A relic of the Druze Nation

[Peter Mc]

My interest in the Royal Irish Constabulary led me to acquire this little piece. It was owned by Douglas V Duff; author and adventurer, who served in both the RIC and the Palestine Police.

It appears to be of solid silver, and measures approximately 6" x 4". On the reverse of the mount which came with the buckle is a typed memo "The buckle of the sword-belt presented to me by The Sultan Pasha el Atrash,principal prince of the DRUZE nation, shortly after the Battle of the Wadi Sirhan, when we defeated the Wahabite invasion of Transjordania in 1923. Douglas V Duff of the Palestine Gendarmerie."

Sultan Pasha al-Atrash appears to have been a very important figure as regards the Druze nation.

I have not been able to find out much about Wadi Sirhan. Although there are a number of references to a battle, the dates and places are sometimes contradictory. The spelling of placenames and individuals also seems inconsistent. However the following extract from Duff's book "Bailing with a Teaspoon" is relevant:

"Abdullah, a younger son of King Hussein, was given the land east of the

River Jordan, the territories of the ancient Moabites, Ammonites and

Nabataeans, as his quasi-independent principality. Transjordan is the one

exception to our tale of ineptitude in Arab lands. We have succeeded there,

to a far greater extent than elsewhere, because we had some of the very best

men in all the Empire acting as our representatives at the court of the Emir.

Such stalwarts as Peake, Glubb, the two Kirkbrides, Cox and Foot have,

with a few others, played a noble part, in startling contrast to the generality

of British officials west of the Sacred River.

But the very fact of the Emir, whom we imposed on the tribes and towns

of Transjordan, being an Outlander made matters precarious at first. There

have been countless intrigues and risings which had to be met with inade-

quate forces, so that a policy of "divide and rule" was intelligently employed

until a new generation arose who had no memory of Ottoman Turkish days.

When I first went east of the Jordan the Paramount sheikhs still enjoyed

great power and were almost absolute rulers within their own areas. Another

great danger was the ancient feud between the Saudian House of the Princes

of Nejd and the Hashimites of Mecca, which had reached a climax, for, at

that time, the great Arab prince, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saoud, who has since

proved himself among the most enlightened and unselfish of monarchs,

was confined to his own territory in the Nejd, the interior of Arabia.

There is no man in modern times who has lived a more adventurous and

hazardous life than he; his story reads like that of some mediaeval monarch

of the days of the Crusades. His Majesty King Ibn Saoud has endured all the

vicissitudes of war and fortune that befell Bohemund or Richard Lion-heart

As a young man he led a forlorn hope of stormers across the ramparts of his

capital city; like Baldwin the First he has been a homeless wanderer with

only a few followers and, also like that Crusading King of Jerusalem, has

won great power and place through his own courage and infinite resource.

King Ibn Saoud is the head of a great religious movement which was in

bitter opposition to the form of Islam practised by the rulers of Mecca. The

Wahabite Reform of the Faith is stern and uncompromising, but it appeals

to the puritanical spirit of the fighting Bedouin tribesmen, tinder King Ibn

Saoud it has welded the loose confederation of nomad clans in the Hedjaz

into an obedient and extremely courageous whole, somewhat on the lines of

an extremely efficient and hardy Cromwellian New Model.

At the time of which I am writing, however, King Ibn Saoud had only

newly emerged from the fastnesses of his native Nejd and was attacking the

kingdom of the Hedjaz in which Britain had enthroned the Emir's father,

King Hussein. The Wahabites were swiftly driving the Hashimites out of

Arabia; the stern sectaries were not only victorious at almost every point,

but the former subjects of Hussein were accepting the invaders with alacrity

and embracing their rugged Reformed religion.

The main danger was that a Wahabite expeditionary force might thrust

into Transjordania to expel our protege, the Hashimite Emir. But we moved

no Imperial troops into Transjordania, although a few British gendarmes

were sent to prepare accommodation in case our Force, being a purely

Colonial one and not an Imperial regiment whose presence might have

provoked League of Nations comment, had to be employed. The Arab

Legion, then a far smaller Force than it is nowadays, was told to do all it

could and not ask for reinforcement if it could avoid doing so. There was a

squadron of R.A.F., stationed in Ramleh, near Jaffa, with a few obsolescent

armoured-cars, which was moved to Amman in case their use became

imperative. That was all our striking-force.

Fortunately, we had Peake in command of the Arab Legion, Peake

Pasha, as he is widely known, and he worked wonders. It must be remem-

bered that the Legion was in its infancy and that there was always a risk that

its troopers, who were mainly tribesmen, might be swayed more by loyalty to

their individual Paramount-sheikhs than by their oath to serve the Out-

lander prince whom Britain had imposed on them. The Arab Legion was

not mechanized then, it consisted of a few squadrons of cavalry and camelry,

together with a mixed battery of four guns, two of them lost by the Honour-

able Artillery Company during the abortive Es Salt Raid in 1918. Another

was an ex-Turkish piece; the fourth, of different calibre, had been abandoned

by a German battery serving under General Liman von Sanders. There is

a good tale, it may be apocryphal, which says that the sabres of the

Legion were donated by a Cairo museum after they had lain disregarded in

its cellars ever since Napoleon's cavalry lost them a century and a quarter

before. The only asset possessed by the Emir's Legion was the indomitable

personality of Peake Pasha moulding the inherent courage of his Bedouins.

