Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  But Bethlehem is quiet in the sun, and before long we are in the streets of Jerusalem. The Holy City is full of police and soldiers, but retains something of its old serenity nonetheless. The Arabs meditate in the courtyard of the Dome of the Rock, the Jews touch the Wailing Wall reverently with their foreheads, the British laugh over their gins-and-tonics in the bar of the King David Hotel or are to be heard blasphemously banging balls about on the tennis courts of the YMCA. The sun-bleached streets are orderly, but watchful. Rolls-Royce armoured cars trundle through the shadows of the Jaffa Gate. At dinner an Arab economist tells us Islamic unity is inevitable, a man from the Jewish Agency expounds the nature of kibbutzim, and Mrs T explains how to get to a dear little shop near the Citadel that sells divine embroideries.

  Next morning Wing-Commander W kindly flies us to Baghdad, in the back seat of his Wapiti biplane. We resolve to press our suits and get our hair done, as we check into the Regent Palace Hotel (cuisine anglaise, and conveniently up the road from the Eastern Bank), for Anglo-Arab life on the Tigris is very formal. You never know whom you may meet, in the shady old Turkish houses, dusty in the palm groves along the river, in which the English community prefers to live. Sniffy will be the conversation after the soirée, if you neglect your curtsey to the Regent, or speak to him too frankly, man to man.1 With luck, it is true, we may bump into the delightful Freya Stark, home in the flower of her enthusiasm from some unimaginable journey, and we are sure to meet Lady Drower, whose speciality is the language of the Mandaeans, or even Agatha Christie the popular novelist, whose husband is excavating up at Nineveh. Look out for Sir X Y, though, we have been warned, mind your Arab sympathies in front of Mrs Z, and whatever you do, don’t go spouting any Fabian nonsense to Nuri Pasha.

  And before we leave these neo-imperial scenes, pleasure bound to Isfahan perhaps, or back to duty in Baluchistan, we must be sure to attend a parade of the Assyrian Levies, who guard the British airfields in Iraq. They will leave a proper after-taste, for if any of the Middle Eastern peoples are protégés of the Empire, these are they. The Empire indeed brought them here, snatching them from Turkish persecution in the confused aftermath of the war, and now they are the Empire’s devoted wards. Their commanding officer is very proud of them. Splendid little chaps. Almost like Gurkhas. One would never know, would one, that they had been bullied, massacred, exiled and humiliated so constantly down the centuries?

  They’re safe now, anyway, many of them with English names, many more with English manners, every one of them loyal to the Crown. Whatever the Iraqis do, we can always depend upon the Assyrians! They march by in their stocky hundreds, brown and solemn in puttees and forage caps, with no trade but their soldiering, no loyalty but to the British Empire, no pride except pride of service —heads very high, arms swinging to the regulation height, marching and counter-marching in the Mesopotamian heat to the strains of a florid Colonel Bogey from the Levy band.1

  ‘I say, your car’s waiting. Don’t want to rush you, but you’ve got a long way to go, haven’t you? Do remember me to Molly, if she’s still in Karachi….’

  11

  They are sad scenes really, ironic scenes: an Empire in menopause, ruling with a benevolent obscurantism a people just realizing its potential. Soon it will all be swept away, leaving very little behind: but though it is a transient and infertile association, still there is much charm to it, and much goodwill. Let us cheat now, and return just for an evening to Amman, that modest country capital in the hills of Moab: for there we may pay a call upon the most beguiling of all the Anglo-Arab chieftains, Abdullah ibn Hussein, the second son of the old Sharif, and now a greybeard in his own right.

  No need to be nervous or diplomatic, as he was himself when, half a lifetime ago, he first encountered the British Empire in the person of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, eyes ablaze upon the steps of the Cairo Residency. Abdullah is a hospitable prince, and hardly have we signed the book at the British Residency than we are invited up to the palace for dinner that evening. Here is Empire at its happiest, an ambiance without grand principles or purposes perhaps, but without arrogance or sycophancy either. The palace stands on a ridge outside the town, guarded by long-haired Arab Legionaries in the street outside, by stalwart Circassian bodyguards, in astrakhan hats and polished jack-boots, inside its high gates. The evening is fresh; the food smells excellent; an evening with the Emir Abdullah is likely to be fun.

