DRINKERS OF THE MILK OF WAR
While Lawrence was traveling from sheik to sheik and from shereef
to shereef, urging them, with the eloquence of all the desert
dialects at his command, to join in the campaign against the Turks,
squadrons of German aëroplanes were swarming down from Constantinople
in a winged attempt to frighten the Arabian army with their strange
devil-birds. But the Arabs refused to be intimidated. Instead, they
insisted that their resourceful British leader should get them some
“fighting swallows” too.
Not long after a particularly obnoxious German air raid over Akaba,
a royal courier galloped up to Lawrence’s tent on his racing
dromedary. Without even waiting for his mount to kneel, he slid
off the camel’s hump and delivered a scroll on which was inscribed
the following:
O faithful one! Thy Government hath aëroplanes as the
locusts. By the Grace of Allah I implore thee to ask thy
King to despatch us a dozen or so.
Hussein.
The people of Arabia are exceedingly ornate and poetical in
expressing themselves. They swear by the splendor of light and the
silence of night and love to talk in imagery as rich as the colors
in their Turkoman prayer-rugs.
An American typewriting concern startled some people by advertising
that more people use the Arabic alphabet than use either Roman or
Chinese characters. They are very proud of their language and call
it the language of the angels; they believe it is spoken in heaven.
It is one of the most difficult languages in the world to master.
According to our way of thinking the Arabs begin at the end of a
sentence and write backward. They have 450 words meaning “line,”
822 words meaning “camel,” and 1037 words meaning “sword.” Their
language is full of color. They call a hobo “a son of the road,”
and a jackal “a son of howling.” Arab despatch writers penned their
accounts in picturesque vein. “The fighting was worth seeing,”
wrote Emir Abdullah to Colonel Lawrence. “The armed locomotives
were escaping with the coaches of the train like a serpent beaten
on the head.”
Inspired by a squadron of antiquated bombing and reconnaissance
planes which Lawrence had brought down from Egypt, the Arabs won
an important victory over the Turks in the desert just south of
the Dead Sea. Thereupon the commander of the Arabian army sent this
message to King George:
To His Majesty the King of England.
Our victorious troops have captured one of the enemy’s
divisions near Tafileh. The truth follows by post.
Feisal.
Another Arab chieftain in writing an account of an engagement said:
I sallied forth with my people, drinkers of the milk of
war. The enemy advanced to meet us, but Allah was not
with them.
During the war the British Government ran telephone and telegraph
wires from Jeddah on the Red Sea to the king’s palace in the
Forbidden City. The lines were strung by Mohammedans from Egypt,
not by Christians. In spite of his abhorrence of all modern
inventions, the king permitted the installation merely because he
realized the urgent importance of being able to keep in touch with
his Allies. As he insisted on living in the Forbidden City, the
telephone and telegraph were a military necessity. There are about
twenty branch ’phones on this official telephone system. One day
a British general telephoned to his Majesty from Jeddah to discuss
some urgent military and political question with him. In the middle
of the conversation the king overheard other voices on the line
and shouted angrily down the wire to the exchange: “I command thee
to cut off every telephone in the Hedjaz for one hour! It is I,
the king, who speaks.” And so it came to pass that the entire
Arabian telephone system was tied up by a royal command. If you
ever happen to be in Arabia and want to telephone to King Hussein,
“Calif of Islam and commander of the Faithful,” all you have to do
is to ask Central to give you “Mecca Number One.” Shortly after
the capture of Jeddah, Lawrence, in company with Colonel C. E.
Wilson, the governor of Port Sudan, Mr. Ronald Storrs, and Emir
Abdullah, for their amusement, made the Turkish band which they
had captured a few days before play “Deutschland, Deutschland über
Alles,” “The Hymn of Hate,” and other German songs. The king
happened to ring up in the middle of the concert. Hearing the
medley of discord he requested that the receiver be left down, and
for half an hour he sat in his palace in Mecca chuckling with glee
while the band did its worst.
The British aviators who came down to Arabia not only had to wear
Arab head-dress, but they had to fly at a considerable height to
avoid being shot at by the Bedouins, who have an irresistible
desire to shoot anything that is moving fast. They peppered an
armored car on one occasion and then sent around profuse apologies.
They admitted they knew it was a friendly machine but said it was
going so fast they simply could not resist the temptation to see
if they could hit it.
Colonel Lawrence and his associates introduced the first motor-cars
into Holy Arabia, and Emir Feisal used a one-ton truck as his royal
limousine. I went with him on one of his journeys from Akaba to
the front line outposts at Waheida in the desert, north of the
Turkish stronghold at Maan on the Hedjaz Railway. We camped for
the day on the summit of a high hill amid the ruins of an old
Turkish fortress. That noon Feisal gave a dinner in our honor. We
sat around on empty boxes instead of squatting on the ground Arab
fashion, and a table was improvised for our special benefit. The
others present were General Nuri Pasha, Malud Bey, and old Auda
Abu Tayi. Before the meal they served us with cups of sweetened
tea. Then for dinner a great plate of rice crowned with chunks of
lamb and goat was placed in the center of the table. Besides this
there was another dish of rice mixed with pieces of meat. Beans
with tomato sauce, lentils and peas, pomegranates, dried dates and
figs, and a sort of candy made from sesame seed and sugar,
resembling raw asbestos, heaped the groaning banquet board. For
dessert we were to have had a tin of California pears; they had
been sent down from Egypt as a gift for the Emir. Old Auda Abu Tayi
had never seen such delicious-looking pears in his life, and the
temptation to sample them so sorely tried his patience that he was
unable to await the end of the meal. Disregarding the food before
him, and throwing formality to the winds, he attacked them at once
and devoured all of them before the rest of us were through with
the first course! At the end of the meal small cups of coffee
flavored with cardamom, an Indian seed with a minty taste, were
served to us, and a bowl of water was solemnly passed around in
order that we might remove remnants of gravy still lingering in
our beards. Then the emir’s Abyssinian slaves brought cigarettes,
and we strolled out with our field-glasses to watch the battle in
progress a few miles distant in the hollow of the land around Maan.
Both before and after lunch scores of Arabs filed into the tent to
kiss Feisal’s hand. He never allowed them to touch it with their
lips, but pulled it away just before they had an opportunity to
kiss it, to show them how reluctant he was to be treated with
special deference.
Both Feisal and Lawrence owed much of their authoritative leadership
to their recognition of the traditional independence of the tribes.
The gallant old brigands who had roamed freely all their lives over
the vast stretches of Arabia, making little private wars of their
own, were not to be commanded or conscripted; they had to be gently
cajoled into the bigger war and made to feel the sense of their
own importance.