Harb between them and Rabegh would join them and all would be lost.
His father would then put himself at the head of his few troops and
die fighting in defence of the city. At this point the telephone bell
rang and the Sherif himself from Mecca spoke to Abdulla. Abdulla told
him what was being said, and the Sherif answered, ‘Yes, that is so!
The Turks will only enter over my dead body,’ and rang off. Abdulla
smiled a little and asked whether in order to prevent such a disaster
a British brigade, if possible composed of Mohammedan troops, might
be sent to Suez, with ships waiting there to rush it to Rabegh as
soon as the Turks began their march from Medina. To reach Mecca the
Turks had to go through Rabegh because of the water supply, and if
Rabegh could be held for a little while, he would himself soon lead up
his victorious troops to Medina by the eastern road. When he was in
position his brothers Feisal from the west and Ali from the south would
close in and a grand attack would be made on Medina from three sides.
[Illustration:
description: Portrait drawing of Emir Abdulla from chest up
caption: THE EMIR ABDULLA
_from a drawing by_ ERIC KENNINGTON
]
Lawrence did not like the idea of sending troops to Rabegh, and replied
that there were difficulties about providing shipping for a whole
brigade. There were no wholly Mohammedan regiments in the British
Army, and a brigade was not large enough anyhow. Ships’ guns would
defend the beach, which was all that the brigade could defend, just
as well as men on the shore. Moreover, if Christian troops were sent
to the assistance of the Holy City against the Turks, it would cause
bad feeling in India, where the action would be misunderstood; already
there had been great excitement in India when a small British Fleet
had bombarded the Turks at Jiddah, the port of Mecca. Still, he would
do his best and tell the British in Egypt what Abdulla’s views were.
Meanwhile might he go to Rabegh, see what the country was like and also
talk with Feisal? He could find out from Feisal whether the hills could
be held against the Turks if more help in arms and stores were sent
from Egypt.
Abdulla consented but had to get permission from his father; which
after some difficulty (for Hussein was very suspicious) was given.
Abdulla wrote to his brother Ali telling him to mount Lawrence well
and convey him safely and speedily to Feisal’s camp. This was all that
Lawrence wanted. That night a sad-looking brass band, in tattered
Turkish uniforms, whom Abdulla had captured at Taif played them Turkish
and German tunes, and Abdulla told Lawrence of the plans he had made
some time before for winning freedom from the Turks by the simple
method of detaining important pilgrims to Mecca and holding them as
hostages: but Feisal had disagreed. Then Abdulla asked Lawrence how
many generations back King George could trace his ancestry: Lawrence
replied, ‘Twenty-six generations; to Cedric the Saxon.’ (Or however
many it was: I have forgotten, but of course Lawrence knew.) Abdulla
proudly remarked that this was not bad, but that he could go seventeen
better. Clearly Abdulla was not the prophet. Next day Lawrence took
boat to Rabegh and there gave the letter to Ali.
Lawrence took a fancy to Ali, who was the eldest of the four brothers,
a man of thirty-seven: he was pleasant-mannered, well read in Arabic
literature, pious, conscientious; but he was a consumptive and his
weakness made him nervous and moody. If Feisal was not what Lawrence
hoped him to be, Ali would perhaps lead the revolt very fairly well.
With Ali was another brother, Zeid, a boy of nineteen. He was calm and
flippant and not zealous for the Revolt. He had been brought up in the
harem and had not yet found himself as a man of action; but Lawrence
liked him and he was more pleasant than Ali who did not like the idea
of a Christian, even with the permission of the Sherif, travelling in
the Holy Province. Ali did not allow Lawrence to start until after
sunset lest any of his followers, whom he could not trust, should see
him leave the camp. He kept the journey a secret even from his slaves,
gave Lawrence an Arab cloak and headcloth to wrap round his uniform
and told the old guide who was to go with him to keep his charge from
all questioning and curiosity by the way, and to avoid all camps. The
Arabs in Rabegh and the district were of the Harb tribe whose chief was
pro-Turkish and had fled to the hills when Ali came to Rabegh with his
army. They owed this chief obedience, and if he heard of Lawrence’s
journey to Feisal, a band of them might be sent to stop him.
Lawrence could count on his guide: a guide had to answer with his life
for that of his charge. Some years before a Harb tribesman had promised
to take the traveller Huber to Medina by this very road (which was the
pilgrims’ road between Medina and Mecca), but finding that he was a
Christian had killed him. The murderer relied on public opinion
to excuse him, but it went against him in spite of Huber having been
a Christian. He had ever since lived alone in the hills without any
friends to visit him and had been refused permission to marry any woman
of the tribe. It was a warning to Lawrence’s guide and the guide’s son
who went with them.
