This could not have been an oversight because I had written more than once to enquire whether this distinction had yet been conferred on the battalion. Having seen the majority of my officers and men all carried off to Hospital, and feeling ill and depressed in my lonely camp, I sat down late one night and wrote a letter of condolence to Mrs. Cross. I told her that although we had wired to every Turkish Hospital, from Es Salt to Damascus, we could obtain no information about her husband; I wound up my letter by stating that although there might still be some very faint hope, she must steel herself to face the facts, for I feared she would never see her husband again. It must have been close on midnight when I lay down, and, as I was unable to sleep, I was reading by the dim light of a candle when suddenly I saw a white ghostly face appear in the tent door, and only that I knew Cross was dead I would have thought it was the face of Cross. Then a sepulchral voice said, "Are you awake, Sir?" and I began to wonder if it were all a dream. When the figure approached the light, I saw that it really _was_ Cross, so I bounded up to give him a welcome--such a welcome as one would give to a friend who had risen from the dead. It appeared that when the patrol had been ambushed, Cross got wounded and lay under a sandbank where he was discovered by the Turks; they carried him off, and, as they were then retiring as fast as they could, took him with them, pushed him on to Amman, and from there by rail to Damascus. He was about to be sent further north when the British entered the city. In the confusion Cross made good his escape and eventually worked his way back to me. Thus it was that nobody knew anything of his whereabouts, for he had never reported to any of the Hospitals en route. Mrs. Cross had already been informed by the War Office that he was missing and reported killed. I told Cross that I had just posted a letter to his wife to say that I feared that he must have been killed: he, of course, at once sent a private cable to tell her that he was alive and well, while I sent an official one to the War Office giving the same account. At all events, my letter of condolence to Mrs. Cross will always be a good souvenir of the part her husband took in the Great War. CHAPTER XXII. AT RAFA. The Armistice with Turkey was announced on the 31st October, 1918, amid the firing of guns and rockets and joy stunts by the Air Force above our camp at Ludd. On the 6th November the battalion was ordered to proceed to Rafa to recuperate, refit and reorganise, and on the 7th, in the early morning, we arrived at this frontier station bordering on "the desert and the town." Rafa is actually in Egypt, just over the borders of Palestine, on the Palestine-Egyptian Railway line some five miles from the Mediterranean, and here the tents of Israel were pitched.