Until the foodships arrived the British Army fed most of the people; I use the word "most" advisedly, for even here there were fat profiteers who had made fortunes out of the War, and who cared nothing for the sufferings of others. The poorer inhabitants literally thronged the various camps in search of food, and with characteristic generosity the troops tried to feed them all! They gave away bully-beef and biscuits to those most in need, and, whenever possible, their tea and sugar rations also; it was painful to see the gratitude of the recipients.
Except amongst the very wealthy both tea and sugar had been literally unknown for four years. When we entered Beyrout the price of tea was four hundred piastres (£4 2s.) per lb.--and chemically-treated stuff at that; and sugar, which was all but unobtainable by anybody, cost three hundred piastres per lb.! Within a week of our arrival you could buy both commodities in the shops at about twenty piastres and five piastres per lb. respectively.
But distress and suffering were not confined to Beyrout alone. On the pleasant hills of Lebanon north of the town are numerous villages through which the Turks had swept like a plague. Here the policy had been not so much starvation as extermination: whole villages were stripped of their inhabitants, who had been forcibly carried away, the men to slavery or death; the women to something worse. You could ride through village after village without seeing a soul, save perhaps an old man who would tell you that he was keeping the keys of the houses for their owners--who would never return. It is impossible to describe the pall of desolation that hung over those silent villages, a desolation that seemed to be accentuated by the beauty of the surrounding country.
Upwards of a quarter of a million people were either deported or massacred by the Turks in the Lebanon hills alone; and only in the villages occupied by Circassians, whom the Turks themselves had subsidised, were there any signs of even moderate prosperity. These people, moreover, showed marked hostility towards our troops, and had to be suppressed.
When the 7th Division left Beyrout in the middle of October to march farther north to Tripoli the situation was considerably easier. Foodships had arrived, and arrangements had been made for regular supplies to be given to the people, though at first they needed medical aid rather than food, so weakened were they by long privation and want. The chief difficulty in the distribution of supplies was the shortage of labour, for the advance had been so rapid that it had quite outdistanced the administrative branches of the service. Half a dozen R.A.S.C. clerks and a small party of the Egyptian Labour Corps, assisted by the "Camels," toiled night and day at the docks: we were dock-labourers, stevedores, and transport all in one. The fact that Beyrout was the only real port in the whole country nearer than Port Said did not tend to relieve the strain, for the natural disadvantages of Jaffa as a port prevented its being utilised to the full, while Haifa, although it possesses a magnificent harbour, had not as yet enough accommodation for ships.