Such were the conditions under which we--four Australian officers and myself--came to Damascus. All the way from Nazareth we were guarded closely as a secret meeting of the Peace Conference. Only three weeks earlier Major Evans had escaped from Afuleh and walked forty miles before he was recaptured; so that in our case more than ordinary precautions were taken. We drove down the steep hill from Nazareth in three rickety carts. Each of the first two contained a pair of prisoners and a pair of guards, with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets; but H., whose giant height and strength the Turks respected, had a cart and two guards all to himself. At Afuleh we sat until nightfall in a mud hut, with the local population gazing and chattering through the open door, as if we had been strange animals. We welcomed the change to a covered cattle-truck on the railway, away from prying Turks and Arabs. In this truck, with coats serving as pillows, we lay on the filthy floor throughout the night, while the train jolted eastward over the badly kept track. Whenever I looked at the half-open shutter I met the alert eyes of a guard, whose business it was to prevent us from jumping into the darkness. The next day we passed in playing poker, in looking at the wild hills of Samaria, and, by juggling with the few French words he could understand, in trying to tell the Arab officer in charge of us how contented were the Arab population in those parts of Palestine, Arabia, and Mesopotamia occupied by the British. This man, like most of the Syrian Arabs, showed himself well-disposed to prisoners. He presented us with bread and hard-boiled eggs, bought with his own money, and refused to take payment. As always, no food had been provided by the military authorities. So we jogged on, with many a halt, across the Jordan and round and up the winding tracks in the hill country beyond it. We stopped for an hour at Deraa, where a Turkish doctor with pleasant manners and a dirty hypodermic needle visited the truck. Having assured us that cholera was very prevalent in the British army, he proceeded to inoculate us, so that we might have no chance of taking the disease to Damascus. As a matter of fact, the British army in Palestine was entirely free from cholera, while Damascus, as we afterward learned, was full of it. Fortunately, nothing worse than sore chests resulted from the use of his rusty, unsterilized needle.