sheba was swarming with troops. They filled the town and overflowed
on to the sands outside, where a great tent-city grew up. And everywhere
that the Turkish soldiers went, disorganization and inefficiency
followed them. From all over the country the finest camels had been
"requisitioned" and sent down to Beersheba until, at the time I was
there, thousands and thousands of them were collected in the
neighborhood. Through the laziness and stupidity of the Turkish
commissariat officers, which no amount of German efficiency could
counteract, no adequate provision was made for feeding them, and
incredible numbers succumbed to starvation and neglect. Their great
carcasses dotted the sand in all directions; it was only the wonderful
antiseptic power of the Eastern sun that held pestilence in check.

The soldiers themselves suffered much hardship. The crowding in the
tents was unspeakable; the water-supply was almost as inadequate as the
medical service, which consisted chiefly of volunteer Red Crescent
societies--among them a unit of twenty German nurses sent by the
American College at Beirut. Medical supplies, such as they were, had
been taken from the different mission hospitals and pharmacies of
Palestine--these "requisitions" being made by officers who knew nothing
of medical requirements and simply scooped together everything in sight.
As a result, one of the army physicians told me that in Beersheba he had
opened some medical chests consigned to him and found, to his horror,
that they were full of microscopes and gynecological instruments--for
the care of wounded soldiers in the desert!

Visits of British aeroplanes to Beersheba were common occurrences. Long
before the machine itself could be seen, its whanging, resonant hum
would come floating out of the blazing sky, seemingly from everywhere at
once. Soldiers rushed from their tents, squinting up into the heavens
until the speck was discovered, swimming slowly through the air; then
followed wholesale firing at an impossible range until the officers
forbade it. True to the policy of avoiding all unnecessary harm to the
natives, these British aviators never dropped bombs on the town,
but--what was more dangerous from the Turkish point of view--they would
unload packages of pamphlets, printed in Arabic, informing the natives
that they were being deceived; that the Allies were their only true
friends; that the Germans were merely making use of them to further
their own s