At dawn, Yale saw that his fears were misplaced, that Damascus still stood; the Turks and Germans had only been blowing up their ammunition and fuel storage depots before they fled the city.
Quite by chance, Yale and de Sambouy had camped that night beside the same band of journalists who had disappeared on them at General Headquarters on the eve of the offensive, and for some time that morning the reunited campmates discussed among themselves whether it might be safe to venture down into Damascus. The matter was rather decided when Yale, having briefly gone in search of water for coffee, returned to discover that the journalists had ditched them once again. “Where a correspondent goes,” he told de Sambouy, “an attaché can go.” Jumping in the Model T, they made for the city.
They were plunged into a riotous celebration. In the streets, joyous crowds of Damascenes sang and danced and beat on drums, and as Arab warriors on horses and camels fired their rifles into the air, women on overhead balconies showered them all with rose petals. The deeper the attachés ventured toward the city center, the more delirious the scenes became. “Pandemonium reigned,” Yale recalled. “I, who had lived nearly three years in Palestine under the strain and in fear of the Turks, could share the madness of the Arabs with the added exhilaration of being one of the host of deliverers.… We were invited into people’s homes and had wines and sweetmeats urged upon us. It was a wild hectic day, the like of which a man is fortunate to experience but once in a lifetime.”
Lawrence was also experiencing the madness of Damascus that day, if to much weightier effect. Far earlier than the journalists or the attachés, he and Stirling had set off for the city in the “Blue Mist,” only to be detained for several hours by an Indian army guard suspicious of their Arab headdresses. The delay nearly proved disastrous, for when Lawrence finally reached Damascus city hall, the gathering point for the Arab rebel leaders coming into the city, he discovered something of a coup in progress.
As Faisal’s lieutenants at city hall had set to establishing a provisional government that morning, they had been joined by two men who claimed to have already done so the night before; what’s more, these interlopers maintained, they were King Hussein’s rightful representatives in Damascus. Lawrence knew the two men well: they were Abd el Kader, the Algerian traitor who had nearly gotten him killed at Yarmuk, and his brother, Mohammed Said. Within a few minutes, the brothers and their followers left city hall, but in hindsight probably wished they hadn’t. In their absence, Lawrence summarily dismissed their claim to authority and appointed another man, Shukri Pasha el-Ayubi, as the interim Damascus military governor.
Lawrence’s timing was impeccable for, just minutes later, General Henry Chauvel, the Australian commander of the EEF’s Desert Mounted Corps, showed up at city hall. As the first senior EEF commander to enter Damascus, Chauvel was under instructions from Allenby to find the wali, the Turkish-appointed governor, and ask him to temporarily continue running the city. Instead, at city hall Chauvel was met by Lawrence, who quickly led him to Shukri Pasha. “I understood that this official was the Wali,” Chauvel subsequently reported to Allenby, “and I issued him instructions through Lt. Col. Lawrence to carry on the civil administration of the city, and informed him that I would find any military guards and police that he required.” Quite completing this sleight of hand, Chauvel then asked Lawrence “to assist in these matters, because I had no Political Officer at the moment at my disposal.”
What it meant was that in one deft move, Lawrence had established the legitimacy of his personally chosen Arab “government” in the eyes of the EEF military authorities. It also meant that for the next crucial few days, he would be the de facto ruler of Damascus, able to draw on EEF troops if needed, able to direct the Arabs through the “office” of the military governor as required.
His first order of business was to neutralize the continuing threat posed by Abd el Kader and Mohammed Said. Summoning the brothers to city hall, he informed them that their government had been abolished, and named a number of Faisal loyalists to positions of authority in its place. After a tense confrontation that almost led to knifeplay, Lawrence recounted, “Mohammed Said and Abd el Kader then went away, breathing vengeance against me as a Christian.” Shortly afterward, Lawrence had EEF troops called out to quell looting that was occurring in several parts of the city.
