Jerusalem. The Biography

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
     
    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 andstature – ‘the last of the paladins’ – and even Jemal Pasha admired his ‘alertness, discretion and brains’. An a mateur naturalist, he