first rule of Arab war was that women and children too young to fight
must be spared and that property which could not be carried off in fair
raiding should be left undamaged. Feisal’s men realized what Feisal
knew already, that the Turks would stick at nothing, and they fell back
to consider what must now be done. They were in honour bound, because
of the massacre, to fight to the last man; and yet their arms were
plainly worth nothing against modern Turkish (and German) rifles and
machine-guns and artillery. The Turks in Medina realizing that they
were henceforward in a state of real or threatened siege, made their
situation better by driving out into the desert many hundreds of the
poorer Arab townsmen whom they would otherwise have had to feed.
* * * * *
Feisal’s attack on Medina had been timed to the day of his father’s
attempt on the Turks at Mecca. Hussein was more successful; he
succeeded in capturing the city itself at the first rush, but it
was some days before he could silence the Turkish forts that commanded
the city from the hills outside. The Turks were foolish enough to
shell the holy Mosque which was the goal of the yearly pilgrimage.
It contained the Kaaba, a cubical shrine into whose walls was built
the sacred black stone worshipped there as a rain-bringing charm long
before Mohammed’s time and the one exception that Mohammed was forced
to make in his orders against the worshipping of idols. The black
stone was said to have fallen from Heaven and what is more, probably
had; it is apparently a meteorite. In the bombardment a Turkish shell
killed several worshippers praying before the Kaaba itself and a second
shudder of horror ran through the Mohammedan world. Jiddah, the port
of Mecca, was also captured with the assistance of the British Navy;
and the whole province with the exception of Medina, was after a time
cleared of Turks.
From their camp to the west of Medina, Feisal and Ali sent messenger
after messenger to the Red Sea port, Rabegh, which was on the
roundabout road between Medina and Mecca. They knew that the British,
at their father’s request, were landing military stores there. Yet they
got nothing from Rabegh but a little food and a consignment of Japanese
rifles, rusty relics of the fighting at Port Arthur ten years before,
which burst as soon as fired. Their father remained in Mecca.
Ali went at last to see what was happening: he found that the local
chief at Rabegh had decided that the Turks were bound to win and
so had decided to join them. Ali made a demonstration and got help
from another brother, Zeid, and the chief fled as an outlaw to the
hills. Ali and Zeid took possession of his villages and found in them
great stores of arms and food landed from the British ships. The
temptation to settle down for a spell of ease and comfort was too much
for them. They stopped where they were.
Feisal was left to carry on the war alone a hundred and fifty miles
away inland. In August 1915 he visited another port on the Red Sea
farther north than Rabegh, called Yenbo, where the British Navy had
landed a force of marines and captured the Turkish garrison. Here
he met a British colonel who was acting under orders of the High
Commissioner in Egypt, and asked him for military help. After some
time he was sent a battery of mountain guns and some maxims which
were to be handled by Egyptian Army gunners. The Arabs with Feisal
rejoiced when the Egyptians arrived outside Medina, and thought that
they were now the equal of the Turks. They went forward in a mob and
drove in first the Turkish outposts and then the supports, so that
the commander in the city was alarmed. He reinforced the threatened
flank, bringing up heavy guns which opened long-range fire on the
Arabs. One shell burst close to Feisal’s tent where he was sitting
with his Staff. The Egyptian gunners were asked to return the fire
and knock out the Turkish guns: but they had to admit that they were
helpless. The Turkish guns were nine thousand yards away and their
own—twenty-year-old Krupp guns—only had a range of three thousand. The
Arabs laughed scornfully and retreated again to their defiles in the
hills.
Feisal was greatly discouraged. His men were tired; he had had heavy
losses. Money was running short and his army was gradually melting
away. He did not like having to carry on entirely by himself while his
brother Abdulla remained in Mecca and Ali and Zeid at Rabegh. He
fell back with his main body to a position nearer the coast, leaving
local tribes to carry on his policy of sudden raids on Turkish supply
columns and night attacks on the outposts. It was at this point in the
history of the Revolt that Lawrence appeared and turned the tide.
