Jerusalem: The Biography

The guns were still booming when General Sir Edmund Allenby rode down the Jaffa Road to the Jaffa Gate. Inside his saddlebag, he kept a book entitled Historical Geography of the Holy Land by George Adam Smith, a present from Lloyd George. In London, the prime minister was elated. ‘The capture of Jerusalem has made a most profound impression throughout the whole civilised world,’ he declaimed in a rodomontade a few days later. ‘The most famous city in the world, after centuries of strife and vain struggle, has fallen into the hands of the British army, never to be restored to those who so successfully held it against the embattled hosts of Christendom. The name of every hill thrills with sacred memories.’

The Foreign Office telegraphed Allenby to avoid any kaiserine grandiosity or Christ-like pretension as he entered the city: ‘STRONGLY SUGGEST DISMOUNTING!’ The general walked through the gate, accompanied by American, French and Italian legates and watched by all the patriarchs, rabbis, muftis and consuls, to be greeted by the Mayor of Jerusalem who for the seventh time surrendered the city as ‘many wept for joy’ and ‘strangers greeted and congratulated each other’.

Allenby was accompanied by Lawrence of Arabia, who had just survived the greatest trauma of his life. In late November, on a solitary recce behind enemy lines, he had been captured at Deraa in Syria by the sadistic Ottoman governor Hajim Bey who, with his myrmidons, had subjected the ‘absurdly boyish’ Englishman to a homosexual rape. Lawrence managed to escape and seemingly recover but the psychological damage was profound and, after the war, he described feeling ‘maimed, imperfect, only half-myself. Probably it had been the breaking of the spirit by that frenzied nerveshattering pain which degraded me to beast level and which had journeyed with me ever since, a fascination and terror and morbid desire.’ When he reached Aqaba after his escape, Allenby summoned him just as Jerusalem fell.

Lawrence, eschewing his Bedouin gear, borrowed a captain’s uniform for the day. ‘For me,’ he wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘my appointment in the ceremony of the Jaffa Gate’ was ‘the supreme moment of the war, the one which for historical reasons made a greater appeal than anything on earth.’ He still regarded Jerusalem as ‘a squalid town’ of ‘hotel servants’, but now he bowed to the ‘mastering spirit of the place’. Naturally, the diarist Wasif Jawhariyyeh was also watching from the crowd.

Allenby was nicknamed the Bloody Bull for his force, dignity and stature – ‘the last of the paladins’ – and even Jemal Pasha admired his ‘alertness, discretion and brains’. An a mateur naturalist, he knew‘ all there was to know about birds and beasts’ and had ‘read everything and quoted in full at dinner one of the lesser known sonnets of Rupert Brooke’. He had a cumbersome sense of humour – his horse and his pet scorpion were both named Hindenburg after the German military supremo – but even the fastidious Lawrence worshipped the ‘gigantic, red and merry’ general, who was ‘morally so great that the comprehension of our littleness came slow to him. What an idol that man was.’

Allenby climbed the steps to the platform to read his proclamation about ‘Jerusalem the Blessed’, which was then repeated in French, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Russian and Italian – carefully not mentioning the word that was on everyone’s mind: Crusade. But when Mayor Husseini finally handed over the city’s keys Allenby is supposed to have said: ‘The Crusades have now ended.’ The mayor and the mufti, both Husseinis, stalked off angrily. However, for the millenarian American Colonists, it was different: ‘We thought we were witnessing the triumph of the last Crusade,’ said Bertha Spafford. ‘A Christian nation had conquered Palestine!’ No one could share Lawrence’s thoughts for, as he listened to Allenby, he imagined himself a few days earlier: ‘It was strange to stand before the Tower with the Chief listening to his proclamation and to think how a few days earlier I had stood before [his rapist] Hajim.’

Allenby then marched out of the Jaffa Gate and remounted Hindenburg.^* ‘Jerusalem cheered us mightily. It was impressive,’ wrote Lawrence, but the Ottomans were counter-attacking with, Lawrence noted, ‘an accompaniment of machine-gun fire with aeroplanes circling over us continually. Jerusalem has not been taken for so long nor has it ever fallen so tamely before.’ In spite of himself, he felt ‘shame-faced with triumph’.

Afterwards, recalled Lawrence, there was a luncheon at General Shea’s headquarters, which was spoiled when the French envoy Picot made a bid for France to share Jerusalem. ‘And tomorrow, my dear general,’ he told Allenby in his ‘fluting voice’, ‘I’ll take the necessary steps to set up civil government in this town.’