Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

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.