Swords From the Desert (51 page)

Tourists don't visit them, and they will probably remain as they are, deserted and slowly crumbling under sun and rain for some centuries yet. I've seen a good many things, but nothing quite as impressive as those strongholds of the crusaders.

April 1, 1931

A note from Harold Lamb, in connection with "The Trial of the Templars," in this issue. This piece, as you know, concludes his series of true stories of the Crusades. His next efforts for our pages will be, he expects, some more of his colorful tales of the Don Cossacks, which many of you have been asking for.

Piedmont, California

One last word about the crusaders. In my books, and in the Adventure narrative, I've tried to show the men and the happenings of that time as they actually were. To do this, I used the chronicles of that time-leaving out present-day opinion.

Recently, however, the crusaders have come in for debunking, along with other characters of the past. In the last generations we've been fed up a bit too much with heroics, and the present tendency to kick down pedestals is a healthy one, so long as it is honest and intelligent kicking.

The debunkers say something like this: "The Crusades were a vain undertaking, a mistake, resulting only in waste of lives and treasure. The crusaders themselves, instead of being saints in arms turned out to be human sinners, who massacred and pillaged, while they made of the idealistic Kingdom of God around Jerusalem a kind of robbers'roost. They were really adventurers, who became degenerate and lost everything."

Some cynics say one thing, some another. But their point of view is pretty much the same. And in this case it is wrong. Because you can't lift men out of the twelfth century and set them down beside men of today, for comparison. Not that the world today is any Utopia. But the comparison is meaningless.

As to the question of the gain and loss in the Crusades, the wisest of the historians admit that they cannot answer it. We have no scales vast enough to weigh the inventions and the knowledge that came out of the great venture, against the destruction of goods and life.

Nor is modern civilization, which has seen itself torn asunder by a world war, without apparent cause, entitled to cast a stone at the crusaders, who fought for what was to them the greatest of earthly causes.

Remember, to the men of that time, the Crusades triumphed for more than a century. Whole people were torn loose from their isolation and merged with their fellows. Men who had been to the East returned with new knowledge-the rudiments of the knowledge that gave birth to the Renaissance thereafter, to the era of voyages of discovery. Four centuries before the first voyages, the crusaders set out over the sea to Outremer. And long before the first modern European entente the Crusades brought about the first international alliance.

As to the crusaders themselves, they were a cross-section of the humanity of the time; if anything, they were the best with the worst. And the debunker errs when he assumes they looked upon the venture as a kind of shortcut to salvation. The Church granted them absolution from their sins during the time of the crusade-usually fixed at three years-because the danger of the venture was so great.

Many of them, of course, hoped to carve a fortune for themselves in the East. Beside a Godfrey of Bouillon you will find a Bohemund; and with a Coeur de Lion, a Conrad of Montserrat. That happens in any great movement. And far outnumbering the fortune-seekers were the multitude who sold or pawned their possessions at home to pay their way on crusade, and brought back nothing but memories with them.

There were adventurers, no doubt of that. Probably-except for the Vikings and Varangians who formed clan units-they were the first massed adventurers. Certainly the first recruited from all nations to take part in a single enterprise. They paid their own way and put their lives at hazard for a cause. Of course they pillaged and took land where they found it-women too, at times. How else were they to live in that age when commissaries and paydays were things undreamed of?

But the kingdom they founded and held-Antioch was held for two centuries-knew more peace than the countries of Europe. There were quarrels in Jerusalem, but worse in Rome or Paris or Venice. And their code of laws, the Assizes, is nowlooked upon as the model of the early Medieval Age.

The crusaders have been accused of callous massacres. When they first penetrated the East they killed without discrimination, but they stopped this as soon as they found out that the Moslems were human beings very much like themselves, and not servants of Anti- Christ as they had been taught. Moslem chroniclers do not accuse them of any massacre except the slaughter at the capture of Jerusalem.

The crusaders who settled beyond the sea became colonists in earnest, and adapted themselves to their surroundings and the peoples of the East. They were exploited by the Italian merchant-republics, upon whose fleets they were dependent, and by the Church of Rome, which turned the Crusades into armed movements against enemies and heretics at home, leaving the exiles in Outremer to fare as best they could.

That they should lose their conquests was inevitable, when the new masses of Moslems, trained in the Mongol method of fighting, came against them from the East. At the end they were dozens against hundreds-garrison posts against armies. Degenerate they were not.

Their devotion and their chivalry cast a light upon an age otherwise dark and grim and treacherous. No words of ours can alter what these men did. Theyreached the summit of daring. They drained the cup to the very dregs of suffering and shame. They followed the light of their star, until they died. And in spite of all that modern cynics can say, the Crusades will always remain a cherished memory.

May 25, 1946: "The Lowdown on Jonah"

In Harold Lamb's entertaining story of an American in Persia- "Oracle by Hafiz," page i6-some of the most spirited action takes place at a pass. The pass Lamb had in mind-he knows the Middle East as well as most Americans know their own country-is one called Young Woman Old Woman Pass. It is exceedingly high, and gets its name from the idea that a young girl starting up would be an old woman by the time she got down.

Lamb wrote "Oracle by Hafiz" in his home in Beverly Hills, California, out of knowledge gained in some 59,000 miles of travel in the Middle East. He spent more than two years there in wartime, sometimes in palaces, sometimes in tents. He came back with an unbroken record of defeats at various sports. The Middle East is the homeland of chess, and Lamb was not surprised to lose to Emir Abdullah of Transjordan at that game. He was a little surprised, however, to find that the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza, could beat him at tennis, and that his bridge wasn't good enough for official circles in Tehran.

