Naturally I was on the _qui vive_ for signs of pan-Islamic activity on the enemy's side, and I questioned my little Syrian very closely to ascertain how far the movement was used as a driving force among the troops engaged against us. He, personally, had rather a grievance on the subject, for the Indian Moslems who took him had reproached him bitterly for fighting on the wrong side. "I fought," he said, "because it was my duty as an officer of the Ottoman Army. I know that men were invited to join as for a _jihad_, but we officers did not deceive ourselves. _Par exemple_, I think myself a better Moslem than any Turk, but what would you?" I consoled the little man while concealing my satisfaction at the feeling displayed against him. An extraordinarily heterogeneous collection of prisoners came dribbling through my hands directly after the Turks were repulsed. Most were practically deserters who had been forcibly enrolled, given a Mauser and a bandoleer, and told to go and fight for the Holy Places of Islam. As one of the more intelligent remarked, "If the Holy Places are really in danger, what are we doing down this way?" They came from all over the Moslem world. There were one or two Russian pilgrims returning from Mecca to be snapped up by the military authorities at Damascus railway station when they got out of the pilgrim train from Medina. There were cabdrivers from Jerusalem, a stranded pilgrim from China, several Tripolitans who had been roped in on the Palestine seaboard while trying to get a passage home, a Moor who tried to embrace my feet when I spoke of the snow-crowned Atlas above Morocco City (Marraksh) and told him that he would be landed at Tangier in due course--Inshallah. Of course we released, and repatriated as far as we could, men who were not Ottoman subjects and had obviously been forced into service against us. A few days later, when Jemal Pasha's army was getting into commissariat difficulties out in the Sinaitic desert (for the Staff had relied on entering Egypt), we began to get the real Turks among our prisoners.