V
At the outbreak of the War Lawrence had of course to give up the idea
of continuing at Carchemish, which was in Turkish territory. He was,
at the time, in Oxford—it was the off-season for digging—and he much
resented this interruption of what had been to him a nearly perfect
life. He tried to join an Officers’ Training Corps at Oxford, but
without success. He tried again in London; but it was no good. It has
been incorrectly said that he was marked as ‘physically below fighting
standard’: this would, however, be quite believable. Perhaps the only
other man in England who was Lawrence’s equal in physical strength and
endurance was Jimmy Wilde, the fly-weight boxer, a World’s champion
who not only beat every other man of his own weight but for years
was unbeaten by boxers weighing a whole stone heavier than himself.
Wilde was rejected as being of ‘emaciated physique’ and not fit for
active service. But in Lawrence’s case it was only a temporary glut of
recruits that was responsible for his being turned away. Dr. Hogarth
heard that Lawrence was at a loose end and got him given a week’s
trial, as a favour, by Colonel Hedley, the head of the Geographic
Section of the General Staff at Whitehall. Three weeks later Hogarth
met Hedley and asked him, ‘Did you find young Lawrence any use?’
‘He’s running my entire department for me now,’ said Hedley shortly.
Lawrence’s task here was making maps of Sinai, Belgium and France.
Four months later, on Turkey’s entering the War, Lord Kitchener
ordered all members of the Sinai Survey expedition of 1913—14 to be
sent immediately to Egypt, where their knowledge would be useful in
view of a possible Turkish invasion of Egypt. General Maxwell
wired that they were not wanted. Kitchener wired back that they were
already on their way. In Cairo Lawrence naturally went to the Military
Map Department of the Intelligence Service, where again he made his
presence felt. About certain parts of Syria and Mesopotamia he knew
even more than the Turks themselves. At the same time he was engaged
in general intelligence as staff-captain at General Headquarters,
Egypt. He was charged with making out a periodic report to the General
Staff as to the position of the various divisions and smaller units of
the Turkish Army: this information came from spies or from prisoners
captured on the various fronts. Although a most valuable officer he was
not popular with the senior military officers about him, particularly
with those fresh from England who did not believe that a civilian like
Lawrence was competent to talk about military subjects. There was
annoyance, for instance, when he interrupted two generals discussing
a reported movement of Turkish troops from So-and-So to Such-and-Such
by saying: ‘Nonsense; they can’t make the distance in twice the time
you give them. The roads are bad and there’s no local transport.
Besides, their commanding officer is a very lazy fellow.’ Also he was
looked on with disfavour for going about without a military belt, in
patent-leather shoes, and not wearing the right-coloured socks or tie.
His reports, too, were not written in the style favoured. The War
Office handbook of information about the Turkish Army, of which he was
joint editor for fourteen editions, contained such comments as ‘General
Abd el Mahmoud commanding the —th Division is half-Albanian by birth
and a consumptive; an able officer and a gunnery expert; but a vicious
scoundrel, and will accept bribes.’ These personal comments were
thought unnecessary: the theory held by the British was that their
officer opponents were gallant fellows entitled to every courtesy. An
objection was also raised to such scholarly footnotes as a comparison
between the new Boy Scout movement in Turkey and the Corps of Pages
kept in Egypt in the time of the Janissaries. The General Staff
disliked history and suspected a joke. Among Lawrence’s other tasks was
questioning suspected persons; he had the gift of being able to tell at
once from small points in a man’s dress and from the dialect he spoke
more or less what he was and where he came from. Two recorded examples
will serve. An ugly-looking ruffian was caught on the Suez Canal,
suspected of being a spy. He said he was a Syrian. Lawrence, overcoming
his usual aversion to looking a man in the face, said ‘He’s lying; look
at his little pig eyes! The man’s an Egyptian of the pedlar class.’ He
spoke sharply in the pedlar’s dialect, and the man admitted who he was.
On another occasion, but later in the War, when Lawrence had greatly
improved his accuracy, a fine-looking Arab came in with information.