"It's a fine country to visit," he said. "Anywhere in the desert, you can still drive up to a village, pick out the best house and tell the owner you are going to be his guest for the night. In one Zoroastrian home we stayed three days, telling the servants what we wanted done, before seeing our host. You don't pay for things like that.

"I wanted to meet the people and live with them, and it is very easy to do, whether they are Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Kurds, Armenians, or Asiatic Jews. My only real grief was an excess of hospitality. Most of the folks out there look on an American as a visitor from the Promised Land. The United States seems to them to be a composite of the biggest, toughest, and wealthiest nation, expounder of the Atlantic Charter, President Wilson's idealism, typhus control, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It's a reputation very hard to live up to."

Like the hero of his story, Mr. Lamb got along very well with the mountain tribes, in spite of some differences in viewpoint. He found the tribesmen living quite well, getting such luxury items as tea, sugar, and gasoline by raiding highway convoys. One British military attache arrived at Shiraz, during Lamb's stay, wearing nothing but gray woolen underwear. He had come through the mountains at a moment when the tribesmen needed clothes.

One of the many Middle Easterners Lamb visited was Fattah Agha, a tribal head in the mountains south of Lake Urmia. Fattah Agha's tribe, the Hirkli, was getting along fine, finding good grazing as it moved around and carrying a little contraband salt across the frontier as a sideline. Fattah Agha asked with interest how Lamb's tribe found the grazing and such in the United States. "Do Americans migrate with their animals," he asked, "or do they build homes in settlements?"

Lamb told him the Americans had a tendency to build homes and stay in them, although they did migrate around a good deal with their women. Fattah Agha said he supposed it was all right if you liked that kind of life, but added frankly that he couldn't see how Americans would ever make any money staying in one place all the time.

Mr. Lamb also picked up a new version of what happened to Jonah. The real story, he was assured, is not the one he had been taught in Sunday school. It seems that Jonah prophesied that the wicked city of Nineveh was due to feel the wrath of the Lord, who would demolish it in forty days. And for forty days a wind shook the strongest of the city's walls and torrential rains flooded the city's streets. But when the storm ended, the city was still there. So the inhabitants went looking for Jonah, who lived up the Tigris River, and told him that while they were glad his prophecy had not come to pass, with an inevitable lowering of real-estate values, he must realize that they couldn't put up with a prophet whose predictions didn't come true, and they would like to have a word with him down by the river. So they tossed him into the Tigris, where the biggest fish-big, but by no means a whale-swallowed the prophet at a gulp. "They assured me," said the traveler, "that this is official."

February 24, 1951: Those Delightful Turks

Girl meets Lieut. Comdr. Terry McGowan in Istanbul's Great Bazaar on page 31, and in that same famous market-where one buys strictly at his own risk-author Harold Lamb once met an extraordinary bargain. One day he bought a fine Armenian manuscript book, which had a yellowed parchment page stuck inside it. While Lamb was examining something else, he noticed the dealer slip out the parchment. When the dealer went to get wrapping paper, Lamb slipped the parchment back in. The dealer obviously saw this, but said nothing, and the sale was gravely consummated, the whole business being considered fair and aboveboard by Bezistan standards. The parchment turned out to be a fragment of a rare early Gospel and is now in the University of Chicago collection labeled "The Harold Lamb Gospel of Mark."

But outside of the bazaar's free-for-all Turks are apt to be so honest that they get Americans all mixed up. One day a boy walked eight miles with three of Lamb's shirts to get them washed. The clean shirts returned with some rents tastefully embroidered. Price: twenty cents. So the grateful Lamb added eight cents for the needlework. The boy seemed upset, but presently returned in better humor after another eight-mile constitutional, reporting that the wash woman said the charge was twenty cents, and twenty it would be. Lamb took back the eight cents, dazedly apologized for his mistake, and everybody was happy.

Lamb, who worked the ancient Turkish Sultan Suleiman into an earlier Post story and now is being acclaimed for his new book Suleiman the Magnificent, loves the way the Turks use few words to say much. Example: once he got a Turkish ambassador to inscribe a helpful visa in his passport, expecting many flowery sentences. His excellency wrote seven words. Lamb got worried and had them translated. They said, "Do what you can for this man, lawfully." Another example: several years ago the Kremlin employed a vast number of paragraphs explaining to Turkey that for mutual security she should cede various territories and let Russia police the Dardanelles. Turkey's economically worded official reply boiled down to five English words, "Then come and take them."

Harold Lamb (1892-1962) was born in Alpine, New Jersey, the son of Eliza Rollinson and Frederick Lamb, a renowned stained-glass designer, painter, and writer. Lamb later described himself as having been born with damaged eyes, ears, and speech, adding that by adulthood these problems had mostly righted themselves. He was never very comfortable in crowds or cities and found school "a torment." He had two main refuges when growing up-his grandfather's library and the outdoors. Lamb loved tennis and played the game well into his later years.

Lamb attended Columbia, where he first dug into the histories of Eastern civilizations, ever after his lifelong fascination. He served briefly in World War I as an infantryman but saw no action. In 1917 he married Ruth Barbour, and by all accounts their marriage was a long and happy one. They had two children, Frederick and Cary. Arthur Sullivan Hoffman, the chief editor of Adventure magazine, recognized Lamb's storytelling skills and encouraged him to write about the subjects he most loved. For the next twenty years or so, historical fiction set in the remote East flowed from Lamb's pen, and he quickly became one of Adventure's most popular writers. Lamb did not stop with fiction, however, and soon began to draft biographies and screenplays. By the time the pulp magazine market dried up, Lamb was an established and recognized historian, and for the rest of his life he produced respected biographies and histories, earning numerous awards, including one from the Persian government for his two-volume history of the Crusades.