Jimgrim and Allahs Peace | Page 2

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