“The people here told us of the hard times they had during the war. they said that first of all they had a plague of typhus. That was followed by a plague of cholera. Then to make matters still worse they has a great plague of locusts. Billions upon billions of these insects flew up from the South in such dense clouds that they darkened the sun, It was the worst locust plague that Palestine had had for hundreds of years. They devoured the crops and made the green fields a desert. They devoured the dead Turkish horses and camels. They even devoured one another. You could see millions of them clawling over the stone walls.”

-Lowell Thomas
“With Allenby in Palestine” (1919)