THE ARCHÆOLOGIST TURNED SOLDIER
Lord Kitchener’s advice and his own personal observations led
Lawrence to believe that a crash was imminent. When it came he at
once attempted to enlist as a private in the ranks of “Kitchener’s
Mob.” But members of the Army Medical Board looked at the frail,
five-foot-three, tow-headed youth, winked at one another, and told
him to run home to his mother and wait until the next war. Just
four years after he had been turned down as physically unfit for
the ranks, this young Oxford graduate, small of stature, shy and
scholarly as ever, entered Damascus at the head of his victorious
Arabian army. Imagine what the members of the medical board would
have said if some one had suggested to them in 1914 that three or
four years later this same young man would decline knighthood and
the rank of general and would even avoid the coveted Victoria Cross
and various other honors!
After his rejection Lawrence returned to his ancient ruins and
toiled lovingly over inscriptions that unlocked the secrets of
civilizations that flourished and crumbled to dust thousands of
years ago. But, with many other scientists, scholars, and a few
young men of exceptional ability, such as Mark Sykes, Aubrey
Herbert, Cornwallis, Newcombe, and others, he was summoned to
headquarters in Cairo by Sir Gilbert F. Clayton. Though he was then
only twenty-six years old, he was already familiar with Turkey,
Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia. He had lived
with the wild tribesmen of the interior, as well as with the
inhabitants of the principal cities such as Aleppo, Mosul, Bagdad,
Beyrouth, Jerusalem, and Damascus; in fact, his knowledge of some
parts of the Near East was unique. He not only spoke many of the
languages, but he knew the customs of all the different nationalities
and their historical development. To begin with, he was placed in
the map department, where generals spent hours poring over
inaccurate charts, discussing plans for piercing vulnerable spots
in the Turkish armor. After working out a scheme they would turn,
not infrequently, and ask the insignificant-looking subaltern if,
in view of his personal knowledge of the country, he had any
suggestion to offer. Not infrequently his reply would be:
“While there are many excellent points in your plan, it is not
feasible except at the expense of great loss of time in building
roads for transport of supplies and artillery, and at needless
expense of lives in maintaining lines of communication through the
territory of hostile native tribes.”
Then, as an alternative, he would point out a safer and shorter
route, with which he happened to be familiar because he had tramped
every inch of it afoot while hunting for lost traces of the invading
armies of Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, and Crusaders. The most staid
old army officers on the staff put their confidence in this
quiet-voiced junior lieutenant, and in a short time he had
established a reputation for himself at G. H. Q.
Later on in Arabia, Lawrence frequently outwitted the Turks because
of this same superior knowledge of the topography of the country.
He was better acquainted with many distant parts of the Turkish
Empire than were the Turks themselves.
From the map department he was transferred to another branch of
the Intelligence Service, which dealt mainly with affairs inside
the enemy lines. It was his duty, as one of the heads of the Secret
Corps, to keep the commander-in-chief informed of the movements of
various units of the Turkish army. Sir Archibald Murray, then head
of the British Forces in the Near East, has told me how highly he
valued the knowledge of this youth under whom were the native
secret agents who passed back and forth through the Turkish lines.
It was in the summer of 1915 that the Hedjaz Arabs broke out in
revolt against their Turkish masters in that part of the Arabian
peninsula which lies mainly between the Forbidden City of Mecca
and the southern end of the Dead Sea, known as Holy Arabia.
In order to understand the reasons for the outbreak of this
revolution, and in order to appreciate the delicate and complicated
problems which Lawrence was to face upon his arrival in Arabia
after the Arabs had won a few initial victories and were confronted
with the probability of their revolt collapsing, let us digress
for a moment and glance in retrospect through the pages of Arabian
history and refresh our memories regarding the romantic story of
this historic peninsula and its picturesque peoples.
