Jimgrim and Allah\'s Peace by Talbot Mundy

T >> Talbot Mundy >> Jimgrim and Allah\'s Peace

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

by Talbot Mundy

To Jimgrim: whose real name, rank, and military distinctions,
I promised never to make public.

Contents

I. "Look for a man named Grim."
II. "No objection; Only a stipulation."
III. "Do whatever the leader of the escort tells you."
IV. "I am willing to use all means--all methods."
V. "D'you mind if I use you?"
VI. "That man will repay study."
VII. "Who gives orders to me?"
VIII. "He will say next that it was he who set the stars in the
sky over El-Kerak, and makes the moon rise!"
IX. "Feet downwards, too afraid to yell"--
X. "Money doesn't weigh much!"
XI. "And the rest of the acts of Ahaziah--"
XII. "You know you'll get scuppered if you're found out!"
XIII. "You may now be unsafe and an outlaw and enjoy yourself!"
XIV. "Windy bellies without hearts in them."
XV. "I'll have nothing to do with it!"
XVI. "The enemy is nearly always useful if you leave him free to
make mistakes."
XVII. "Poor old Scharnhoff's in the soup."
XVIII. "But we're ready for them."
XIX. "Dead or Alive, Sahib."
XX. "All men are equal in the dark."
------------

Chapter One

"Look for a man named Grim."

There is a beautiful belief that journalists may do exactly as
they please, and whenever they please. Pleasure with violet
eyes was in Chicago. My passport describes me as a journalist.
My employer said: "Go to Jerusalem." I went, that was in 1920.

I had been there a couple of times before the World War, when the
Turks were in full control. So I knew about the bedbugs and the
stench of the citadel moat; the pre-war price of camels; enough
Arabic to misunderstand it when spoken fluently, and enough of
the Old Testament and the Koran to guess at Arabian motives,
which are important, whereas words are usually such stuff as lies
are made of.

El Kudz, as Arabs call Jerusalem, is, from a certain distance, as
they also call it, shellabi kabir. Extremely beautiful.
Beautiful upon a mountain. El Kudz means The City, and in a
certain sense it is that, to unnumbered millions of people.
Ludicrous, uproarious, dignified, pious, sinful, naively
confidential, secretive, altruistic, realistic. Hoary-ancient
and ultra-modern. Very, very proud of its name Jerusalem, which
means City of Peace. Full to the brim with the malice of
certainly fifty religions, fifty races, and five hundred thousand
curious political chicaneries disguised as plans to save our
souls from hell and fill some fellow's purse. The jails
are full.

"Look for a man named Grim," said my employer. "James Schuyler
Grim, American, aged thirty-four or so. I've heard he knows
the ropes."

The ropes, when I was in Jerusalem before the war, were
principally used for hanging people at the Jaffa Gate, after they
had been well beaten on the soles of their feet to compel them to
tell where their money was hidden. The Turks entirely understood
the arts of suppression and extortion, which they defined as
government. The British, on the other hand, subject their normal
human impulse to be greedy, and their educated craving to be
gentlemanly white man's burden-bearers, to a process of compromise.
Perhaps that isn't government. But it works. They even carry
compromise to the point of not hanging even their critics if
they can possibly avoid doing it. They had not yet, but they
were about to receive a brand-new mandate from a brand-new
League of Nations, awkwardly qualified by Mr. Balfour's
post-Armistice promise to the Zionists to give the country to
the Jews, and by a war-time promise, in which the French had
joined, to create an Arab kingdom for the Arabs.

So there was lots of compromising being done, and hell to pay,
with no one paying, except, of course, the guests in the hotels,
at New York prices. The Zionist Jews were arriving in droves.
The Arabs, who owned most of the land, were threatening to cut
all the Jews' throats as soon as they could first get all their
money. Feisal, a descendant of the Prophet, who had fought
gloriously against the Turks, was romantically getting ready in
Damascus to be crowned King of Syria. The French, who pride
themselves on being realistic, were getting ready to go after
Feisal with bayonets and poison-gas, as they eventually did.

In Jerusalem the Bolsheviks, astonishingly credulous of "secret"
news from Moscow, and skeptical of every one's opinion but their
own, were bolsheviking Marxian Utopia beneath a screen of such
arrogant innocence that even the streetcorner police constables
suspected them. And Mustapha Kemal, in Anatolia, was rumoured to
be preparing a holy war. It was known as a Ghazi in those
days. He had not yet scrapped religion. He was contemplating,
so said rumour, a genuine old-fashioned moslem jihad, with
modern trimmings.

