XXVIII
He went to sleep, for the first time for days, but was almost immediately aroused by news that Abd el Kader was making rebellion. He sent word across to Nuri Said, glad that the mad fellow was digging his own grave. Abd el Kader had summoned his retainers, told them that the members of the new government were merely the tools of the English and called on them to strike a blow for religion while there was yet time. The simple Algerians had taken his word that it was so and run to arms. They were joined by the Druses, who were angry that Lawrence had sharply refused to reward them for their services; they had joined the Revolt too late to be of any real use. Algerians and Druses together began to burst open shops and to riot.
Lawrence and Nuri Said waited until dawn, then moved men to the upper suburbs and swept the rioters towards the river-districts of the centre of the city. Here machine-guns kept a constant barrage of fire along the river-front, aimed merely at blank walls but impossible to pass. Mohammed Said was captured and gaoled; Abd el Kader fled back to his Yarmuk village. The Druses were expelled from the city, leaving horses and rifles in the hands of the Damascus citizens enrolled for the emergency as civic guards. By noon everything was quiet and the street traffic became normal again with the pedlars hawking, as before, sweetmeats, iced drinks, flowers and little crimson Arab flags.
When the fighting began Lawrence had called up Chauvel on the telephone and he had at once offered troops. Lawrence thanked him and asked for a second company of horse to be added to the company already stationed at the principal Turkish Barracks; to stand by in case of need. But they were not needed. The only startling effect was on the war-correspondents. They were in a hotel, the blank wall of which was the stop-block of one of the barrages, and began telegraphing home without sufficient caution the wild stories that were flying about.
Allenby, still in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, asked Lawrence to confirm their reports of wholesale massacre. He sent back a death-roll naming the five victims and the hurts of the ten wounded.
He returned to the organization of public services. The Spanish Consul called officially; he was representing the interests of seventeen nationalities and had been vainly searching for some responsible governing body with which to deal. Lawrence was glad of the opportunity of using such international channels for spreading the authority of a Government which he had audaciously appointed on his own initiative. At midday an Australian doctor appeared, imploring Lawrence for the sake of humanity to take notice of the Turkish hospital. Lawrence ran over in his mind the three hospitals in Arab charge, the military, the civil, the missionary, and told him that they were as well cared for as they could be. The Arabs could not invent drugs and Chauvel could not let them have any of his. The doctor went on to describe a huge range of filthy buildings without a single medical officer or orderly, packed with dead and dying; mainly dysentery cases, but at least some typhoid; and it was to be hoped, no typhus or cholera.
Lawrence wondered if he could mean the Turkish barracks where the two Australian companies were stationed. He asked whether there were sentries at the gates. ‘Yes, that’s the place,’ said the doctor, ‘but it’s full of Turkish sick.’ Lawrence walked there at once and parleyed with the Australian guard. At last his English accent got him past the little lodge, and a garden filled with two hundred wretched prisoners in exhaustion and despair. He stood at the great door of the barrack and called up the dusty echoing corridors.
Nobody answered. The guard had told him that thousands of prisoners had yesterday gone from here to a camp beyond the city. Since then no one had come in or out. He walked over to a shuttered lobby and stepped in. There was a sickening stench and a heap of dead bodies laid out on the stone floor, some in uniform, some naked. A few were corpses of no more than a day or two old; some had been there for days. Beyond was a great ward from which he thought he heard a groan. He walked down the room between the beds, lifting his white silk skirts off the filthy floor. It seemed that every bed held a dead man; but as he went forward there was a stir as several tried to raise their hands. Not one of them had strength to speak, but the dry whisper ‘Pity, pity’ came in unison.
Lawrence ran into the garden where the Australians had picketed their horses and asked for a working party. They could not help him. Kirkbride, the young English officer who had been with Lawrence since Tafileh and had been foremost in suppressing the Abd el Kader rebellion, came to help. He had heard that Turkish doctors were upstairs. He burst open a door and found seven men in nightgowns sitting on unmade beds in a great room, boiling toffee. Lawrence impressed on these Turks that the dead must be at once sorted from the living and a list of the numbers presented to him in half an hour’s time. Kirkbride, a tall fellow with heavy boots and a ready revolver, was a suitable overseer of this duty.
