by Harold Lamb
“It’s my fault,” I confessed. “I ought to have found out about this in Beirut before we started. We’ve got to keep out of the way of these tribesmen.”
“Well, there’s no harm done,” Aymon said. “We can pack up in the morning and go somewhere else.”
AN EXCLAMATION from Tug Donovan woke me up before the first light. Then Aymon’s cot creaked violently. I sat up and heard dogs barking. Then a shouting and a distant uproar that came nearer by the minute.
Aymon and I went out of the tent in our pajamas and joined Donovan, who had slept in his clothes. He was stirring up the embers of the fire and listening to what sounded like a menagerie let loose. The air was cold, the stars beginning to fade in the east. The black walls of The Watcher loomed around us.
Then a half dozen camels pranced into our courtyard, groaning and squealing. A pack of horses followed with a rush, and tried to keep out of the way of the camels.
“Do you have this,” Tug asked me, “every morning—or what?”
Dim human figures appeared, loaded with bundles. Then a bleating, tumbling gray flood of sheep. Tug tossed an armful of thorn bush on the fire, and when it flared up we saw that most of the Arab village was moving into our castle. The men came last up the chute from the entrance, driving a herd of cattle. By then there was standing room only in the great courtyard. If it had not been for the fire, our tents would have been trampled down.
Assorted animals oozed into the adjoining salle and, judging from the sounds below, the cellars were filling rapidly.
Jane appeared, fully dressed, and laughed. “I thought,” she said, “you were making an awful row about packing up*”
Then the entrance corridor was lit by the headlights of a car. It roared slowly up the grade in low, and started the animals to milling when it churned into our courtyard. Khalil had driven our car into the castle, and for a while we had all we could do, dodging camels. Did you ever see a camel trying to climb a fifteen-foot stone wall?
By the time Aymon and I were dressed, Khalil had calmed down enough to explain the situation. The Druses, he said, were almost here. They were in the village, he thought, by now.
Aymon and I talked it over and decided to pack our suitcases into the car and drive out as soon as it was full light and we could see where we were going. With Tug Donovan along, we’d just about fill that sedan. We’d leave the tents and big stuff. If the Druses did not see any baggage tied on the car, the chances were they would not try to stop us. Khalil thought they had no firearms, and with their horses and swords they could not very well stop a heavy sedan going downhill. Once down on the level, of course, they could never catch us.
IT WAS the best way out. And we were jamming things back into our bags when Jane came in, saying that her pet dozen Arabs were following her around talking to her. Because I’d taught her a few words of Arabic, they thought she could understand all they said.
Jane drew me out to listen to them. They made quite an oration to me. They reminded me that we Americans had shared their salt, and begged us to protect them against the Druses by staying in the castle. Evidently they thought that we could do as much for them as the French backed by machine guns.
By the time they had finished orating, a whole crowd was gathered around, in breathless suspense. In the hurry of the moment, I made a serious mistake. I explained all this to Jane.
“One thing you’ve never heard about your ancestors,” I added lightly, “is that those crusading lords of the castle used to protect the countryside. You see the feudal idea still holds good here.”
Jane looked me full in the eyes. “Do you mean to say the Druses would take their babies?”
They might, I admitted. After all. a child was worth as much as a donkey—and what difference did it make if the children grew up village Arabs or tribal Druses? Not having any guns, what could we do about it?
Jane went and climbed up the nearest stair to the outer wall, where Tug Donovan was amusing himself with Aymon’s field glasses. The sun was up by then, and we could see horsemen dismounted in the village. They wore flowing dark robes, and they were going from hut to hut looking over what our Arabs had left behind.
“I’m not going to run away,” the girl said quietly.
Her gray eyes were dark with excitement. She had made up her mind to stay in the castle and defend her assorted villagers, with their livestock.
Aymon came up in time to hear what she said. “Don’t fool yourself, Jane,” he retorted. “We’re all clearing out. If you want to make a fuss about it, we’ll tie you up for better transportation.”
Evidently Uncle Arthur had dealt with her whims as a small child.
She ignored him, and looked at Tug, who had put the glasses down.
“I don’t know about this,” he remarked. “Those birds in costume down there don’t look good to me. Let’s clear out.”
That made it unanimous except for Jane. She was still watching Tug from the corners of her eyes. “So you three ex-officers and athletes and gentlemen will push off in a closed car and let these bandits take their pick of slaves from my people, in the castle.”
It was about as mean a thing as she could have said. Donovan got red around the throat. “All right,” he said. “I’ll stick here. But you and Mr. Aymon can’t do that.”
“I suppose,” she replied calmly, “you think Uncle Arthur and I would go off and leave Mr. Halliday and you. Well, we won’t.”
Having put Tug out of commission, as it were, she turned to Aymon and worked on him. And he gave in, because, being ignorant of the country, he couldn’t understand that argument would not show the Druses the error of their way.
Khalil and I took turns enlightening him. Before we finished, the Druses raced their horses up the hill, to rush the entrance of the castle. Our Arabs drove them off with a volley of heavy stones that frightened the horses, and Tug came up to report that our villagers had stopped up the entrance with a ten-foot barricade of heavy stone blocks. So there we were, besieged in the castle—the four of us, and some five-score villagers, and any number of animals. . . .
