Sometime afterwards a British officer, John Hackett, who had been wounded in the advance towards Damascus, met a Vichy officer he knew who had been hurt in the same encounter. As they dissected the engagement over lunch at the Hôtel St Georges in Beirut, the Frenchman claimed that his side had been the better of the two. ‘Well, Jacques, in the end we did win, we did win,’ replied Hackett. ‘Yes,’ his counterpart grimaced, ‘and that is the least satisfactory aspect of the whole squalid episode.’