A few enthusiasts astonishingly still laboured for an American
mandate. At the Holy Sepulchre a British soldier stood on guard
with bayonet and bullets to prevent the priests of rival creeds
from murdering one another. The sun shone and so did the stars.
General Bols reopened Pontius Pilate's water-works. The learned
monks in convents argued about facts and theories denied by
archaeologists. Old-fashioned Jews wailed at the Wailing Wall.
Tommy Atkins blasphemously dug corpses of donkeys and dogs from
the Citadel moat.

I arrived in the midst of all that, and spent a couple of months
trying to make head or tail of it, and wondering, if that was
peace, what war is? They say that wherever a man was ever slain
in Palestine a flower grows. So one gets a fair idea of the
country's mass-experience without much difficulty. For three
months of the year, from end to end, the whole landscape is
carpeted with flowers so close together that, except where beasts
and men have trodden winding tracks, one can hardly walk without
crushing an anemone or wild chrysanthemum. There are more
battle-fields in that small land than all Europe can show. There
are streams everywhere that historians assert repeatedly "ran
blood for days."

Five thousand years of bloody terrorism, intermingling of races,
piety, plunder, politics and pilgrims, have produced a self-
consciousness as concentrated as liquid poison-gas. The laughter
is sarcastic, the humour sardonic, and the credulity beyond
analysis. For instance, when I got there, I heard the British
being accused of "imperialistic savagery" because they had
removed the leprous beggars from the streets into a clean place
where they could receive medical treatment.

It was difficult to find one line of observation. Whatever
anybody told you, was reversed entirely by the next man. The
throat-distorting obligation to study Arabic called for rather
intimate association with educated Arabs, whose main obsession
was fear of the Zionist Jews. The things they said against
the Jews turned me pro-Zionist. So I cautiously made the
acquaintance of some gentlemen with gold-rimmed spectacles, and
the things they said about the Arabs set me to sympathizing with
the sons of Ishmael again.

In the midst of that predicament I met Jimgrim--Major James
Schuyler Grim, to give him his full title, although hardly any
one ever called him by it. After that, bewilderment began to
cease as, under his amused, painstaking fingers, thread after
thread of the involved gnarl of plots and politics betrayed
its course.

However, first I must tell how I met him. There is an American
Colony in Jerusalem--a community concern that runs a one-price
store, and is even more savagely criticized than the British
Administration, as is only natural. The story of what they did
in the war is a three-year epic. You can't be "epic" and not
make enemies.

A Chicago Jew assured me they were swine and horse-thieves. But
I learned that the Yemen Jews prayed for them--first prayer--
every Sabbath of the year, calling down blessings on their heads
for charitable service rendered.

One hardly goes all the way to Palestine to meet Americans; but
a journalist can't afford to be wilfully ignorant. A British
official assured me they were "good blokes" and an Armenian told
me they could skin fleas for their hides and tallow; but the
Armenian was wearing a good suit, and eating good food, which he
admitted had been given to him by the American Colony. He was
bitter with them because they had refused to cash a draft on
Mosul, drawn on a bank that had ceased to exist.

It seemed a good idea to call on the American Colony, at their
store near the Jaffa Gate, and it turned out to be a very clean
spot in a dirty city. I taxed their generosity, and sat for
hours on a ten-thousand-dollar pile of Asian rugs behind the
store; and, whatever I have missed and lost, or squandered, at
least I know their story and can keep it until the proper time.

Of course, you have to allow for point of view, just as the
mariner allows for variation and deviation; but when they
inferred that most of the constructive good that has come to the
Near East in the last fifty years has been American, they spoke
with the authority of men who have lived on the spot and watched
it happen.

"You see, the Americans who have come here haven't set up
governments. They've opened schools and colleges. They've
poured in education, and taken nothing. Then there are thousands
of Arabs, living in hovels because there's nothing better, who
have been to America and brought back memories with them. All
that accounts for the desire for an American mandate--which would
be a very bad thing, though, because the moment we set up a
government we would lose our chance to be disinterested. The
country is better off under any other mandate, provided it gives
Americans the right to teach without ruling. America's mission
is educational. There's an American, though, who might seem to
prove the contrary. Do you see him?"

