November 13, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER 
with a certain cheapness, but indeed this profound ideal 
is of very gradual effect, acting upon character slowly and 
revealing itself in the ways we ha\e been speaking of, in 
the obliteration of irritable and fictions motives and the 
development of a single absorbing purpose. Weight and 
volume, as of a mighty accumulation of water behind an 
embankment, characterise its action. But we must be 
prepared to have patience, to let it extend its influence by 
degrees. Sickened w(> all are of the discord in Parliament 
and the press, and well do we know what we want. It 
is all comprised in the one word " Silence " — silence and 
to back up and strengthen Government and Army with 
the will of a united people. 
All who have ever conceived what such a backing 
means, all who have divined that a nation's strength in 
war is in the last resort but the measure of its unity of 
purpose, must shudder at the inconceivable folly which is 
dissipating this source of our best energy. Nevertheless, 
help is on its way. The national consciousness begins 
to take effect through individual chfferences. The spirit 
of union is overcoming the spirit of separation ; at least 
its presence is making itself felt ; it is stirring. 
Behind Ltmdon's shrill party and press clamour one 
seems to feel an impulse gathering as different to the 
other as English woods and moors are different to 
London's streets and pavements. 
THE TURK IN ASIA. 
By Sir Thomas Holdich. 
Lady Sykes has brought out her husband's book. 
The Caliph's Last Heritage, (by Col. Sir Mark Sykes 
Macmillan's. 20s. net), at an opportune time. The 
Near East practically means Turkey in Asia, and it is 
to Turkey in Asia that the moving drama of the war 
will certainly call public attention ere long, in a manner, 
and to an extent, that has not yet been touched. The 
book includes twenty-seven chapters of history embracing 
a period extending from Persian times, about 600 B.C. 
to the Omayid Caliph, 750 A.D. ; 1350 years of perpetual 
struggle and intertribal war, varied at times by the sweep 
of Arab irruptions and all the terrible tragedy of 
obliterated nationalities and civilisation trampled out of 
existence. 
So rapid and so tragic have been the movements 
on this chess-board of the world that the story of them 
is always thrilling, even in much le's able hands than those 
of Sir Mark Sykes. Sir Mark possesses such a charmingly 
easy literary style that this long-extended human drama 
becomes almost fascinating, especially where the sequence 
of events is traced from the babyhood of Mahommed to 
the full realisation of Ottoman power in Europe and Asia. 
He writes, too, as only a man can write who is thoroughly 
at home in the scenes he describes, and is in heartfelt 
human sympathy with the sentiments of the people 
who most nearly represent the heroes of his story. There 
is no straining after effect by the use of extravagant 
terms of admiration, or the reverse. The actors in these 
turbulent scenes are just ordinary human beings in an 
extraordinary atmosphere of environment and motive ; 
and they act as men would act now under similar con- 
ditions. There are no saints and no devils. 
Romans and Parthians. 
Here and there new light derived from local observa- 
tion is thrown on the pre-Mahommedan periods of 
Mesopotamian and Anatolian history ; the wear^' 
wars between Romans and Parthians fifty years before 
our era, and the reasons for their inconclusive character, 
as well as the subsequent wars between Romans and 
Persians which ended with the capture of the Emperor 
Valerian, are told with a soldier's appreciation of the 
geographical difficulties which determined military results, 
and they are not uninstructive even in these days when 
campaigns are still conducted in distant comers of the 
earth where the highest and latest developments of military 
science are cither unattainable or inapplicable. 
Considerable space is devoted to the rise and fall of 
that ephemeral commercial capital Palmyra, and to the 
melancholy evidence of decadent and spurious art 
exhibited in the rains ; but the comparison between its 
faded splendours and the quasi-magnificence of the 
decorative furniture of the Hotel Cecil is perhaps a little 
strained. The effect of both on the taste of the author 
seems to be equally disagreeable, but Time has intervened 
with too much space for any such com,parison to be 
really effective. 
The real kernel of this compressed histor\- — its 
central interest — undoubtedly lies in the story of the early 
days of the prophet Mahommed. How, from an illiterate 
boyhood he rose to be a stump orator — a ranter in the 
market place — with a confidence in his mission and belief 
in his destiny that is nothing short of sublime, is told 
as only a man could tell it who knows his Arab b^' heart. 
There was nothing of the charlatan and impostor about 
Mahommed in the author's opinion. On the contrary, it 
was in times of deepest disappointment and affliction that 
he rose to the highest inspiration. Truly he was without 
honour in his own coimtry. It was his own tribe, the 
Koreish, who not only repudiated him, but were his 
bitterest foes through the best years of his life whilst he 
was pleading for the one true God and planting the 
seeds of the new faith in Medina. And when success 
came he succumbed to it like any smaller man. There 
is nothing divine in the gradual development of the 
enthusiast into the stern fanatical leader of men who could 
deal out nothing less than Paradise to his friends and Hell 
fire to his enemies. He became obsessed with the idea 
that his Heaven-sent mission which ensured that Allah 
should always be on his side was one of death and des- 
truction to all who opposed him, and he was ever ready 
to cut off the heads of any of his Generals who gave not 
" God the glory " when victory crowned their efforts. 
Mahommed's Character. 
This study of Mahommed's character is deeply 
mteresting. We have seen something hke it elsewhere 
quite lately ; the dormant lust for destruction breaking 
out with the power to destroy. Through all these early 
troubles of Mahommed there runs a vein of common 
human sympathy ; the steady and clear-headed devotion 
of his first wife ; the unswerving and self-sacrificing attach- 
ment of his friends (who did not in the least believe in 
his mission) his own most human grief at the death of 
his little son, and the final prayer that passed his dying 
lips " Lord forgive me." 
The oft-told story of the marvellous success of 
Islam is told again concisely, but modern interest will 
centre itself rather upon the position occupied by the 
Caliphs in Mesopotamia and the rise of Bagdad to 
greatness under Arab rule. 
It was the Caliph Al Mansur, treacherous, crafty 
and inconceivably cruel, who founded Bagdad. Sir 
Mark Sykes spells the name Baghdad, but he omits to 
observe that in the year 1848 Sir H. Rawlinson discovered 
bricks inscribed with the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar 
forming an embankment of solid brickwork on the eastern 
bank of the Tigris, when the river was six feet below its 
normal level. As the name Bagdad occurs in one of the 
Assyrian geographical catalogues of cities in the time of 
Sardanapalus it seems probable that Al Mansur selected 
the site of the Assyrian city for his new capital, and 
retained the original name — Bagdad. The extraordinary' 
care and provision which was exercised in the planning 
of the town by Al Mansur in order to render his palace 
and the administrative offices safe from any local attack 
by placing them within three concentric circles of wall 
defences almost certainly applied to that part of the 
city which is on the right or western bank of the river. 
This western suburb is now barely one-fourth the size of 
the gigantic irregular narrow-strccted and slatternly city 
which adorns the eastern bank and which has absolutely 
no plan whatever to recommend it. The whole city 
now is surrounded by a single brick wall with towers 
at intervals, the Tigris intersecting it. Although the 
days of its greatest magnificence are long past, it never- 
21 
