Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope

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       Chapter Five

      Hackett’s interest in academic study had not ended when he left Oxford. ‘I used to spend my long leave partly in Bodley,’ he tells the interviewer, ‘and partly in the Reading Room of the British Museum at work on a campaign of Saladin.’ He does not specify a year, but, by the time the next long leave came around in April 1935 and Hackett embarked on a journey to Syria, he was already well acquainted with the mediaeval accounts of Salah al-Din’s life and the Third Crusade. It could perhaps be inferred that Shan’s rediscovery of his scholarly ambitions was in part a reaction to the social riot of February and March 1934. In January he had ‘contrived to read a few pages of Halphen’s L’Essor de l’Europe most days’, but that had gone by the board as the polo season neared its climax. At any rate, he returned from leave with renewed academic vigour. In the quiet months of July, August and September, when the other half of the regiment’s officers were on leave and the rest languished at their summer camp in Alexandria, Hackett applied himself to learning Arabic more seriously. He began to study for the army’s preliminary interpretership examination and his plans to visit Syria the following spring added incentive.

      Also during his visit to Oxford, the focus of his study seems to have shifted away from the Third Crusade itself and settled on the events of two years earlier. The change is telling. The Christian expedition of 1190 came to be led by an Anglo-Norman king, Richard Coeur de Lion. It was the first crusade to have a large contingent from England, funded by the first poll tax, the Saladin Tithe. T.E. Lawrence, Hackett’s hero as a schoolboy, could trace his ancestry to an Anglo-Norman knight who had served in Richard’s army, and he had taken an obsessive journey through the Levant in 1909 visiting as many Crusader castles as he could for his BA thesis. His final tally was thirty-six, having walked nearly nine hundred miles in three months. Hackett too had knightly Norman forebears and his initial interest in the Third Crusade must have involved an element of atavism. When, however, he came to submit the subject for his B. Litt. thesis, after a year as an officer in command of a light cavalry unit, his interest fell not on the stalemate that confined Richard’s reconquest of the Holy Land to a coastal strip, but on Salah al-Din’s brilliant campaign against the Crusader states in 1187 and 1188 whose success had prompted the Third Crusade in the first place.

      In July 1187, Salah al-Din had won a battle over the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin so decisive that by December all its former territory was under his control, with the exception of the port of Tyre. When the next campaigning season came round in May of 1188 he was preparing an attack against the two remaining Crusader states, the County of Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch. His efforts were concentrated on the latter, since, realising his success against Jerusalem would bring a renewed Christian invasion, he was attempting to block the route across Asia Minor taken by all the previous crusading armies. It was this swift campaign in particular that formed the subject of Shan’s thesis. For Hackett the study became a lesson in military planning, in how to keep a large force in the field and use it to best effect against static positions, as well as an historical analysis of contemporary sources. He hoped it would make him a better soldier.

      To travel from Cairo to Damascus by train, changing at Haifa onto the Samakh spur of the Hejaz Railway, was an easier proposition in 1934 than it is today. Unfortunately, Hackett’s first impressions of the Holy Land, unlike those of many before him, of crossing the Jordan and climbing up the Yarmuk Valley to Dera’a, are not recorded; no diary of the journey has been found. From Damascus a road continued north to Homs where it met the road to the coast, an ancient trade route that runs through the gap between the Lebanon and al-Nusayriyah ranges. The riches of Asia reached the Mediterranean along this route and made wealthy the ports of Trablus and Tartus (Tripoli and Tortosa of the Crusaders). It was the route that Salah al-Din took in July 1188, in the shadow of the strongest Crusader castle in the Levant, Krac des Chevaliers. Its own impregnability could not stop Salah al-Din picking off its outlying defences and passing on to lay siege to Tortosa. Dated photograph captions put Hackett in Tortosa late in April 1935.

      As is to be expected in a scholarly thesis, there is little in the way of personal material in the paper, but there is much that is characteristic of its author. Hackett’s notes suggest his first recourse was to the Mediterranean Pilot and its geographical detail, as though reconnoitring the coast for an invasion of his own. From this work he gleaned such essential facts as the depth of the Orontes at its mouth and the mean annual rainfall of Jaffa. Yet one piece of information did make it into the final analysis. The Pilot identifies a spring that rises offshore in the bay below Markab castle, causing an area of disturbed water. Hackett uses this feature, mentioned in the chronicles, to locate the closest point to the shore accessible to the Sicilian fleet from Tripoli and demonstrate that the road between the sea and the castle’s outposts, along which Salah al-Din had to pass, was indeed within their bowshot; ibn al-Athir records the rapid construction of breastworks from which to return fire. Elsewhere, a military eye is cast over ibn al-Athir’s account of the fall of Saône castle at the end of July 1188, an account which conflicts with that of the other Arab chronicler, Baha al-Din. Hackett resolves the uncertainty by establishing the only place where a direct assault on the walls could have been successful and so fixes the position of Salah al-Din’s key battery: ‘For the actual emplacement, I selected a slight levelling out of the forward slope of the ravine, a little below the highest point, and experiments conducted with the aid of three small Arab boys convinced me that it was well within mangonel range.’ One assumes the boys were armed with slings or the like.

      The same acuity is brought to bear on the castles of Bakas-Shogr, Bourzey, Darbsak and Baghras and their fall to Salah al-Din, but Hackett shows his tactical appreciation of the campaign nowhere more than in his analysis of the Kurdish commander’s supply problems. His examiners were prompted to remark that he had ‘to some extent rediscovered Saladin’s lines of communication … Mr Hackett’s work, though short, is a remarkably good example of the critical discussion of literary evidence in the light of field work.’ It was not until 1937 that he received their verdict.

      In his IWM recordings Hackett offers some insight into why it was so delayed and so brief. ‘I wrote this up in my spare time,’ he claims, ‘without missing, I may say, a single party or a single chukka of polo. It was rewarded by the Regius Professor’s observation on it … that “this is a model … of what such a work should be.”’ Hackett remembers the exact words used by the examiners forty-two years previously. It is a fact he does not need to embellish, but there is a hint of broidery in his recollection of ‘spending a lot of time on a mule up and down the Orontes Valley living with Arabs’. It was in truth no more than a week and maybe as few as two days actually on a mule, yet the experience obviously made an impression on the 24-year-old that lasted longer. During more than a year in Egypt he had never been in contact with local people so intimately and for so long. One can easily imagine him caught up in the romance of the journey. He could not have kept himself from thinking, as he rode through the Syrian wilderness, that he had glimpsed what Lawrence had experienced in Arabia. Spring stood on the threshold of summer as they rode beside the marshes of the valley floor from Bourzey to Apamea. His companions СКАЧАТЬ