race of Shem but visitors from Central Asia; they were late converts
to Mohammedanism as the Prussians to Christianity, and made their
home in Anatolia, in Asia Minor. They are, like the Prussians, before
anything else a fighting people. They are dull, brutal and enduring:
their chief virtue is the soldierly one of united action against their
neighbours, whom they divide and conquer like the Romans. After the
first exciting days of Mohammedan conquest, when the Arabs overran
half the known world, the huge new empire had to be knit together. The
Arabs had no ruling power themselves and had to rely on the non-Semitic
peoples whom they had conquered to provide a system of government.
This was the opportunity of the Turks. They were first the servants,
then the helpers, then the rulers of the Arab races. Finally they
became tyrants and burned and destroyed everything that annoyed their
soldier-minds by its beauty or superiority. They robbed the Arabs of
their richest possessions and gave them nothing in return. They were
not even great road-makers and bridge-builders and marsh-drainers like
the Romans. They neglected public works and were the enemies of art,
literature and ideas.
The Arabs by their early conquests in Spain and Sicily had been really
helpful to European civilization in the Dark Ages: the Arabic origin
of many early scientific terms is a reminder of the refreshment that
Arab thought provided. True, they were imitative rather than creative,
and the ideas that they brought were merely the remnants of Classical
learning caught from the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt before it
died. But compared with the Turks they have always seemed cultured,
prosperous, even progressive. Turkish rule was a parasite growth,
strangling the Empire as ivy strangles a tree. It was cunning at
setting subject communities at each other’s throats, and teaching them
that the local politics of a province were more important than
nationality. The Turks gradually banished the Arabic language from
courts, offices, the Government service and superior schools. Arabs
might only serve the State, now a mere Turkish Empire, by becoming
imitation Turks.
There was of course great resistance to this tyranny. Many revolts took
place in Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia; but the Turks were too strong.
The Arabs lost their racial pride and all their proud traditions. But
of one thing they could not be robbed, the Koran, the sacred book of
all Mohammedans, to study which was every man’s first religious duty,
whether Arab or Turk. Not only was the Koran the foundation of the
legal system used throughout the Arabic-speaking world, except where
the Turks had lately imposed their more Western code, but it was the
finest example of Arabic literature. In reading the Koran every Arab
had a standard by which to judge the dull minds of his Turkish masters.
And the Arabs did succeed in keeping their rich and flexible language,
and actually in filling the crude Turkish with Arabic words.
The last Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid, who reigned during the first
few years of this century, went even further than those before him. He
was jealous of the power of the Arab Grand Sherif of Mecca, who was
the head of the priestly family of sherifs (or men descended from the
prophet Mohammed) and ruled with great honour in the Holy City.[2]
Previous Turkish Sultans finding the Sherif of Mecca too strong to be
destroyed had saved their own dignity by solemnly confirming in
power whatever Sherif was elected by his family, which numbered about
two thousand persons. But Abdul Hamid, who, for autocratic reasons,
laid new stress on his inherited title of Caliph or Ruler of the
Faithful (the orthodox Mohammedans), wanted the Holy Cities to be under
his direct rule; until now he had been safely able to garrison them
with soldiers only by means of the Suez Canal. He decided to build the
pilgrims’ railway and to increase Turkish influence among the tribes of
Arabia by money, intrigue, and armed expeditions. Finally, not content
with interfering with the Sherif’s rule even in Mecca itself, he even
took away important members of the Prophet’s family to Constantinople,
as hostages for the good behaviour of the rest.
[2] Mr. Lowell Thomas has described Lawrence as a Sherif of Mecca. This
is plainly ridiculous. Whatever mixed blood Lawrence has in him he
certainly is not a pedigreed descendant of the Prophet. He has never
been to Mecca and would not offend the Arabs by so doing.
Among these captives were Hussein, the future Sherif, and his four
sons, Ali, Abdulla, Feisal and Zeid, who are important in this story.
