Thus the hunt was up on both flanks, the infantry for the most part following the coast route and the Hedjaz column riding _via_ Der'aa.
In the centre, with a long start, the cavalry who had poured through the first gap in the Turkish line were still riding hard after the enemy. The cavalry travelled so quickly that they missed, I think, much of the interest of the journey, which took them through the centre of a country wherein almost every village has a history; the reader, therefore, will perhaps find the slower gait of the "Camels" more to his taste.
The prisoners were still pouring in when we left Ras el Ain, and in the eyes of those we passed was an awful glassy stare as of men who had come through great torment: these were they who had come out of the Valley of Chaos alive.
Here and there a German officer walked alone at the head of a batch of Turks, and as this was a sufficiently unusual sight, I asked one of the guards the reason. He replied that many of the Turkish battalions were commanded by German officers, whose principal asset was a firm belief in discipline as practised in the Fatherland. Hated and feared by Turkish officers, and contemptuously regarded as inferiors by officers of their own blood, in captivity neither party would own them: they were Ishmaelites.
The attitude of our camel drivers towards the Turks was somewhat amusing, though it is to be feared that pity is a quality but little understood by Eastern nations. "Turkey finish!" they would say with an indescribable shrug of the shoulders, and this expression, about the only English they knew, seemed to afford them infinite satisfaction.
In the early stages our route lay across the recent battlefield, where on every hand were the terrible signs of a routed army: dead horses, the wreckage of guns and waggons, rifles with the murderous saw-bayonet attached--a monstrous weapon for any nation to use, little clusters of shells near dismantled battery positions, long rows of sharpened stakes in front of a trench smashed almost out of recognition, and endless barbed-wire torn and blown into grotesque piles by the violence of our bombardment; and through the débris slunk the predatory Bedouin with his dingy galabeah full of loot. At one place a Turkish camel with a gaily caparisoned saddle trotted up to us and joined the column for company; he earned his keep, too, after he had recovered from the effects of his long fast and had been fattened up again. While on the subject of animals let me state that on this first day a goat, an ass, another camel, and numerous pariah dogs added themselves to our ration strength.