Lawrence spent the night in Kiswe, only a few miles from Damascus; and the next day he consulted with Nasir and Nuri Shaalan, and “decided to send the Rualla horse galloping into town,” to alert Feisal’s supporters and Ali Riza Pasha, the governor of Damascus, who was a secret supporter of Feisal’s, that the Arab army was on its way. Allenby had told Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Chauvel, who commanded the Desert Mounted Corps, to let the Arabs go into Damascus first if possible, and with that in mind Chauvel had ordered the Australian Mounted Division to swing around the city and cut the railway line leading to Aleppo in the north and to Beirut in the west. During the day British and Arab forces mixed together outside the city, and Lawrence was anxious that an Arab government should be in place before any British troops entered Damascus. That night he succeeded in sending another 4,000 mounted tribesmen into the city, to support the Rualla sheikhs; then he waited, sleepless, through a breathlessly hot night, illuminated by fires and explosions in Damascus as the Germans blew up their ammunition dumps and stores. At dawn he drove to a ridge and looked out over the city, afraid that he would see it in ruins. Instead, he saw a green oasis of silent gardens shrouded in early morning mist, with only a few columns of black smoke rising from the night’s explosions. As he drove down toward the city, through green fields, a single horseman galloped up the road toward him. Seeing Lawrence’s head cloth, the horseman held out “a bunch of yellow grapes, shouting: ‘Good news: Damascus salutes you,’ “ and told him that his friends held the city.
Lawrence had urged Nasir and Nuri Shaalan to ride into the city before him. He was then temporarily halted by an importunate Indian army NCO who attempted to take him prisoner, and finally drove into Damascus along the long boulevard on the west bank of the Barada River toward the government buildings. People were packed solid along the road, on the pavement, on the roofs and balconies of the houses, and at every window. Many shouted Lawrence’s name as they glimpsed the small Englishman in a dark cloak and a white robe and headdress with a golden agal, seated beside his driver in the dusty open Rolls-Royce. “A movement like a breath, in a long sigh from gate to heart of the city, marked our course,” Lawrence wrote, and it was perhaps the proudest moment of his life, the culmination of what had begun just two years earlier when he set out to meet Feisal in the desert.
Whatever pleasure Lawrence may have allowed himself to feel at the taking of Damascus, or at the cheers from those in the crowds who recognized him, was soon erased by the scene that met him at the town hall. The building was mobbed by people dancing, weeping, and shouting for joy; but once he had pushed his way inside to the antechamber, he found a noisy chaos of political rivalry and old feuds boiling over. The leading figures among the Damascenes and the Bedouin were seated at a crowded table, with their followers behind them, all of them armed, all in furious dispute. Seated at the center of the table was Lawrence’s old enemy Abd el Kader and his brother Mohammed Said, on either side of the respected old anti-Turk hero Shukri Pasha el Ayubi, who had been arrested and tortured by Jemal Pasha in 1916. Abd el Kader was shouting at the top of his voice that he, Shukri, and his brother had formed a provisional government and proclaimed Hussein king of the Arabs, even though until yesterday the brothers had been with the Turks. The two brothers had brought their Algerian followers with them and used them to break into the meeting and seize control of it.* Since Lawrence believed that Abd el Kader had betrayed his attempt to destroy the bridge over the Yarmuk and also given the Turks a description of himself that had led to his being stopped at Deraa, he was infuriated; but before he could do anything about it, a furious fight broke out in front of the table, chairs went flying, and a familiar voice shouted in such violent rage that it silenced the whole room. In the center of an angry mob of their followers Auda Abu Tayi and the Druse chieftain Sultan el Atrash, old enemies, tore and clawed at each other until Lawrence “jumped in to drive them apart.” Sultan el Atrash was pushed into another room, while Lawrence dragged Auda, “blind with rage,” into the empty state room of the town hall. Sultan el Atrash had hit Auda in the face with a stick, and Auda was determined “to wash out the insult with Druse blood.” Lawrence managed to calm Auda down, and to hustle Sultan el Atrash out of town. He then decided to make Shukri the temporary military governor of Damascus until Ali Riza Rejabi returned and Feisal arrived and sorted matters out. When he announced this to Abd el Kader and his brother, they “took it rather hard, and had to be sent home,” though not before Abd el Kader “in a white heat of passion” had lunged at Lawrence with a drawn dagger, only to be stopped from using it by the intervention of Auda. Lawrence briefly contemplated having the two brothers arrested and shot, but decided that it would be a mistake to begin Arab rule in Syria with a political execution. The entire town was now in a combination of frenzied celebration and open political agitation, with the two brothers and their Algerian followers clearly bent on seizing control before Feisal or the British reached Damascus.
