Who Walks in Damascus?

The aftermath was bitter. The British had hardly halted the French shelling of Damascus and taken over the city (TIME, June 11) before Syria's President Shukri el-Kuwatly said: "This generation of Syrians will not tolerate seeing one Frenchman walk through the streets of Damascus." In neighboring coastal Lebanon, anti-French feeling mounted. When Lebanese demanded that "something be done here as was done in Syria," they meant that British troops should eject the French from the newly sandbagged public buildings and from street-corner barricades in Beirut, where the French last week emplaced machine guns.

But the British seemed reluctant to take another step that might further disrupt relations with their essential, difficult ally. French General Fernand Oliva-Roget suddenly turned up in Paris, where he denied that his shelling of Damascus had been "indiscriminate." He said that the outbreaks had been deliberately provoked by Syrian police in the hope of British intervention. How much the British had encouraged the demonstrators he would not guess, but he added darkly that the identity of British agents in Syria was "perfectly well known."

One of them, said Oliva-Roget, was Colonel William Frank ("Pete") Stirling, who, during the last war, was the good right hand of the late, famed T. E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"). Oliva-Roget said that Colonel Stirling was now known as "I'homme au chien" because, in full uniform, he walked the streets of Damascus with a big black dog.

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