The Maccabaean

(A member of the British Judaeans tells of the meeting of Jewish Legionaires from many lands on the Palestinian Front.)

The regiment halted for a day or two near some Jewish colonies. The intimacy and sincerity of the welcome was thrilling. A party of men and girls from-one of the best known of the Colonies (Jaffa) marched seven miles on foot to give welcome to their kinsfolk. What mattered the heat of the grinding Palestinian sun? Why, it was as nothing to the blazing ardor of the patriotism of these colonists, swinging sturdily along with the indefatigability of men and women inured to the joys and the hardships of the physical life.

joys and the hardships of the physical life. And then a few return visits to Tel Aviv. To those of us who had not yet acquired our own Hebrew language (and how ashamed some of us felt) the visit to this miniature town, where Hebrew was the spoken tongue of the inhabitants, produced a paradoxical effect of at once the exotic and the intimate. One felt extraordinarily at home, and yet at the same time the delighted victim of a sweet, strange thrill at being in a place where Hebrew, far from being a tongue too sacred to be spoken, was the living flesh and reality of everyday life.

And then once more up the line, by route march, till we reached a place in a back area where we celebrated the Sabbath service. But as war knows no Sabbath, some shells fell during the service. The padre went on unperturbed. The congregation stood fast, and the shells must, at the last minute have become converted to the observance of the Shabbas, for they did no practical work, simply exploding, one after the other, in noisy futility.

And then, after a few days’ rest, not merely up the line, but into it, and for our spell of weeks we held the line. Our patrols went out night after night. A few encounters were experienced with the Turks. But though our own side suffered no losses, we have reason to hope that the enemy had cause to appreciate, for the first time, the feeling of Jewish bullets from Jewish rifles and Jewish Lewis guns. .

But I must insist on telling a story well indicative of our Jewish sang froid. After firing out on patrol several magazines from the Lewis gun at the enemy, the men, with the economic instinct of the race, stopped to pick up their empty cartridges. Incidentally, a prophetic curse upon the mosquitoes, and an equally vehement blessing upon the mosquito nets issued to all the soldiers by the Government in those spots particularly infested by those imps of disease. It was, of course, the devil Beelzebub who invented malaria.

"SELF-CONSCRIPTION IN PALESTINE"

But while the Regiment was in the line, recruiting was in full swing in the chief Jew-

ish centres of Palestine. I personally wit- -nessed some of the scenes in Jaffa. Not here a case of conscription. Not here a case of able-bodied men paying adroit lawyers to argue them out of the army. Not even of a case of the Derby scheme, where men gave on their lives and services post-dated cheques, which I am afraid they did not always anticipate or even hope would ever be presented, but the glorious impetuous mood of 1914. Old men uttered blessings to the God of their fathers if their children were—accepted. Young men protested if they were—rejected.

Young women wanted to band themselves into a "Battalion of Death" in order that thereby they might benefit the life of the people.

The Palestinian recruits are now being trained. What degree of training they have reached I am forbidden to state. But from personal observation I feel justified, in fact compelled to pay some tribute, however inadequate, to the military zeal and energy of the men. And now back once more to Camp, where we had the honor of entertaining the

other night in our Mess many ladies and gentlemen from the American Zionist Medical Mission. The evening terminated in a concert given by the men (though I must not forget that most successful Yiddish song given on the spur of the moment by Sister Edman of the Mission). And after the concert had concluded it was instructive to watch how some of those Jewish soldiers (who though they wear Canadian buttons have at any rate passed a certain portion of their lives not forsooth in the land of the Chosen People, but in that country which claims to be the private property of the Deity) clamored round the sisters of the mission to be received news and messages from their Transatlantic relatives.

"AN EDUCATION IN THINGS JEWISH"

‘And every minute the Jewish Regiment grows in multiplicity and interest. Recruiting has started both in Cairo and Alexandria. Day after day the batches arrive, and the harassed but happy officer to whom they are assigned has to welcome, feed, and equip at short notice a crowd of his kinsfolk talking a fascinating babel of Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish. French. Italian. and modern Greek.

As an instance of the success of the recruiting campaign, I may mention that Jacques Caling, the editor of La Bourse Egyptienne, well-known as an extremely militant Zionist, has joined the unit, and it is hoped and anticipated that the good example will spread among all classes, high and low, rich and poor, of local Jewish.

To be in the Regiment as at present constituted is an education in things Jewish, for the Regiment is a living exhibition of the most diverse types. The Palestinian Jew already rooted in the atavistic soil, the Trans- atlantic Jew who talks English with what I must, in view of the technicalities of international Law, perforce call a Canadian accent, the Jew who talks Yiddish, the language of the bondage, the Jew who talks Hebrew, the ~ language of the new Jewish freedom, the highly-anglicised Jew who stares blandly and blankly if you say unto him Shalom, and his long-lost brother, the Jew from the Yemen of Arabia, sunburnt and sturdy, the Jew from Corfu talking Greek and Italian with the equal fluency of that bilingual island, the Jew who is pleased and complimented because you talk French, the Jew of the latest ultra-modern Russian culture, the Jew who only talks Arabic, the. Jew who only talks Ladino- Spanish; but, nevertheless, every Jack one of them a Jew. And what matter the minor difficulties of the language, which we are surmounting with success? For do we not all talk the universal Esperanto of the Jewish heart?