, too insignificant to be used to further the success of the great cause. For fresh supplies of food and water, for “heavies” with which to batter down the defenses of the enemy, the army was for a time dependent upon temporary tracks of chicken wire laid in a waste of moving sand!

Against the horizon we could see the slow moving train of camels. A group of Arabs on horseback halted to watch us pass. We were in Palestine, that land of small distances and great deeds.

“I cannot believe that I am in Palestine,” said the young daughter of a British officer who was to see her father for the first time in four years. “I have not been able to think of it as a real land. I know, in a way, that Moses and Joshua fought here. But think of father’s fighting here, too!” The girl had expressed the thought of hundreds of others who have studied the Bible stories, become familiar with the difficult names, drawn maps and located the cities of Moses and of Paul, marked the journeyings of Christ, but to whom the land has never been a real land and its records, shrouded in vague mystery, have never seemed a part of the earth. But now we knew it to be real. We began to comprehend “the wilderness and the solitary place.”

It is only about the size of my own state of Massachusetts, I told myself again and again. Its greatest length is but one hundred eighty miles and it is nowhere more than fifty-five miles wide. If I had the railways and engines of home I could cross it in less than two hours. I could travel its entire length easily in five or six. But the present train, with its light engine, on a roadbed hastily made, parts of it finished under fire from enemy guns, moves slowly. We are stopping at Gaza.

Once Gaza was the largest city of the old country of the Philistines. I can almost see Samson, strong and powerful, coming down over the hill called today Samson’s Ridge, bearing the great city gates upon his shoulders while men stood aghast. I can see him too, blinded and powerless, walking the treadmill of his enemies. As I look out over the desert road, I remember the Ethiopian struggling to find the meaning of the words of the prophet Isaiah and young Philip running by his chariot, eagerly responding to the invitation to sit with him and explain the prophecy. Riding along through the dust, I can hear him talking with the ruler about Jesus and what He had taught of God and man; and, half-astonished at the quick response, I can hear the Ethiopian, as they came near to a place with water, saying, “Behold, here is water, what doth hinder me to be baptized?” But I am brought back suddenly from the long past. Men in British uniform are on the platform of the little station. They follow the mail bag eagerly, joking each other in clear English accents about the probable contents.

For eight months in nineteen hundred and seventeen, Gaza became again the center of a great battle area. We could see the remains of the Turkish trenches, dug deep into the earth and protected by great masses of wire or by sand bags made from the gay colored hangings and curtains taken from the houses of its people. But in spite of all their careful preparations and their gallant defence, Gaza fell into the hands of the British troops whose splendid officers and men had braved heat, terrible thirst, sand-storms, deadly fire that robbed them of hundreds of their comrades, that they might take this important post on the road that was to lead them through untold suffering up to Jerusalem, as it had led other armies of days long ago. The British Tommies read their Bibles in their spare time these days. They read over again the battles of Israelites and Philistines which they had found very stupid when they were boys in Sunday schools but which are exceedingly interesting to them now. As they fought, step by step, for possession of that same land, they asked themselves if, battling against a foe to whom the desert was home, on trackless wastes whose every spring and rock was known, they could ever win. Never for a moment did they hesitate in their answer, but many a brave young officer and many a hardy soldier of Australia or New Zealand must have had misgivings as he looked at the cactus hedge, miles deep, or out over the still, barren, hopeless desert hills.

We left Gaza to climb slowly up to Lydda, now called Ludd, where we were obliged to change cars. On all sides were signs of the fighting of two years before, and now and then white crosses or Turkish graves reminded us of the terrible price youth has paid throughout the long centuries of history to make this land holy indeed.

As we climbed up into the hills, it began to rain, the air was fresh and cool, the vineyards here and there on the hillsides brought great relief after the glare of the sands through which we had been passing for so many hours. Our first glimpse of Jerusalem was in the soft mist through which the sun was attempting to shine. The walls looked high and forbidding, the whole city, from its point of vantage crowning the hilltops, seemed to look down upon us as though we were but very little things, little and unimportant, come to gaze, without half understanding what we should see, upon all man has dreamed and suffered in his reach for God and happiness.

A thrill of anticipation had passed up and down the corridor of the train. Not a person sat in his compartment. Corridor windows were opened and eager faces crowded about them. The face of the young girl who was to see her father after the four years of separation was flushed with excitement, but the face of her mother was pale and there were tears in her eyes. She had given her two sons—one in France and one in Mesopotamia—to the world’s great effort to preserve its freedom. I shall never forget the light in the eyes of two thin, haggard, long-bearded Hebrews, looking out from the windows, then turning to speak with each other in Russian words that, though unintelligible to us, seemed to be on fire with passion. Their gestures were expressive of emotion that could not be restrained. Long before the train stopped they were at the door.