There were two Arabs in the room, talking in low tones over by
the window. I could imagine the smaller of the two as a peddler
of lace and filigree-silver in the States, who had taken out
papers for the sake of privilege and returned full of notions to
exploit his motherland. But the tall one--never. He was a
Bedouin, if ever a son of the desert breathed. If he had visited
the States, then he had come back as unchanged as gold out of an
acid bath; and as for being born there--

"That little beady-eyed, rat-faced fellow may be an American," I
said. "In fact, of course he is, since you say so. But as for
being up to any good--"

"You're mistaken. You're looking at the wrong man. Observe the
other one."

I was more than ever sure I was not mistaken. Stately gesture,
dignity, complexion, attitude--to say nothing of his Bedouin
array and the steadiness with which he kept his dark eyes fixed
on the smaller man he was talking to, had laid the stamp of the
desert on the taller man from head to heel.

"That tall man is an American officer in the British army.
Doesn't look the part, eh? They say he was the first American to
be granted a commission without any pretense of his being a
Canadian. They accepted him as an American. It was a case of
that or nothing. Lived here for years, and knew the country so
well that they felt they had to have him on his own terms."

You can believe anything in Jerusalem after you have been in the
place a week or two, so, seeing who my informant was, I swallowed
the fact. But it was a marvel. It seemed even greater when the
man strolled out, pausing to salute my host with the solemn
politeness that warfare with the desert breeds. You could not
imagine that at Ellis Island, or on Broadway--even on the stage.
It was too untheatrical to be acting; too individual to be
imitation; to unself-conscious to have been acquired. I
hazarded a guess.

"A red man, then. Carlisle for education. Swallowed again by
the first desert he stayed in for more than a week."

"Wrong. His name is Grim. Sounds like Scandinavian ancestry, on
one side. James Schuyler Grim--Dutch, then, on the other; and
some English. Ten generations in the States at any rate. He can
tell you all about this country. Why not call on him?"

It did not need much intelligence to agree to that suggestion;
but the British military take their code with them to the
uttermost ends of earth, behind which they wonder why so many
folks with different codes, or none, dislike them.

"Write me an introduction," I said.

"You won't need one. Just call on him. He lives at a place they
call the junior Staff Officers' Mess--up beyond the Russian
Convent and below the Zionist Hospital."

So I went that evening, finding the way with difficulty because
they talk at least eighteen languages in Jerusalem and, with the
exception of official residences, no names were posted anywhere.
That was not an official residence. It was a sort of communal
boarding-house improvised by a dozen or so officers in preference
to the bug-laden inconvenience of tents--in a German-owned
(therefore enemy property) stone house at the end of an alley, in
a garden full of blooming pomegranates.

I sent my card in by a flat-footed old Russian female, who ran
down passages and round corners like a wet hen, trying to find a
man-servant. The place seemed deserted, but presently she came
on her quarry in the back yard, and a very small boy in a
tarboosh and knickerbockers carried the card on a tray into a
room on the left. Through the open door I could hear one quiet
question and a high-pitched disclaimer of all knowledge; then an
order, sounding like a grumble, and the small boy returned to the
hall to invite me in, in reasonably good English, of which he
seemed prouder than I of my Arabic.

So I went into the room on the left, with that Bedouin still in
mind. There was only one man in there, who got out of a deep
armchair as I entered, marking his place in a book with a
Damascus dagger. He did not look much more than middle height,
nor more than medium dark complexioned, and he wore a major's
khaki uniform.

"Beg pardon," I said. "I've disturbed the wrong man. I came to
call on an American named Major Grim."

"I'm Grim."

"Must be a mistake, though. The man I'm looking for is taller
than you--very dark--looks, walks, speaks and acts like a
Bedouin. I saw him this afternoon in Bedouin costume in the
American Colony store."

"Yes, I noticed you. Sit down, won't you? Yes, I'm he--the
Bedouin abayi* seems to add to a man's height. Soap and water
account for the rest of it. These cigars are from the States."
[*Long-sleeved outer cloak.]

It was hard to believe, even on the strength of his straight
statement--he talking undisguised American, and smiling at me, no
doubt vastly pleased with my incredulity.

"Are you a case of Jekyll and Hyde?" I asked.

"No. I'm more like both sides of a sandwich with some army mule-
meat in the middle. But I won't be interviewed. I hate it.
Besides, it's against the regulations."