Triumph: Lawrence, in the Blue Mist, arrives in Damascus.
The arrival of Lieutenant-General Chauvel added to Lawrence’s burdens. Like General Barrow at Deraa, Chauvel was shocked and appalled by the disorder in Damascus, anxious to assert order as quickly as possible, and infuriated to discover that the city appeared to be in the hands of a comparatively junior officer dressed in Arab clothing. Some of Chauvel’s Australian horsemen had entered the city the day before, on October 1, despite Allenby’s order, and Chauvel therefore believed that he, not Lawrence and the Arabs, had taken Damascus. He expected to make “a formal entry” into the city, with a parade the next day; and it is clear enough from Lawrence’s account of their conversation that Lawrence not only attached no great importance to Chauvel’s wish, but was pulling his leg—something that Chauvel no doubt recognized, though he was not amused. He considered himself honor-bound to receive the formal surrender of the city from the wali, the Turkish military governor. Lawrence told him that Shukri Pasha was the man, but did not tell him, until later in the day, that the “original” Turkish wali had fled and that he, Lawrence, had only just appointed Shukri to replace this man. When Chauvel learned this, he felt that he had been tricked, and warned Lawrence that he “could not recognize the King of the Hedjaz in this matter without further instructions.”
In retrospect, it might have been wiser to bring Feisal into Damascus sooner, but there was also something to be said for Lawrence’s idea of keeping him away while the local politicians and the tribesmen fought it out. Feisal’s object was to make his entrance only after Lawrence and those political figures Feisal trusted had (to paraphrase Isaiah 40) prepared the way. The Turks’ neglect of the city had to be put right; an effort had to be made to clean up garbage, round up and disarm the remaining Turkish soldiers, remove the signs of widespread looting and the corpses in the streets, and restore such vital public services as electricity, fire brigades, and hospitals. Above all, the activities of Abd el Kader and Mohammed Said, now amounting to a small-scale rebellion, had to be dealt with, since they were exhorting people to reject a government contaminated by its relationship with a Christian power—the British. The fact that Syria was going to be taken by the French was not yet widely known.
On October 2, Chauvel marched some of his troops into the city and placed a company of Australian light horsemen at the railway station and the town hall. Their presence was enough to restore a certain degree of order to the city, though it left Lawrence with the problem of finding forage for 40,000 horses. Still, the political situation remained obscure. Ali Riza Rejabi, a more energetic figure altogether, replaced Shukri as military governor, and promptly sided with Abd el Kader and his brother. Lawrence thought this was likely to give rise to trouble with both the British and the French.
