XXVII
The war was over. Lawrence went on to Kiswe, where the Australians were waiting for Barrow to join them. He did not stop long, for Allenby had allowed him and Feisal a single night in which to restore order in Damascus before the British entry. The Ruwalla horse was sent in at dusk to find Ali Riza, the governor, and to ask him to take charge of things. Ali Riza who, as chairman of the committee of freedom, had long been prepared to form an Arab government when the Turks finally left, was away, put by the Turks in command of the army retreating from Galilee. But Shukri, his assistant, was there and with unexpected help, as will be related, set up the Arab flag on the Town Hall as the last Turkish and German troops marched out. It is said that the hindmost general saluted it ironically.
Four thousand Ruwalla tribesmen were sent in to help Shukri keep order. All that night huge explosions were heard from the town, and showers of flame shot up. Lawrence thought that Damascus was being destroyed. But dawn showed him the beautiful city still standing: it had only been the Germans blowing up the ammunition dumps and stores. A horseman galloped out with a bunch of yellow grapes, a token from Shukri, crying: ‘Good news: Damascus salutes you.’ Lawrence, who was in the Rolls-Royce, gave Nasir the tidings. Nasir’s fifty battles since the Revolt began in Medina two and a half years back had earned him the right of first entry. So Lawrence gave him a fair start with the Emir Nuri while he stopped to wash and shave at a wayside brook. Some Indian troopers again mistook him and his party for Turks and tried to take them prisoners. When delivered from arrest Lawrence drove on up the long central street to the Government buildings.
The way was packed with people crowded solid on either side of the car, at the windows, on the balconies and housetops. Many were crying, some cheered faintly, a few bolder ones cried out greetings. But for the most part, there came little more than a whisper like a long sigh from the gate of the city to the city’s heart. At the Town Hall there was greater liveliness. The steps and stairs were packed with a swaying mob yelling, embracing, dancing, singing. They recognized Lawrence and crushed back to let him pass.
In the antechamber he found Nasir and the Emir Nuri seated. On either side of these stood—Lawrence was dumb with amazement at the sight—his old enemy the Algerian Abd el Kader who had betrayed him on the Yarmuk raid, and Mohammed Said, the assassin, his brother. Mohammed Said leaped forward and said that he and his brother, grandsons of the famous Abd el Kader, Emir of Algiers, had, with Shukri, formed the government the previous afternoon and proclaimed Hussein ‘Emperor of the Arabs’ in the ears of the humbled Turks and Germans. Lawrence turned inquiringly to Shukri, an honest man beloved in Damascus and almost a martyr in the people’s eyes for what he had suffered at Jemal’s hands. Shukri told how these two alone of all Damascus had stood by the Turks until they saw them running. Then with their Algerian retainers they had burst in on Shukri’s committee where it sat in secret and brutally assumed control.
Lawrence determined with Nasir’s help to check their impudence at once. But a diversion interrupted him. The yelling crowd was parted as if by a battering ram; men went flying right and left among ruined chairs and tables while a familiar voice roared them to silence. It was Auda, in a dog-fight with the chief of the Druses. Lawrence and Mohammed el Dheilan sprang forward and broke the two apart. They forced Auda back while somebody else hustled the Druse chief into a side room. Auda, with bleeding face and his long hair streaming over his eyes, was too blind with rage to know what was happening. They held him down in a gilt chair in the great pompous state-hall, where he shouted till his voice cracked. His body was twitching and jerking, his hands reached wildly for any weapon within reach. The Druse had hit him first and he swore to wipe out the insult in blood. Zaal and one or two more came in to help. It was an hour before they could calm Auda down and get him to promise to postpone his vengeance for three days.