Lawrence’s colleague said: ‘Here’s one of the real Bedouin come to see
you.’ Lawrence said, ‘No! He’s not got the Bedouin walk or style. He’s
a Syrian Arab farmer living under the protection of the Beni Sakhr
tribe,’ and so it proved.
In 1915 Cairo got so full of generals and colonels with nothing to
do but send unnecessary messages about and get in the way of the few
people who were doing any work, that it was mere comic opera. No less
than three General Staffs fully officered were collected in Egypt,
and it was impossible for any one of them to define exactly where its
duties began and ended. There was current a wicked parody of an
old Egyptian-Christian creed, in which occurred the phrase, ‘And yet
there are not three Incompetents but one Incompetent.’ One of the most
intimate glimpses we get of Lawrence in 1915 is of a small grinning
second-lieutenant, with hair of unmilitary length and no belt, hiding
behind a screen in the Savoy Hotel with another equally unmilitary
colleague, softly counting ‘One, two, three, four!’ ... through a hole
in the screen. They were counting generals. An important conference
was going on in the room, for generals only. His colleague swears to
me that Lawrence counted up to sixty-five. He himself only made it
sixty-four, but one of the Brigadier-Generals may have moved.
Lawrence went on several journeys to the Suez Canal, where a weak
Turkish attack had been made and a strong one was always expected, and
one to the Senussi Desert in the West of Egypt (I believe to discover
the whereabouts of British prisoners captured by the hostile Arabs
there). He was also sent to Athens to get contact with the Levant
group of the British Secret Service, whose agent in Egypt he was for
a time until the work grew too important for an officer of his low
rank to perform. He also was engaged in getting information about
the anti-British revolutionary societies in Egypt and, because the
Egyptians are not as loyal in their secret societies as the Syrians and
Mesopotamians, was always having visitors; one party after another came
offering to betray the names of its fellow-members until he had seen
nearly the whole society. Lawrence’s chief difficulty was to prevent
the various parties meeting each other on the office-stairs. Social
life in Egypt bored him. ‘It’s a bad life this,’ he wrote at the end of
March 1915, ‘living at close quarters with a khaki crowd very intent
on “Banker” and parades and lunch. I am a total abstainer from all
of these and so a snob.’ In April 1916 he was sent to Mesopotamia. He
had an official task in which he was not much interested and a private
intention known only to a few colleagues whom he could trust.
In Mesopotamia an army composed of mixed Indian and British troops had
been marching up the Tigris from the Persian Gulf and had at first met
with success, but sickness, transport difficulties, bad strategy and
strong Turkish forces had held up the advance, which became a retreat:
and soon General Townshend with a large force was cut off and besieged
in the town of Kut. Provisions were failing and the fall was believed
to be a certainty because reinforcements could not arrive from India in
time. Lawrence’s official task given him direct from the War Office at
London was to go as member of a secret mission to the Turkish commander
who was besieging Kut: to persuade him not to press the siege. It was
thought possible that a large bribe might work because it was known
that the Turks were themselves in difficulties. They had few troops—the
Arabic-speaking regiments were openly mutinous—and a Russian army
to the North had just captured the town of Erzeroum, the capital of
Kurdistan, in the famous snow battle. The Russians were pressing on
towards Anatolia, the Turks’ home province; so that at any moment the
siege might collapse. As a matter of fact the capture of Erzeroum had
been ‘arranged’—Colonel Buchan’s novel _Greenmantle_ has more than a
flavour of truth—and the War Office hoped that the same success could
be repeated at Kut. Nevertheless bribes would be useless, Lawrence
had told those who sent him, and would only encourage the Turks. The
Turkish commander, being a nephew of Enver, the chief Young Turk, never
needed to worry about money.
