It was from Wady Hanein that the Brigade moved out on the long trek across Judea and Jordan Valley and the Mountains of Moab for the first attack on Amman, in March, 1918. Nearly every Australian feigns qualification in his regard for the Jews in Palestine. But as the Regiments made ready for the road that morning it was pretty to see Jewish families visiting their favourite officers and men in the bustling camp, and wishing them God-speed with a sincerity and a touch of distress quite unmistakable. And all ranks rode to that bitter fight the stronger and better for those Jewish good wishes. The 2nd Brigade also chanced to be in the village in December of 1917, when Jerusalem was captured, and the citizens entertained the Brigadier and his officers at a feast, a speech-making and a dance. Proceedings were, for a time, somewhat formal and cold. The Brigadier and his senior officers sat at a central table in a large hall with the village fathers and notables. The girls, expectant, their toes tingling for the dance, sat stiffly in a row down one wall and the matrons along the other—a very convenient arrangement, because the dashing young Light Horse subalterns could seek a pretty partner without feeling obliged to ask for the programme of her elderly chaperon. The young men of the village stood with the junior officers of the Brigade at one end of the hall. The eloquence was terrific. The erudite village schoolmaster proposed the “Health of the King of England,” coupled with the name of the Brigadier, the British Army, the Australian Army, and the British universe generally. He spoke fluent and faultless Russian—or so it seemed to us. (Our linguistic attainments will startle Australians when we come home. There is not a man amongst us who cannot now say Bread and Wine and Darling, in all the languages of East and West.) He made happy reference to great British apostles of freedom, instancing Cromwell, Lord Byron, and Gladstone. He garbled the names, but we caught his drift; and, anxious to get in, we cheered tumultuously; and then, in an unhappy moment, some one on our side released the Brigade interpreter—a dusky fellow of dubious nationality—who rose eagerly to make the meaning of the village schoolmaster a little clearer to us. His success was indifferent, but he brought down the house with references to Lord Cromwell, Mr. Byron, and Sir Gladstone. [Illustration]