JOYCE & CO., AND THE ARABIAN KNIGHTS OF THE AIR
The forces of the king of the Hedjaz, as previously stated, included
both regulars and irregulars; the latter were Bedouins mounted on
camels and horses, while the former were deserters from the Turkish
army, men of Arab blood conscripted into the Ottoman armies and
afterward captured by the British in Palestine and Mesopotamia.
There were nearly twenty thousand regulars specially trained as
infantry to attack those fortified positions which could not be
taken by Lawrence’s irregulars; they were under the leadership of
Lieutenant-Colonel P. C. Joyce, who like Lawrence was an Irishman,
and who next to Lawrence probably played a more important rôle in
the campaign than any one else. Unlike Lawrence, Joyce was a
soldier by profession, an officer in the Connaught Rangers with a
splendid record for service in the Boer War and in Egypt and the
Sudan. Physically there was a further difference between them, for
while Lawrence stood barely five feet three his colleague loomed
well over six feet three. None but the largest ship of the desert
could navigate under Joyce’s bulk, so that he seldom mounted a
camel. But when he did, it looked like one mountain on top of
another.
Colonel Joyce spent nearly a year building up an army to send
against the strongly fortified city of Medina. It was to be under
the leadership of Emir Ali. At last, when by the grace of Allah
all seemed in readiness, a courier from Emir Ali handed a message
to Joyce to be forwarded on to his Majesty the king in Mecca with
all possible despatch. The message read:
O Father of Mercies and Lord of the Earth, greetings
from thy son:
Thy heroic army awaits but the command for its
victorious advance upon the Turks. Yet for lack of one
mere detail are we delayed. Our valorous officers swear
that it would be futile for them to advance without swords.
Wherefore I implore thee to send thirty of thy Damascus
blades in scabbards of beaten gold in order that they may
be satisfied.
Thy Slave.
But fortunately Colonel Joyce proved himself capable of coping with
the thousand and one unexpected difficulties that arose, for in
addition to his ability to speak Arabic he had many other valuable
qualifications. For instance he was tactful and cool and utterly
imperturbable, could not be hustled under any circumstances, was
painstaking, and above all patient beyond the normal vanishing-point
of patience as practised in the Occident. So while Lawrence spent
his time with his Bedouin rabble, Joyce demonstrated his military
ability by building up the auxiliary force of regulars from the
medley of Syrians, Palestinians, and Bagdadis who were attracted
to the Shereefian banner. But he also now and then found time to
join Lawrence on a raid or to lead a demolition expedition of his
own. In fact on one occasion he destroyed seven small bridges and
tore up two thousand rails on the Turkish railway, between the
stations of Toweira and Hedia.
There were a number of other officers who fought with the Arabs
and took part in the fascinating game of planting tulips and
blowing up the Turkish railway. Among these were Lieutenant-Colonel
W. F. Stirling, Major P. G. W. Maynard of the Irish Rifles, who
had been a judge in a remote corner of the Sudan, Major H. W.
Young, Major William E. Marshall, Captain E. Scott Higgins, Captain
H. S. Hornby, and Lieutenant H. Garland, who taught demolition to
the Arabs. Nearly all of the men who fought in Arabia had annexed
various military honors long before they were selected to play a
part in the war in the Land of the Arabian Nights, but none had
been quite so generously decorated as Stirling, who not only was
a veteran of the South African War but had found time to serve with
high distinction in the Royal Flying Corps before he crashed and
nearly lost his life while on a reconnaissance flight over one of
the most inhospitable corners of Arabia. Doomed to serve the
remainder of the war on the ground, he was selected as the right
type of man for the Hedjaz show. He joined the Arabs just as they
were about to invade Syria and was with Lawrence when the latter
reached Damascus. Young, formerly of the Intelligence Department
in Mesopotamia, was another who reveled in the manipulation of high
explosives. During the final stage of the campaign he took over
the all-important job of organizing the transport system, but among
his numerous achievements by no means the least was the success he
met in raising a silky beard that was the envy of his colleagues
and which transformed him into an ideal sheik.
Perhaps the most universally liked, both by British and Arabs, of
all the Europeans who took part in the desert war was Lawrence’s
tent-mate and intimate friend, an optimistic Scot of the Royal Army
Medical Corps with a Highland brogue thicker than Harry Lauder’s,
who divided his affections between his bacillus menagerie and
tulip-planting. Under him were two other medical men, Captains
Ramsay and McKibbin. But Major Marshall, although a quiet, shy man
of science whose whole life had been devoted to the realm of
test-tubes, microscopes, and a search for mysterious microbes in
the jungles of tropical Africa, had proved himself enough of a
soldier to win the Military Cross in the battle of the Somme and
other honors in Arabia. When Lawrence was away on an expedition
Marshall would transform their tent at Akaba into a zoo for cholera,
typhus, and plague bacillus. Incidentally he usually managed to
contract most of the diseases the mysteries of which he sought to
solve. Then on his trips into the desert he would fill his
stretchers with high explosives and after a raid would throw out
all the remaining dynamite and substitute the wounded. After
inflicting casualties among the Turks he would proceed to bandage
them up. So successful was he as a combined medical officer and
soldier that after the war he was appointed adviser to the king of
the Hedjaz and for several years remained at Jeddah as the British
resident.