That evening, as Lawrence heard the muezzins recite the call to evening prayer, he thought about the falseness of his position: “I had been born free, and a stranger to those whom I had led for two years, and tonight it seemed that I had given them al
l my gift, this false liberty drawn down to them by spells and wickedness, and nothing was left me but to go away.” His departure would be sooner than he may have expected. In the meantime, Abd el Kader and his brother Mohammed Said staged their rebellion at midnight, encouraging their followers and dissident Druses to arm themselves and “burst open shops.” At first light, Mohammed Said was arrested, but Abd el Kader fled into the countryside, to hide among his followers. Lawrence “itched to shoot him,” but decided to wait until both brothers were in custody.*
At lunchtime, an Australian army doctor complained to Lawrence of the appalling conditions in the Turkish military hospital. Lawrence thought he had covered all three hospitals in Damascus—the civil, the military, and the missionary—but the Turks had used their barracks as a hospital as well, and this had been overlooked. He rushed to the barracks—where the Australian guard at first refused to let him enter, thinking he was an Arab—then walked through the huge area “squalid with rags and rubbish.” He eventually found a room crammed with dead Turkish soldiers: “There might be thirty there, and they crept with rats who had gnawed red galleries into them…. Of some the flesh, just going putrid, was yellow and blue and black. Others were already swollen…. Of others the softer parts were fallen in, while the worst had burst open, and were liquescent with decay.” Beyond this room was a large ward, into which Lawrence had to advance over “a soft mass of bodies,” a worse place of horror, in which long lines of men lay in their beds, dying of disease, thirst, and hunger and crying out softly, Aman, aman (“Pity, pity”). Most of them had dysentery, and their few clothes and dressings were stiff with caked filth. Lawrence tried, but failed, to interest the Australians in helping, then went upstairs into the barracks and found the Turkish commandant and a few doctors “boiling coffee over a spirit stove.” He forced them, and a few of the less seriously sick of the Turkish soldiers, to dig a six-foot-deep trench in the garden, gather up the corpses, and dump them one by one into it. Some of the corpses could be lifted and carried on stretchers; others had to be scraped up off the floor with shovels. He finally left another British officer in charge of the work and went back to the Hotel Victoria at midnight, ill and exhausted. He had slept less than three hours before leaving Deraa four days ago. At the hotel, the first thing to greet him was a reprimand from General Chauvel because the Arabs had failed to salute Australian officers properly.
The next morning, October 3, he went back to the Turkish barracks and found that conditions were improving. The dead were buried; lime had been spread everywhere; the living were being washed, put into clean shirts, and given water—it was still a charnel house, but a measure of order and humanity was being restored. Just as Lawrence was leaving, a major of the Royal Army Medical Corps, an Englishman, strode up to him and “asked [him] shortly if he spoke English.” Lawrence said he did, and “with a glance of disgust at my skirts and sandals” the major asked whether Lawrence was in charge. Lawrence said that in a way he was, and the major began to shout at him indignantly and almost incoherently: “scandalous, disgraceful, outrageous, ought to be shot.” Taken aback by this onslaught, just as he was about to congratulate himself on having taken care of a hopeless situation, Lawrence involuntarily laughed, “cackled like a duck, with the wild laughter that often took me at moments of strain.” He was unable to stop laughing, and the major, wild with anger, slapped him hard across the face “and stalked off, leaving me more ashamed than angry, for in my heart I felt that he was right, and that anyone who had, like me, pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their master, must come out of it so stained that nothing in the world would make him clean again.”
In essence this was the feeling that would motivate Lawrence throughout the rest of his life: the belief not just that he had failed the Arabs by not getting them the state and the independence they had fought for, but that he was rendered, by what he had done, seen, and experienced, permanently unclean, unfit for the society of decent people, a kind of moral leper. It is important to realize that while Lawrence’s behavior after the war seemed strange to many people, it is not at all unfamiliar to those who have fought in a war.
Lawrence was always able to function; indeed in many respects his greatest achievements were still ahead of him—but in some way he took on the guilt and the shame of everything he, and millions of others, had done. His wild, manic laughter in Damascus took place, perhaps appropriately, on the day he would leave behind the role of “Colonel Lawrence,” which he had come to despise, and begin, with halting steps, a new life, under a variety of new names.
