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between British authorities in Palestine and their French neighbours in Syria, and if General Weygand had not been suddenly recalled to make room for General Sarrail, whom nobody found it easy to get on with at Salonica, one might have reckoned with more confidence on the early construction of a railway, between Beirut and Haifa, which would link up the two mandated territories and allay the rivalry of economic interests between them. Unfortunately Trans-Jordania may yet only too easily become a danger point. There, too, the Emir Abdullah, who rules under our protection, is a son of King Hussein, and a no less unsatisfactory ruler than his father, of whose least estimable qualities he appears to have inherited his full share. Some of the difficulties which the Palestine Government has had with its French neighbours have arisen out of his readiness to give sanctuary to unruly Arabs who, after seeking unsuccessfully to create disturbances in Syria, escape into safety across the Trans-Jordanian border. It must be remembered, too, that only a few months ago we had to send an air force to repel a Wahabi raid into Abdullah's territory, even before Ibn Saud's descent upon Mecca. The Wahabi leader may for the present have plenty to do in consolidating his authority in the Hedjaz; but when he has completed that task, is he likely to keep his hands off Emir Abdullah? And, if he does not, shall we have to embroil ourselves with him by again affording military assistance to King Hussein's son, who, without our help, would, long before his father, have been another roi en exil?

With the perennial struggles in South-Western Arabia between the Idrisi Sheikh and the Imam Yehia of Sanoa, the Wahabi Sultan is for the present, perhaps, even less concerned than we are, owing to our position in Aden. But these rival chieftains have family and religious connexions in the Sudan, and to the reactions which Ibn Saud's adventure may have all over the Arabian peninsula, and even in the Mohamedan world beyond Arabia, must be added now those of the recent crisis in Egypt. For though Egyptians have for the last century, owing to their exceptionally close intercourse with the West, occupied a somewhat distinct position of their own in the world of Islam, and are as a whole rather more

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free from Mohamedan fanaticism than other Islamic countries, they belong nevertheless to the great brotherhood of Islam which can never be entirely indifferent to their fate. Strong as was our case against Egypt, as represented by the Zaghlul Government, Mohamedans will see only the methods adopted by an Infidel power to establish its domination over a downtrodden Mohamedan nation. The wires by which contact is maintained between all the Mohamedan peoples in the East are well and very secretly laid. They are skilfully handled by the many Mohamedan fraternities which, though in matters of doctrine on the extreme edge of orthodoxy, are the most active agents in spreading the gospel of Islamic revolt, and their organisation is, perhaps, nowhere more militant than along the fringe of Western domination right across North Africa. It is largely due to their influence that Italian authority is still almost ineffective in Tripoli beyond the Mediterranean coast-line, and the French believe them to have had a hand in the Nationalist movement which is giving them some trouble in Tunisia, though on the surface it appears to be closely modelled on Egyptian lines. Their activities can sometimes be traced first in one and then in another remote centre, but their emissaries display consummate skill in covering up their tracks. There is hardly to-day another European administrator in any Mohamedan country so well qualified to gauge the temper of the Mohamedan world as Marshal Lyautey. None has made greater efforts to conciliate Mohamedan feeling than he has in French Morocco, and none has succeeded better within the range of his personal influence. But Morocco is only one small country in the vast world of Islam, and even in Morocco Lyautey's keen and observant eyes detect signs of trouble extending far beyond it. He has recently given public expression to his anxieties. The world of Islam, conscious that it is steadily crumbling under the impact of the dynamic West, is in search of the promised Mahdi, the guide who shall lead it once more in the path of final victory over the Infidels of the World of War,' whose overthrow must some day consummate, as all true Believers hold the Prophet himself to have promised, the final triumph of the Faith. Where will that Mahdi