Legend tells us that Arabia was the home of our common ancestors,
Adam and Eve, the land of the queen of Sheba, home of the heroes
of “The Arabian Nights,” and a country peopled by a race that lived
and hoped and loved before even the prehistoric mound-builders
dwelt on the plains of North America, and before the druids in woad
built their rock temples in Britain. Tradition tells us that it is
a land whose peoples founded empires centuries before Moses led
the children of Israel out of Egypt, perhaps even before Khufu
built the Great Pyramid. Archæologists, who have risked their lives
to solve Arabia’s mysteries, tell us that great cities flourished
and fell there long before the days of Tut-ankh-Amen and that in
one distant corner of the country the great King Hammurabi
formulated his code of justice long before Buddha taught on the
banks of the Ganges and before Confucius enunciated the principle
of the Golden Rule.
Jazirat-ul-Arab, the Peninsula of the Arabs, is larger than England,
Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, France, and Spain all
combined. The Greeks and Romans traded, fought, and studied there
and divided it into three geographical parts: Arabia Petræa to the
north, Arabia Deserta to the east, and Arabia Felix (Arabia the
blest) to the west.
Although some scholars believe it to have been the birthplace of
the human race, we have better maps of the north pole; in fact, we
have better maps of Mars than we have of some parts of the interior
of Arabia from whence came many of the fighting men of Lawrence’s
army.
The distance from the city of Aleppo, at the extreme north, to the
city of Mecca, half-way down the western coast of Arabia, is as
great as the distance from London to Rome. Yet Lawrence and his
men trekked all the way from Mecca to Aleppo on the backs of
camels, over country as barren as the mountains of the moon.
In order to keep from becoming confused by the strange Arabic names
it would be well for the reader to keep in mind that the Arabian
campaign opened at Mecca and moved steadily north to Akaba, and
then on to Damascus and Aleppo in Syria. Each event described in
this account is a little farther north than the last.
Although some authorities on the Near East estimate that there is
a total population of twenty million people in the whole of Arabia,
for centuries a large portion of them have been held together only
by loose travel alliances, like those which existed between the
Red Indian tribes of America a hundred years ago.
The peoples of Arabia since time immemorial have been divided into
two distinct classes: those who dwell in villages and cities, and
those who wander from place to place with all their worldly
possessions in their camel-bags. Both classes are called Arabs,
but the wandering nomads are referred to as Bedouins whenever it
is desired to differentiate between them and their kinsmen of the
cultivated areas. The true Bedouin knows nothing about the
cultivation of land, and his only animals are his camels and
horses. The Bedouins are the more admirable of the two. They are
the Arabs who have preserved the love of freedom and the ancient
virtues of this virile race.
The foremost of all Arabian travelers was an Englishman, Charles
M. Doughty, poet, philosopher, and author of that great classic,
“Arabia Deserta,” written in quaint Elizabethan style. With the
exception of Colonel Lawrence, he was the only European who ever
spent any considerable length of time traveling about the interior
of Holy Arabia without disguising himself as a Mohammedan. Doughty
found, what all who know them have discovered, that the Bedouins
are kind hosts if visited in their camps. But frequently the
stranger who falls into their hands in the desert, under
circumstances which according to their unwritten law do not cause
them to regard him as a guest, finds them ruthless. In savage
wantonness the Shammar Arabs may even cut his throat. There is a
proverb in the desert that a man will slay the son of his mother
for old shoe-leather; but, despite this, their hospitality is so
sweeping that it has become proverbial throughout the world. “The
Bedouin says: ‘Be we not all guests of Allah?’” Then adds Doughty,
“After the guests eat ‘the bread and salt’ there is a peace
established between them for a time (that is counted two nights
and a day, in the most whilst their food is in him).”
The word “Arab” comes from “Araba,” the name of a small territory
in an ancient province south of the Hedjaz, which is said to have
been named after Yarab, the son of Kahtan, the son of Abeis, the
son of Shalah, the son of Arfakhshad, the son of Shem, the son of
Noah, who they say was the first to speak Arabic, “the tongue of
the angels.” They are a Semitic people, of the same race as the
Jews.
