In Jerusalem the Bolsheviks, astonishingly credulous of “secret” news from Moscow, and skeptical of every one’s opinion but their own, were bolsheviking Marxian Utopia beneath a screen of such arrogant innocence that even the streetcorner police constables suspected them.  And Mustapha Kemal, in Anatolia, was rumoured to be preparing a holy war.  It was known as a Ghazi in those days.  He had not yet scrapped religion.  He was contemplating, so said rumour, a genuine old-fashioned moslem jihad, with modern trimmings.

A few enthusiasts astonishingly still laboured for an American mandate.  At the Holy Sepulchre a British soldier stood on guard with bayonet and bullets to prevent the priests of rival creeds from murdering one another.  The sun shone and so did the stars.  General Bols reopened Pontius Pilate’s water-works.  The learned monks in convents argued about facts and theories denied by archaeologists.  Old-fashioned Jews wailed at the Wailing Wall.  Tommy Atkins blasphemously dug corpses of donkeys and dogs from the Citadel moat.

I arrived in the midst of all that, and spent a couple of months trying to make head or tail of it, and wondering, if that was peace, what war is?  They say that wherever a man was ever slain in Palestine a flower grows.  So one gets a fair idea of the country’s mass-experience without much difficulty.  For three months of the year, from end to end, the whole landscape is carpeted with flowers so close together that, except where beasts and men have trodden winding tracks, one can hardly walk without crushing an anemone or wild chrysanthemum.  There are more battle-fields in that small land than all Europe can show.  There are streams everywhere that historians assert repeatedly “ran blood for days.”

Five thousand years of bloody terrorism, intermingling of races, piety, plunder, politics and pilgrims, have produced a self-consciousness as concentrated as liquid poison-gas.  The laughter is sarcastic, the humour sardonic, and the credulity beyond analysis.  For instance, when I got there, I heard the British being accused of “imperialistic savagery” because they had removed the leprous beggars from the streets into a clean place where they could receive medical treatment.

It was difficult to find one line of observation.  Whatever anybody told you, was reversed entirely by the next man.  The throat-distorting obligation to study Arabic called for rather intimate association with educated Arabs, whose main obsession was fear of the Zionist Jews.  The things they said against the Jews turned me pro-Zionist.  So I cautiously made the acquaintance of some gentlemen with gold-rimmed spectacles, and the things they said about the Arabs set me to sympathizing with the sons of Ishmael again.

In the midst of that predicament I met Jimgrim—­Major James Schuyler Grim, to give him his full title, although hardly any one ever called him by it.  After that, bewilderment began to cease as, under his amused, painstaking fingers, thread after thread of the involved gnarl of plots and politics betrayed its course.