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.
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