 | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
| | DOWN A BLIND ALLEY |
CHAPTER XXVI
OUR last months in the Middle East unfold in my memory like a landscape veiled in drifting mist. They are tinged with melancholy but now and again the mist rolls away and a scene of great beauty shines out of the past. It is as if we were traveling again the road we knew so well between Beirut and Damascus, were climbing in a fog as we often did to the high pass over the Lebanon, then swinging down through the wintry drama of the mountains above the wide wonderful Bekaa. And I hold my breath as I used to do and clutch B.'s arm and whisper "Look," for the mist is lifted and the great gentle valley lies below us---a place of dreams, of utter peace, of unimaginable beauty. The emerald land far below is flowing softly, silently through space and time, the leaves of the tall poplars, pointing to the sky above the little village houses, are green and silver; a shepherd moves eternally beside us on the hill calling to his sheep; a camel caravan comes slowly up around the bend and beyond the swaying procession, far beyond across the limpid chasm, the mountains are folded one upon the other until Mount Hermon.
Then we plunge again through the grim gorge of the Anti-Lebanon. The rocks are sinister, their shapes are tortured, behind them the hills are crimson in the evening light. But it is fading, it will soon be dark and I am glad that the mist comes down, for I am frightened and unhappy.
Memory is a capricious faculty. I do not understand why, dipping into the past, mine selects one thing rather than another. There seems to be no reason behind its choice. It darts about among the shadows like a crazy thing; certainly the moments that I remember most vividly from those last days in the Levant are not what reasonable men would call the most important.
There was a day high in the mountains; nothing of any consequence occurred; but it shines as if enclosed in a lighted crystal globe. There was a moonlit night on our top roof in Damascus and I hear Saadullel Jabri talking softly with small chuckles of his life in exile. A trolley goes rattling down from Hamman in Trans-Jordan through the country Colonel Lawrence traveled with his Arab friends, and a vermilion temple is blazing in the sun at the end of a black gorge that leads to the strange long-lost city of Petra; these are more vivid in my memory than the crowd of ragged, filthy, drunken ruffians who came in trucks, shouting for De Gaulle, and stormed the summer residence of General Bénèt to celebrate with him the liberation of Paris.
That great day was tawdry in the Lebanon. The news from France that should have echoed through the mountains like a trumpet blast had a sound as thin and shrill as a scream. It was Radio Levant screaming. "The citizens of Paris have driven out the Germans. Koenig is in command of the capital. Le Clerc and his armored division are marching in." The voice was trembling, screaming with excitement. Poor frenzied voice. It fell on ears that waited for a mention of the Allies, but there was none. Poor, smarting, humiliated exiles, this was their day and their great chance; they missed it. The town of Beirut and the whole country of the Lebanon would have joined with a good heart in their rejoicing had it been announced a little differently. As it was Beirut divided into camps and some said: "One cannot blame them. It means so much to them." But others asked: "Were there no British troops in Normandy? Nor Americans to march on Paris?" And people squabbled instead of cheering, and many shut their doors and stayed at home instead of going to the French reception.
A dreadful business. Nothing could have proved, as this proved, the feeling in the country. General Bénèt had to hire men to make a crowd outside his gate and shout "De Gaulle, De Gaulle," the twenty-fifth of August. He had to bring them up the mountain road to his residence in Aley and when they got there they rushed through the gate, invaded his house and stole the spoons and even the electric light bulbs in the garden, so there were no illuminations that night at the French Residency as had been planned.
I had gone to represent my husband, but also because of my unit that was advancing north from the south coast of France toward Lyons. I wanted to shake General Bénèt's hand and say, "At last Winston Churchill has shown that he means to keep the promise he made in June five years ago. But when I heard the drunken shouts and was caught on the stairs in the evil-smelling crowd (I couldn't have got through to Madame Bénèt if it hadn't been for B.'s military police corporal who forced a way), I was hot with shame and so sorry for her that I could only murmur and slip away. So now the glorious summer campaign that liberated most of France is all confused and soiled in my memory. I lived through it in the Lebanon, and it will always seem unreal like a picture stained and torn by jealous hands too quick to snatch and make of it a placard, a cheap showman's sign. And though I've crossed the lovely land of France since a dozen times, and saw the German posts beyond the broken bridge of Kiel near Strasbourg from a high observation tower and drove through the dreadful disemboweled villages along the Rhine, with their entrails lying strewn in the mud, dead cows and horses flung down with babies' cots and broken toys and images of Christ, I cannot think of the liberation of Paris without remembering that horrid day at Aley.