  The style of it is cosmopolitan. Though neither of the Emir’s two wives are present, nor his black concubine either, there are several Englishwomen at the table: and though there is no alcohol there is excellent Turkish food, stuffed aubergines, sizzling kebabs, baklava or savoury pastries. Abdullah loves his victuals and the black Berberine servants silently keep his plate well-stocked, or replenish the table with steaming silver platters. The conversation is variously in Arabic, Turkish and English. The English guests are in evening clothes; the Emir wears a black Turkish frock-coat, with a white waistcoat buttoning up to his neck, and a spotless white turban on his head.

  He is in his merriest form, his face all a-twinkle, and as he worries his kebab he chaffs the imperturbable Kirkbride, making outrageous comments in Arabic or Turkish, or telling him comic stories. Glubb is there, rubicund and amiable, and Lancaster Harding, the Director of Archaeology, describes his new dig at Jerash, and all the wives laugh a good deal, and all the men wish they had a drink. It is a homely evening. Arab and Briton, they have been brought into each other’s lives by the processes of history, and share the same experiences of war and peace. Artificial though it is, still there is to the occasion a wistful breath of might-have-been; and here, authentically to capture its fugitive beguilement, is the Emir’s own after-dinner story, a favourite of his for many years, and fondly familiar to all his guests. It is called the Tale of the Upstairs Donkey.

  On the outskirts of my native Mecca (the Emir Abdullah says) there used to be a haunted house, empty for many a year. One day the merchant Abdel Kader, passing it on his way home, heard sounds of revelry from its upper floors. He was a sceptical man, and thought some young bloods were having a party up there. When he stopped beside the gate to listen the noise stopped and a voice called to him out of the darkness: ‘Come up, Abdel Kader, come up!’ Determined to teach the young rascals a lesson, he tethered his donkey and entered the house. At once the noise started again, but the higher he climbed the stairs, the higher the revelry seemed to be, until when at last he reached the flat roof of the house, there was nobody there.

  As he stood there cursing, though, he heard a peal of raucous laughter from the garden below, and set off angrily down the stairs again. Again there was nobody in the house, and nobody in the garden, and nobody at the gate: but when he reached the street once more, he found that his donkey had vanished into the dark. Poor Abdel Kader, how he cursed now! but as he stood there in the half-light, vowing retribution and reviling the younger generation, he heard another peal of laughter, high above his head. He looked up at the roof above him, determined to catch a glimpse of his tormentors, and this time saw a head silhouetted against the parapet of the house, clear against a starlit sky.

  It was (concludes the Emir Abdullah, spitting out a datestone and half-winking at Mrs Glubb), his donkey.1

  1 Britain’s wartime promises to the Arabs are debated to this day, especially as to whether or not Palestine was included in the area of Arab independence. This is how it seems to me a reasonably unprejudiced observer might interpret them:

  Region To Hussein To France To the Zionists

  Syria Independent French-Arab —

  Lebanon and coastal Syria Reserved French —

  Northern Iraq Independent French-Arab —

  Central Iraq Independent British-Arab —

  Southern Iraq British British —

  Palestine Independent International National Home

  Transjordan Independent British-Arab National Home

  1 The uniform was borrowed, in bits and pieces from members of t
he general staff. Like Allenby, Lawrence thought the entry into Jerusalem ‘the supreme moment of the war’.

  1 ‘As I was working in my tent last night … in walked an Arab boy dressed in spotless white, white headdress with golden circlet; for the moment I thought the boy was somebody’s pleasure-boy but it soon dawned on me that he must be Lawrence whom I knew to be in camp. I just stared in silence at the very beautiful apparition…. He then said in a soft voice, “I am Lawrence, Dalmeny sent me over to see you.” I said “Boy or girl?” He smiled and blushed, saying “Boy”….’

  —from Richard Meinertzhagen’s Middle East Diary (London 1959).

