As if reading our thoughts, the guide said quietly, “Some day it will be only the wall for the wailing that we shall see. There will be no more need for wailing, and the children will forget. So the young prophets among the Jews say in the markets. We shall see.”
We walked through a section of the Temple area and out past the Austrian Hospice through the Damascus Gate where, according to agreement, the carriage waited.
The road out to the spot where the Mount of Olives drops abruptly to the plain has been repaired, stray shell holes filled in and a large section of new road built since that wonderful day when the last line of Turks were driven from the position they thought secure. The air was as clear as an October day at home and the shining city “compact together” seemed substantial and strong. It was along the high ridge of Olivet that, in the pressure of the days when relief workers toiled twelve and fifteen hours without respite, they came to renew their strength. In the home of the Greek Patriarch more than one strong soul, overcome for the moment by the ceaseless stream of dirty, hopeless, despairing human things that he must strive to save from the wreckage of war, found, in the white moonlight sifting down over the hill, in the kindly stars, in the silence and in sacred memories, courage to attempt again tasks that had been called impossible.
We had been gazing so steadily at the city that when the driver suddenly stopped we turned in surprise. There on a gently sloping stretch of ground, close to the road at the left, stood row after row of crosses over the resting places of Scot and Londoner, Welshman and Irishman, Indian and Anzac who had paid for the Holy City with his life. On some of the crosses fresh green garlands were hanging, and on one a wreath with English holly.
We got down from our carriage and walked slowly along, looking now at the crosses and now at the place where in agony of soul Christ had prayed for the strength to meet the test of Calvary that has made the Cross forever the symbol which shall mark the spots on earth most sacred to us. These lying out on the hillside had also been to Calvary.
A little farther on in the road we passed men in the British uniform. They had survived the terrible test of those wind-swept hills with the rain falling in torrents, the benumbing cold, the soft, thick, gray mud, the night in the open with no shelter save a little wall of stones built up with care only to be blown over by a sudden vicious blast, with little food and only the ammunition that could reach them on the backs of the pack donkeys. It was through this they had won that peaceful city lying contentedly there in the sun, even the shining dome of its Mohammedan Mosque unharmed.