His voice was not quite so harshly nasal as those of the Middle
West, but he had not picked up the ultra-English drawl and
clipped-off consonants that so many Americans affect abroad
and overdo.

I don't think a wise crook would have chosen him as a subject for
experiments. He had dark eyes with noticeably long lashes;
heavy eyebrows; what the army examination-sheets describe as a
medium chin; rather large hands with long, straight fingers;
and feet such as an athlete stands on, fully big for his size,
but well shaped. He was young for a major--somewhere between
thirty and thirty-five.

Once he was satisfied that I would not write him up for the
newspapers he showed no disinclination to talk, although it was
difficult to keep him on the subject of himself, and easy to let
him lose you in a maze of tribal history. He seemed to know the
ins and outs of every blood-feud from Beersheba to Damascus, and
warmed to his subject as you listened.

"You see," he said, by way of apology when I laughed at a string
of names that to me conjured up only confusion, "my beat is all
the way from Cairo to Aleppo--both sides of the Jordan. I'm not
on the regular strength, but attached to the Intelligence--no,
not permanent--don't know what the future has in store--that
probably depends on whether or not the Zionists get full control,
and how soon. Meanwhile, I'm my own boss more or less--report
direct to the Administrator, and he's one of those men who allows
you lots of scope."

That was the sort of occasional glimpse he gave of himself, and
then switched off into straight statements about the Zionist
problem. All his statements were unqualified, and given with the
air of knowing all about it right from the beginning.

"There's nothing here that really matters outside the Zionist-
Arab problem. But that's a big one. People don't realize it--
even on the spot--but it's a world movement with ramifications
everywhere. All the other politics of the Near East hinge on it,
even when it doesn't appear so on the surface. You see, the Jews
have international affiliations through banks and commerce. They
have blood-relations everywhere. A ripple here may mean there's
a wave in Russia, or London, or New York. I've known at least
one Arab blood-feud over here that began with a quarrel between a
Jew and a Christian in Chicago."

"Are the Zionists as dangerous as the Arabs seem to think?" I asked.

"Yes and no. Depends what you call danger. They're like an
incoming tide. All you can do is accept the fact and ride on top
of it, move away in front of it, or go under. The Arabs want to
push it back with sword-blades. Can't be done!"

"Speaking as a mere onlooker, I feel sorry for the Arabs," I
said. "It has been their country for several hundred years.
They didn't even drive the Jews out of it; the Romans attended
to that, after the Assyrians and Babylonians had cleaned up
nine-tenths of the population. And at that, the Jews were
invaders themselves."

"Sure," Grim answered. "But you can't argue with tides. The
Arabs are sore, and nobody has any right to blame them. The
English betrayed the Arabs--I don't mean the fellows out here,
but the gang at the Foreign Office."

I glanced at his uniform. That was a strange statement coming
from a man who wore it. He understood, and laughed.

"Oh, the men out here all admit it. They're as sore as the Arabs
are themselves."

"Then you're on the wrong side, and you know it?" I suggested.

"The meat," he said, "is in the middle of the sandwich. In a
small way you might say I'm a doctor, staying on after a riot to
stitch up cuts. The quarrel was none of my making, although I
was in it and did what I could to help against the Turks. Like
everybody else who knows them, I admire the Turks and hate what
they stand for--hate their cruelty. I was with Lawrence across
the Jordan--went all the way to Damascus with him--saw the war
through to a finish--in case you choose to call it finished."

Vainly I tried to pin him down to personal reminiscences. He was
not interested in his own story.

"The British promised old King Hussein of Mecca that if he'd
raise an Arab army to use against the Turks, there should be a
united Arab kingdom afterward under a ruler of their own
choosing. The kingdom was to include Syria, Arabia and
Palestine. The French agreed. Well, the Arabs raised the army;
Emir Feisul, King Hussein's third son, commanded it; Lawrence
did so well that he became a legend. The result was, Allenby
could concentrate his army on this side of the Jordan and
clean up. He made a good job of it. The Arabs were naturally
cock-a-hoop."

I suggested that the Arabs with that great army could have
enforced the contract, but he laughed again.