Lawrence went out and had the Druse chief secretly and speedily removed from the city. When he returned Nasir and Abd el Kader had gone off. There remained Shukri. Lawrence took him out in the Rolls-Royce to show him off as acting-Governor to the delighted city. The streets were more crowded than ever. Damascus went mad with joy. The men tossed up their red felt hats, the women tore off their veils. Householders threw flowers, hangings, carpets into the road before the car. Their wives leaned out, screaming with laughter, through the harem-lattices, splashing Lawrence and Shukri with bath-dippers of scent. Dervishes ran before and behind, howling and cutting themselves with frenzy, while a measured chant rose from the men of the crowd: ‘Feisal, Nasir, Shukri, Aurans,’ rolling in waves round the city. Chauvel, like Barrow, had no instructions as to what to do with the captured city and was relieved when Lawrence told him that an Arab government was appointed. But Lawrence begged him to keep his Australians out of Damascus that night, because there would be such a carnival as the city had not seen for six hundred years and Arab hospitality might pervert the troops’ discipline. Chauvel agreed, and asked if it would be convenient to make a formal entry the next day. Lawrence said: ‘Certainly.’
While they were discussing ceremonial antics there was enormously more important work waiting inside and outside the city for both of them. Lawrence felt ashamed to be spoiling Chauvel’s entry in this rather low-down way, but the political importance of winning the game of grab justified everything. Now he hurried off to the Town Hall to find Abd el Kader and his brother, but they had not returned, and when he sent a messenger to their house he received only a curt reply that they were sleeping. So should Lawrence have been, but instead he was eating a snatch meal with the Emir Nuri, Shukri and others, seated on gold chairs at a gold table in the gaudy banquet-hall. He told the messenger that the Algerians must come at once or they would be fetched: the messenger ran off hurriedly.
The old Emir asked quietly what Lawrence meant to do. He answered that he would dismiss Abd el Kader and his brother. The Emir asked whether he would call in English troops. Lawrence answered that he might have to do so, but the trouble was that afterwards they might not go. The Emir thought a moment and said, ‘You shall have the Ruwalla to do all you want to do, and at once.’ He ran out to muster his tribe. The Algerians came to the Town Hall with their body-guards, murder in their eyes, but on the way met the Ruwalla tribesmen massed under their Emir; and Nuri Said with his Arab regulars in the Square; and in the Town Hall itself Lawrence’s reckless body-guard lounging in the antechamber. They saw that the game was up; but it was a stormy meeting.
Lawrence speaking as Feisal’s deputy pronounced their government abolished. He named Shukri as acting Military Governor until Ali Riza’s return. Nuri Said was to be Commandant of Troops, and he appointed also a Chief of Public Security and an Adjutant-General. Mohammed Said in a bitter reply denounced Lawrence as a Christian and an Englishman; he called on Nasir, whom he and his brother had been entertaining and who knew nothing of Abd el Kader’s treacheries, to assert himself. Nasir did not understand this falling out of his friends: he could only sit and look miserable. Abd el Kader leaped up and cursed Lawrence, working himself up to a fanatic passion. Lawrence paid no attention at all. This maddened Abd el Kader even more. Suddenly he went for Lawrence with a drawn dagger.
Like a flash old Auda was on him, still boiling with fury from the morning’s insult and longing for a fight. Lawrence he loved and trusted as much as he loathed the traitor Abd el Kader. It would have been heaven for the old man to have torn the Algerian limb from limb with his great hands. Again he was pulled away. Abd el Kader was frightened, and the Emir Nuri closed the debate in his short dry way by saying that the Ruwalla were at Lawrence’s service, and no questions asked. The Algerians rose and angrily swept out of the hall. Lawrence was convinced that they should be seized and shot, but he did not want to set the Arabs a bad example of political murder on the first day of their government.
He set about helping Shukri and the rest to organize the government of the city and province. He knew that the change from war to peace was an ungracious one; rebels, especially successful rebels, were necessarily bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal’s unhappy duty would be to rid himself of most of his war-friends and replace them by the officials who had been most useful to the Turkish Government. These were the solid steady people who had been too unimaginative to rebel and who would work for an Arab government as solidly and steadily as they had for the Turks. Nasir did not realize this, but Nuri Said and the Emir Nuri knew it well.