Lawrence, out of training after two years of office work in Cairo,
found the journey trying, though the experience of riding a first-class
camel of the sort trained in its paces for Arab princes was new and
delightful. There were no good camels in Egypt, or in the Sinai desert
where the animals though hardy and strong had not been properly
trained. The party rode all night except for a short rest and sleep
between midnight and the grey dawn. The road was at first over soft
flat sand, along the coast between the beach and the hills. After some
hours they struck the bed of what in the short rainy season of Arabia
is a broad flood-river, but now was merely a wide field of stones, with
here and there clumps of thorn bushes and scrub. Here the going was
better for the camels and in the early sunlight they made a steady trot
towards Masturah, where was the next watering-place out from Rabegh on
the pilgrims’ road. Here the guide’s son watered the camels, climbing
twenty feet down the side of the stone well and drawing up water in a
goatskin, which he poured into a shallow trough. The camels drank about
five gallons each, while Lawrence rested in the shade of a ruined stone
wall, and the son smoked a cigarette.
Presently some Harb tribesmen came up and watered their she-camels.
The guide did not speak to them, for they belonged to a clan with whom
his own people, their neighbours, had until recently been at war
and even now had little friendship. As Lawrence watched the watering
two more Arabs arrived from the direction in which he was bound. Both
were young and well mounted; but one was dressed in rich silk robes
and embroidered headcloth, the other more plainly in white cotton with
a red cotton head-dress, evidently his servant. They halted beside
the well and the more splendid one slipped gracefully to the ground
without making his camel kneel and said to his companion: ‘Water the
camels while I go over there and rest.’ He strolled over to the wall
where Lawrence was sitting and pretended to be at his ease, offering
a cigarette just rolled and licked. ‘Your presence is from Syria?’ he
asked. Lawrence politely parried the question, not wishing to reveal
himself, and asked in turn: ‘Your presence is from Mecca?’ The Arab
also was unwilling to reveal himself.
Then there a comedy was played which Lawrence did not understand until
the guide explained it later. The servant stood holding the camels’
halters waiting for the Harb herdsmen to finish their watering. ‘What
is it, Mustafa?’ said his richly-dressed master, ‘Water them at once!’
‘They will not let me,’ said the servant dismally. The master grew
furious and struck his servant about the head and shoulders with his
riding stick. The servant looked hurt, astonished and angry, and was
about to hit back when he thought better of it and ran to the well.
The herdsmen were shocked and out of pity made way for him. As his
camels drank from their trough they whispered, ‘Who is he?’ The servant
answered, ‘The Sherif’s cousin, from Mecca.’ The herdsmen at once
untied bundles of green leaves and buds from the thorn trees and fed
the camels of this honourable visitor. He watched them contentedly
and called God’s blessing on them: soon he and his servant rode away
south along the road to Mecca, while Lawrence and his guides went off
in the opposite direction.
The old guide began to chuckle and explain the joke. The two men were
both of noble birth. The one who played the part of master was Ali ibn
el Hussein, a sherif, the other was his cousin. They were nobles of the
Harith tribe and blood enemies of the Harb clan to which these herdsmen
belonged. Fearing that they would be delayed or driven off the water
if they were recognized, they pretended to be master and servant from
Mecca. Ali ibn el Hussein afterwards became Lawrence’s best friend
among the Arab fighting men and at one time saved his life: he had
already made a name for himself in the fighting at Medina and had been
the leader of the Ateiba tribesmen in much camel-fighting with the
Turks. Ali had run away from home at the age of eleven to his uncle,
a famous robber chieftain, and lived by his hands for months until
his father caught him. The old guide grew enthusiastic in his account
of Ali, ending with the local proverb, ‘The children of Harith are
children of battle.’
The day’s ride which began over shingle continued over pure white sand.
The glare dazzled the eyes, so that Lawrence had to frown hard and pull
his headcloth forward as a peak over his eyes and beneath them too.
The heat beat up in waves from the ground. After awhile the pilgrims’
road was left and a short cut was taken inland over a gradually rising
ground of rock ridges covered with drift sand. Here grew patches of
hard wiry grass and ♦shrubs, on which a few sheep and goats were
pasturing. The guide then showed Lawrence a boundary stone and said
with some relief that he was now at home in his own tribal ground and
might come off his guard.