Photograph: WE RODE INTO THE AUDITORIUM ON OUR CAMELS
Photograph: “PHARAOH’S TREASURY” OR THE “TEMPLE OF ISIS”
But of all the tulip-planters there was certainly none more daring
than Captain H. S. Hornby, who like Newcombe had been an engineer.
He had received his preliminary schooling in adventure on the Gold
Coast, in the heart of the Congo, and in other out-of-the-way
corners of the earth, and so reckless was he that even the wild
Bedouins regarded him as stark mad. But his career as a dynamiter
of trains came to an untimely end when a part of a mine exploded
in his face, leaving him partially blind and deaf. The Arabs who
were with him had great difficulty in getting him back to Akaba
alive, and from then on he spent his time in administrative work.
At the base-camp in Akaba were two other officers, Major T. H.
Scott, of the Inniskilling Fusiliers, and Captain Raymond Goslett.
Scott specialized in mirth and money, while Goslett dispensed
everything from boots to flour. In Scott’s tent were boxes of
sovereigns, gold conscripted from every corner of the Empire to
help arouse enthusiasm in the breasts of the temperamental Bedouins
whenever the spirits of those rather fickle gentlemen began to
flag. The only guardian of all these boxes of golden “goblins” was
a dog about the size of a squirrel, which Major Scott called his
Bulgarian weasel-hound. His associate, Captain Goslett, was the
czar of the supply and commissary department, excepting when Auda
Abu Tayi or some of Lawrence’s other brigands could no longer
resist the temptation of looting their own base-camp.
Then there were the officers in command of the armored cars and
light mobile artillery: Captains Gillman, Dowsett, and Brodie, and
Lieutenants Greenhill, Wade, and Pascoe. Although seriously
handicapped by lack of roads, they somehow managed to scale the
barren mountains and get into action on many occasions, and they
were mixed up in innumerable thrilling adventures during the latter
stages of the campaign.
But of all the unpleasant jobs, surely the airmen who were sent
down to satisfy the Arabs, who insisted that their army like the
Turks should have birds that laid explosive eggs, were the least
to be envied. With Akaba as their base-camp they would sally forth
to locate approaching Turkish patrols and bomb the enemy garrisons
along the Damascus-Medina Railway. Nowhere in the world have
aviators ever taken greater risks except perhaps in East Africa
and on the Afghan frontier. When a plane left Akaba the pilot and
observer knew full well that if they encountered engine-trouble
they were for it, because they were constantly flying over
unexplored, unmapped country, as uninviting as the mountains of
the moon. On one occasion when we were trekking across the mountains
of the Edom on our way to the “rose-red city of Petra,” we heard
the drone of a battle-plane overhead, and as we gazed about at that
jagged, unfriendly landscape, with the blue Arabian sky punctured
everywhere by sharp lava mountains, our admiration for those
reckless British Elijahs, soaring thousands of feet above us,
increased appreciably.
These sheiks of the air were first under a Captain Harold
Furness-Williams; although during the later stages of the campaign
an embryo parson, Captain Victor Siddons, became the flight-commander.
On one occasion Furness-Williams flew from Egypt to Arabia, by way
of the Sinai desert. Hung around the fuselage and back struts he
carried a precious cargo consisting of four dozen bottles of Bass,
which his fellow-sufferers in that thirsty land had commissioned
him to bring. But under the eyes of his expectant friends the
unfortunate aviator made a bad landing, the plane turned over, and
every bottle was smashed. They told him that they would sooner have
seen his blood soaking into the sands of the desert than that
priceless liquid.
Captain Furness-Williams and his associates spent a portion of
their spare time in taking the Arab chiefs for joy-rides. They gave
old Auda Abu Tayi his first “flip,” and that cheerful chieftain,
who had already demonstrated his courage by marrying twenty-eight
wives, with the inborn poetic spirit of the desert declared upon
his return to earth that he deeply regretted he had failed to take
his rifle aloft with him. Never, he said, had he had such a splendid
opportunity for taking pot-shots at all his “friends” in Akaba.
Among the Arabian knights of the air were Lieutenants Divers,
Makins, Oldfield, Sefi, and several others, but the only one of
them who went right through the campaign to Damascus was Lieutenant
Junor, who dropped bombs during nearly every Arab battle and
survived to play a similar rôle on the equally wild Afghan Frontier
in India long after the World War.
In the southern area were a number of other officers of whom I saw
little or nothing, men like Colonel A. C. Parker, a nephew of
Kitchener, who was on the Red Sea coast for a short time and then
appointed governor of the vast mountain and desert region called
the Sinai Peninsula, where the children of Israel wandered for
forty years. There also was Lieutenant-Colonel J. R. Bassett,
transferred to Arabia from the War Office in London, who was second
in command to Colonel Wilson at Jeddah, and Major H. J. Goldie,
who described his headquarters in Jeddah as so hot that nothing
could live there but human beings, and they could just gasp. Over
around Medina, where Emir Abdullah’s army made things lively for
the large Turkish garrison, were two more demolition experts,
Majors W. A. Davenport and H. St. J. Garrood.