Quickly they collected a staff and began to take the necessary administrative steps. A police force. The water-supply (for the city-conduit was foul with dead men and animals). The electric light supply; most important, for to have the street-lights working again would be the most obvious sign that peace had come at last—it was successfully working that night. Sanitation; the streets and squares were full of the strewn relics of the Turkish retreat, broken carts, baggage, dead animals, typhus and dysentery corpses. Nuri Said appointed scavengers to clear up and distributed his few doctors among the hospitals, promising drugs and stores next day if any were to be had. A fire-brigade; the local fire-engines had been smashed by the Germans and the storehouses were still on fire, but volunteers were sent to blow up houses around the fires to keep the flames from spreading farther. The prisons; warders and prisoners had vanished together, so Shukri proclaimed a general amnesty. Civil disturbance; they must gradually disarm the citizens or at least persuade them not to carry rifles in the street. Relief-work; the destitute had been half-starved for days, so the damaged food rescued from the burning storehouses was distributed among them.
The general food-supply; there were no food-stocks in Damascus and starvation would follow in two days if steps were not taken at once. It would be easy to get temporary supplies from the near villages if confidence were restored, the roads safeguarded and the transport animals (carried off by the Turks) replaced by others from the general pool of captures. The British refused to share out, so the Arab army had to give the city all its own transport animals. The railway; for the future food-supply. Pointsmen, drivers, firemen, shopmen, traffic-staff had to be found and re-engaged immediately. The telegraph-system; the lines had to be repaired and directors appointed. Finance; the Australians had looted millions of pounds in Turkish notes, the only currency in use, and reduced it to no value by throwing it about. One trooper had given a boy a five-hundred pound note for holding his horse for three minutes. What was left of the British gold from Akaba was used to stabilize the currency at a low rate of exchange; but new prices then had to be fixed and this meant setting up a printing press.
Then a newspaper was demanded, to restore public confidence. Then Chauvel demanded forage for his forty thousand horses. He had to be given it, for otherwise he would be compelled to seize what he needed by main force. The Arabs could expect little mercy from Chauvel and the fate of Syria’s freedom depended on his being satisfied. Three Arabic-speaking British officers who had been on the Akaba expedition with Lawrence helped him and Shukri and the rest with all this hasty organization. Lawrence’s aim had been to run up a façade rather than a whole well-fitted building, but so furiously well had the work of that evening been done that when he left Damascus three days later the Syrians had a government which endured for two years without foreign advice, in an occupied country wasted by war, and against the will of at least one of the occupying Allies.
Lawrence writes then:
‘Later I was sitting alone in my room working and thinking out as firm a way as the turbulent memories of the day allowed, when the muezzins began to send their call of last prayer through the moist night over the illuminations of the feasting city. One, with a ringing voice of special sweetness, cried into my window from a near mosque. I found myself involuntarily distinguishing his words: “God alone is great: I testify that there are no gods but God: and Mohammed is his Prophet. Come to prayer: come to security. God alone is great: there is no god—but God.”
‘At the close he dropped his voice two tones, almost to speaking level, and softly added: “And He is very good to us this day, O people of Damascus.” The clamour hushed, as every one seemed to obey the call to prayer on this their first night of perfect freedom.’
It is with this passage that Lawrence closes the popular abridged version of his great Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But almost dishonestly, for there followed this further sentence:
‘While my fancy, in the overwhelming pause, showed me my loneliness and lack of reason in their movement: since only for me, of all the hearers, was the event sorrowful and the phrase meaningless.’
He is referring, I think, both to the extinction of that strong personal motive that kept him alive through the almost incredible hardships of his task, and to the shame he felt for deceiving the Arabs with what still seemed the hollowest of frauds.