Allenby enters Jerusalem

At noon on 11 December 1917 General Sir Edmund Allenby, commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, made his formal entry into Jerusalem. In front of the Jaffa Gate he got out of his car and entered the Old City on foot. From the steps of the citadel his proclamation was read out in seven languages: the city was placed under martial law, and all the holy places of Christians, Jews and Muslims would be protected according to existing customs. Two days earlier, after fighting on the western approaches, the Turks had abandoned Jerusalem and the mayor had surrendered it to the British. The whole ceremony was brief and carefully thought out. It was meant to show the world that the British were coming to the Holy City not as conquerors but as its guardians.

Preparations

The entry into Jerusalem was carefully prepared, to a large extent in London. According to the British official history, the government had agreed the text of the proclamation and telegraphed it to Allenby three weeks earlier. The course of the ceremony, as T. E. Lawrence wrote, was devised by Sir Mark Sykes, the government’s political adviser with Allenby’s army. The prime minister, David Lloyd George, who wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present, took a personal interest in the details. According to some accounts, he demanded precise information from Allenby on how the population had received him, whether he had entered on foot and how the holy places had been secured, so that he could announce it in Parliament. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson, is said to have advised Allenby to enter on foot, recalling the entry of the Kaiser Wilhelm II, who in 1898 had ridden into the city on horseback through a breach made specially for him in the wall beside the Jaffa Gate.

After the surrender of 9 December the British occupied only the modern suburbs. Guards stood at the gates of the Old City, and soldiers were not allowed inside the walls until the commander-in-chief had entered. On 10 December Allenby’s report of the occupation of the city and the announcement of his official entry were read out in the House of Commons.

The ceremony

Guards representing the troops fighting in Palestine were drawn up at the Jaffa Gate: outside, fifty British soldiers, from English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh units, on the right of the gate and an Australian and New Zealand guard on the left, and inside twenty French and twenty Italian soldiers. Allenby came along the Jaffa road, which was lined by soldiers of the 180th Brigade, got out of his car and walked through the gate. Behind him came his aides-de-camp and staff officers, among them Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Wavell, the future field marshal, and beside them the commanders of the French and Italian contingents, Colonel P. de Piépape and Lieutenant-Colonel F. d’Agostino. Next came the French High Commissioner François Georges-Picot, the head of the political service, Brigadier-General Gilbert Clayton, with Major Lawrence as his staff officer, the French and Italian military attachés, the army’s chief of staff Major-General Louis Bols and, last of all, the commander of XX Corps, which had taken the city, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode. All four guards marched behind the procession.

At the gate Allenby was greeted by the military governor of Jerusalem, Brigadier-General William Borton, who led him to the steps of the Tower of David, where the notables of the city were waiting. There the proclamation was read in English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Russian and Italian. It ran: “The defeat inflicted upon the Turks by the troops under my command has resulted in the occupation of your city by my forces. I therefore here and now proclaim it to be under martial law, under which form of administration it will remain so long as military considerations make it necessary. However, lest any of you be alarmed by reason of your experience at the hands of the enemy who has retired, I hereby inform you that it is my desire that every person pursue his lawful business without fear of interruption. Furthermore, since your city is regarded with affection by the adherents of three of the great religions of mankind and its soil has been consecrated by the prayers and pilgrimages of multitudes of devout people of these three religions for many centuries, therefore do I make known to you that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of the three religions will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faiths they are sacred.” The proclamation was also posted on the walls.

Allenby received the notables, among them representatives of the clergy of various denominations, and left the Old City by the same gate. According to the official history the ceremony was simple and dignified. The onlookers were clearly pleased with the turn of events but showed no great enthusiasm, and no flags were hung out anywhere. This contrasted with the exuberant joy with which the inhabitants had greeted the first British soldiers two days earlier.

Guards at the holy places

Even before Allenby’s entry, guards had been posted at the holy places. The Temple Mount, the Muslim Haram al-Sharif with the Dome of the Rock, was placed under Muslim control and surrounded by a cordon of Muslim soldiers and officers of the Indian Army. The Muslim families who for centuries had kept the gates of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were asked to resume their duties, in memory of the magnanimity of the Caliph Omar, who after taking the city in the 7th century refused to pray in the church lest his followers turn it into a mosque. The official history attributes this idea to Sykes and calls it an apt gesture of political courtesy. Guards were also posted in Bethlehem and at Rachel’s Tomb.

Lawrence and Picot

In the procession walked Lawrence, who had recently returned from an unsuccessful raid on the railway bridges in the Yarmuk valley and was just then reporting on it to Allenby. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom he wrote that staff officers had lent him a uniform, red tabs and a staff cap, so that he looked like a major of the British Army, and he called the ceremony at the Jaffa Gate the supreme moment of the war for him. He also described a scene at lunch in General Shea’s headquarters. Picot, who under the Sykes–Picot Agreement counted on France having a share in the administration of Palestine, announced: “And tomorrow, my dear general, I will take the necessary steps to set up civil government in this town.” Allenby turned red and replied that in the zone of military operations the only authority was the commander-in-chief, that is himself, and that civil government would be set up when he judged that the military situation allowed it. The scene is known only from Lawrence’s colourful account, but it reflects reality well: Jerusalem and the whole of occupied Palestine came under British military administration.

Echoes

Allenby’s entry was filmed by the cameraman Harold Jeapes. The film General Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem, some fifteen minutes long, reached cinemas in February 1918, and the photographs went round the press of the whole world. In Britain, after the Italian defeat at Caporetto, the disintegration of the Russian army and the counter-attack at Cambrai, the capture of Jerusalem was one of the few pieces of good news of the year. Some of the press wrote of the end of the Crusades, although according to many historians the authorities, out of regard for the empire’s Muslim subjects, tried to avoid such comparisons. Allenby wrote to his wife that day that the Turks had been pushed back three or four miles along the Jericho road and six to eight miles to the north, and that his troops had occupied Bethany.

The fighting around the city died down. The Turks were exhausted by defeat and a hurried retreat, and the British, after five weeks of advance, were building roads and bringing up supplies. The soldiers, as the official history stresses, had no illusions that the capture of the city ended the war. A few days after the ceremony, on 15 December, Allenby summed up the campaign in an order of the day: in forty days his troops had taken many strong Turkish positions and advanced some sixty miles on a front thirty miles wide.