but the battle for the crest ebbed and flowed for days with terrific violence, we never giving up possession of it, though it was stormed again and again by an enemy who, it is fair to admit, displayed fine courage and not a little skill.  That hill-top at this period had to submit to a thunderous bombardment, and the Mosque of Nebi Samwil became a battered shell.  Here are supposed to lie the remains of the Prophet Samuel.  The tradition may or may not be well founded, but at any rate Mahomedans and Christians alike have held the place in veneration for centuries.  The Turk paid no regard to the sanctity of the Mosque, and, as it was of military importance to him that we should not hold it, he shelled it daily with all his available guns, utterly destroying it.  There may be cases where the Turks will deny that they damaged a Holy Place.  They could not hide their guilt on Nebi Samwil.  I was at pains to examine the Mosque and the immediate surroundings, and the photographs I took are proof that the wreckage of this church came from artillery fired from the east and north, the direction of the Turkish gun-pits.  It is possible we are apt to be a little too sentimental about the destruction in war of a place of worship.  If a general has reason to think that a tower or minaret is being used as an observation post, or that a church or mosque is sheltering a body of troops, there are those who hold that he is justified in deliberately planning its destruction, but here was a sacred building with associations held in reverence by all classes and creeds in a land where these things are counted high, and to have set about wrecking it was a crime.  The German influence over the Turk asserted itself, as it did in the heavy fighting after we had taken Jerusalem.  We had batteries on the Mount of Olives and the Turk searched for them, but they never fired one round at the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria Hospice near by.  That had been used as Falkenhayn’s headquarters.  General Chetwode occupied it as his Corps Headquarters soon after he entered Jerusalem.  There was a wireless installation and the Turks could see the coming and going of the Corps’ motor cars.  I have watched operations from a summer-house in the gardens, and no enemy plane could pass over the building without discovering the purpose to which it was put.  And there were spies.  But not one shell fell within the precincts of the hospice because it was a German building, containing the statues of the Kaiser and Kaiserin, and (oh, the taste of the Hun!) with effigies of the Kaiser and his consort painted in the roof of the chapel not far from a picture of the Saviour.  Britain is rebuilding what the Turks destroyed, and there will soon arise on Nebi Samwil a new mosque to show Mahomedans that tolerance and freedom abide under our flag.