Much has been said of late about the lamentable state to which our Palestinian brethren have been reduced; talk of them is on every tongue, and some have taken to inventing stories and false rumors for purposes of their own. To refute these fabrications I wished to offer a brief account of some of these abnormal circumstances and of the feelings that surround them. So I visited some of the shelters and spoke with a great number of these families, the stricken and the unstricken alike, and came upon truths at whose horror the limbs tremble, and from whose atrocities every proud soul recoils — if it holds within it even a little justice and mercy!

I approached a lady in her fifth decade, surrounded by four young men and one young woman. From my first glance I could tell that they were all her children. I greeted her and asked after her; she thanked God and thanked me. I did not dare multiply my questions, for the air was heavy, saturated with grief; and it was as though this lady took comfort in my visit, for she began to tell me of the dark thoughts wandering through her distracted mind. She said:

"They were five young men, and one of them fell a martyr some days ago in the battle of Tiberias. It was my eldest son's turn to guard our Arab quarter at night against the assaults of the Zionists. He was stricken with a sudden acute attack of illness, so his second brother gallantly stepped forward and volunteered to keep the watch in his place; he armed himself, kissed my hand, and asked my blessing. He had gone only a little way when the bombs began to pour down upon the streets and the houses without any warning, and through the windowpane I saw my son's body flying apart, limb from limb... I saw his hand fly off and his head torn to pieces. I crawled out to gather those beloved fragments of flesh and bone scattered upon the dust, and we continued our crawl to the convent under cover of night — and there was the convent, refuge of all the Arab families... The shelling went on for three days running, and when we stole secretly, under cover of darkness, back to our houses to fetch what we needed, we found the houses empty and bare, the doors and windows wrenched off and smashed. So we came to Lebanon as we are, owning nothing — and all this counts for little for the sake of the cause..."

Then she added: "The warm welcome we meet from our Lebanese brethren, and the kindness we have known from the Permanent Palestine Committee and the body of the Lebanese Red Cross — all this plants a beautiful consolation in our hearts, for we feel that you share our sorrows out of true feeling... And we pray God never to let you see the like of what we have seen and known."

I calmed her fears as best I could, and passed to a second room...

Here was a young woman, her brow knotted, her wits astray, surrendered to despair; her visitor could hardly find strength enough to greet her and question her! Her calamity, beyond doubt, is one of those that break the strength — here she was, all but touched with madness!

— Good day, my sister; can I be of any service to you?

She raised to me an eye tearful and bloodshot, and told me, sobbing, how during the shelling of Haifa she had rushed to her house, wrapped up her infant daughter, gathered her jewelry and her few coins, and fled to the car under a hail of bullets; and it was her lot to escape death and to reach Tyre safely... And in Tyre, when she looked to her baby, she found that she had been clasping a bolster of straw, and that her baby was still in the locked house! How, then, should her eye ever dry, or her eyelid know rest? Here I found myself unable to speak, for I am a mother and I know a mother's feelings — the more so as this wretched woman had fallen prey to tormenting whispers telling her that it was she who had killed her child; and that feeling alone was enough to unseat her reason! I asked her about her husband; she said he was a volunteer, and word had reached her that he was well.

And I saw... I saw many of the wretched, men and women, and it pained me to see what I saw. But of all these many groups, differing in their tendencies and creeds, the one that pained me most was the conscious, cultivated group — the ardent patriotic group that was forced to abandon its homeland under the weight of terror.

At the house of a friend I met a physician whom I had known for a long time, one of the most patriotic of men. He told me, deeply moved, the story of his flight — how he was driven to it, not free to choose; and how, had any of his friends predicted a week beforehand that he would flee, he would have slapped his face and counted his words an insult. But when dread and violent panic spread through the hearts of the Arabs — most of the inhabitants being stripped of arms — they found in staying a certain death; and under the shells and the roar of the bullets they pushed one another onward against their own will... They had imagined that in getting away from the guns and the fire they would find rest; and here they are instead, under the weight of a fearful crisis of the soul, burning with a fire from within, finding no justification for their presence in the safety of Lebanon while Palestine bleeds and fights in defense of her sacred soil.