Late that afternoon, with some degree of calm restored and Faisal loyalists now in control, Lawrence dropped by Chauvel’s office to allow that perhaps there’d been some misunderstanding at their earlier meeting, that Shukri Pasha was not in fact the Damascus wali, but rather Lawrence’s own very recent appointee. But if this was couched as a clarification, Lawrence was also presenting Chauvel with a dare; with Damascus still a very tense place, the general could either accept the current arrangement or come up with his own idea and risk the consequences. Henry Chauvel already disliked Lawrence, but apparently disliked the prospect of urban insurrection even more; that evening, Lawrence was able to send his own cable off to Allenby’s headquarters announcing that Chauvel “agrees with my carrying on with the town administration until further instructions.”
This he proceeded to do for the next two days, and with a curious marriage of munificence to severity. Even with looting persisting in certain quarters, municipal work crews were set to restoring the city’s electrical system and waterworks. Garbage was collected, a fire brigade organized, food distributed to the destitute, at the same time that new disturbances in the city center—purportedly the result of another power bid by Abd el Kader and his brother—necessitated a firmer hand. “We called out the Arab troops,” Lawrence blandly noted in his official report, “put Hotchkiss [machine guns] round the central square, and imposed peace in three hours after inflicting about twenty casualties.”
Given their very different roles, it’s not surprising that the paths of T. E. Lawrence and William Yale intersected just once during those tumultuous days in Damascus. It’s also understandable, given the weight of issues he was dealing with, that Lawrence would have no memory of their meeting; Yale sought him out in order to complain about the looting of some shops owned by American citizens. Yet the two would ultimately be joined by a shared experience in Damascus. It was a place of such unspeakable horror that both would be forever scarred by it, a place known simply as “the Turkish hospital.”
ON THE MORNING of October 2, an Australian officer approached William Yale in the lobby of his Damascus hotel to ask if he had seen “the Turkish hospital.” Not familiar with the site, Yale was given directions to a compound near the railway station, and he and Major de Sambouy soon made for it.
It was actually a Turkish army barracks fronted by a large parade ground. Once past the two Australian sentries at the front gate, Yale recalled, “we crossed the vacant parade ground without seeing a person, climbed the steps and entered what was a charnel house.”
The Turks had converted the barracks into a makeshift military hospital, but had abandoned it on September 29 amid their general exodus from the city, leaving behind some eight hundred wounded or diseased men. In the intervening three days, those men had been set upon by Arab marauders who had stripped the place bare of food and medicine, even tossing many of the invalids onto the floor in their search for concealed valuables. Other than posting sentries at the front gate, the Australian detachment that had pitched camp nearby had done nothing for the desperate and dying patients, neglecting even to bring them water.
“The floors were slimy with human offal,” Yale recounted, “hundreds of men lay in small soiled hospital cots everywhere. The dead, the wounded, the sick [were] lying side by side in their own filth, save for the corpses on the floor and those who, writhing in agony, had fallen off their cots.… Most of them suffered in silence; some moaned, others cried to us pitifully, their tragic eyes filled with terror, following us as we walked the length of the room.”
Somehow compounding the horror, in a small alcove above the main floor Yale and de Sambouy found three
nurse-orderlies mutely sitting about a table drinking coffee. “My impression was that they were badly frightened, hopeless beings who, faced with a horrible and impossible situation, had lost all capacity to act. They sat drinking coffee in a hell beyond the ken of one’s imagination.” Seeing enough, the attachés fled the barracks building and set out in search of someone in authority—although just what constituted authority that day in Damascus was not completely clear.
T. E. Lawrence learned of the Turkish hospital that same afternoon, and also made for it. He found a scene very much as Yale described, although, in his more accomplished hand, the macabre details would be far more graphically rendered: rats had gnawed “wet red galleries” into the bodies of the dead, many of which “were already swollen twice or thrice life-width, their fat heads laughing with black mouth.… Of others the softer parts were fallen in. A few had burst open, and were liquescent with decay.”