I had been alone at Aley for several weeks, with Hamish MacKenzie to look after me. B. had gone to England in late July, almost immediately after my return from Italy, and had left me behind to hold the fort. Just what that was going to mean I didn't know but I soon found out. For no sooner was he gone than the government and its friends grew uneasy, and rumors began to circulate that he wasn't coming back. The rumors were annoying, the uneasiness in official Lebanese circles touching but disturbing. If the President and his Ministers began to worry the moment their friend the British Minister left for England, this was surely a sign of weakness. What hope had they of winning a long struggle for true independence if they depended so much on this one man? They had been valiant six mouths before under extreme provocation and they had achieved some of their sovereign rights as a result. They could stamp their own passports and collect their own customs duties, the French had grudgingly conceded these things, but they did not yet command their army. The troops in the Levant were still controlled and officered by the French, they were being used as a bargaining counter in the matter of a treaty. The Levant States, the Grand Sérail declared, should take over their own troops if and when they signed a treaty with the French but not before.
The women were very nervous. There was talk of plots, the French were up to something, I would see. They were working up the people. What people? The Alouitter round Latakia, General Montclar was at work among them. There was a man who said he was God, a cross between a brigand and a peasant, a trafficker in hashish, a thief and probably a murderer. I laughed but it was, they said, no laughing matter. I didn't understand. What I understood was that they were nervous and apprehensive.
They had formed a Women's League after November '43, uniting Moslems, Druses and Christians. I had been to some of their meetings. Madame Malik had translated the Arabic speeches for me and I had been impressed by their ardor and good sense, but now they seemed to be drawing apart again, seemed to be going back to their old fears and antagonisms. How disturbed they were, poor gentle creatures, how easily frightened by what seemed to me old imaginary bogeys, how prone to credit rumors. "Beware the Moslems. The Moslems are our enemies ... ... The Christians of the Lebanon are in great danger from the Moslems." Again and again the note was sounded. And one day, at Alice Tueni's or perhaps it was at Linda Sursock's, they told me how a Christian had been murdered in the mountains by a band of Moslems and all the region round was terrified and the priest had sent to General Bénèt for protection.
It was exasperating. I would go in search of Zelfa Chamoun or Anna Tabet or Renée Tacla's mother, Madame Achou, she was grand.
"How can they believe such tales? If a Protestant is murdered in England by a Roman Catholic, or vice versa, the church doesn't get in a panic. Surely the fact that there is a Christian Prime Minister in Moslem Syria must prove to you that all this talk is nonsense." And they would answer, "But of course, we know it as well as you, and we know where these stories come from. We would be all right if the French would only leave us alone. But it has always been their policy to divide the country by religious faction. They are doing it now. They never stop. The teachers in their schools are telling the children that if the French go away the Moslems will murder us all in our beds."
"Are you sure of that? I can't believe they would talk such wicked rubbish."
"You don't understand. It is their plan. It always has been. If they can divide us and frighten us and if because we are frightened there is trouble, then they will say they must stay in the country to protect us. That is what we are afraid of---not the Moslems but the Moslems put up to it by the French. If the British go away----"
There it was again. "If the French go away, if the British go away---"
What was to be the end of it all, or was there to be no end in our lifetime? The British Army would most assuredly go when the war was over and peace established, even if all the country begged them to remain, and the French were most evidently determined to stay whatever the wishes of the people. 'The will of a small people appeared to have no hearing on such questions as their own future. "Zones of influence." "Privileged position." It was we the British who had recognized the privileged position of the French in the Levant.
I would go home tired and depressed, turn on the wireless and listen to the news from France, but all the reiterated rumors, the hurting, nagging, stinging whispers that my friends repeated to me interfered. The British were working to get the Levant for themselves, and Spears was the prime mover in the plot. His secret agents were at work all through the country. If they could get rid of Spears all would be well. I seemed to hear the malicious gossip coming up the valley from Beirut like the buzzing of a swarm of bees.
Then Hamish would come in with letters or news from "the Minister"; all was well in London. He would be back by the beginning of September.
Dear Hamish, what a comfort be was and what a delightful A.D.C., so cozy, so considerate, so loyal to his absent chief. And a fighter like a small fierce bulldog.
