The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
not knowing what they would do, since they did not know themselves.
I do not know what were his thoughts, or whether they were far from
Palestine and all possibilities that tyranny might return and reign
for ever. But I have sometimes fancied that, in that ghastly silence,
he may have heard again only the guns of Lee and the last battle
in the Wilderness.
If the mention of the American Consul refers back to the oppression
of the past, the mention of the Military Governor brings back
all the problems of the present. Here I only sketch these groups
as I first found them in the present; and it must be remembered
that my present is already past. All this was before the latest
change from military to civil government, but the mere name
of Colonel Storrs raises a question which is rather misunderstood
in relation to that change itself. Many of our journalists,
especially at the time of the last and worst of the riots,
wrote as if it would be a change from some sort of stiff militarism
to a liberal policy akin to parliamentarism. I think this a fallacy,
and a fallacy not uncommon in journalism, which is professedly
very much up to date, and actually very much behind the times.
As a fact it is nearly four years behind the times, for it is
thinking in terms of the old small and rigidly professional army.
Colonel Storrs is the very last man to be called militaristic in
the narrow sense; he is a particularly liberal and enlightened type
of the sort of English gentleman who readily served his country in war,
but who is rather particularly fitted to serve her in politics
or literature. Of course many purely professional soldiers have
liberal and artistic tastes; as General Shea, one of the organisers
of Palestinian victory, has a fine taste in poetry, or Colonel Popham,
then deputy Governor of Jerusalem, an admirable taste in painting.
But while it is sometimes forgotten that many soldiers are men, it is
now still more strange to forget that most men are soldiers. I fancy
there are now few things more representative than the British Army;
certainly it is much more representative than the British Parliament.
The men I knew, and whom I remember with so much gratitude, working under
General Bols at the seat of government on the Mount of Olives,
were certainly not narrowed by any military professionalism, and had if
anything the mark of quite different professions. One was a very shrewd
and humorous lawyer employed on legal problems about enemy property,
another was a young schoolmaster, with keen and clear ideas,
or rather ideals, about education for all the races in Palestine.
These men did not cease to be themselves because they were all
dressed in khaki; and if Colonel Storrs recurs first to the memory,
it is not because he had become a colonel in the trade of soldiering,
but because he is the sort of man who could talk equally about
all these other trades and twenty more. Incidentally, and by way
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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