Jimgrim and Allahs Peace | Page 6

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.
Two of the Arab chiefs were Christians; the rest were not. The peace
and war record of the Colony was what had brought them all there.
Hardly an Arab in the country was not the Colony's debtor for
disinterested help, direct or indirect, at some time in some way. The
American Colony was the one place in the country where a man of any
creed could go and be sure that whatever he might say would not be
used against him. So they were talking their heads off. Hot air and Arab
politics have quite a lot in common. But there was a broad
desert-breath about it all. It wasn't like the little gusty yaps you hear in
the city coffee-shops. A lot of the talk was foolish, but it was all
magnificent.
There was one sheikh named Mustapha ben Nasir dressed in a blue
serge suit and patent-leather boots, with nothing to show his nationality
except a striped silk head-dress with the camel-hair band around the
forehead. He was a handsome fellow, with a black beard trimmed to a
point, and perfect manners, polished no doubt in a dozen countries, but
still Eastern in slow, deferential dignity. He could talk good French. I
fell in conversation with him.
The frankness with which treason is mooted, admitted and discussed in

the Near East is one of the first things that amaze you. They are so open
about it that nobody takes them seriously. Apparently it is only when
they don't talk treason openly that the ruling authorities get curious and
make arrests. To me, a total stranger, with nothing to recommend me
but that for an hour or two that afternoon I was a guest of the American
Colony, Mustapha ben Nasir made no bones whatever about the fact
that the was being paid by the French to stir up feeling over Jordan
against the British.
"I receive a monthly salary," he boasted. "I am just