Lawrence then found Ali Riza, now back again from the Turks and appointed Governor, asking him to detail one of the four Arab Army doctors to take charge of the place. When the doctor arrived the fifty fittest prisoners of the lodge were pressed to act as a labour party and set in the backyard to dig a common grave. It was cruelty to work men so tired and ill, but haste gave Lawrence no choice. The doctor reported fifty-six dead, two hundred dying, seven hundred not dangerously ill. A stretcher party was formed, but before the work was done two of their bodies were added to the heap of dead men in the pit. The Australians protested that it was no fit place for a grave; the smell might drive them from their garden.... Lawrence found quicklime to cover the bodies. Before the work was finished it was midnight, and Lawrence went off to his hotel, leaving Kirkbride to finish the burying and close the pit.
Lawrence then slept—for four days he had only allowed himself three hours’ sleep—and in the morning everything in Damascus seemed to have cleared up wonderfully. The tramcars were running, the shops open, grain and vegetables and fruit were coming in well from outside. The streets were being watered to lay the terrible dust, though no surface treatment would remedy the damage of three years’ heavy lorry traffic. Lawrence was particularly glad to see numbers of British troops sightseeing unarmed in the city. The telegraph was restored with Palestine and Beyrout. He was sorry to hear that the Arabs had seized Beyrout the night before, for as long ago as the Wejh operations he had warned them, when they took Damascus, to leave Beyrout and the Lebanon to the French, but to take the port of Tripoli, fifty miles north, instead. Still, he was glad to think that they felt themselves grown-up enough to disobey him.
Even the hospital was better. The fifty prisoners, now called ‘orderlies,’ had cleaned up the litter and rubbish. Others had gone through the wards, lifting and washing each patient. One ward had been cleared of beds, brushed out and sprinkled with disinfectant, and the less serious cases were about to be transferred here for their ward to be cleaned in turn. At this rate three days would have seen the place in fairly good order.
Lawrence was arranging other improvements when an Army Medical Corps major strode up and asked him shortly whether he spoke English. ‘Yes,’ said Lawrence. The Major looked with disgust at his skirts and sandals and asked: ‘You’re in charge?’ ‘In a way I am,’ Lawrence answered. ‘Scandalous, disgraceful, outrageous, ought to be shot ...’ the major bellowed. At this sudden attack Lawrence, whose nerves were very ragged, began to laugh hysterically; he had been so proud of himself for having bettered what was apparently past hope. The major had not seen the charnel-house of the day before, nor smelt it, nor helped in the burying of the putrefying corpses. He smacked Lawrence in the face and stalked off.
When Lawrence returned to the hotel he saw large crowds round a familiar grey Rolls-Royce: he ran in and found Allenby. Allenby welcomed him and approved the steps that he had taken for setting up Arab governments at Deraa and Damascus. He confirmed Ali Riza’s appointment as his military governor and regulated the spheres of interest for Feisal and Chauvel. He agreed to take over the barracks-hospital and the railway. In ten minutes all difficulties had slipped away: Allenby’s confidence and decision and kindliness were like a pleasant dream.
Then Feisal’s train arrived from Deraa and the rolling cheers as he came riding up could be heard louder and louder through the windows. He was coming to call on Allenby, and Lawrence was happy to be the interpreter between his two masters at their first meeting. Allenby gave Lawrence, for Feisal, a telegram just received from the British Government ‘recognizing to the Arabs their status as belligerents.’ But nobody knew what it meant in English, let alone in Arabic, so Feisal, smiling but still with tears in his eyes from his welcome by the crowd, put it aside to satisfy the ambition of a year—he thanked Allenby for the trust which had helped his Revolt to victory. ‘They were a strange contrast,’ writes Lawrence—‘Feisal large-eyed, colourless and worn, like a fine dagger; Allenby gigantic and red and merry, fit representative of the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and strong dealing around the world.’
FEISAL JUST AFTER HIS MEETING WITH ALLENBY
Copyright Imperial War Museum
The interview lasted only a few minutes and when Feisal had gone Lawrence made Allenby the first and last request that he had ever made for himself—leave to go away. For a while Allenby would not give it, but Lawrence pointed out how much easier the change from war to peace conditions would be for the Arabs if his influence were removed. Allenby understood and gave his permission and then Lawrence at once realized how sorry he was to be going.
He took leave of his Arab friends. Among those others who came to say good-bye was Chauvel, who thanked Lawrence warmly for all he had done for him. He went off then in a Rolls-Royce. For more than a year after there were groups of his friends hanging about the aerodromes in hope of his return. It rather annoyed the Air Force officers when they landed from a flight that each time a small mob came pressing about the machine, to draw back always disappointed, crying: ‘No Aurans!’