"They were being paid in gold by the British, and had Lawrence to
hold them together. The flow of gold stopped, and Lawrence was
sent home. Somebody at the Foreign Office had changed his mind.
You see, they were all taken by surprise at the speed of
Allenby's campaign. The Zionists saw their chance, and claimed
Palestine. No doubt they had money and influence. Perhaps it
was Jewish gold that had paid the wages of the Arab army.
Anyhow, the French laid claim to Syria. By the time the war was
over the Zionists had a hard-and-fast guarantee, the French claim
to Syria had been admitted, and there wasn't any country left
except some Arabian desert to let the Arabs have. That's the
situation. Feisul is in Damascus, going through the farce of
being proclaimed king, with the French holding the sea-ports and
getting ready to oust him. The Zionists are in Jerusalem,
working like beavers, and the British are getting ready to pull
out as much as possible and leave the Zionists to do their own
worrying. Mesopotamia is in a state of more or less anarchy.
Egypt is like a hot-box full of explosive--may go off any minute.
The Arabs would like to challenge the world to mortal combat,
and then fight one another while the rest of the world pays
the bill--"

"And you?"

"The French, for instance. Their army is weak at the moment.
They've neither men nor money--only a hunger to own Syria. They
don't play what the English call 'on side.' They play a mean
game. The French General Staff figure that if Feisul should
attack them now he might beat them. So they've conceived the
brilliant idea of spreading sedition and every kind of political
discontent into Palestine and across the Jordan, so that if the
Arabs make an effort they'll make it simultaneously in both
countries. Then the British, being in the same mess with the
French, would have to take the French side and make a joint
campaign of it."

"But don't the British know this?"

"You bet they know it. What's the Intelligence for? The French
are hiring all the Arab newspapers to preach against the British.
A child could see it with his eyes shut."

"Then why in thunder don't the British have a showdown?"

"That's where the joker comes in. The French know there's a sort
of diplomatic credo at the London Foreign Office to the general
effect that England and France have got to stand together or
Europe will go to pieces. The French are realists. They bank
on that. They tread on British corns, out here, all they want
to, while they toss bouquets, backed by airplanes, across the
English Channel."

"Then the war didn't end the old diplomacy?"

"What a question! But I haven't more than scratched the Near
East surface for you yet. There's Mustapha Kemal in Anatolia,
leader of the Turkish Nationalists, no more dead or incapacitated
than a possum. He's playing for his own hand--Kaiser Willy
stuff--studying Trotzky and Lenin, and flirting with Feisul's
party on the side. Then there's a Bolshevist element among the
Zionists--got teeth, too. There's an effort being made from
India to intrigue among the Sikh troops employed in Palestine.
There's a very strong party yelling for an American mandate. The
Armenians, poor devils, are pulling any string they can get hold
of, in the hope that anything at all may happen. The orthodox
Jews are against the Zionists; the Arabs are against them both,
and furious with one another. There's a pan-Islam movement on
foot, and a pan-Turanian--both different, and opposed. About 75
per cent of the British are as pro-Arab as they dare be, but the
rest are strong for the Zionists. And the Administrator's
neutral!--strong for law and order but taking no sides."

"And you?"

"I'm one of the men who is trying to keep the peace."

He invited me to stay to dinner. The other members of the mess
were trooping in, all his juniors, all obviously fond of him
and boisterously irreverent of his rank. Dinner under his
chairmanship was a sort of school for repartee. It was utterly
unlike the usual British mess dinner. If you shut your eyes for
a minute you couldn't believe that any one present had ever worn
a uniform. I learned afterward that there was quite a little
competition to get into that mess.

After dinner most of them trooped out again, to dance with
Zionist ladies at an institute affair. But he and I stayed, and
talked until midnight. Before I left, the key of Palestine and
Syria was in my hands.

"You seem interested," he said, coming with me to the door. "If
you don't mind rough spots now and then, I'll try to show you a
few things at first hand."

Chapter Two

"No objection; only a stipulation."

The showmanship began much sooner than I hoped. The following
day was Sunday, and I had an invitation to a sort of semi-public
tea given by the American Colony after their afternoon religious
service.

They received their guests in a huge, well-furnished room on the
upper floor of a stone house built around a courtyard filled with
flowers. I think they were a little proud of the number of
fierce-looking Arabs, who had traveled long distances in order to
be present. Ten Arab chieftains in full costume, with fifteen or
twenty of their followers, all there at great expense of trouble,
time and money, for friends sake, were, after all, something to
feel a bit chesty about. Every member of the Colony seemed able
to talk Arabic like a native and, as they used to say in the up-
state papers, a good time was being had by all. The Near East
adores ice-cream, and there was lots of it.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18