Our new councilor and chargé d'affaires wasn't a great comfort to me. He didn't appear to like the Lebanese nor indeed to care for me very much. A short thickset man with a keen but secretive eye. I daresay he was very able, I don't know, I seldom saw him. He had a tall wife with large red cheeks and a slightly foolish smile who made many demands on him. Some said she was charming, I never found out if it was true. She wasn't strong it seemed, for all her high color and sprightly manner and could not help me with my clubs or committees and was not interested in any war work. She never came down, I think, to Beirut that summer unless for some special official party, it was too hot, but waited in the hills for him to join her and take her with him to this function or that. I used to run into them sometimes at these affairs, but depended on Hamish to be my escort.
He would go down each morning early to the office and I would follow for there was much to do. We would meet or not for lunch. I would lunch perhaps with the Wadsworths or with Bayard and Mary Dodge. The Wadsworths were very good to me. We had our native land in common and much else. They are friends and were a great help during those weeks when the tongues of Beirut were so tiresomely busy with the affairs of my absent general. If the gossips grew too noisy, if the slings and arrows came too thick and fast from certain quarters I could go to them for refuge or to Bayard and Mary Dodge, sink down and relax in their house that was quiet and serene. It breathed peace and charity to all men, it was safe.
I had many talks with Bayard Dodge about the future of the Spears clinics. We must envisage, we agree, the end of the war and endeavor to establish them on a peacetime basis. The Bishop of Jerusalem might take over the clinic at Tel Tamar, the Church of England had always been concerned with the Assyrians of that region and a first-class Syrian doctor seemed willing to undertake the work at Latakia. It would be a pity if it all came to an end; but John Gough, who was now in charge of the five centers, pointed out that the F.A.U. boys would be going home when the war was over.
The phrase kept coming up. Everyone was talking of the end of the war, everyone was restless. Ninth Army's Welfare Council was much concerned by such talk. We must be more active, not less, the army said as the war drew to a close. The most difficult period of all among the troops would follow the end of the fighting. They would demand to be shipped home, and it would take two years or three to get them back. The holiday camps on the beach would be needed more than ever. The same was true of my service women's clubs.
It was not an idle summer. People came to stay. Sir Kinahan Cornwallis turned up for a night on his way to fish in the Orontes, my delightful air marshal, Keith Park, sent me his sprightly wife and dropped down to pick her up and whisk her off to Teheran. Anne Brians came from Cairo and Paddy Leigh Fermor convalescing after his adventures in Crete. It was while they were with us that we had our perfect day. Nothing happened, but it shines, it is touched with magic. We only lunched on a high mountain, that was all, and sat in the sun looking out over the world. The mountains rolled away to the north and east and south, the very blue Mediterranean spread to the west. We could follow the line of the coast almost to Palestine. What was there about that day to make it relatively eternal? Succulent dishes richly spiced spread on a sunny table; they disappeared within us. Pin specials and old brandy followed; from a gramophone somewhere behind us timeworn sentimental tunes from the Paris boulevards floated out to mingle with our laughter in the shining rarefied air. We walked home down the mountain road in the golden afternoon and sat on the terrace at Aley talking of Greece and of Crete where Paddy and Billy Moss had captured a German general and kept him prisoner in a cave, and of France where I hoped to find the girls before the war ended, and presently the day passed softly away into the night and was gone.
If our life, Hamish's and mine, seemed trivial compared with the great events taking place in Europe it was at least busy and sociable. We dined out perpetually and when we weren't out had people in to dine with us on the terrace. Nor did I have to tell myself that all this had its own small value. I knew it was so, particularly among the Lebanese. For everywhere I went they would ask, "Is he coming back? Are you certain that he's coming back?" Or "They say the Spears Mission is closing down. Is it true?" Or "We hear De Gaulle is coming, that he is sending two new French divisions. Do you know? Have you heard? They say the French are going to re-establish the mandate, that your government has agreed, that the general has resigned, is only coming back to fetch you home."
Again and again I would reassure them. Yes, he was coming back. Yes, I was certain of it. Not to stay perhaps for very long. They knew, I reminded them, that soon he must go home. But not just yet. No, the Spears Mission wasn't closing. De Gaulle most certainly was not coming nor was he sending troops. How could he? His divisions were in France. As for the British government, they must not listen to such rumors. Our government had pledged its word, there was no question of the mandate. All that was finished. Had they no confidence in Great Britain? Did they believe that we were going back on our guarantee, were about to strike a bargain with the French and sell them out? Sometimes I would grow angry with these timid doubting people and tell them they ought to be ashamed of having so little faith in Britain and the British Minister. But the rumors still went on, and as the days passed into weeks they rose in a maddening crescendo.
