The position, as we read it, was that Allenby was a stickler for accuracy in dress and discipline. while we know that these were points which could never appeal to many people, some from the Home country. but more particularly from overseas who believed they had enlisted to fight and only to fight. The position, of course, is that a modern army is so much of a machine that any idea of ignoring these elements leads too often to slackness on the battlefield. Allenby's insistence points which the Australians could not enthuse over did not help relations between the C.-L-C. and the troops, but had the final episode not occurred such differences would readily have been forgotten once the struggle was at an end. The final painful incident occurred at Surafend. subsequent to the armist when a New Zealander was shot by an Arab.
This man had been awakened at night by feeling somebody attempting to rob him while he slept in camp. He gave chase, and Arab thief shot him. The m died soon after his comrade rived, and so great was their dignation, bei already exasperated state by re great amount of petty thieving on the part of Arabs, that. they drew a cordon round the adjacent village and next morning demande the surrender of the murder The head sheik was evasive, and seeing no chance of justice, the New Zealanders and Australians forced the women and children to leave and then attacked the men Many Arabs were killed, a large number injured and the vill was fired The writer of this volume makes no attempt to instify any such action. hit he has something sav on Allenhy's seheronent con. duet When it was found that no individual could be charged with the act, he assembled the brigades in hollow square and "addressed them in strong, and. even, one might say, ill-considered language. He used terms which became his hich position as little as the huei ness at Surafend had been worthy of the great soldiers before him.
Allenby's outburst. left the division sore but unpunished:!." Subsequently the writer says that without making excuses for the Anzacs it may be said that the affair arose out of the simple fact that British regular often failed to grasp the v that the narrow—traditions methods of handling the soldiers of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales are not by any absolute: law also the way to handle young men of the Dominions
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.