The world owes much to the Arabs. Not only did they invent many of
our boyhood games, such as the humming top set spinning by pulling
a cord, but they made great strides in medicine, and their materia
medica was but little different from the modern. Their highly
skilled surgeons were performing difficult major operations with
the use of anesthetics in the day when Europe depended entirely
upon the miraculous healing of the clergy. In chemistry we have
them to thank for the discovery of alcohol, potassium, nitrate of
silver, corrosive sublimate, sulphuric acid, and nitric acid. They
even had experimented in scientific farming and understood
irrigation, the use of fertilizers, and such things as the grafting
of fruit and flowers. They were world-famous for their tanning of
leather, their dyeing of cloth, their manufacture of glass and
pottery, of textiles, and of paper, and for their unsurpassed
workmanship in gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and steel.
The richest part of Arabia, excluding Mesopotamia, always has been,
and still is, the province of Yemen in the extreme southwestern
corner, a mountainous region just north of Aden, famous these
thousands of years for its wealth, its delightful climate, the
fertility of its valleys, and as the home of Mocha coffee. Strabo,
the Greek geographer, tells us that Alexander the Great, shortly
before his death, planned to return from India and there establish
his imperial capital. Many scholars believe this rich region to
have been the original habitation of man and the country whence
the early Egyptians came. Beginning earlier than 1000 b. c.,
highly organized monarchies existed here such as the
Minæan, the Sabæan, and the Himyaritic. After the destruction of
Jerusalem by Titus, many Jews fled here, and their quaint
descendants still reside in Yemen. But when the Ptolemies introduced
the sea-route to India, the Yemen became less important, and for
centuries the best-known part of Arabia has been the province of
Hedjaz on the Red Sea, north of Yemen, bounded on the east by the
Central Arabian region known as Nejd, and on the northeast and
north by Syria, the Dead Sea, Palestine, and the Sinai Peninsula.
The word “Hedjaz” or “Hijaz” means “barrier.” The fame of this
particularly waterless country is due to its two chief cities:
Mecca, the birthplace of Mohammed, in olden times called Macoraba;
and Medina, the ancient Yathrib, where the Prophet spent the last
ten years of his life and where he was interred. It is the duty of
all Moslems who can afford it to make a pilgrimage to these sacred
cities, just as it was the duty of the people to journey here in
idolatrous pre-Islamic times.
About a thousand years before Columbus discovered America, a boy
was born in the city of Mecca. This boy was destined to shape very
materially the history of the world. As a youth he herded goats
and sheep on the hills around Mecca, and then as a young man he
hired himself out as a camel-driver to a rich widow in Mecca. He
used to drive her camel caravans up to Syria to trade with rich
merchants there. In Syria he became better acquainted with the
religions of the Jews and the Christians and became convinced that
his fellow-Arabs, who were worshipers of idols, did not possess a
true religion. So this camel-driver appropriated some of the tenets
of Christianity, some of the principles of Judaism, a few scraps
of philosophy from the Persian fire-worshipers, a sprinkling of
Arabian tradition, then threw in a number of his own ideas for good
measure, and established a new religion. He encouraged his followers
to regard Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Christ as prophets of Islam.
To-day, however, they are looked upon as of infinitely less
importance than Mohammed himself, whose teachings are regarded as
a later and final revelation of the will of God. Nearly every
family in Arabia has at least one child named after the Prophet.
There are more men in the world bearing the given name “Mohammed”
than there are with such names as “John” and “William.”
Is it so strange, after all, that the desert should be the old
homestead of three of the world’s greatest religions—Judaism,
Christianity, and Mohammedanism? The Arabs call the desert the
Garden of Allah; they say there is no one in the desert but God.
Out in the deserts of Arabia, even more than in many other parts
of the world, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the
firmament sheweth His handy-work. Day unto day uttereth speech,
and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” There is no striving in
the desert to amass wealth for wealth’s sake; there is no mad rush
to get ahead of one’s fellow-men. One of the curses of our modern
civilization is that we do not have time to think or meditate. The
desert is a fitting place for one to ponder over man’s destiny and
to meditate upon the things that moth and rust do not corrupt and
that thieves do not break through and steal.
Mohammed, the camel-boy of Mecca, was the first man to bind together
in any sort of unity the peoples of Arabia. He came at the opportune
time when a great leader was needed to drive out foreign domination.
