Item 06: Letters sent by Robert Christian Wilson to his family, 1918-April 1919 - Page 278
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[Page 278]
drawing towards you - his long slender body and arms stretch up to heaven, as he seems to gloat over you, and hold you in awful suspense, like some bad night-mare where you fall over an unending precipice, and never seem to reach the bottom.
Still the whirl wind skips and dances on the plain, going backwards and forwards but ever creeping nearer to you. He gets close; stops and plays about in a little wadi, seems to pass and then with a bound and a swirl is upon you.
Away goes your shade, empty plates go up in the air and tea billies and dixies go flying as everyone dives to cover their stews with their bare hands only to snatch them off again to grab furtively at their hats as they too go up in the air.
Then the whirl wind passes, and leaves you, when your eyes are sufficiently clear, to survey the awful wreck, and think what might have been had the Kaiser not seen red in August 14.
All the food, that has not been spilt, is inches deep in dust, and if ever dust was unappetising surely it is this dust of the Jordan Valley.
For in it you seem to see the bones of long dead nations who were wiped out down masacred round here like the People of Jericho, whom Joshua so wantonly slaughtered after his sensational, but bloodless capture of their city.
Lurid are the epithets then, that are hurled