lem, an admirable taste in painting.
But while it is sometimes forgotten that many soldiers are men, it is
now still more strange to forget that most men are soldiers. I fancy
there are now few things more representative than the British Army;
certainly it is much more representative than the British Parliament.
The men I knew, and whom I remember with so much gratitude, working under
General Bols at the seat of government on the Mount of Olives,
were certainly not narrowed by any military professionalism, and had if
anything the mark of quite different professions. One was a very shrewd
and humorous lawyer employed on legal problems about enemy property,
another was a young schoolmaster, with keen and clear ideas,
or rather ideals, about education for all the races in Palestine.
These men did not cease to be themselves because they were all
dressed in khaki; and if Colonel Storrs recurs first to the memory,
it is not because he had become a colonel in the trade of soldiering,
but because he is the sort of man who could talk equally about
all these other trades and twenty more. Incidentally, and by way
of example, he can talk about them in about ten languages.
There is a story, which whether or no it be true is very typical,
that one of the Zionist leaders made a patriotic speech in Hebrew,
and broke off short in his recollection of this partially revived
national tongue; whereupon the Governor of Jerusalem finished
his Hebrew speech for him--whether to exactly the same effect
or not it would be impertinent to inquire. He is a man rather
recalling the eighteenth century aristocrat, with his love of wit
and classical learning; one of that small group of the governing
class that contains his uncle, Harry Cust, and was warmed with
the generous culture of George Wyndham. It was a purely mechanical
distinction between the military and civil government that would
lend to such figures the stiffness of a drumhead court martial.
And even those who differed with him accused him in practice,
not of militarist lack of sympathy with any of those he ruled,
but rather with too imaginative a sympathy with some of them.
To know these things, however slightly, and then read the English
newspapers afterwards is often amusing enough; but I have only mentioned
the matter because there is a real danger in so crude a differentiation.
It would be a bad thing if a system military in form but representative
in fact gave place to a system re