Page:The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).djvu/205

 was good enough. If we held the rest, the Turks were welcome to Warfare the tiny fraction on which they stood, till peace or Doomsday showed in Hejaz them the futility of clinging to our window-pane. i brushed off the same flies once more from my face patiently, content to know that the Hejaz War was won and finished with : won from the day we took Wejh, if we had had wit to see it. Then I broke the thread of my argument again to listen. The distant shots had grown and tied themselves into long, ragged volleys. They ceased. [strained my ears for the other sounds which I knew would follow. Sure enough across the silence came a rustle like the dragging of a skirt over the flints, around the thin walls of my tent. A pause, while the camel-riders drew up: and then the soggy tapping of canes on the thick of the beasts’ necks to make them kneel.

They knelt without noise : and | timed it in my memory: first the hesitation, as the camels, looking down, felt the soil with one foot for a soft place ; then the muffled thud and the sudden loosening of breath as they dropped on their fore-legs, since this party had come far and were tired ; then the shuffle as the hind legs were folded in, and the rocking as they tossed from side to side thrusting outward with their knees to bury them in the cooler subsoil below the burning ints, while the riders, with a quick soft patter of bare feet, like birds over the ground, were led off tacitly either to the coffee hearth or to Abdulla’s tent, according to their business. The camels would rest there, uneasily switching their tails across the shingle till their masters were free and looked to their stabling.

I had made a comfortable beginning of doctrine, but was left still to find an alternative end and means of war. Ours seemed unlike the ritual of which Foch was priest ; and I recalled him, to see a difference in kind between him and us. In his modern war—absolute war he called it—two nations professing incompatible philosophies put them to the test of force. Philosophically, it was idiotic, for while opinions were arguable, convictions needed shooting to be cured ; and the struggle could end only when the supporters of the one immaterial principle had no more means of resistance against the supporters of the other. It sounded like a twentieth-century restatement of the wars of religion, whose logical end was utter destruction of one creed, and whose protagonists believed that God’s judgement would prevail.