Of course many purely professional soldiers have liberal and artistic tastes; as General Shea, one of the organisers of Palestinian victory, has a fine taste in poetry, or Colonel Popham, then deputy Governor of Jerusalem, an admirable taste in painting.
But while it is sometimes forgotten that many soldiers are men, it is now still more strange to forget that most men are soldiers.

I fancy there are now few things more representative than the British Army; certainly it is much more representative than the British Parliament.
The men I knew, and whom I remember with so much gratitude, working under General Bols at the seat of government on the Mount of Olives, were certainly not narrowed by any military professionalism, and had if anything the mark of quite different professions.

One was a very shrewd and humorous lawyer employed on legal problems about enemy property, another was a young schoolmaster, with keen and clear ideas, or rather ideals, about education for all the races in Palestine.
These men did not cease to be themselves because they were all dressed in khaki; and if Colonel Storrs recurs first to the memory, it is not because he had become a colonel in the trade of soldiering, but because he is the sort of man who could talk equally about all these other trades and twenty more.

Incidentally, and by way of example, he can talk about them in about ten languages.
There is a story, which whether or no it be true is very typical, that one of the Zionist leaders made a patriotic speech in Hebrew, and broke off short in his recollection of this partially revived national tongue; whereupon the Governor of Jerusalem finished his Hebrew speech for him--whether to exactly the same effect or not it would be impertinent to inquire.

He is a man rather recalling the eighteenth century aristocrat, with his love of wit and classical learning; one of that small group of the governing class that contains his uncle, Harry Cust, and was warmed with the generous culture of George Wyndham.