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 nottell him, until later in the day, that the “original” Turkish walihad 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 all 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.