The British Generals in Mesopotamia were not pleased with the idea
of this conference. Two of them told Lawrence that his intentions
(which they did not know) were dishonourable, and unworthy of a soldier
(which he never acknowledged himself to be). Now, this Mesopotamian
Army was under the orders of the Government of India and though Lord
Kitchener, who was in general command of the Imperial British Forces,
had early in the War approached two leaders of the secret freedom
society of Mesopotamia to offer to help in a mutiny which might have
cleared Mesopotamia of the Turks at a single blow, his hand had been
held. The Indian Government was afraid that if the Arabs mutinied
it would be not able to grant Mesopotamia those benefits of British
protection which had been granted to Burma some years before; the Arabs
would want to remain free. So the help that Kitchener would have given
was withheld and the mutiny did not come about. Instead, an army was
sent from India to act without the Arabs: with disastrous results. The
British and Indians were looked upon as invaders as unwelcome as the
Turks and were not only given no help but were constantly being raided
and robbed by the local Arab tribes.
Lawrence’s private intention, which was the real reason of his coming,
had been to see whether the situation in Mesopotamia would allow of
local co-operation on Nationalist lines between the British and the
Euphrates tribes, whom he knew well from his Carchemish days. Some of
these were already in revolt—he hoped further to get in touch with
the great Ruwalla tribe of the Northern Syrian desert—and with his
assistance might soon have cut all Turkish communications by holding up
river traffic and raiding supply columns until the army before Kut
would be in a state of siege itself. Kut could hold out until he had
made his preparations; if only eight more aeroplanes could be found for
dropping provisions into the town. But he found that it was hopeless.
The policy of wresting Mesopotamia without Arab help and making it part
of the Empire was to be stubbornly maintained; sooner, almost, than
recognize the Arabs as a political force the English would leave the
country to the Turks. The result was that Lawrence did not do what he
intended.
The conference with the Turkish General to which he and two others
went across the Turkish lines with a white flag and with handkerchiefs
bound over their eyes, was merely an attempt to ransom, on grounds of
humanity or interest, those of the garrison of Kut whose health had
suffered by the siege and whom captivity would kill, and to persuade
the general not to punish the Arab civilians in Kut who had helped
the British. After these things had been not very satisfactorily
settled—they got nearly a thousand of the sick exchanged against
healthy Turks; they should have got three thousand—the conference
developed into a mere exchange of courtesies. In these, however,
Lawrence and Colonel Aubrey Herbert, who was with him, would not join.
When the Turk said, ‘After all, gentlemen, our interests as Empire
builders are much the same as yours. There is nothing that need stand
between us,’ Herbert replied shortly: ‘Only a million dead Armenians,’
and that ended the conference.
Lawrence had one more task; to explain to the British Staff in
Mesopotamia, on behalf of the High Commissioner of Egypt, that the help
promised to Sherif Hussein did not include a support of his claim to
the Caliphate, the spiritual headship of the Mohammedan world, as
was believed in India, with alarm. The official Caliph was still the
ex-sultan Abdul Hamid. Having done this, he came away. Kut surrendered
(half its garrison died in captivity and the Turks hanged a number
of the Arab civilians) and the remainder of the British Army, whose
advance the local Arabs continued to resent, lost enormous numbers of
men and spent another two years in reaching Bagdad.
Things were going from bad to worse. The British High Commissioner,
who had made the promises to Sherif Hussein on behalf of the British
Foreign Office, found himself in difficulties. The general commanding
the British forces in Egypt, who took his orders only from the War
Office, did not believe in the Revolt and was not going to waste men,
arms or money over it. His rule was ‘No side shows.’ It is possible
also that he did not like the High Commissioner, a civilian, to be
interfering in military matters. So, outside Medina, Feisal, waiting
every day anxiously for the artillery and other stores which had
been promised him, and with his own private treasure nearly spent in
paying his armies, was left in disappointment and inaction. After the
landing of a few native Egyptian troops and stores at Rabegh nothing
much more was done; and it seemed that the Revolt was already over.
Many of the staff officers at Cairo looked on all this as a great joke
at the expense of the High Commissioner. They laughed that Hussein
would soon find himself on a Turkish scaffold. As plain soldiers they
had a fellow-feeling for the Turk, and could not see the tragedy and
dishonour that they were intending. To make matters worse a French
military mission was arranging an intrigue against Hussein in his towns
of Jiddah and Mecca, and was also proposing to the harassed old man
military schemes that would have ruined his cause in the eyes of all
Mohammedans.