appear? Hardly in the shape of the Wahabi leader, Ibn Saud, whom all orthodox Mohamedans regard as a rank heretic, though, if his star continued to rise, he might perhaps be purged of his heresies. But what of Abdul Krim, the Riff leader, educated in Spain and for many years in Spanish service, whom a Spanish General's brutal fit of temper drove out, with black wrath and humiliation in his heart, to head yet another rebellion against the Spaniards in his native mountains? The successful revolt in the Spanish zone may attract little attention in Europe and merely as an item of local Moroccan news of small significance except to those powers that have special interests in that detached northwest corner of Africa. But news travels fast in the East, and already, even in India, there are Mohamedans who are turning their eyes towards Abdul Krim as a successor to their former and now shattered idol, Mustapha Kemal Pasha, since the Turkish dictator chose to cast away the Sword of Islam with the Ottoman Caliphate. It is hard for Englishmen to realise that in this 20th century of ours religion is still just as much the great basic force all over the East, as it was in Europe in the Middle Ages. So we look upon Egypt merely as the half-way house between Europe and the Middle and Far East, which we must control because it is essential to our Imperial lines of communication. Scores of millions of Mohamedans look upon Egypt from a very different angle of vision. For them it is the half-way house between the Western and the Eastern lands of Islam, and their religious as well as racial pride resents its defilement by the European Infidel.

VALENTINE CHIROL,

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Art. 11.-ROMANCE OF THE MERCHANT SHIPS.

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1. Seaborne Trade. By C. Ernest Fayle. Three vols, with maps. Murray, 1920-1924.

2. The Merchant Navy. By Archibald Hurd. Two vols, with maps. Murray, 1921-1924.

THE train was crossing the Forth Bridge. It was noonday and the sun shone. A light breeze ruffled the river; the ripples gleamed. Seawards the islands and rocks rose like new-carven things; westwards one looked down on and over the piers, almost deserted, of South Queensferry, then across to Rosyth, with its giant cranes idle in the smokeless air. Rare good visibility for December in these parts; fine weather for the time o' year; too clear, perhaps, for the imagining of things that never were, yet not too bright for the seeing of ghosts of things that had been.

A little black coaster jogged sedately up channel towards the bridge. It appeared that she had the Forth to herself. On her alone, this gay December day, looked down the bridge that not so long ago had looked down on many great ships of a great navy. How strange it was now to behold yonder waters so vacant and untroubled! In those dread days to cross the Forth Bridge was a thrill-to some a cold thrill. Those great grey ships, all moored and motionless, waiting-for what? Sometimes one could count them; sometimes they were blurred or blanketed by haar or fog. And now and then most of them were gone away, on what business one never knew, save once, when they returned, battered and broken and burned, from Jutland. A heart-shaking sight that, compared with which the coming of the German ships at the end of it all was as nothing. Does any one of us who crossed the Forth Bridge in wartime forget what he saw by day, or fancied in the night?

The train ran into Fife, and I was on the alert lest I should miss the bay of Inverkeithing, wherein, after the war, were crowded together vessels, large and small, for the shipbreakers. Of late their numbers have been dwindling, but a few still remained-worn-out, usedup mine-sweepers and patrol boats. There they lay,

ruinous, forlorn, in the mud; and, with all reverence to the memory of the Great Admiral, it was borne on me that the meanest of these poor derelicts might well have known more of the terrors and horrors and sheer awfulness of sea war than had any one of his mighty Wooden Walls.

So in the train, on that December noon-only a few days ago came back to me a throng of things seen, heard, and felt in those years of wonder and woe; small things mostly, scarce worth recording then, or now, except in so far as they may serve as pages, so to speak, pointing to the portals of great matters. For since that railway journey I have been reading certain volumes in The History of the Great War, based on Official Documents,' namely, 'The Merchant Navy' and 'Seaborne Trade,' wherein at last old questions are answered, old mysteries laid bare, old rumours discredited, and countless amazing, moving records of human courage and endurance, moral and physical, and of human labour, brain and body, given to the world; and only because my small memories are also of humanity, I am venturing to set some of them down here, at the gates.

A night in December 1914. The train for the North has halted at Dalmeny. An official enters the compartment-as it chances, I am alone-glances at the racks, peeps under the seats, and takes my solitary piece of hand luggage, remarking, as one very weary of explaining, that I shall have it back later. In these times we civilians are not easily insulted; readily we bow to official rule. Besides, the present precaution is not absurd, even in my own case. When rumour jostles rumour and no one knows anything for certain, nothing that is unusual seems absurd. It is but right and proper that any man with a suit-case should be suspected of intent to bomb the Forth Bridge.

From the dimmed lights of the station the train slips into outer darkness. Only the change in the note of the wheels tells when we leave the land, only the loom of the girders that we are surely on the bridge. I open the windows and a dank sea vapour is puffed through the compartment. The rising wind is charged with a bitterness that may mean snow. There are no

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