It was by his amazing evangelization that he succeeded in uniting
the Arabs. To an even greater degree than most leaders of men this
camel-boy of Mecca had:
The Monarch mind, the mystery of commanding,
The birth-hour gift, the art Napoleon,
Of wielding, moulding, gathering, welding, bending,
The hearts of thousands till they moved as one.
Following the death of Mohammed came that great wave of fanatical
fury when the Arabian peoples, filled with religious fervor, swept
out of the desert, overran a great part of the world, and built up
that huge Moslem Empire which was even greater than the empire of
the Romans. In those triumphant days of Islam, the Arabs supplied
the dominant religious, political, and military leaders for all
the countries they conquered. They seemed irresistible. “When the
Arabs, who had fed on locusts and wild honey, once tasted the
delicacies of civilization in Syria, and reveled in the luxurious
palaces of the Khosroes,” writes El Tabari, the Moslem historian,
“they said, ‘By Allah, even if we cared not to fight for the cause
of God, yet we could not but wish to contend and enjoy _these,_
leaving distress and hunger henceforth to others.’” Within a
century after the death of Mohammed the Hedjaz Arabs had built up
an empire vaster than either that of Alexander or of Rome; “Islam
swept across the world like a whirlwind.”
But the vast empire reached its zenith in the seventh century of
this era, and its decline dates from the battle of Tours, a. d.
732, when the Arabs were defeated in France by the Christians under
Charles Martel.
Many of the Arabs remained in the lands they had conquered. As
merchants and missionaries they have carried the crisp, brief creed
of Mohammed from Arabia to Gibraltar, Central Africa, Central
China, and the islands of the South Seas. Unlike followers of other
faiths, they shout their creed from the minarets and housetops of
every land where they are to be found: “La-ilahu ilia Allah! Allahu
Akbar!”
And even to-day we find thousands of Arabs occupying positions of
affluence in far-off Hong-Kong, Singapore, the East Indies, and
Spain. The others drifted back to their old life in the Arabian
Desert. Once more Arabia stood isolated from the world by the
barren mountain ranges which fringe its coasts and by its trackless
belts of shifting sand. In the twelfth century the descendants of
Saladin, who was half Kurd, conquered the fringes of Arabia. Then
three centuries later a new tribe swept down from the unknown
plateaus of Central Asia. They were of the tribe of Othman,
forefathers of the modern Turks, and they attempted to govern the
Arabs as though they were a people of an inferior race. The Turks
claimed possession of Arabia for four hundred years, simply because
they were able to maintain a few garrisons along the coast. A few
of these garrisons were successful in holding out to the very end
of the Great War, but at last they surrendered, leaving Arabia once
again in the undisputed possession of its freedom-loving inhabitants.
The Hedjaz tribes have never acknowledged the sovereignty of any
foreign ruler. They have preserved their liberty with but little
interruption since prehistoric times, and consequently they regard
their personal freedom above all else. Great armies have been sent
against them, but not even the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians,
the Greeks, or the Romans were able to conquer them.
Ever since the decline of the Arabian Empire, more than a thousand
years ago, generals, sultans, and califs have attempted to unify
the peoples of Arabia, and particularly of the province of Hedjaz,
because it contains the two sacred Mohammedan cities. None were
successful, but where they failed, Thomas Edward Lawrence, the
unknown unbeliever, succeeded. It remained for this youthful
British archæologist to go into forbidden Arabia and lead the Arabs
through the spectacular and triumphant campaign which helped
Allenby break the backbone of the Turkish Empire and destroy the
Pan-German dream of world dominion. The way in which he swept the
Turks from Holy Arabia and temporarily built this mosaic of peoples
into a homogeneous nation, now known as the Kingdom of the Hedjaz,
is a story that I should have failed to believe had I not visited
Arabia and come into personal contact with Lawrence and his
associates during their campaign.
Perhaps no factor played a greater part in simplifying Lawrence’s
task in Arabia than the existence of an ancient desert fraternity
which has been called “the cult of the Blood of Mohammed.” We must
know something about this cult and its present-day leaders in order
to understand the diplomacy and strategy of Colonel Lawrence which
we are to follow during the desert war.