Hussein gave his sons a modern education at Constantinople and the
experience which afterwards helped them as leaders of the Arab revolt
against the Turks. But he also kept them good Mohammedans and when he
returned to Mecca took good care to cure them of any Western softness.
He sent them out into the desert in command of the Sherifian troops
that guarded the pilgrim road between Medina and Mecca, and kept them
there for months at a time.
IV
Four years before the War, Abdul Hamid was deposed by a political party
known as the Young Turks. The Young Turks believed in Western political
ideas learned from the American schools founded in Turkey, and in
military methods learned from their advisers, the Germans; but French
culture and government gave them their clearest model to imitate. They
objected to Abdul Hamid’s idea of a religious empire ruled by a Sultan
who was both head of the State and spiritual ruler. They favoured
the Western idea of a military state—Turkey—ruling its subject races
merely by the sword, with religion a matter of less importance. As
part of this policy they sent Hussein and his family back to Mecca.
This nationalist movement in Turkey was really one of self-protection.
Already Western ideas about the rights of subject races to govern
themselves had begun to crumble up the Turkish Empire. The Greeks,
Serbs, Bulgars, Persians and others had broken away and set up their
own governments. It was time for the Turks to protect what was left by
adopting the same nationalist policy.
After their first success against the Sultan the Young Turks began to
behave foolishly. They preached ‘Turkish brotherhood’; meaning no more
than to rally together all men of Turkish blood. Turkey should be the
absolute mistress of a subject empire in the modern French style; not
merely the chief state of a religious Empire only bound together by
the Arabic language and the Koran. They also hoped to get back into
their state the Turkish population which was at the time under Russian
rule in Central Asia. But the subject races, who far outnumbered the
Turks, did not understand this. Seeing that the Turks even in their
own country were dependent on Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians,
Persians and others for the running of all their government offices
and doing all their business except the simple military part, they
thought that the Young Turks meant to have an Empire something like the
white part of the British Empire, one in which Turkey was to be the
head of a number of free states, self-governed but contributing to the
general expenses of the Empire. The Young Turks saw their mistake and
immediately made their intentions quite plain. Led by Enver, the son
of the late Sultan’s chief furniture-maker, and a soldier-politician
who had worked his way up, it was said, by murdering in turn every
superior officer who stood in his way, they stopped at nothing. The
Armenians began to take up arms for freedom. The Turks crushed them—the
Armenian leaders failed their followers—and massacred men, women and
children in hundreds of thousands. They massacred them not because
they were Christians but because they were Armenians and wanted to be
independent. Such wholesale barbarity was made possible for Enver and
his friends by the nature of the Turkish private soldier, who has been
described as the best natural soldier in the world. This means that he
is brave, enduring and so obedient that he allows himself to have no
feelings except those that he is ordered to have. He will butcher and
burn even in his own country if so ordered, and will be merciful and
affectionate if so ordered. He merely tries to do his duty.
The Arabs, who had also begun to talk of freedom, were more difficult
to deal with because more numerous and because being (unlike the
Armenians) Semites they were more powerfully affected by the idea.
For Semites can be swung on an idea as on a cord (the phrase is
Lawrence’s). The Syrian Arabs, since they were nearest to Europe, first
caught fire, and the Young Turks took what measures they dared
to take short of massacre. The Arab members of the Turkish Congress
were scattered, Arab political societies were suppressed. The public
use of the Arabic language except for strictly religious purposes was
forbidden all over the Empire. Any talk of Arab self-government was a
punishable offence. As a result of this oppression, secret societies
sprang up of a more violently revolutionary kind. One of these, the
Syrian society, was numerous, well organized, and kept its secret so
well that the Turks, though they had suspicions, could not find any
clear evidence of its leaders or membership, and without evidence dared
not begin another reign of terror of the Armenian kind for fear of
European opinion. Another society was composed almost entirely of Arab
officers serving in the Turkish army, who were sworn to turn against
their masters as soon as a chance offered. This society was founded in
Mesopotamia and was so fanatically pro-Arab that its leaders would not
even have dealings with the English, French and Russians, who might
otherwise have been their allies, because they did not believe that if
they accepted European help they would be allowed to keep any freedom
that they might win. They preferred a single bad tyranny which they
knew well to a possible new tyranny of several nations whom they did
not know so well; and at the end of the War members of the society were
still commanding Turkish divisions against the English. The Syrian
society, however, looked for help to England, to Egypt, to the Sherif
of Mecca, to anyone in fact who would do the Arabs’ work for them.