"We faced a situation and a problem very similar to those experienced by

the Crusading kings; the princes of Islam were fighting between themselves

and in their warfare anything might happen to the weak and under-garrisoned

coastal strip ruled under the Red Cross of St. George. If a Wahabite army

swept into Amman, the next dawn might find it ravening round the walls of

Jerusalem, while the evening of the same day could see the few survivors

of the British Mandate making their last stand on the beaches of the

Mediterranean.

The emergency sprang on us so suddenly that there was no time to do

more than to hold the threatened breach as best we could.

We had time only to dash out to a valley about fifteen miles from

Amman the capital, and to dig-in, before the fanatical flood of hardy desert

riders broke against us on their surge towards the destruction of the Hashi-

mite principality. We numbered about 400 Arab Legionaries under Peake

Pasha, two R.A.F. armoured-cars and the small advance party of about

a dozen British Gendarmerie. We counted thirteen banners waving above

the heads of the Arab cavalry and reckoned that there were close on five to

six thousand riders, all well armed and superbly mounted, facing us.

We had strung a thin fence of barbed wire across the narrow valley,

which was about 400 yards wide from rock to rock, and 100 yards

behind it we dug a shallow, trench and erected a second fence, both of

them very flimsy, for we had to be economical with our scanty wire. The

enemy came at us in the fashion of the riders of Saladin and of Bibars the

Mameluke, banners waving, swords brandished in the air, lance-heads

glittering, mantles aswirl and head-cloths streaming wildly in the wind of

their own headlong passage. Shrill voices screamed "Attak-hu-AklarJ", the

age-old battle-shout of Islam; every rider in the horde desperate to come to

handstrokes with the pitifully small line of heretics and foreign infidels who

faced them.

They struck our further wire like a wave of the ocean hitting the rocks

of the foreshore. Scores went down, horses kicking, men struggling madly to

free themselves, only to be ridden over by their roaring comrades in the rear,

who used them as a ramp to carry them over the apron-fence and on to our

parapet. Rifles, and our heterogeneous selection of machine-guns, about ten

or a dozen of them, did not stop them, though they went down in swathes,

but the second wire fence did, where we of the Gendarmerie pelted the

shrieking, writhing mass with hand-grenades. Two small causeways, left to

span the trench, allowed the old Rolls-Royce armoured-cars to go through

and join in the fray.

I saw men clad in the mail hauberks their ancestors may have used at the

Horns of Hattin, or at the Mameluke's intaking of Antioch, swinging swords

as they tried to reach the Legionaries in the trench. Only a few of the Waha-

bites troubled to use the rifles they all wore slung on their shoulders. A

handful who fought their way over the bodies of comrades blanketing our

wire, died on the bayonets, or beneath the swinging sabres of the Legion. It

was more than human flesh could stand. Suddenly they broke, streaming

away down the valley in full rout.

It was over too quickly for me to feel very much during the hectic

moments of the actual fighting, but I did realize that the Lord God had been

very good to me in allowing me to bear a hand in the same kind of warfare

as that which our ancestors had shared when they ringed their shield- wall

round the crest of the Mount of Beatitudes of Hattin, to face the horsemen

and archers of Saladin charging through the acrid smoke of the smouldering

herbiage.

I found two mail hauberks on the battlefield, one of them was of Cru-

sading chainwork, the other made of the fine Damascene rings the Saracens

once wore. I also found a sword, whose blade was new but whose cross-hilt

bore the mark of two knights astride a single horse, the badge of the Poor

Knights of Christ and the Temple of the Lord, the Knights Templar. I took

away a most noble battle-axe of Frankish origin."

Transjordan was a small nation of only 400,000 people and of these most of them were farmers or nomads. Because of this, there was little infrastructure in place and still less expertise in running a bureaucracy of any kind. Consequently, the Emir ran affairs much as any Sheikh had done before, leaving British officials to handle the problems of defense, finance, and foreign policy. The British appointed a resident to Transjordan, but he was effectively under instructions from the British High Commissioner in Palestine.

In 1921, a police force was organised to help the king with his problems of internal control. It was organised by F. G. Peake, a British officer known to the Arabs as Peake Pasha. This Arab force was soon actively engaged in suppressing brigandage and repelling raids by the Wahhabis. In 1923 the police and reserve force were combined into the Arab Legion as a regular army under Peake's command and helped regular British units fight against further Wahhabi incursions.

If any member can add to or correct my assumptions I would be most grateful.

Edited September 15, 2017 by Peter Mc
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