Foreign News: Ham, Ham! Dam, Dam!”’

Cables from Syria announced that the Jebel Druz Sultan, El Atrash, has resorted to the last extremity of resistance against the French by proclaiming a holy war. After issuing an order prohibiting the sowing of winter grain by men between 20 and 60 years of age, El Atrash called an assembly of the chiefs at which it was allegedly decided to excommunicate every Druse who should fail to devote himself to the long-standing struggle with the French (TIME, Dec. 14 et ante).

Travelers recalled that “Sultan” El Atrash dwells like a feudal lord in a tribal castle, “with walls more than a metre thick,” which is perched upon a rocky crag of the Jebel Druz.** It has been alleged that he regards the whole Franco-Druse war as having sprung up because he killed a French officer “to avenge the arrest of a tribesman who was the Sultan’s guest.” Since that time (1921), El Atrash has employed against the French not only his temporal authority, but the influence of the religious cult which distinguishes his fellow tribesmen, a mixture of various racial strains, as “Druses.”

Late despatches reported that the Druses are now riding into battle shouting, “Ham, ham! Dam, dam!” (Trouble, trouble! Blood, blood!).

Safe at Beirut, noted Chicago Tribune correspondent George Seldes filed a sensational bit of news to the following effect: “The rebels at Damascus have threatened to disembowel me if I ever return there.” In Manhattan, Gilbert Seldes, famed esthete and onetime editor of the Dial, received this news of his brother with many an uneasy qualm.

**Literally “Mountain of the Druses:” a wild and inaccessible region some 60 miles southeast of Damascus.