These freedom societies grew until in 1914 the War broke out: then
European opinion did not matter much and the Turks, with the power
given them by the general mobilization of the Army, could act.
Nearly one-third of the original Turkish Army was Arabic-speaking, and
after the first few months of the War when they had recognized the
danger the Turks took good care to send Arab regiments as far away as
possible from their homes, to the northern battle fronts, and there put
them into the firing line as quickly as possible. But before this, a
few Syrian revolutionaries were found to have been appealing to France
for help in their campaign for freedom, and here was an excuse for a
reign of terror. Arab Mohammedans and Arab Christians were crowded into
the same prisons, and by the end of 1915 the whole of Syria was united
by a cause that suppression only made stronger.
Early in the same year the Young Turks were convinced by arguments and
pressure from the part of their German Allies that in order to win
their war, which was pressing them very hard, they must work up some
religious enthusiasm, proclaim a Holy War. In spite of their former
decision to give religion an unimportant position in the empire, Holy
War was necessary for more than one reason; they wanted the support
of the religious party in Turkey; they wanted their soldiers, now
badly fed and badly equipped, to fight bravely in the confidence of
going straight to Paradise if they were killed; and they also wanted
to encourage Mohammedan soldiers in the French and British armies to
throw down their arms. In India particularly, such a proclamation
was expected to have an immense effect. The Holy War was therefore
proclaimed at Constantinople and the Sherif of Mecca was invited, or
rather ordered, to confirm the proclamation.
If Hussein had done so the course of the War might have been very
different. But he did not wish to take the step. He hated the
Turks, whom he knew for bad Mohammedans without honour or good
feelings, and he believed that a true Holy War could only be a
defensive one, and this was clearly aggressive. Besides, Germany, a
Christian ally, made a Holy War look absurd. He refused.
Hussein was shrewd, honourable and deeply pious. His position, however,
was difficult. The yearly pilgrimage ended with the outbreak of war and
with it went a great part of his revenues. As he was for the Allies an
enemy subject, there was danger of their stopping the usual food-ships
from India. And if he angered the Turks they might stop food from
coming to him by the desert railway; and his own province could not
grow food enough for its population. So having refused to proclaim
the Holy War he begged the Allies not to starve his people out for
what was not their fault. The Turks, in reply to his refusal, began a
partial blockade of Hussein’s province by controlling the traffic on
the railway. The British, on the other hand, allowed the food vessels
to come as usual. This decided Hussein. He decided to revolt (as his
neighbour Ibn Saud of the central oases had successfully done four
or five years previously) and had a secret meeting with a party of
British officers on a deserted reef on the Red Sea coast near Mecca.
He was given assurance that England would give him what help he needed
in guns and stores for his war. He had also just been secretly asked
for his support by leaders of both secret societies, the Syrian and
the Mesopotamian. A military mutiny was proposed in Syria. Hussein
undertook to do his best for them. He therefore sent Feisal, his third
son, to report to him from Syria what were the chances of a successful
revolt.
Feisal, who had been a member of the Turkish Government and was
therefore able to travel about freely, went and reported that
prospects were good in Syria, but that the war in general was going
against the Allies; the time was not yet. If, however, the Australian
divisions then in Egypt were landed, as was expected, at Alexandretta
in Syria, a military mutiny of the Arab divisions then stationed in
Syria would certainly be successful. The Arabs could make a quick peace
with the Turks, securing their freedom, and after this even if Germany
won the world-war they might hold what they had won.