Photograph: LOOKING OUT THROUGH THE DOORWAY OF THE TEMPLE,
IN THE DISTANCE WE SEE THE NARROW DEFILE THROUGH WHICH WE
CAME IN ENTERING THE “LOST CITY”
Photograph: AN AMPHITHEATER HEWN OUT OF THE MOUNTAIN
But this brief enumeration of the other Europeans who played a part
in the desert war would not be complete without reference to the
French. Early in September, 1916, the French indicated their faith
in the Arab cause by sending a mission to Jeddah under the
leadership of a Colonel Bremond. The French were at a great
disadvantage simply because their Government could not give them
sufficient backing and the British had to furnish nearly everything
for them. This made it difficult for them to get a strong hold over
the Arabs, because the latter were aware of the circumstances. But
Captain Pisani, who led a detachment of French Algerians throughout
the campaign, had had unlimited experience in the Moroccan Desert
and did splendid sporting work against the Turkish railway in 1917,
and again in the final operations around Deraa in 1918.
The only other foreigners in the Hedjaz were some mixed Egyptian
troops and a Mohammedan machine-gun section from India.
One of the finest sporting achievements during the war in the Near
East was accomplished by a British civilian official, a Mr. H. St.
John Philby, who played no part in the Hedjaz campaign, but who
startled King Hussein one day by turning up in Bedouin costume at
his summer capital of Taif. Philby had been sent on a secret
mission to the court of Ibn Saud in the very heart of Central
Arabia, and he had accomplished the remarkable feat of trekking
right across Arabia from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through
a totally unknown region. Lawrence was so impressed with Philby’s
achievement and his skill in dealing with the Bedouins, that after
the war he was instrumental in having Philby appointed adviser to
the sultan of Transjordania.
Perhaps the most genuine-looking brigand of all the Europeans who
fought in the Arab rebellion was the Earl of Winterton. He wore a
huge beard and an Arab head-cloth and rode a tall racing-camel
bedecked with gorgeous trappings. Lord Winterton turned out to be
as much of a fire-eater in the field as he was back home in the
House of Commons when on one occasion a member from the Whitechapel
district interrupted him while he was making a speech. The earl
wheeled round, gave the disturber a withering look, and shouted,
“Silence in the Ghetto,” and the House simply howled.
In the desert the noble earl managed to look as disreputable as
possible and in appearance was as successful a brigand as Auda Abu
Tayi himself. One day Lord Winterton in his sheik’s regalia came
riding along on his camel on his way from Jaffa to Allenby’s
headquarters near Ramleh. There is a particularly attractive
stretch of road between those two Palestinian cities, but during
the war all natives on camels or donkeys or on foot were instructed
to take a side path so that the road could be reserved for the
interminable caravans of motor-lorries and whizzing staff cars.
Right up the middle of that sacred motor highway came Lord
Winterton, ambling along on his camel on a mission from the Arab
army to Allenby. A military police sergeant, on point duty directing
traffic, saw him and shouted, “Get off the road, you black bounder!”
Winterton placidly continued on his way; he was not accustomed to
being addressed with such levity and naturally assumed that the
sergeant was speaking to some one else. But the latter shouted
again: “I say, you black beggar,——,——, can’t you hear me talking
to you? I said get off this road and over there where you belong.”
Winterton pulled up his dromedary at this and replied as only one
of his social standing could reply: “Evidently, old chap, you don’t
know who I am. I am a major, a member of Parliament, and an earl!”
Whereupon the sergeant nearly collapsed but managed to salute
weakly and stammer: “Proceed, my lord, proceed,” or words to that
effect.
The most of the officers in Arabia were either colonels,
lieutenant-colonels, or majors. But rank made very little
difference, and there was a free-masonry among them such as did
not exist on any other front. Saluting was taboo, and in addressing
each other titles were dispensed with. Even when Lawrence had the
opportunity to become a general he declined the honor and gave as
his reason that he preferred not to be elevated in rank beyond his
associates. Each man had his own task and went his own way. Each
was a free-lance and conducted himself with much the same freedom
as did the knights of old.
In a letter written home from Arabia during the latter part of the
desert war by Colonel R. V. Buxton, who was in command of the Camel
Corps sent over from Palestine to coöperate with the Shereefian
force, this army officer said of Lawrence: “He is the most wonderful
of fellows and is our guide, philosopher, and friend. Although he
is only a boy to look at and has a very quiet manner, he is known
to every Arab in this country for his exploits. He lives entirely
with them, wears their clothes, and eats only their food. He always
travels in spotless white and in fact reminds one of the Prophet.
He has practically started all this movement here and is a wonderful
enthusiast.”
Photograph: THE ROCK SEEMED TO SWIRL LIKE WATERED SILK
Photograph: THE “THREE-STORIED TEMPLE”