  2 Among several Bedouin children named after him was Lawrence al Shaalan of the Rualla tribe, born in 1918, who survived both the rise and the fall of the British supremacy in the Middle East to die in 1976 as the last of the great independent chieftains—smuggler, gun-runner, tribal raider and friend of Britons to the end.

  1 Even franker were the sun-awnings of the house—which, though Egypt had officially been independent since 1922, were still decorated with the Arabic advertisement Dar-el-Himaya—‘House of the Protectorate’.

  2 Which had been Lord Cromer’s house, by the way, and survived to be burnt down by the mob in 1952.

  3 Not until the Second World War, when it came splendidly into its own for church parades, and General Montgomery used to read the lessons, to the despair of his security advisers, during weekend leave from the western desert.

  4 Yes, and he continued to do things the hard way, living on a superannuated Nile steamboat, taking the tram to his office at the Egyptian Ministry of Finance, wearing an old tarboosh, until his retirement in 1954, when I succeeded him as tenant of the SS Saphir. May he rest in peace.

  5‘Wogs’ were a new invention then. The word was applied originally by the RAF to any native, allegedly from ‘Wily Oriental Gentleman’, more probably, says Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slangy just from ‘golliwog’.

  1 Possibly C. S. Jarvis (1879–1953), who was Governor of Sinai from 1922 to 1936, and was indeed a prolific comic writer. He ran the desert province almost single-handed, and might well have been sitting in that customs post, for he was a specialist in drug smuggling.

  1As I did during an interview in 1955, when we were discussing the Arab dress Abdulillah occasionally wore. ‘You would be surprised how comfortable it is’, he said. ‘Yes,’ I foolishly replied, ‘and it does make one look so fearfully dignified.’ This was not a success, and our conversation soon ended. Within a few years the poor man was to be dismembered by the mob, and a hawker walked through the streets of Bagdad offering one of his fingers for sale.

  1 They were to serve the British until 1955, when the Royal Air Force bases in Iraq were handed over to the Iraqis, and the Assyrians were left to look after themselves. I went to their farewell parade, at Habbaniyah, and thought it touching that they marched away to oblivion to a martial arrangement of ‘The Old Folks at Home’.

  1 Abdullah was assassinated in 1951, in the Haram esh Sherif in Jerusalem, but his grandson King Hussein, long since emancipated from the Empire, is still guarded by Circassians and served by Berberines in the palace. Sir Alec Kirkbride was my kind eye-witness of this imaginary dinner-party, and to him also I owe the story of Abdel Kader and his donkey.

  Sir Henry McMahon, the true progenitor of this chapter, survived until 1949, achieving his greatest eminence as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Masonic Supreme Council 33°. He won immortality twice over, as the author of the McMahon Letters and as the negotiator of the McMahon Line, which defines to this day the frontier between Assam and Tibet.

  As for his correspondent the Grand Sharif, he was at least recognized by the British as King of the Hejaz: but in 1924 Ibn Saud seized his kingdom from him, incorporating it into the new State of Saudi Arabia, and poor Hussein spent his last years in exile on the British island of Cyprus, where his greatest joy was his Arab mare Zahra—‘Draw nigh!’ he would gently call to her in his lonely old age—‘Come nearer, Cooling of the Eyelids!’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Muddled Progress

  IN the meantime, while this frail new empire came fitfully into being, a terrible event occurred in the greatest of the old possessions, India, providing one of those markers in time, like the Indian Mutiny or the Boer War, by which imperial patterns can best be traced. It was the massacre at Amritsar, which was recognized even then as the worst of all stains upon the imperial record.

  It happened in a public enclosure, something between a square, a rubbish dump and a garden, called the Jallianwalla Bagh, in the very heart of Amritsar. This was a venerable city of the Punjab, and it contained the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple, where the splendid major-domos of the faith, sashed and staved, all day long marshalled the pilgrims towards their holy places beside the pool. The city was a brown maze of narrow streets, mud-paved, always crowded, with open-fronted bazaar shops, and toppling merchants’ houses, and foetid lanes with open drains. It was a highly-strung and volatile place, like most such sacred sites, and in April 1919 it was in a state of uproar. A wave of nationalist protest had been sweeping India, yet another epilogue to the Great War, and in Amritsar there had been riots and demonstrations, culminating in the deaths of five Englishmen and an assault upon an English woman missionary, riding her bicycle innocently through the town.

