Jerusalem: The Biography

British planes bombed German headquarters in the Augusta Victoria and Allenby’s intelligence chief dropped opium cigarettes for the Ottoman troops, hoping that they would be too stoned to defend Jerusalem. Refugees poured out of the city. Removing the portrait of the Kaiser from the Augusta Victoria Chapel, Falkenhayn finally left the city himself and moved his headquarters to Nablus. British and German planes fought a quick dogfight over Jerusalem. Howitzers bombarded enemy positions; the Ottomans counter-attacked three times at Nabi Samuel; savage fighting raged for four days. ‘The war was at its height,’ wrote the teacher Sakakini, ‘shells falling all around, total pandemonium, soldiers running around, and fear ruling all.’^* On 4 December, British planes bombed Ottoman headquarters in the Russian Compound. In the Fast Hotel, German officers drank their last schnapps

and laughed until the final moment, while the Ottoman generals debated whether to surrender or not; the Husseinis met secretly in one of their mansions. The Turks started to desert. Cartloads of wounded soldiers and shattered corpses rumbled through the streets.

On the evening of 7 December, the first British troops saw Jerusalem. A heavy fog hung over the city; rain darkened the hills. The next morning, Governor Izzat Bey smashed his telegraph instruments with a hammer, handed over his writ of surrender to the mayor, ‘borrowed’ a carriage with two horses from the American Colony which he swore to return,^† and galloped away towards Jericho. All night thousands of Ottoman troops trudged through the city and out of history. At 3 a.m. on the 9th, German forces withdrew from the city on what Count Ballobar called a day of ‘astounding beauty’. The last Turk left St Stephen’s Gate at 7 a.m. By coincidence, it was the first day of Jewish Hanukkah, the festival of lights that celebrated the Maccabean liberation of Jerusalem. Looters raided the shops on Jaffa Road. At 8.45 a.m., British soldiers approached the Zion Gate.

Hussein Husseini, Mayor of Jerusalem, the hedonistic patron of Wasif the oud

-player, rushed to break the glad tidings to the American Colony, where the Holy Colonists sang ‘Alleluia’. The mayor sought a white flag – even though in his society, it proclaimed the home of a marriageable virgin. A woman offered him a white blouse, but this seemed inappropriate, so Husseini finally borrowed a bedsheet from the American Colony which he tied to a broom, and, gathering a delegation that contained several Husseinis, he mounted this horse and set off through Jaffa Gate to surrender, all the while brandishing this farcical banner.

Jerusalem proved surprisingly hard to surrender. First the mayor and his fluttering sheet found two Cockney mess-cooks near the northwestern Arab village of Lifta, looking for eggs in a chicken coop. He offered to surrender Jerusalem to them. But the Cockneys refused; the sheet and broom looked like a Levantine trick and their major was waiting for his eggs; they hurried back to their lines.

The mayor met the teenaged son of a friend from a respected Jewish family, Menache Elyashar. ‘Witness a historical event you’ll never forget,’ he said to the boy. Like a scene from The Wizard of Oz

, Elyashar too joined the gang, which now included Muslims, Jews and Christians. Then two sergeants from another London regiment cried ‘Halt!’ and emerged from behind a wall with guns cocked; the mayor waved his sheet. Sergeants James Sedgewick and Fred Hurcombe refused the surrender, ‘Hey, don’t any of you Johnnies speak English?’ they exclaimed. The mayor spoke it fluently but preferred to save it for more senior Englishmen. But they agreed to be photographed by a Swede from the American Colony with the mayor and his merry men and accepted some cigarettes.

The Jerusalemites next found two artillery officers, who also refused the honour but offered to inform headquarters. The mayor then came upon Lieutenant-Colonel Bayley who passed the offer on to Brigadier-General C. F. Watson, commander of the 180th Brigade. He summoned Major-General John Shea, General Officer Commanding the 160th Division, who galloped up on horseback. ‘They’ve come!’ cried the mayor’s group, waiting on the steps outside the Tower of David.^* Bertha Spafford, the American Colonist, kissed the general’s stirrup. Shea accepted the surrender in the name of General Allenby, who heard the news in his tent near Jaffa where he was talking to Lawrence of Arabia. But Mayor Husseini had one surrender left.¹³

ALLENBY THE BULL: THE SUPREME MOMENT