The Druses would not parley. They wanted to get into the castle, to get at the cattle, and whatever else they fancied worth while, and it was up to us to keep them out. Toward noon we had watched their main caravan filing through the valley toward the desert; but the fighting men had remained in the village.
“If we only had one rifle!” Aymon lamented.
“Well, it’s good for us that the Druses haven’t any,” I said. The French had seen to it that the natives in the coast region carried no firearms.
But we felt lost without machinery of any kind. Our minds worked in terms of bullets, motors and searchlights, and here was the Syrian twilight settling down on the beleaguered castle, and nothing we could lay hand on that was not seven hundred years old—in style.
A FEW of our Arabs had swords. Some carried long sling-shots that used stones as large as hen’s eggs. I understood then how David had cracked down the Carnera of his time, Goliath. For the first time I saw how the jaw-bone of an ass or ox made a mean weapon. With all its teeth intact, and mounted on a three-foot staff, a bone like that could crush in the side of a man’s skull.
But all of our men had their favorite cudgels of hardwood, four feet long, with a heavy knot at the end. A very few of them turned out in ring-mail shirts, a century old. Such iron mail had probably been cherished in their families since before the days when rifles were available. They even brought three of the shirts to Aymon and Donovan and me.
I put mine on and urged the other two to do the same, but they wouldn’t, at first. Tug was grinning at the whole affair, and Jane was laying out a dressing station in the men’s tent. She had a first-aid kit and I had various medicines. She admitted she knew nothing about dressing wounds.
Well, we got organized as well as we could. Built a bonfire on the summit of the wall over the entrance, ready to light at the first alarm. Made a survey o
f the outer wall, and stationed groups of Arabs where it was broken down part way. The Druses could not very well swarm over the twenty-foot portions of our wall, but they could get in at these weak places. We told off boys to patrol the intervening spaces, and set the women to work piling ammunition—heavy rocks—by the breaks.
“Don’t think this is going to be funny,” I warned Aymon. “We’ve got to keep those chaps out.”
“Sure,” he said. He looked at me with a queer expression. “Do you know what, Halliday? I’d give something to see Richard the Lion Heart come clanking along in his armor to help us out with that sword of his.”
“Well,” I told him, “if you know any way to bring back the ghost of those dead knights, go to it.”
When I went down, an hour or so later, to my post—some of our Arabs were yelling that the Druses were coming—I felt the same way Aymon did. Without flashlights and guns, with only our hands to fight with, we were infants compared to that fighting crusader with his gear on.
My Arabs, however, seemed glad to see me. The moral effect of white men was on their side.
We had to wait in that walled passage behind the barricade. This entrance corridor in the heart of the main structure had two turns in it, where heavy doors had once stood. The round roof of the passage had holes and slits through which the knights could have shot crossbow bolts and poured liquid fire on attackers—but we had no bolts or fire.
WE LISTENED for a while to the tumult above us. Aymon ran down in a lull in the fight, and explained that his bonfire was no good. It showed up his own men instead of the enemy, and he had shoved it all over on the Druses with poles—hence the temporary quiet. He said our Arabs had beaten off attempts elsewhere along the wall. The moon was coming up, too.
“Better put on your iron shirt,” I said. “If we can stop them once, they’ll lose heart.” Both of us knew we were in for a bad time, but we did not see any use in alarming Jane and Tug, who had looked on it as a swell show, so far.
The yelling and banging of rocks began again, and he hurried off.
Then the barricade in front of me began to rattle, and slide down. The Druses were pulling the stone blocks away on their side. We had made a number of torches, which boys held behind us. So we could see the dark heads of tribesmen peering at us over the diminishing pile of stone.
I heard a whiz and a crash as a man near me let loose with a sling-shot. Then a half dozen tribesmen scrambled over. The Arabs beat them back with those long cudgels.
Volleys of heavy stones began to come from the other side of the barrier, and I found out that our makeshift wall did as much harm as good. When several Arabs had been knocked down, bleeding, by the stones, I ordered them all back to the first angle in the passage. The torches went back with us, of course.
By now my men were raising such an uproar that I couldn’t hear anything else. For a time the Druses didn’t show around the angle; when they did they came with a rush, with spears, cudgels and knives.
That was the last I saw clearly for some moments. The corridor became a press of screaming, stabbing men, fighting face to face. A whack from a cudgel numbed my chest, and I lost my footing when a knife slashed at my eyes. I crawled back, over struggling bodies and between knees. The Arabs were going back, too—fast.
Some one hauled me up by the armpits. We were almost at the end of the corridor—the torch-bearers were out in the courtyard.
“Y’allah—shoof!” a man yelled in my ear. “Oh, Allah—look!”
A big figure had plunged down among us. Its tawny bare head gleamed in the torchlight, its mailed arm rose and fell as it pushed through the pack, knocking men aside.
It was Tug Donovan, one cheek a bloody smear, and he was fighting mad. He had got on his mail shirt and the weapon he wielded was three feet of massive iron chain. He swung it like a rope. Tug Donovan, six-foot-two, the weight man, could handle a thing like that.