I didn't ask their origin. I knew and didn't want to know. Our relations with the French in Beirut had been almost pleasant since the arrival of the Bénèts. Madame Bénèt I had found charming, the general, if rather uncouth, quite agreeable. We had dined with them before B. left and they with us. We had dined with Count Ostrorogue and at the French Admiralty with Commandant and Madame Fatou. Madame Fatou to be sure had asked angrily when news came of the fighting in Normandy why the American and British armies had invaded France? Why couldn't they have landed in Belgium instead? But she was a nervous woman and her question had gone unanswered. I had pretended not to hear it. I pretended indeed to a continual deafness all that summer, though never had my hearing been so painfully acute.
And yet, I have forgotten now, or almost, why I was unhappy, what the stings were and the hurts or who caused them. One can forget what is best forgotten.
There was a tree, I remember, a giant eucalyptus at the mouth of the Valley of the Dogs; it stands uncannily still in the afternoon sun. What has that tree to do with the march of events or the fate of nations? Nothing.? Something? I do not know. It stood immense and motionless above the river, its great smooth arms lifted up, but its long slender leaves bathed in sunlight drooping down, dreaming, a gentle giant wrapped in a dream.
There were other trees that seemed to speak of a world that was quite different from the world of men. Olive trees ages old with squat, gnarled, twisted trunks, palm trees solitary by the sea and groves of poplars with happy trembling leaves. And the water wheels of Hama are creaking in my memory, all the strange proud mysterious town is filled with the sound of their labored turning, and far to the north there is a ghostly city in an empty plain, and a small boy is leading his flock of goats over the stones where Simeon Stylites once built himself a pillar and founded a church. But in the street called Straight in Damascus much business is going on, there is a great clatter of tongues and jangling of coins and the colors leap like flame from the shops and the riches of the street are loaded onto the backs of arrogant camels, who carry them indifferently away across the desert.
And now a trolley rattles down across the desert of Transjordan; an absurd vehicle, like half of one of those trams they call open streetcars in the U.S.A., and Madame Bechara Khoury, tucked in behind B. and me, with her son Mimo and her daughter Huguette and John Stokes, our A.D.C., is laughing. We are all laughing as we go rattling and banging at what seems breakneck speed across the desert. But I am confusing the times and the seasons. It was early spring when we took the President's wife and children to Petra and very cold in the open trolley with only a canvas curtain to shield us from the wind. We are all bundled up in sheepskins, and slender Mimo is almost obliterated between his large mama and his very fat little sister. Captain Mimo, as B. called him affectionately, doesn't laugh, life is very serious for this sensitive boy of sixteen. He looks out across Trans-Jordan with round wondering eyes. There is no one to be seen, Mimo, anywhere, as far as the eye can reach. This is a silent, empty, happy land. Our escort, you remember, the soldier of the Arab Legion, said so. He told you Trans-Jordan was a happy country because they were allowed to govern themselves and had no foreigners to interfere with them and when you said, "But there is Mr. Kirkbride and General Glubb who commands your Legion," he answered, "Glubb Pasha is no foreigner, he is one of us," and I think you made a comparison in your thoughtful boy's mind between his country and your own.
But look, there is a drove of camels and one of them bars the way, he steps casually with that maddening, supercilious lift of the lip onto the. line. We are going to run him down, help! Oh help! Your mother speaks quietly in Arabic to our worn and wrinkled driver, who smiles and brakes, checking our headlong speed, and approaching as gently as a rattling trolley can, we persuade the silly beast to lope off the track and let us pass.
We stop when we are hungry for the line is all our own. There is no other trolley, and no train will come along today or next day. So we can stop when and where we like and lift out the lunch baskets and sit on the ground beside the tram and eat. I say when we are hungry, but if we consulted Huguette only on that point, we would not go very far I am afraid across the plain.
It is her mother who must decide, and it is difficult to choose a place for one place is exactly like another, there is no shelter anywhere from the wind and sun. All the land is pale-brown sand and stone until far away on the skyline it shades into shimmering blue. But at last Huguette cannot bear it any longer so we stop.
