As I considered these things a deepening disquiet possessed me, and my thoughts were far away from where I stood.  After all, the English did not indulge in this doubling of parts and muddling of mistaken identity in their real and unique success in India.  They may have been wrong or right but they were realistic about Moslems and Hindoos; they did not say Moslems were Hindoos, or send a highly intelligent Hindoo from Oxford to rule Moslems as an Englishman.  They may not have cared for things like the ideal of Zionism; but they understood the common sense of Zionism, the desirability of distinguishing between entirely different things.  But I remembered that of late their tact had often failed them even in their chief success in India; and that every hour brought worse and wilder news of their failure in Ireland.  I remembered that in the Early Victorian time, against the advice only of the wisest and subtlest of the Early Victorians, we had tied ourselves to the triumphant progress of industrial capitalism; and that progress had now come to a crisis and what might well be a crash.  And now, on the top of all, our fine patriotic tradition of foreign policy seemed to be doing these irrational and random things.  A sort of fear took hold of me; and it was not for the Holy Land that I feared.

A cold wave went over me, like that unreasonable change and chill with which a man far from home fancies his house has been burned down, or that those dear to him are dead.  For one horrible moment at least I wondered if we had come to the end of compromise and comfortable nonsense, and if at last the successful stupidity of England would topple over like the successful wickedness of Prussia; because God is not mocked by the denial of reason any more than the denial of justice.  And I fancied the very crowds of Jerusalem retorted on me words spoken to them long ago; that a great voice crying of old along the Via Dolorosa was rolled back on me like thunder from the mountains; and that all those alien faces are turned against us to-day, bidding us weep not for them, who have faith and clarity and a purpose, but weep for ourselves and for our children.

CHAPTER VIII

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESERT

There was a story in Jerusalem so true or so well told that I can see the actors in it like figures in coloured costumes on a lighted stage.  It occurred during the last days of Turkish occupation, while the English advance was still halted before Gaza, and heroically enduring the slow death of desert warfare.  There were German and Austrian elements present in the garrison with the Turks, though the three allies seem to have held strangely aloof from each other.  In the Austrian group there was an Austrian lady, “who had some dignity or other,” like Lord Lundy’s grandmother.  She was very beautiful, very fashionable, somewhat frivolous, but with fits of Catholic devotion.