Venturing deep into the room, Lawrence charted a path between the dead and dying, “holding my white skirts about me [so as] not to dip my bare feet in their puddled running, when suddenly I heard a sigh.” Turning, he met the gaze of a still-living man, who whispered, “Aman, aman (pity).” That call was quickly joined by others, and then by a “brown waver” as some of the men tried to raise beseeching hands—“a thin fluttering like withered leaves”—before they fell back again. “No one of them had strength to speak,” Lawrence recalled, “but there was something which made me laugh at their whispering in unison, as if by command.”
In Lawrence’s telling, he immediately took command of the hideous situation. Finding a group of Turkish doctors idly sitting in an upstairs room, he ordered them down to the sick ward. Refused help from the adjacent Australian encampment, he instead had Arab troops bring food and water, then press-ganged a group of Turkish prisoners to dig a mass grave for the dead. Even here, though, Lawrence couldn’t resist the gruesome detail. “The trench was small for them,” he noted of the men being buried, “but so fluid was the mass that each newcomer, when tipped in, fell softly, just jellying out the edges of the pile a little with his weight.”
In his own effort to address the tragedy at the Turkish hospital, Yale eventually tracked down the recently arrived Gilbert Clayton. Over the course of their dealings in Cairo, Yale had developed a keen distaste for the brigadier general, finding him a cold and hard man, and nothing in Clayton’s manner at their meeting on the night of October 2 changed that view. After hearing out the attaché’s impassioned plea for something to be done, Clayton calmly said, “Yale, you’re not a military man.” Seeing the rage building in Yale’s eyes, he then added, “You need not be offended; I’m not a soldier either.”
So deeply did the Turkish hospital incident affect Lawrence and Yale that it would dominate the one dialogue they were to have in the postwar era, an exchange of letters in 1929. While Yale’s initiating letter has been lost, he clearly pressed Lawrence for details on the subject, considering that fully a third of Lawrence’s handwritten reply—some four hundred words—was devoted to explaining his own actions at the hospital. The episode would also figure prominently in both men’s memoirs and, in the process, offer an intriguing glimpse into their very different personalities.
For William Yale, the guilt he felt over the Turkish hospital was to make for perhaps the most heartfelt and anguished passage in his manuscript. “Nothing I did during the whole war period do I regret so deeply and with such shame as my failure to use my position wisely and calmly to alleviate the atrocious suffering of those eight hundred men. May their curses be upon my head.” But self-recrimination was never one of Yale’s strong suits, and after just two more sentences, he’d settled on a new culprit to blame. “I lay this horror at the door of European imperialism, to be added to the multitude of crimes already committed in its name.”
As might be expected, Lawrence’s description in Seven Pillars, in addition to being far more visceral, was also—perhaps unconsciously—far more self-revelatory. By that account, Lawrence returned to the hospital the next day to find conditions vastly improved as a result of his efforts, only to be confronted by an irate Australian major. Clad in his Arab robes, Lawrence didn’t bother to identify himself as a lieutenant colonel, even when the junior officer demanded to know who was in charge of the still-ghastly scene. When Lawrence acknowledged he was in charge, the Australian major spat “bloody brute,” slapped Lawrence across the face, and stormed off.
If that is a rather peculiar passage to appear on the penultimate page of a 660-page book that has as its subtitle “A Triumph,” there is also something about the moment that somehow rings a bit false; as with some of the Tafas details, it feels just a little too neat, too much of a stage-play coda. Yet, fictional or not, that major’s slap served a great function, for it left Lawrence “more ashamed than angry, for in my heart I felt he was right, and that anyone who pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their masters must come out of it so stained in estimation that, afterward, nothing in the world would make him feel clean.”
For the remainder of his life, Lawrence was to feel stained by what he had seen and done during the war, and in his struggle to ever “feel clean” again, repeatedly looked to self-abnegation and violence against himself—violence far worse than a major’s slap—as recompense for his sins.