We had promised Madame Khoury long before to take her and the children to Petra and at last it had been possible for B. to find the time to go. We had motored to Humam where we spent the night with Mrs. Kirkbride at the British Residency, but Glubb Pasha had done the honors as Mr. Kirkbride was away in England and it was Glubb who had arranged the trip. Petra, the Atlantis of the earth, hidden below the earth's surface, lost and forgotten, is surely one of the strangest places in the world, since you go down and down to find it at the bottom of a secret cañon behind a gate of black rock a thousand feet high and as narrow as a bedroom door. But I remember scarcely anything about it save the violent red of the rocky walls within and the pompous shallow temples cut into the face of the cliffs. Tombs, tier upon tier of empty tombs, ugly, forbidding, desolate reminders of the emptiness of death and man's futile vanity; it was the living land above that enthralled me, the open land that had been led into the ways of peace by two Englishmen and has now achieved its freedom.
And if in these pages I am to say good-by to the family of the Lebanese President, I should like to do it not at the official dinner they gave us later, but now as we rattled back along that tramline and stopping at a lonely station, a solitary stone house in a vast empty plain, drink scalding hot tea very sweet and strongly flavored with mint that is brought to us by the Arab stationmaster. For Huguette's round face is bubbling with a child's laughter and her mother is laughing too, she is happy and not frightened as she was in '43, and Captain Mimo is looking gravely, wistfully at the British Minister.
It is troubling to think that this boy and others like him hold the future of their country in their slender hands.
B. returned early in September and I remember next an evening in Zebdani. It was Ramadan and we were dining with the President of Syria in his garden.
Zebdani is a summer resort in the Anti-Lebanon much frequented by the people of Damascus. Coming from Beirut you turn off to the left of the main road just before dipping down to the Barada and find the river again higher up. The little town is fresh and green with villas set among orchards on the hill above the river. The President had two villas, both in the same garden, one for his wife and children, the other where he transacted official business. The table was set under a grape arbor and two of the children dined with us. We were a family party and we dined early for it was the Quwatlis' first meal of the day. Faris Khoury, the venerable Christian Prime Minister, and Saadullel Jabri, president of the Chamber, and Jamil Mardam Bey came in later for the President and his colleagues had grave matters to discuss with the British Minister. When they arrived Madame Quwatli and I withdrew with the children, but she sat at the head of her table during dinner with B. beside her, for he was a friend of her people and her husband trusted him. She had never before received, I think, a foreigner, indeed she seldom saw the President's colleagues, but it was Quwatli's wish that she should extend this courtesy to his British friend.
Madame Quwatli is a very handsome woman, tall, massive like her husband with a clear fair skin and fine gray eyes. She speaks neither French nor English but sitting at table in the shadowy garden, with a soft blue veil falling in folds round her broad shoulders, she was very beautiful and she would watch us as we talked and when Chukri translated she would laugh as happy women do who adore their husbands.
We withdrew, she and I, to her villa when the Ministers were announced. Coffee was brought to us on her veranda, and the little boy went off to bed but the daughter stayed with us to act as interpreter for she had been studying French at her school.
We sat together in the soft September night for a long time and Madame Quwatli told me through her daughter's lips the story of her marriage in exile and of the great house with many rooms in Damascus where she had spent her childhood. Every now and then a servant would emerge from the shadows with iced orangeade in tall glasses and we would sit in silence listening to the wind in the trees.
I wondered as I sat with her what was going on in the other villa. The burden of the talk between my husband and these Arab leaders would be undoubtedly, what it had been for the past year, a treaty with the French. How would they take the message that he brought from London? Would they still trust him, consider him a friend?
It was often said that no Englishman could make a friend of an Arab. It wasn't true. Lawrence had proved it to be a lie in 1914-1918. Kirkbride and Glubb were doing the same now in Trans-Jordan, and Cornwallis in Iraq, to say nothing of the younger men like Major Harvey and Captain Dearden who had found their way to the heart of Hama, the closed, the most conservative and fanatic city in all Syria. I had stayed with them, I had seen for myself how it was in Hama, and Dearden had been to see me to ask if it was true that we were going home. "If your husband leaves," he said, "we may as well pack up." And now B. had come with bad news for Chukri Bey, that I knew. I could not help knowing, but if I knew anything, had learned anything, was quite convinced about one single thing, it was that Chukri loved and trusted him and I believed would always be the same, whatever happened.
