PLAIN PEOPLE: Plain Charity

In Damascus last week French officers were ordered not to speak to Britons who had taken over the city (TIME, June 11). But among the little people, practical cooperation was hard to down.

Twenty-eight stokers from a British cruiser at Beirut were sent to Damascus, assigned as guards around a French convent. Since the nuns could not venture into the troubled town, the stokers made daily shopping trips for them. In return the nuns washed the stokers' coal-black clothes. When the 28 returned to the cruiser, they were so clean that their own officers did not recognize them.

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