So there was lots of compromising being done, and hell to pay,
with no one paying, except, of course, the guests in the hotels,
at New York prices. The Zionist Jews were arriving in droves.
The Arabs, who owned most of the land, were threatening to cut
all the Jews' throats as soon as they could first get all their
money. Feisal, a descendant of the Prophet, who had fought
gloriously against the Turks, was romantically getting ready in
Damascus to be crowned King of Syria. The French, who pride
themselves on being realistic, were getting ready to go after
Feisal with bayonets and poison-gas, as they eventually did.

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