Was it vital or not to Great Britain that these lands should be friendly? There had been a moment in July '42 when I had thought I would be cut off from Beirut and be forced to retreat with my girls down the Red Sea and get home if I ever did get home via India or Australia. Suppose the Arabs at that time had risen against us, and all the Middle East gone up in flames? Their friendliness had been no foregone conclusion in '39. The Syrian leaders had made no secret of their loss of faith in us after the last war and had often talked of the change in their attitude toward Great Britain since B. had been appointed Minister. Saadullel Jabri had talked very frankly that summer night when he and Jamil Mardam dined with us and we sat after dinner on our roof in the moonlight looking across the silvered rooftops and minarets of the city. They told how the prestige of Great Britain had fallen very low in the Middle East since Allenby had marched on Damascus in 1918 to drive out the Turks. There had been an Arab awakening after that, they said, under Feisal and we, the British, had played Feisal false for the sake of the French, to whom the Allies had given a mandate over what he, Feisal, had believed was a part of his kingdom. The Arabs of Syria were all of one mind, they told us, on this question and they had expressed themselves on the subject of the French mandate that night in no uncertain terms.
The French had exercised, they declared, their prerogatives as if a mandate carried with it no responsibility toward the people nor any obligation to teach them self-government but only an opportunity for gain and exploitation. They had established schools, it is true, for the teaching of the French language and French history and had encouraged the many sects of the Christian faith in the Lebanon. But they had created rich monopolies for their own people and taken the revenues of the states for themselves, and had chosen as their friends and tools in the country Moslems of ill repute known to be traffickers in drugs, and thieves and murderers. And they had crushed by force every effort of the people to obtain their just rights and sent every patriot to prison or into exile.
"And we were among them," Saadullel Jabri had said with his chuckling little laugh. "'The President was Feisal's friend, and now the French want us to sign a treaty, but we will have no treaty with the French."
It was late when the men came to join us. The Ministers greeted Madame Quwatli with gentle formality. We talked a little, then said good night. The President and his three colleagues came with us through the garden. Their faces were inscrutable, B.'s was the same. If I asked him, as we drove away, what had been said during the long discussion he didn't answer, or if he did, I have forgotten his words, as I was supposed to do. And this is of no consequence. For the real answer only came eight months later when General Oliva-Roget, that melancholy man, suddenly one evening in May at exactly seven o'clock opened fire on the city of Damascus.
I heard the news in Beaulieu---I was in the south of France with the 1st Free French Division by that time---and B. heard it in London. It was Terence Shone who had to report the matter to London. He had succeeded B. as Minister to the Levant States by then, and it was the French who had to be confined to barracks this time to save them from being massacred by the Arabs. But we didn't know that anything of the sort was going to happen when we said good-by to our friends in the Levant. Even B. couldn't have foreseen to what lengths the French would go in their desire to force a treaty on the States.
We spent the autumn of '44 very peacefully in Damascus until the dreadful day when we heard that Lord Moyne had been murdered. How beautiful it was. We would go for a walk with the dogs every day after lunch. The car would take us up the road that led to Homs and Hama, or circling the city wall with its crazy dwellings we would turn east along the river through the Guta, the wide spreading orchards of Damascus that are a miracle of beauty in the spring when the apricot trees are in bloom and the storks come through on their way to Europe. We would get out of the car by a stream and walk along the autumn paths under the walnut trees or through the olive groves. 'The leaves of the walnut trees were russet and bronze, but the plumes of the great poplars were gold like the sunlight that poured between the gnarled trunks of the olives. Then it would fade, a blue mist would creep over the land and the villagers would come in from the fields. Passing with their carts or their laden donkeys, the men would greet us with, "Mai Salami," or "God be with you," but the women would pull their veils closer, and hurry by. We would watch them moving softly away across the fields like ghosts in their pale pink and blue and mauve mantles of faded cotton.
"How beautiful it is," we said. "How peaceful," and I said what the girls had said to me in France when we left St. Jean le Bassel. "We must come back. Promise to bring me back again."
Then one day B. was called from lunch to the telephone to be told that Lord Moyne had been shot outside his house in Cairo. His face was stricken when he came out of his study. They had been talking together only half an hour before. Moyne had seen Anthony Eden and was feeling particularly cheerful. He had told B. not to worry. All would yet be well in the Levant.
"One of our few real statesmen gone," B. said, "with Walter Moyne."
