Word: beirut
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Twenty-eight stokers from a British cruiser at Beirut were sent to Damascus, assigned as guards around a French convent. Since the nuns could not venture into the troubled town, the stokers made daily shopping trips for them. In return the nuns washed the stokers' coal-black clothes. When the 28 returned to the cruiser, they were so clean that their own officers did not recognize them...
...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...
Pride and Frustration. Then the British moved in. They cut French General Oliva Roget's line of communication with his base at Beirut. Into Damascus clanked a column of Sherman tanks on which Union Jacks had been freshly painted. Up from Cairo flew General Sir Bernard Paget, British commander in chief in the Middle East, who had several hundred thousand men on call. Paget ordered Roget to "cease fire." The Frenchman said that he would not take orders from a Britisher. Paget suggested that Roget call his French superior, General Humbolt, at Beirut. Roget pointed out that the British...
Paget brought General Humbolt up from Beirut to show him what the French Army had done to Damascus. After touring the streets in a British staff car, Humbolt sacked Roget. The Arabs had neither forgotten nor forgiven the shelling of Damascus by the French in 1925. Now they recalled that the French Government removed General Maurice Sarrail for that atrocity-and that the city was shelled again the following year...
...came the explosion. In Damascus and Aleppo anti-French riots broke out. Scores of people were killed or injured. In Beirut French shops were burned. (British stores in the same blocks were spared). Strikes spread, markets closed. Nervously, the French explained that the Senegalese had arrived because the Levant was now a French redeploying area for the Far Eastern war. Cried The Lebanon's Premier Abdul Hamid Keramy: "The French think that with their armies they can deprive us of our independence. . . . They can cut off our heads and destroy us, but they cannot touch our independence...