The chain knocked men around as if they had been stuffed with straw. The Druses beat at his head with their long cudgels and he weaved from side to side throwing up his free arm to take the smash of the clubs. The iron ring shirt protected his body to the hips, and the Druses could not get at his lower limbs.
I saw a couple of them crouch down to knife him in the legs. I yelled at him, but he couldn’t have heard. The knife blade must have stung him, because he jumped high and slashed down with the chain.
That gave the Druses a chance to close in on him. Owing to his height they could not grab his right arm. He shifted his grip to the center of the chain. He snapped the loose ends among the heads of the tribesmen and they fell away from him.
They had nothing to stop that chain, swung by two hundred pounds of trained muscle. And Tug Donovan kept on swinging, although he was breathing like a tired horse and blood was spattering the roof of that corridor. My Arabs pressed after him, yelling and throwing things. But they had to keep out of the lash of that chain.
AT THE barricade the Druses made a stand with knives—for a minute. Then they scrambled out over the rocks. Tug cleared that barricade and started climbing after them, until my Arabs pulled him back. They were shouting with joy, and they stroked his shoulders. They stroked him down as they held him fast, for, as I said, he was fighting mad.
When he was quiet, he sat down all at once, and I ran back for water to wash him, because I wanted to see how much damage had been done. At the first turn I nearly ran into Jane. She was leaning against the wall with her hands hiding her face. I pulled them away, but there didn’t seem to be anything the matter with her except that she was weeping. When I came back with a leaking goatskin of water, she tried to swab off Tug’s face with her handkerchief. Then I told the Arabs to carry him back to her cot.
We stretched him out and looked him over. He had blue bruises from waist to neck and a knife stab through the thigh. One cheek-bone was smashed, and a shoulder fractured. Later, in Beirut, we found out that he had two ribs cracked.
WHAT a night that was! The smell of blood and the general excitement made the animals wild, and from time to time the sheep would start stampeding around the courtyard, which would set off the dogs again, and the boys after them. The women lit fires and lined the castle walls to chant the victory and hurl abuse down at the beaten Druses in the village. The things they said!
The Arabs gathered around the ten-odd prisoners we’d picked off the corridor floor. They brought all the wounded to Aymon’s tent and left them there for us to doctor. By torchlight and by guesswork, we set broken bones without anesthetics.
Not one of our patients whimpered, although some of them screeched. We poured iodine into body slashes, and did not bother about anything less. Jane went white to the lips when she first looked in our tent, which she had fixed up so nicely for a dressing station. She went away quickly. Then she came back and helped us silently to pull and swab and sew. At intervals, she’d go off to look at Tug.
“Sure, I could sleep,” I heard him complain, through the tent wall, “if you’d stop flashing a light in my eyes. . . . And for Pete’s sake take these goats some place else.”
Then Jane came and sat beside me at our fire. She looked washed-out around the eyes, and weak from excitement. She’d seen a real fight, and discovered that it’s hard work and no romance being a trained nurse. Feeling that way, she was sure that she was responsible for the war, and to blame for everything.
Actually, she had won the war. The Druses had had enough. For hours the next day they parleyed with the rayiss of our village about the ransom of their prisoners. It was settled that they would pay two horses for every man. They drove the horses two at a time through a break in our barricade, while we lowered a battered Druse down over the wall with ropes.
Then the Druses went off quickly. We learned the reason for their haste when a half company of black infantry appeared in the village, under command of an exasperated French lieutenant, about sunset.
We left in triumph the
next day. The whole village turned out, of course, to see us go. One after the other, the headmen took Tug’s hand and pressed it to their foreheads. They even escorted us down the hill on their horses, singing some kind of a chant about a lion-maned Frank who had won the battle with his invincible arm. At the bottom of the hill they stopped singing while the rayiss made an oration. It was all about Tug; they had gotten over Jane completely.
“What’s it about?” she asked me.
“Oh, they want Donovan to come and live in the castle. They’ll set him up in housekeeping with livestock, and give him his pick of the young girls for his wives.”
"That’s just what he ought to do,” she said. “That’s just where he belongs.”
“Sure,” he grinned, “I’d be a big hit.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “This is your big moment. What else will you ever do?”
As it happened, I went with her to Cook’s the morning after that to look for mail. And the clerk handed her a fat cable. When she pulled it apart, her fingers trembled. And when she read it, she acted as if nothing in the world mattered except that cable.
Her eyes brightened; she drew a long breath, and she handed it to me. “Read it,” she said.
Darling, why don't you write all I have is your postcard from India stop cable me as soon as you reach Paris and I will arrange to come over we'll be married in Paris and honeymoon for a week on the Riviera make it soon because I can never tell you how I love you.
It was signed Milton.
“Who’s he?” I asked. She took a long time to answer such a simple question.
“He is the better man.” Then she looked as if she was going to cry and laugh at the same time, standing there with her cablegram in the little office. “I’m going to be married in Paris,” she whispered.
And she was married in Paris—to Tug Donovan.
