widely regarded rather as a rescue than an aggression.
And what complaint there was really was, in many cases, a complaint
that the rescue did not come with a rush; that the English forces
had to fall back when they had actually entered Gaza, and could not
for long afterwards continue their advance on Jerusalem. This kind
of criticism of military operations is always, of course, worthless.
In journalists it is generally worthless without being even harmless.
There were some in London whose pessimistic wailing was less excusable
than that of the poor Arab in Jerusalem; who cursed the English with
the addition of being English themselves, who did it, not as he did,
before one foreigner, but before all foreign opinion; and who
advertised their failure in a sort of rags less reputable than his.
No one can judge of a point like the capture and loss of Gaza,
unless he knows a huge mass of technical and local detail that can
only be known to the staff on the spot; it is not a question
of lack of water but of exactly how little water; not of the
arrival of reinforcements but of exactly how much reinforcement;
not of whether time presses, but of exactly how much time there is.
Nobody can know these things who is editing a newspaper at the other
end of the world; and these are the things which, for the soldier
on the spot, make all the difference between jumping over a paling
and jumping over a precipice. Even the latter, as the philosophic
relativist will eagerly point out, is only a matter of degree.
But this is a parenthesis; for the purpose with which I mentioned
the anecdote is something different. It is the text of another and
somewhat more elusive truth; some appreciation of which is necessary
to a sympathy with the more profound problems of Palestine.
And it might be expressed thus; it is a proverb that the Eastern
methods seem to us slow; that the Arabs trail along on labouring
camels while the Europeans flash by on motors or mono-planes. But
there is another and stranger sense in which we do seem to them slow,
and they do seem to themselves to have a secret of swiftness.
There is a sense in which we here touch the limits of a land of lightning;
across which, as in a dream, the motor-car can be seen crawling
like a snail.

I have said that there is another side to the desert; though there
is something queer in talking of another side to something so bare
and big and oppressively obvious. But there is another side be