patriot. The old man replied out of his litter in a weak voice, saying, “Yes, indeed, Lurens Bey, I am hurt: but, thanks be to God, it is nothing. We have taken Semna.” I replied that I was going there. Maulud craned himself feverishly over the edge of the litter, hardly able to see or speak (his thighbone was splintered above the knee), showing me point after point, for organising the hillside defensively.
We arrived as the Turks were beginning to throw halfhearted shells at it. Nuri Said was commanding in Maulud’s place. He stood coolly on the hilltop. Most men talked faster under fire, and acted a betraying ease and joviality. Nuri grew calmer, and Zeid bored.
I asked where Jaafar was. Nuri said that at midnight he was due to have attacked Jerdun. I told him of the night-flares, which must have marked his success. While we were glad together his messengers arrived reporting prisoners and machine-guns; also the station and three thousand rails destroyed. So splendid an effort would settle the northern line for weeks. Then Nuri told me that the preceding dawn he had rushed Ghadir el Haj station and wrecked it, with five bridges and a thousand rails. So the southern line was also settled.
Late in the afternoon it grew deadly quiet. Both sides stopped their aimless shelling. They said that Feisal had moved to Uheida. We crossed the little flooded stream, by a temporary hospital where Maulud lay. Mahmud, the red-bearded, defiant doctor, thought that he would recover without amputation. Feisal was on the hilltop, on the very edge, black against the sun, whose light threw a queer haze about his slender figure, and suffused his head with gold, through the floss-silk of his headcloth. I made my camel kneel. Feisal stretched out his hands crying, “Please God, good?” I replied, “The praise and the victory be to God.” And he swept me into his tent that we might exchange the news.
Feisal had heard from Dawnay more than I knew of the British failure before Amman; of the bad weather and confusion, and how Allenby had