There was a moon that night. Now it was half hidden by soft clouds, now clear, brilliant, white against a velvet sky. We stood crowded close to the heavy ropes stretched across the bridge, which had swung open to permit one boat after another to pass. We were at Kantara on the Suez. Across the canal was the train dimly lighted, standing on the tracks that seemed half buried in the soft, yellow, desert sand. We waited impatiently. Nearly three hours had passed since the train from Port Said had left us there to attend to baggage and troublesome passports, and to eat a meager supper from boxes brought with us from the Port.
Now a Japanese boat passed slowly along the canal; then a smaller craft with cargo, flying the Dutch flag; a British boat brilliantly lighted, its passengers, many of them in uniform, dancing on deck. The canal is so narrow that great ships must creep slowly and carefully along, with no place for miles where one boat may pass another. It is a miracle, this Suez Canal, and the story of its building a most fascinating tale. Its banks are scarred by the battles of the great war. Barbed wire, old dugouts, the remains of hastily constructed forts reminded us of the desperate struggle made by the Allies to protect it against the enemy in the air and under the water. Had any one of their many attempts successfully closed the canal, the war would have had a very different ending.
We had just spent nineteen and one-half hours coming through the canal at the slow speed permitted by law—five miles an hour. Even then our boat twice grazed the retaining wall. In a single year over three thousand boats passed through the locks, crept along through the canal, then hurried to far ports, east or west.
As the fifth boat swung lazily past, a sigh of relief went up from the crowd pressed against the ropes. A moment and the great bridge moved back into place and we were given the signal to cross. It was a weird group that hurried along in the moonlight—a party of Americans, a group of British officers, some Australian soldiers, Jews from Russia clutching their permits to enter the land of promise, Egyptians, Syrians, Arabs in native dress. There were but few women. Our porter found us seats close to the window in one of the compartments. We were sorry for this later, as the fine sand sifted in and covered clothing and baggage. No sleeping-car was possible, so we made ourselves as comfortable as we could with bags for pillows and heavy coats for blankets. We were most grateful for this railroad from Kantara to Jerusalem, realizing that before the war we would have been compelled to make the inconvenient and dangerous landing in the small boats at Jaffa.
We made our way slowly through the night across the desert that stretched as far as the eye could reach in the moonlight and slipped away into blackness when the moon had set. What it had cost the men who had laid those ties in that wilderness of sand, under the scorching rays of a pitiless sun, no history of war can adequately relate. How often in those days, as we looked reverently at old battlegrounds, we searched for words with which to describe the miracles performed by the engineering corps of the fighting armies!
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.
The faces of young British officers on leave, coming up for the first time to see the city for whose delivery they had prepared the way down on the dry parched plain, were keen with interest; no detail of the approach escaped them. The residents accustomed to the journeyings from the Port to the city looked at us all with mild curiosity and kind tolerance.
From the station, the horses dragged us up through gray mud that flew about us in showers, covering carriage, baggage, and robes,—there was no escape from it. From the mist the walls of the “city of cities” emerged, clear, strong, unbroken, no mark of battle upon them. As we went through the great gate, the sun, breaking through the mist, flooded with light, for a few moments, the narrow street and brightened the faces of the crowd of people of every nation that poured ceaselessly in and out. We stopped before the hotel that during the war had served as the Red Crescent Hospital. Lunch was waiting and we sat down with the Mohammedan in his red fez, the Bedouin in his long, beautiful, gay-colored coat, the French officer and the British officer on leave, Jewish business men, the Greek and the Syrian—the world, it seemed to us as we listened to the various languages. All orders for food were given in French, and in French men of different nations spoke with each other in courteous greeting.
We were in Jerusalem. Here Samuel sat; here at the gate was David’s tower; King Solomon once lived over there on the hill in his glittering palace and by his wealth and wisdom made himself famous throughout the world, and here he lost his wisdom as has many another in the courts of the women. Herod and Pilate looked out over these hills; the Crusader stormed the walls and the Turk brought terror and slavery with his sword. Twenty-three times in its history Jerusalem has been captured. It has been pillaged, plundered, burned, utterly destroyed, rebuilt only to be plundered again. Yet here it stood. Upon what unspeakable sorrow the stars of Palestine have looked down! We gazed from our balcony out over the low buildings of solid rock, out through the break in the wall made that the Kaiser, on his visit to the Holy Place, might enter in great pomp and glory with his impressive army of followers, the break redeemed by the simplicity of the entrance of the victorious General Allenby into the city that he had conquered without the destruction of a single building or a foot of wall and accepted, when surrendered, as a sacred trust placed once more in the hands of Christians. It may be that the white crosses in long rows, out on the hillside, guarding the graves of soldiers from every part of the British Empire, young, very young, will continue to remind these latest conquerors of the tremendous cost of the victory that left the city unharmed and help them govern the land with an unselfishness of purpose that will measure up to the high standard of their victory.
After lunch we found that dark clouds had gathered low over the hills, and before we could leave our room the rain came. We studied the map of the city, searched out the location of its sacred places, read over again the words of poet and prophet describing the days of its great glory, when from Mount Zion king and shepherd could look over at Mount Moriah where the smoke of the sacrifice from the temple of Jehovah ascended to heaven.
Late in the afternoon the rising wind scattered the clouds and the sun set in a blaze of glory. We stood just outside the gate on the city wall looking down across the valley over toward Bethlehem. The hills, deep purple, reached up on every side to touch the sky. Their bare rocky slopes became soft as velvet in the fading light.
A young British private, leaning against a part of the parapet, took out a khaki Testament and turned the leaves slowly. He seemed to find what he wanted and read, following the lines with his finger. Then he closed the book, put it back in his pocket and turned, half apologetically to a companion not in uniform.
“We fought out there,” he said, “the 53rd division. We fought around the very hills where the angels sang about Peace on earth.”
A moment of silence and the other spoke: “Yonder is the road He must have climbed when He came up to Jerusalem.”
“I’ll take you over it tomorrow,” was the answer. “We’ll see all the places where He used to go. It makes the story in the Book very plain.”
They moved away. Reluctantly, in the face of coming darkness, we left the great wall and joined the group of Arabs who, with camels and donkeys, were passing in and out of the gate. As we climbed the long stairs to our room, we remembered that tomorrow would be Sunday at home. In thousands of churches all over the world, trusting little children, strong, courageous youth, men and women bearing heavy burdens, the old, the sick, the missionaries would read the story of what He did and said centuries before, in and about Jerusalem—the story that, despite the limitations of those who have told it, has changed the world and that must continue to change it until it shall become what He prayed it might be—the kingdom of God upon the earth. Tomorrow we, like the young soldier in khaki, would begin our journeys to “all the places where He used to go.” And we hoped that for us, too, the sacred spots would “make the story in the Book very plain.”
In a long procession with torches the worshipers of the Greek church, chanting an evensong for their feast day, passed beneath our balcony. A torch lighted up the cross held high over the heads of the marchers. Out over the hills of Bethlehem, hidden now by the night, bright stars were shining. We fell upon our knees and worshiped Him.
