Page:Clyde and Strathnairn.djvu/104

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CLYDE AND STRATHNAIRN

from the Sultan, he was made a Companion of the Bath. He was also allowed to accept the Cross of St. John of Jerusalem, which Frederick William of Prussia presented to his 'former young friend' for his gallant conduct.

Soon after these events, Colonel Rose was appointed British Consul-General in Syria. The position of affairs in the Lebanon was exceedingly complicated. The French and Egyptians still remembered that Syria had once been theirs; the Christian Maronites and Muhammadan Druses were still divided by their hereditary feuds. Local disturbance culminated in civil war; and during these troubles Colonel Rose displayed his accustomed coolness and indifference to personal danger. On one occasion, in 1841, when he found the Maronites and Druses drawn up in two lines, and firing at each other, he rode between them, at imminent risk to his life, and by the sheer force of a stronger will stopped the conflict. At another time he proceeded by himself — after all the consular officers of the other Powers had declined to move — to a district where civil war was actually raging; and by his personal influence saved the lives of some 700 Christians, whom he conducted in safety, after a long and arduous journey, to Beyrout; lending his own horse to the way-worn women while he himself went on foot.

At a subsequent period during which cholera raged with great fury in Beyrout, when, to use the words of an address presented to him by grateful eye-witnesses,