But he was not in touch with Allied politics. The French were afraid
that if British forces were once landed in Syria, they would never
leave it; and Syria was a country in which they were themselves
interested. A joint French and British expedition would not have
been so bad, but the French had no troops to spare. So, as it has
been responsibly stated, the French Government put pressure on the
British to cancel their arrangements for the Alexandretta landing.
After much delay the Australians were landed with numerous other
British and Indian troops and a small French detachment to give an
Allied colouring, not in Syria, but the other side of Asia Minor, at
the Dardanelles. It was an attempt, nearly successful, to capture
Constantinople and so end the eastern war at a blow. After the landing
the English asked Hussein to begin his revolt; on Feisal’s advice he
replied that the Allies must first put a screen of troops between him
and Constantinople; the English, however, were no longer able to find
troops for a landing in Syria even with French consent.
[Illustration:
description: Photo 3⁄4 shot of standing Emir Feisal facing the
camera with other people behind him
caption: THE EMIR FEISAL
and his Negro Freedmen
_Copyright_
]
Feisal went up to the Dardanelles to watch how things went. After
several months the Turkish army, though successful in holding its
position, had been crippled by enormous losses. Feisal, seeing this,
returned to Syria, thinking that the time was at last come for the
mutiny, even without Allied help. But there he found that the Turks had
broken up all the Arab divisions, sending them to the various distant
war-fronts; and his Syrian revolutionary friends were all either under
arrest or in hiding, and numbers had already been hanged on various
political charges. He had lost his opportunity.
He wrote to his father to wait until England grew stronger and Turkey
still weaker. Unfortunately England, quite apart from the difficulties
of the _Entente_, was in a very bad position in the Near East, forced
to withdraw from the Dardanelles after losses as heavy as the Turks
had suffered. The English politicians were content to take the blame
for not having landed troops at Alexandretta, the one really sensible
place, rather than give away their French colleagues; and the rumour
went round England ‘The Greeks let us down.’ Bulgaria, too, had lately
joined with the Turks and Germans, so that the French insisted on
the Dardanelles troops being landed not at Alexandretta, even this
time, as had been intended, but at Salonica. To make matters worse, a
British Army was surrounded and starving in the town of Kut, on the
Mesopotamian front. Feisal’s own position grew very dangerous. He had
to live at Damascus as the guest of Jemal Pasha, the Turkish general
in command of the forces in Syria, and being himself an officer in the
Turkish army had to swallow whatever insults the bullying Jemal threw
at the Arabs in his drunken fits. Feisal had, moreover, been president
of the secret freedom society in Syria before the War and was at the
mercy of its members; if he was denounced by any of these—perhaps a
condemned man might try to buy his life with the information—he was
lost. So Feisal had to stay anxiously with Jemal at Damascus, and
spent his time rubbing up his military knowledge. His elder brother Ali
was now raising troops down in Arabia, giving as the excuse that he
and Feisal intended to lead them in an attack against the English in
Egypt. But the troops were really intended for use against the Turks
as soon as Feisal gave the word. Jemal with his brutal Turkish humour
would send for Feisal and take him to see the hanging of his Syrian
revolutionary friends. The doomed men dared not show that they knew
what Feisal’s real intentions were, for fear that he and his family
would share their fate—Feisal was the one leader in whom Syria had
confidence. Nor could Feisal show them what his feelings were by word
or look; he was under the watchful eye of Jemal. Only once did his
agony make him lose self-possession; he burst out that these executions
would cost Jemal all that he was trying to avoid. Then it took the
strongest efforts of his friends at Constantinople, the leading men of
Turkey, to save him from paying the price of these rash words.
Feisal’s correspondence with his father in Mecca was an extremely
dangerous one: old family retainers were used to take messages up and
down the pilgrims’ railway, messages hidden in sword hilts, in cakes,
sewn between the soles of sandals, or written in invisible ink on the
wrappers of harmless packages. In all his letters Feisal begged his
father to wait, to delay the revolt until a wiser time. But Hussein
trusted in God rather than in military common sense and decided that
the soldiers of his province were able to beat the Turks in fair fight.