THE MEETING TOOK place in a second-floor stateroom of the finest hotel in Damascus, the Victoria, on the afternoon of October 3. Just eight men were present: on the British side, Generals Allenby and Chauvel, together with their chiefs of staff; on the Arab side, Faisal ibn Hussein, his chief of staff, Nuri Said, and Sherif Nasir of Medina. Acting as intermediary and interpreter was T. E. Lawrence. Despite its profound importance—in that stateroom much of the future history, and tragedy, of the Middle East was to be set in motion—no official record was kept.
General Allenby had arrived in the Syrian capital just hours earlier. Never the most patient of men, he was in a particularly cantankerous mood that day. With his offensive still ongoing—his vanguard was continuing a relentless pursuit of the Turks as they fled north—he’d been forced to take time away from his martial duties to sort out the increasingly nettlesome political situation in Damascus. As a result, when informed that Faisal, arriving on a three o’clock train from Deraa, would be slow in reaching the Victoria on account of his planned triumphal entry into the city on horseback, Allenby had thundered, “Triumphal entry be damned,” and ordered Faisal to be brought to the hotel at once.
Although the general may not have been fully aware of it—or more likely was too distracted to care—the astounding initial success of his Palestinian offensive had caused the French government to frantically reassert their claims to Syria as codified in the Sykes-Picot Agreement; on September 23, the British government had largely acquiesced to their demands. The result was that two days later Allenby received a set of instructions from the Foreign Office so obtuse as to be nearly nonsensical. After stating that “the British Government adhere to their declared policy with regard to Syria, namely that should it fall into the sphere of interest of any European Power, that Power should be France,” the September 25 instructions reminded Allenby that under the terms of Sykes-Picot, “you will notice that France and Britain undertake to uphold jointly the independence of any Arab State that may be set up in Area (A)”—meaning Syria. From these two seemingly opposed clauses arose an appropriately muddled proposed course of action, that “if General Allenby advances to Damascus, it would be most desirable that, in conformity with the Anglo-French Agreement of 1916 he should, if possible, work through an Arab administration by means of a French liaison.”
With London apparently deciding these instructions weren’t sufficiently baffling, they were followed on October 1 by a second set that rather settled the matter. Now Allenby was told that since “the belligerent status of the Arabs fighting for the liberation of their territories from Turkish rule” had been recognized by the Allied powers, “the regions so l
iberated [by the Arabs] should properly be treated as Allied territory enjoying the status of an independent State (or confederation of States) of friendly Arabs.” A sudden burst of clarity, perhaps, except this statement was followed by the curious rider that should “the Arab authorities [in Syria] request the assistance or advice of European functionaries, we are bound under the Anglo-French Agreement to let these be French.” In essence, it appeared Sykes-Picot was being invoked to annul and uphold the accord simultaneously, the intent changing from one sentence to the next.
In first hearing of this hash at the Victoria Hotel, Lawrence undoubtedly felt a note of alarm. It was his understanding that Sykes-Picot was a dead letter, and had been for quite some time; for it to return to the conversation now for any purpose was ominous. On the positive side, Allenby’s instructions explicitly recognized the Arab claim to Syrian independence, and since Faisal had no intention of asking for European assistance or advice—that had been the whole point of establishing an interim government—it surely meant the rider about a French liaison officer was moot.
But matters were about to take a very ugly turn—or rather, a series of ugly turns. As recounted by General Chauvel, Allenby announced that Faisal actually didn’t have any choice in the matter, that France was to be the “protecting power” of Syria. Additionally, even though Faisal, as his father’s representative, “was to have the administration of Syria”—albeit “under French guidance and financial backing”—that administration didn’t extend to either Palestine or Lebanon, but “would include the hinterland of Syria only.” “Hinterland” was truly the operative word since, as Faisal was further informed, the boundaries of Lebanon had now been demarcated as the entire Mediterranean coastline from Palestine to the Gulf of Alexandretta, making Syria a landlocked nation. As a final insult, Allenby told Faisal that he would be immediately assigned a French liaison officer, “who would work for the present with Lawrence, who would be expected to give him every assistance.”
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