FLY TO JERUSALEM

Hokitika Guardian, 21 October 1929, Page 7

FLY TO JERUSALEM

WHAT THE TROOPS SEE. (MAURICE FAGENCE IN' “Daily Mail.” Our troops have been flying to Jerusalem. To look down from a pilot's cockpit on the barren, rounded hills that press on the Holy City is to realise that the aeroplane must take a major part in .any operations out there. And nowhere in the world is there more difficult flying country.

Crowd your table with inverted pudding basins cracked and browned with use, until the rims touch. From the chandelier, over the table you can take a bird’s-eye view of the Judean hills from three thousand feet.

Jerusalem is seen on a bright day as a city of silver high up on one slope. Bethlehem is on a lower slope just two pudding basins away.

From 6,003 feet it all looks like a dead world. From 1,000 feet, at which height one skims over the hill-tops, one’s eye picks out the white-lipped wells set on the slopes, the tiny olive estates planted wherever a nttle water can collect, and a few patches of scrubby green that barely relieve the rock-brown that stretches away to every horizon. In two hours’ flying the eye will not pick out a flat stretch as large as a Homo Counties small holding. The aerial navigation maps for these parts give small red. circles to mark proper or emergency landing places. One can see distances of 250 miles between the red circles.

The rise and fall and tortuous winding of the white road to Jerusalem teU you of the difficulty of road and rail building in these parts.

Watching how the road • winds between the pudding basins and remeni-. boring that the Moslem fanatics are uncannily expert snipers, one sees a new difficulty for any troops failed upon to act as watchijdogs in this dead corner of the world. So that west-bound aeroplanes can cross this desolate country and not be Drought down by petrol failure tnere is a store of I,OJO gallons of patrol hidden in the desert east of the Dead Sea. Engine failure over the Judean hills must not' be risked. Across this country the India air mail must take its longest day’s jump from Gaza to Basra, 975 miles.

Troops flying to Jerusalem must cross, hear Gaza, the old British line, which winds over a desolation of sand to face the western rim of this vast expanse of hills. As they cross the parapets to-day they sing their songs in aerial transports.

Walking among the trenches, one meets only an occasional Arab or tall, burly, sun-baked young Briton who is a member of the Palestine Police. They are the type of young Briton who makes one laugh at any statement that our young men are decadent. Usually they wear ■ serviceable khaki, but sometimes they flame up in a uniform lliore’ colourful and commanding than anything you will see in that land of uniforms, Italy.

* * * *& The fanaticism of the Arabs keeps them more busy than any question of larceny. One of these athletic young policemen told me of an Arab farmer, near Gaza, who had sent his son to England for liis education. The boy returned a year ago and sought to introduce modern agricultural machinery to the farm, on which oxen have always been the motive power for every primitive apnlianee used. Some of the new machines have been destroyed by fanatics who saw devilry in them. The others cannot be used, as the farm “hands” refuse to work them. A few simple machines were enough to set tire torch to a district. In the some way we can see a question of right of way near the old Wallin* Wall. a. question which in England could be settled by a few wise words from a stipendiary, setting a torch to a country.