He sent a message to Feisal with the news that all was now ready. Ali
had raised the troops and they were waiting for Feisal’s inspection
before starting for the front.
Feisal told Jemal of his father’s message (without, of course,
explaining its hostile significance) and asked permission to go down
to Medina. To his dismay Jemal replied that Enver Pasha, the Turkish
Commander-in-Chief, was now on his way to the province and that Enver,
Feisal and himself would attend the inspection together. Feisal had
planned to raise his father’s crimson banner of revolt as soon as
he arrived in Medina and so take the Turks unawares: but now he was
saddled with two uninvited guests, the two chief generals of his enemy,
to whom, by the Arab laws of hospitality, he could do no harm. They
would probably delay his action so long that the secret of the revolt
would be given away.
In the end, however, everything passed off well, though the irony of
the review was almost unbearable. Enver, Jemal and Feisal watched the
troops manœuvring in the dusty plain outside the city gate, rushing
up and down in sham camel-fights or playing the ancient Arab game of
javelin-throwing on horseback. At last Enver turned to Feisal and
asked, ‘Are these all volunteers for the Holy War?’ ‘Yes,’ said Feisal,
with another Holy War in mind. ‘Willing to fight to the death against
the enemies of the faithful?’ ‘Yes,’ said Feisal again, and then the
Arab chiefs came up to be presented, and one of the prophet’s family
drew Feisal aside privately, whispering, ‘My lord, shall we kill them
now?’ Feisal answered, ‘No, they are our guests.’
The chiefs protested that it must be done, for so the war could be
ended in two blows. They tried to force Feisal’s hand, and he had
actually to go among them, just out of hearing of Enver and Jemal, to
plead for the lives of these two uninvited guests of his, monsters
who had murdered his best friends. In the end he had to make excuses
and take the party quickly back into the town under his personal
protection and from there escort them all the way to Damascus
with a guard of his own slaves to save them from death on the way.
He explained this action as being merely great courtesy shown to
distinguished guests. But Enver and Jemal were most suspicious of what
they had seen and at once sent large Turkish forces by the railway
to garrison the holy cities. They wanted to keep Feisal captive at
Damascus; but telegrams came from the Turks at Medina asking for him to
return at once to prevent disorder, and Jemal reluctantly let him go.
Feisal was forced, however, to leave his suite behind as hostages.
Feisal found Medina full of Turks, an entire Army Corps of them, and
his hope of a surprise rush, winning success with hardly a shot fired,
had become impossible. His chivalry had ruined him. However, he had
been prudent too long now. On the same day that Feisal’s suite escaped
from Damascus, riding out into the desert to take refuge with a desert
chief, Feisal showed his hand: he raised the banner of revolt outside
Medina.
His first rush on Medina was a desperate business. The Arabs were
badly armed and short of ammunition, the Turks were in great force. In
the middle of the battle one of the principal Arab tribes broke and
ran, and the whole force was driven outside the walls into the open
plain. The Turks then opened fire on them with artillery and machine
guns. The Arabs, who only used muzzle-loading guns in their tribal
battles, were terrified: and thought that the noise of the bursting
shells was equalled by their killing powers. Feisal as a trained
soldier knew better, and with his kinsman, young Ali ibn el Hussein,
rode about on his mare among the shell-bursts to show that the danger
was not so great as the tribesmen feared. But not even Feisal could
draw the Arabs to the charge. Part of the tribe that had first
broken approached the Turkish commander and offered to surrender if its
villages were spared. There was a lull in the fighting and the Turkish
general invited the chiefs to talk over the matter; secretly at the
same time he sent troops to surround one of the suburbs of the city
which he singled out for his object lesson in Turkish terror. While the
conference was in progress these Turks were ordered to carry the suburb
by assault and massacre every living creature in it. It was done,
horribly. Those who were not butchered were burned alive—men, women
and children together. The Turkish general and these troops had served
together in Armenia and such methods were not new to them.