Early the same morning, Allenby arrived in Damascus at last, and stopped briefly at the Victoria Hotel with his staff. Feisal was due to arrive the same day by train, and at first there was some doubt about whether he and Allenby, who was anxious to push on and take Aleppo and Beirut, could meet. Feisal was planning a “triumphal entry” into Damascus, and the streets were already packed with people anticipating his arrival. Allenby was not interested in ceremonies, and ordered Major Young to find Feisal and tell him “to come and see me at once.” Young went off to intercept Feisal in General Liman von Sanders’s huge red Mercedes Roi des Belges limousine, which had been captured in Nazareth. By the time Young found him, Feisal had already left the train and mounted his horse, ready to ride into the city at the head of the mounted Arab regulars. When Young told Feisal that Allenby had only a few minutes and wished to see him, he rode off at the canter at once, so Young was obliged to trail after him in the big car. We have no way of knowing what Feisal thought at having his plans disrupted, but whatever his feelings were, Feisal must have realized that meeting Allenby was more important. Young took him up to Allenby’s suite; Allenby and Lawrence were on the balcony awaiting Feisal’s arrival, and when Allenby walked back into the room he and Feisal met for the first time.
Allenby’s mood was far from cheerful; he had hoped to avoid the meeting until he received definite instructions from London about the political arrangements for Syria, and after the polite greetings, it was his unwelcome task to give Feisal the bad news that the Sykes-Picot agreement was by no means dead. Using Lawrence as his interpreter—though it appears likely that Feisal understood a good deal more English and a lot more French than he thought it politic to admit—Allenby plunged right in with the bad news: France “was to be the Protecting Power over Syria"; Feisal was to have “the Administration of Syria” on behalf of his father, but under French “guidance,” and was not “to have anything to do” with Lebanon, which was reserved to France; and perhaps most unwelcome of all, Feisal was to exchange Lawrence as his liaison officer for “a French Liaison Officer at once.”
Feisal objected “very strongly.” He said that he preferred British to French assistance; that if Lebanon was not joined to Syria, “a country without a port was no good to him"; and that he “declined to have a French Liaison Officer or to recognize French guidance in any way.”
Allenby then “turned to Lawrence and said: ‘But did you not tell him that the French were to have the Protectorate over Syria?’ Lawrence said: ‘No Sir, I know nothing about it.’ [Allenby] then said: ‘But you knew definitely that he, Feisal, was to have nothing to do with the Lebanon?’ Lawrence said: ‘No Sir, I did not.’ ”
After this embarrassing exchange, Allenby laid down the law. Feisal, he pointed out, was a lieutenant-general under his command, and would have to obey his orders. After some further discussion, Feisal took his leave. It is possible that he and Lawrence may not have known of some of the more humiliating details of the French “protectorate,” but Lawrence certainly knew all about the Sykes-Picot agreement and had passed on what he knew to Feisal. Indeed Feisal could have read the agreement for himself, once the Bolsheviks had published the document. Feisal understandably found it more diplomatic to deny any knowledge of a document which he had supposed was a “dead letter,” and whose legitimacy he was bound to oppose. Given his admiration for Allenby, Lawrence must have found it difficult to sa
y with a straight face that he knew nothing of the terms, which differed so dramatically from promises made to the Arabs.
That perhaps explains the bluntness of his dismissal. After Feisal’s departure, Lawrence told Allenby that “he would not work with a French Liaison Officer and that since he was due for leave and thought he had better take it now and go off to England. [Allenby] said, ‘Yes! I think you had!’ and Lawrence left the room.”
The next evening, Lawrence left Damascus, driven, for the last time, in the Blue Mist. His ambitions for the Arabs would have to be fought out in London and Paris now.
By October 24, he was home in Oxford, for the first time since 1914.
*The Army Service Corps (ASC) dealt with transport, supply, and vehicles; it became the royal Army Service Corps (rASC) in 1918.
*Lawrence spells it Tafileh; Liddell Hart spells it Tafila.
*About 35,000 today.
*“one attacks, then waits to see what happens.”
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia Page 49