When Allenby's Egyptian Expeditionary Force entered Jerusalem in December 1917, the British Army discovered it needed a primer. Rev. Henry Sykes, M.A. - a Church Missionary Society veteran of Palestine since 1886, expelled by the Ottomans in December 1914 - supplied one. A Soldier's Handbook is exactly what its title promises: a haversack-sized guide to the country a soldier might find himself crossing, organised around the salient points of geography, biblical history, and present-day life. Part I covers the four strips of the land - Maritime Plain, Western Range, Jordan Valley, Eastern Range - village by village, ruin by ruin. Part II, added between editions, traces the Roman, Caliphate, Seljuk, Crusader, and Ottoman periods that produced what the soldier was now walking over. Sykes wrote with George Adam Smith's endorsement and the working pace of a war pamphlet - three editions in 1918, profits to relief funds. The result is a candid artefact of the moment Britain entered Palestine as an occupying power.
A Soldier's Handbook: Palestine and Jerusalem is a pocket guide of roughly one hundred pages, written by an English clergyman with three decades' acquaintance with the country, addressed to British troops who in 1918 were finding themselves marching across ground most of them knew only from Sunday-school lessons. It belongs to a recognisable wartime genre - the chaplain's primer, the gazetteer cut down for the haversack - but it is unusually disciplined for its kind. Sykes had been Secretary of the Palestine Mission of the Church Missionary Society and had lived in the country from 1886 until the Ottoman authorities expelled him with other enemy subjects in December 1914. He wrote with George Adam Smith's manuscript endorsement and with the Cambridge Hebraist C. W. Moule, Senior Fellow of Corpus Christi College, reading proof. The result is compressed, opinionated, and unembarrassed about its premises. The book is organised in two parts, with two folding maps - one of Palestine, one of the Near East - bound at front and back. Part I, the original 1918 text, covers the country itself: boundaries, the four-strip geographical schema (Maritime Plain, Western Range, Jordan Valley, Eastern Range), Palestine as world highway, as world battle-ground, as land of the Crusades, and as it stood on the ground in 1918 - present population, religions, industries, agriculture. Part II, written as an afterthought between editions, sets that country into chronological context: Palestine and Rome, the Caliphates, Asia Minor and the Seljuks, the Crusaders' routes, Egypt, the Crusader kingdoms, and the present day. A Table of Dates, an Index of Names, and an Index of Scripture References close the volume. The world it came from was the one Allenby's force had just opened. Jerusalem fell to British troops on 9 December 1917; Sykes signed his first preface in Cambridge that same month. Three editions appeared within the following year, each printed by Hodder and Stoughton in London, New York, and Toronto, with profits during the war assigned to relief funds for sailors, soldiers, and prisoners of war. The book sits inside a small library of contemporaneous works - Cyril Falls's later official history, Archibald Wavell's campaign narrative, the political correspondence collected after the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 - but Sykes is interested in none of those questions directly. His project is narrower and more practical: to put a usable map of the land into a soldier's pocket, supply him with the Bible references that explain what he is looking at, and tell him how to behave around the people he will meet there.
