JERUSALEM
1917 CHRISTMAS 1925
[The following article is by an exceptionally well-informed eorrespondent who is resident in Palestine.]
L'anima mia si volse indietro a remirar to passo. THE British troops who, through bitter cold and blinding sleet, fought their painful and perilous way foot by foot up and down the stony peaks and valleys of the mountains of Judea, found, when they delivered Jerusalem, glamour and glory such as the Great War gave but seldom, but they found little else. They mingled indeed with the inhabitants in something near an ecstasy of hope and joy, for these were the days when the trace of the great fear was yet in men's eyes, and the gulp of relief still at their throats ; when, for friendship with the Allies, true or suspected, whole families of Christians had been exiled, at an hour's notice, into the interior of Asia Minor amid the Armenian exterminations, a Moslem Kadi had been hanged at the Jaffa Gate and a young Jewish girl had been tortured to suicide. But the Turk, when he struck his flag and the camp in which he had bivouacked rather than settled for four hundred years carried with him in his retreat money, records, registers, much furniture, all food and generally every- thing that could be of the smallest use to the City or to its liberators.
Roads were impassable ; the railway, then but little advanced beyond Lydda, more than once washed away by winter rains, and the needs of the Army properly para- mount. Gerusalemme Liberata drew near starvation. But the Commander-in-Chief, once apprised, had rushed up wheat convoys, and within a few days a Food Control for flour, sugar and kerosene, with the necessary staff, sheds, warehouses and transactions running into scores of thousands of pounds had been organized by the Military Government, who saw to it personally that the children also were fed, and fed first.
The shops were empty. There was no street lighting and very little private, for few householders could afford lamps, so that the City went to bed at sunset and, apart from military formations, there was not one light to be seen in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives ; from which indeed it was still possible to hear and to witness all the PhaseS of the fight for Jericho. The fellah was a shivering bundle of rags. Beggars swarmed, and the eye, the ear and the nose were violently assaulted at every corner ; nor was it much consolation to remember, with the farmer, that it couldn't be the drains, becausz there weren't any. The Army maintained all roads of military utility (and none other survived), the side tracks of which displayed the pleasing legend : " To be used by horses, mules, camels, donkeys and civilians." Not one civilian car or telephone existed in Jerusalem. There were no Law Courts and consequently no lawyers ; but this description of the New Jerusalem of 1917, though scrupu- lously exact, verges upon the Apocalyptic, and must turn to 1925.
And the difference revealed by the ninth Christmas is, to one revisiting Jerusalem, radical and even startling.
The developed City area already includes some hundred kilometres of very tolerable roads, which will be yet further improved so soon as the recently discovered quartz quarries are able to place a more durable and less powdery metal at the disposal of the civic authorities. They are watered, when water is available, by the latest model of combined water carts and fire engines, the envy of the lesser cities of the Near East. Streets have been widened where possible and re-aligned ; they are regu- larly swept and cleansed, and compare in savour, even within the old walled city, very favourably with those of an independent Cairo. Telephones, both public and private, to the number of many hundreds answer local and trunk calls in English, Arabic and Hebrew at any hour of the day or night.
The shops, though not yet of the first order, supply adequately the needs of the inhabitants, even accomind- dating them with frozen salmon and the latest thing in tennis balls. The increase of building has rendered pos- sible the gradual abolition of rent restrictions, whereby the tenant was for seven lean years tided over the risk of exploitation. There is now a Chamber of Commerce composed of Moslems, Christians and Jews, the only in- stitution of its kind in Palestine that has not found it necessary to split into Arab and Jewish divisions. A Sports Club has been founded in which cricket, football, tennis, hockey and golf are played. There is an active Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. There are, by law, no advertisement hoardings and no bars.
But the heavy and unfortunately far from dead hand of the pre-War Ottoman Concessionaire still presses upon Jerusalem, and you learn with no less surprise than indig- nation that, after eight years of British rule and every possible effort by the local authorities and the Palestine Government, several years must still elapse before the City can be allowed to provide itself with electricity, with a proper water supply or, consequently, a modern drainage system. What this means in a summer of drought only those in charge who planned to bring five trains of water daily up the mountains from Lydda, and, more poignantly, the poor, waiting in the sun for their two days' ration, will ever realize.
For the dumb soul of the City there are many traces of loving care. The names of the streets, preserved or piously bestowed, gleam down in Roman, Arabic and Hebrew script from blue and green tiles fired in the Turns Antonia. The hideous clock tower has been bodily re-; moved from the Jaffa Gate, shorn of its trimmings and re- erected, a model of austere elegance, in the Allenby Square. The Citadel on Zion has been preserved from decay and ruin, and the rampart walk restored, after cen- turies of disuse, to the City Walls. And the gravestone of the solitary Crusader, signatory to. Magna Charts, Governor of the Channel Islands and tutor to King Henry the Third, reposes, safe at last from the trampling of feet, befcire the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ' •
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