In Cairo Lawrence had come to be more plagued than ever by generals and
colonels, and he discovered that since his great interest in the Arab
Revolt was known he was about to be put in a position where he could
not do much more to help it. He decided to get away in time. He asked
for permission to go, but it was not given, so he began making himself
so obnoxious that the General Staff would be only too glad to be rid
of him. He was already known as a conceited young puppy and began a
campaign of pin-pricks, correcting the grammar of the most senior
officers and commenting on their ignorance of the geography and customs
of the East. The break came in this way. The chief of staff one day
rang him up on the telephone. ‘Is that Captain Lawrence? Where exactly
is the Turkish Forty-first Division now stationed?’ Lawrence said, ‘At
So-and-So near Aleppo. The 131st, 132nd, 133rd regiments compose it.
They are quartered in the villages So-and-So, So-and-So, and
So-and-So.’
‘Have you those villages marked on the map?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you noted them yet on the Dislocation files?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they are better in my head until I can check the information.’
‘Yes, but you can’t send your head along to Ismailia every time.’
(Ismailia was a long way from Cairo.)
‘I wish to goodness I could,’ said Lawrence, and rang off.
This had the desired effect; it was decided to get rid of Lawrence
somehow. He took the opportunity to ask for ten days’ leave to go for
a holiday on the Red Sea in company with a Foreign Office official,
Storrs (afterwards the first Christian Governor of Jerusalem since the
Crusades), who was visiting the Sherif on important business. He got
his leave, and at the same time made arrangements to be transferred
from the Military Intelligence Service to the ‘Arab Bureau,’ which was
under the direct orders of the British Foreign Office. The Arab bureau
was a ♦department that had just been formed for helping the Arab Revolt
and was run by a small group of men, some of them, like Lloyd and
Hogarth, old friends of Lawrence’s, who really knew something about the
Arabs—and about the Turks. Lawrence’s transfer was arranged directly
between the War Office and the Foreign Office in London, so that gave
him time. He intended to do much in his ten days’ leave.
♦ “departmen” replaced with “department”
VI
Lawrence and Storrs arrived at Jiddah, the port of Mecca on the Red
Sea, in October 1916. (At this point Lawrence begins his public account
of his adventures, the book _Revolt in the Desert_.)
The Sherif’s second son Abdulla came to meet the two Englishmen, riding
on a white mare with a guard of richly armed slaves, on foot, about
him. Abdulla had just come home victorious from a battle at the town of
Taif, inland from Mecca, which he had won from the Turks in a sudden
rush; he was in great good humour. Abdulla was reported to be the real
leader of revolt, the brain behind Hussein, but Lawrence, summing him
up, decided that he might be a good statesman and useful later to the
Arabs if ever they succeeded in winning freedom (and his judgment of
the present King of Transjordania was correct), but he did not seem
somehow to be the prophet who was needed to make the revolt a success.
He was too affable, too shrewd, too cheerful: prophets are men of a
different stuff. Lawrence’s chief object in coming to Jiddah was to
find the real prophet, if there was one, whose enthusiasm would set the
desert on fire; so he decided at once to look elsewhere.
Meanwhile Abdulla talked to Lawrence about the campaign, and gave him
a report to be repeated to headquarters in Egypt. He said that the
English were largely responsible for the Arab lack of success. They had
neglected to cut the pilgrims’ railway, and the Turks had therefore
been able to collect transport and supplies to reinforce Medina. Feisal
had been driven from Medina and the enemy there was now preparing a
large force to advance on Rabegh, the Red Sea port. The Arabs with
Feisal who were barring their road through the hills were too weak
in supplies and arms to hold out long. Lawrence replied that Hussein
had asked the British not to cut the railway because he would soon need
it for his victorious advance into Syria, and that the dynamite which
had been sent to him had been returned as too dangerous to be used by
Arabs. Moreover, Feisal had not asked for more supplies or arms since
the time when Egyptian gunners had been sent.