  Nobody doubted that the British would retaliate, but by now the city was too inflamed to count the risk; though public assemblies had been forbidden, on April 13 some hundreds of people deliberately and defiantly crowded into the Jallianwalla Bagh for a political meeting. It was an ominous scene. The Bagh, surrounded by high walls, was sunk below the level of the surrounding streets, and overlooked on all sides by towering houses, and this gave it rather the feeling of a prison exercise yard, or a place of execution. There were only three entrances: two gates at the southern end, and a narrow passage, hardly wide enough for two men to pass, at the north-west corner.

  Near this passage a patriotic orator, clambering on to a pile of rubble, began to read to the crowd a passionate poem of liberty. With every word the tension rose. The people swayed, stirred, sighed, and sometimes shouted responses: and the heat was so great, the place so jammed, the emotion of the occasion so high, that one could almost feel the heart of the crowd thumping there, and hear its excited breathing. This was elemental India—‘life chained to an imperfect mind’, as the poet Rabindranath Tagore described it—uncouth but innocent, too big for itself, furious when excited, docile and endearing when calm. It was a crowd in short, like most Indian crowds, assembled there partly out of conviction, partly in the hope of profit, partly for something to do. It was a dangerous crowd.

  Suddenly there was a rumble of heavy automobile engines outside the walls, and people near the entrance passage could see, gleaming in the street outside, the brown steel shape of an armoured car. In a moment the corridor was full of armed men, pushing their way fiercely into the garden, and on to the higher ground behind the speaker. One or two were English officers, some were Baluchis, some were Gurkha riflemen, taut purposeful little mercenaries like tamed wild beasts, with rifles in their hands and kukris at their belts. In a matter of moments they were briskly deployed along the top of the garden, and were kneeling with loaded rifles facing the crowd.

  The speaker did not at first notice the commotion behind him, but some of the crowd at once made for the gates, or took cover behind a small stone shrine that stood half-way down the garden. When the orator looked over his shoulder, and saw the soldiers kneeling there, he shouted to the crowd not to be alarmed—they would never shoot—they only had blank cartridges. Hardly had he spoken than a command rang out, and the impassive Gurkhas, obedient as machines, began to shoot at point-blank range into the crowd. The panic was frightful. People fought each other to get to the gates. They scrabbled at high walls, they trampled one another down, they rushed this way and that, they tried to hide, to take shelter behind each oth
er, to lie flat on the ground. The Gurkhas were unmoved. Loading in their own time, they aimed especially at the two exits at the bottom of the garden, until the gates were jammed with dead and wounded Indians, and nobody else could escape.

  The shooting went on for about six minutes. When the soldiers withdrew again down the alley, and the armoured cars returned to their barracks with a reverberation of gear changes among the city lanes, 379 people had been killed, and another 1,500 wounded. The Bagh was littered with corpses and wounded men, blood trickled through the dust, and when dusk fell upon the carnage, and the last survivors had left the square terrified and aghast, women and children crept around the garden searching for their menfolk—turning bodies over, inspecting shattered faces, or simply squatting helplessly among the horror. Later the jackals and pi-dogs arrived: and since a curfew was in force, by ten o’clock there was scarcely a sound in the Jallianwalla Bagh, but the rustling and gnawing of these animals, the moaning of the wounded, and the echoing voices of the British patrols outside, tramping with cocked rifles through the shuttered streets.1

  2

  This was the tragedy of Amritsar, when Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, CB, felt it his duty to make an object lesson of the demonstrators in the Jallianwalla Bagh. He was obliged to resign his commission, but he had many supporters, for he believed he was forestalling another Indian Mutiny. His superior officers condoned his action; the guardians of the Golden Temple enrolled him into the Brotherhood of Sikhs; the House of Lords passed a motion in his support; the readers of the Morning Post subscribed a £25,000 testimonial; in his attitude as in his orders he was only reflecting an innate sense of inadequacy that would presently debilitate the British in India. Still, as Winston Churchill said, it was an episode ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire … an extraordinary event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’.