_February, 1918_.
"Watchman, what of the night?" The hours pass amid the clash of rumours and
discordant voices--optimist, pessimist, pacificist. Only in the answer of
the fighting man, who knows and says little, but is ready for anything, do
we find the best remedy for impatience and misgiving:
"Soldier, what of the night?"
"Vainly ye question of me;
I know not, I hear not nor see;
The voice of the prophet is dumb
Here in the heart of the fight.
I count the hours on their way;
I know not when morning shall come;
Enough that I work for the day."
The first Brest-Litovsk Treaty has been signed, followed in nine days by
the German invasion of Russia, an apt comment on what an English paper, by
a misprint which is really an inspiration, calls "the Brest Nogotiations."
The record of the Bolshevist régime is already deeply stained with the
massacre of the innocents, but Lenin and Trotsky can plead an august
example. More than fourteen thousand British non-combatants--men, women and
children--have been murdered by the Kaiser's command. And the rigorous
suppression of the strikes in Berlin furnishes a useful test of his recent
avowals of sympathy with democratic ideals. By way of a set-off the German
Press Bureau has circulated a legend of civil war in London, bristling with
circumstantial inaccuracies. The enemy's successes in the field--the
occupation of Reval and the recapture of Trebizond--are the direct outcome
of the Russian _débâcle_. Our capture of Jericho marks a further stage
in a sustained triumph of good generalship and hard fighting, which
verifies an old prophecy current among the Arabs in Palestine and Syria,
viz. that when the waters of the Nile flow into Palestine, a prophet from
the West will drive the Turk out of the Arab countries. The first part of
the prophecy was fulfilled by the pipe-line which has brought Nile water
(taken from the fresh-water canal) for the use of the Egyptian
Expeditionary Force across the Sinai desert to the neighbourhood of Gaza.
The second part was fulfilled by the fact that General Allenby's name is
rendered in Arabic by exactly the same letters which form the words "El
Nebi," i.e. the Prophet.
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