A Pilgrim in Palestine
By . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1919. 8vo, x + 251 pp. Illustrated. $2.00.
IT is a happy omen that America’s first Red Cross Knight to tread the ancient ways of a delivered Palestine should be a poet, close kinsman to those other troubadour Knights of the Cross who rode forth to deliver the Holy Land in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and whose songs have come down to us through the undying echoes of eight hundred years. Scattered along this latest record of pilgrimage are twentieth-century songs of the Sacred Road, as simple, as reverent, as those old crusaders’ lyrics, cherished in the Middle Ages. No twelfth-century minstrel could sing more simply, more endearingly than does Dr. Finley, of St. Dismas, the Penitent Thief, whose ‘sprite’ followed the poet along the Jaffa Road, ‘gray white,’ one memorable night of stars. None could chant more reverently the lines on Armageddon; the Armageddon of September 20, 1918: —
I’ve seen the Angel pour the sixth gold bowl, Off toward the great Euphrates —
And the prose also is a poet’s prose, with that contagious quality of white heat about it, disarming the superficial critic of fervent words and loose sentences, of which there are some examples in this book, and plunging him into the author’s mood, which is something nearer holy ecstasy than critics are accustomed to in twentieth-century writers of travel sketches.
For, soberly classified, this is a book of travel sketches: first, a flight from Egypt to Palestine by airplane, in two-and-one-half hours, to parallel the forty years of Israel’s wandering; then, a walking tour through the Old Testament and the New, through the Crusades, and through the Great War. From Beersheba to Dan the pilgrim walks, from Jericho over ‘beyond Jordan.’ He sees Abraham and Isaac toiling slowly on the way lar ahead, and he thinks of the ‘thousands of fathers whose sons were marching to sacrifice that very night in Europe, marching to the places of burnt offering on hundreds of Mounts from Kemmel to Moab, and with no certainty of any such substitute for their sons as Abraham found at the last moment.’ In the Greek Church, on the Mount of Olives, one asks him if he makes the sign of the Greek Church or of the Church of Rome: ‘Quelle croix? — grecque ou latine?’ And he gives the countersign ‘ La Croix Rouge,’ of Roman, Greek, and Protestant alike.
At General Headquarters, ‘in the valley between the hills of Judæa and the sea, where the “embassies and armies of two continents had passed to and fro”: of Thothmes and Rameses, Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser and Sargon, Sennacherib, Necho and Nebuchadnezzar, Cambyses and Alexander the Great, Geoffrey, Richard Cœur de Lion and Napoleon,’ he meets General Allenby, Palestine’s deliverer, dines with him, and after dinner the two read together the thirty-fourth chapter of Isaiah. Somehow it makes the doings of Alexander and Napoleon seem a little faded.
All these adventures, all these musings on life and eternity, our pilgrim relates in a sort of blissful wonder at himself and at the blessedness of his good fortune. And in this delighted awe the sympathetic reader shares. Never was there pilgrim more intelligently alive to his joyous privilege; never was there crusader who trod more reverently this holy ground. F. C.