They gave us a great send-off in Beirut and Damascus. It wasn't easy for us to say good-by. 'There were many dinners and receptions, all our friends asked us in turn. Linda Sursock, and Alice Tueni and Anna Tabet and Maud Fajalla, and George and Norma Wadsworth and the Dodges. Our evening with Bayard and Mary Dodge is a special poignant memory because we were so gay and they gave us such charming presents, an old precious copy of the Koran for me, and to B. a year's subscription to the New Yorker, and then next day they heard that their younger son whom they hadn't seen for four years had been killed in France.
Mary held her working party all the same two days later, and when I went to say good-by to all these faithful workers who were still making dressings for our hospitals we talked of the boy who had fallen in battle and they came out to their front steps to wave good-by and stood smiling side by side as I drove away.
Crowded days, touching, gratifying, sometimes harrowing. B. was made honorary citizen of both Beirut and Damascus. In the latter, the government gave a great reception and a dinner of three hundred people. It was held in the municipal buildings, and the President attended in defiance of all the rules of protocol. I sat beside him and he told me that only twice before had a dinner been given in these buildings to a foreigner. Once for Feisal, once for Allenby, now the third time for General Spears.
I cannot remember all the functions. I know B. spoke to the Chamber of Deputies in Beirut and that his good-by to the mission was very painful and that our house the morning we left reminded me of the day the government was arrested, it was so thronged with people. And many were the same who had come that day in '43 but now they came not to ask for help, but to say good-by. There were so many, there was such hurry and confusion that I see only a blurred picture of friendly faces, but I have kept the record of what B. said publicly by way of farewell in the two capitals and I will quote from his words.
On December 9, to the Arab leaders when they made him a citizen of Damascus he spoke in French. I give the translation.
I am moved and proud for you have paid me a unique honor. The thought that I am the only Englishman upon whom this distinction has ever been conferred would be too much were it not for the realization that the tribute you are paying me is above all a gesture of friendship toward the country which I have had the honor to represent among you.
Perhaps it is the deep appeal of your historical yearning for liberty which has led you to show such friendliness to my people, who alone in a world laid desolate and threatened with destruction by the forces of oppression dared, solitary and unarmed, to hold on high the flag of liberty, and feed the flame of hope in the world, until the time when other peoples, animated by the same ideal, joined in the struggle and thus made victory sure.
Who, reading through the annals of this war, will doubt that courage is more valuable than weapons, that faith can replace armies and that right is the best of all shields? In the future he who feels weak and discouraged will read the story of the war and will know that hope can never die on the earth.
I am deeply honored by your gesture, but I know that the true Ambassador of Great Britain among you has not been just one man, a general, a Minister, but the ordinary English soldier who in his hundreds of thousands has made himself known and loved in Syria. One of the things of which I am really proud is that never during the years I have spent amongst you have I seen a woman or a child show any sign of fear or even of distrust of these men bearing deadly weapons.
Damascus has always been the ultimate destination in the desert. The caravans dreamed of the coolness of her oasis, the merchants of her bazaars, the conquerors of her riches, and the poets of her gardens. . . . Henceforth there will be another man to dream of Damascus and of the day of his return. In my place in Parliament enveloped in the mists of London I shall only have to close my eyes to conjure up your sunlight, your blue sky and your teeming streets. I shall recall my sojourn among you, my friends, with feelings of deep emotion, and if the time seems long and if I am too homesick, I shall console myself in making plans to return.
And to the Chamber of Deputies of Beirut he said, on December 12:
You are the guardians of the liberty of your country, just as the British Parliament is the guardian of British liberty. Liberty is the most precious of all possessions as those who have fought against Nazism should know.
That is what my country has done without quarter and without truce for the past five years. The liberty that we have preserved in the world is not the prerogative of a few, it is the domain of all, and what that liberty means is set forth in the terms of the Atlantic Charter.
In the great concert of free nations, absolute respect for the independence of each member is the rule. It is the fundamental law of the club. Those who think otherwise are automatically excluded; as in every civilized community the weak have the same rights as the strong.
I am certain of little Lebanon's welcome among the noble company of those who have dared all for freedom and who, refusing to accept defeat, are witnessing at last the dawn of the day of triumph, of victory won at the cost of much blood, many tears and great sacrifice.
We left on the fifteenth of December. Ninth Army mounted a guard of honor at area headquarters. B. inspected the guard, then we drove away. The sea I remember was angry but very blue in the winter sun, the date pal ins by the shore lashed in the wind, the mountains of the Lebanon were covered with snow.