♦ “shurbs” replaced with “shrubs”
By sunset they reached a hamlet of twenty huts where the guide bought
flour and kneaded a dough cake with water, two inches thick and eight
across. He cooked it in a brush-wood fire that a woman provided for
him and, shaking off the ashes, shared it with Lawrence. They had come
sixty miles from Rabegh since the evening before and still had as far
again to go before they reached Feisal’s camp. Lawrence was stiff and
aching, his skin blistered and his eyes weary. They stopped at the
hamlet for two hours and rode on in pitch darkness up valleys and
down valleys. Underfoot it seemed to be sand, for there was no noise,
and the only change came from the heat of the air in the hollows and
the comparative coolness of the open places. Lawrence kept on falling
asleep in the saddle and being woken up again suddenly and sickeningly
as he made a clutch by instinct at the saddle-post to recover his
balance. Long after midnight they halted, slept for three hours and
went on again under a moon. The road was among trees along another
water-course with sharp pointed hills on either side, black and white
in the moonlight: the air was stifling. Day came as they entered a
broader part of the valley with dust spinning round here and there
in the dawn wind. On the right lay another hamlet of brown and white
houses looking like a dolls’ village in the shadow of a huge precipice
thousands of feet high.
From the houses after a while came out a talkative old man on a camel
and joined the party. The guide gave him short answers and showed
that he was unwelcome, and the old man to make things easier burrowed
in his saddle pouch and offered the party food. It was yesterday’s
dough cake moistened with liquid butter and dusted with sugar.
One made pellets of it with the fingers and ate it that way. Lawrence
accepted little, but the guide and his son ate greedily, so that the
old man went short: and this was as it should be, for it was considered
effeminate for an Arab to carry so much food on a journey of a mere
hundred miles. The old man gave news of Feisal; the day before he had
been repulsed in an attack and had had a few men wounded: he gave the
names of the men and details of their wounds.
They were riding over a firm pebbly ground among acacia and tamarisk
trees and their long morning shadows. The valley was like a park; a
quarter of a mile broad. It was walled in by precipices, a thousand
feet high, of brown and dark-red with pink stains, at the base were
long streaks of dark green stone. After seven miles they came to
a tumbledown barrier which ran across the valley and right up the
hill-sides wherever the slope was not too steep to take the wall: in
the middle were two walled-in enclosures. Lawrence asked the old man
what the wall meant. He answered instead that he had been in Damascus,
Constantinople and Cairo and had friends among the great men of Egypt,
and asked whether Lawrence knew any of the English there? He was very
inquisitive about Lawrence’s intentions and tried to trip him in
Egyptian phrases. Lawrence answered in the Syrian dialect of Aleppo,
whereupon the old man told him of prominent Syrians whom he knew.
Lawrence knew them too. The man then began to talk local politics, of
the Sherif and his sons, and asked Lawrence what Feisal would do next.
Lawrence as usual avoided answering, and indeed he knew nothing of
Feisal’s plans. The guide came to the rescue and changed the subject.
Later Lawrence found that the old man was a spy in Turkish pay who
used to send frequent reports to Medina of what came past his village
for Feisal’s army.
After a long morning’s travel, through two more valleys and across
a saddle of hills, the party found itself in a third valley, where
the old spy had told them that they would soon find Feisal. In this
valley they stopped at a large village where there was a strip of clear
water two hundred yards long and twelve wide, bordered with grass and
flowers. Here they were given bread and dates by negro slaves—the best
dates Lawrence had ever tasted—at the house of a principal man. The
owner was, however, away with Feisal, and his wife and children were in
tents in the hills, looking after the camels. The climate was feverish
in these valleys and the Arabs only spent five months in the year in
their houses: in their absence the negroes did the work for them. The
black men did not mind the climate and prospered with their gardening,
growing melons, marrows, cucumber, grapes, tobacco, which gave them
pocket-money. They married among themselves, built their own houses and
were well treated by the Arabs. Indeed so many of them had been given
their freedom that there were thirteen purely negro villages in this
valley alone.
After their bread and dates, the party went on farther up the valley,
which was about four hundred yards broad and enclosed by bare red and
black rocks with sharp edges and ridges, and soon came upon parties
of Feisal’s soldiers and grazing herds of camels. The guide exchanged
greetings with them and hurried his pace; they pressed towards the
hamlet where Feisal was encamped. Here there were about a hundred mud
houses with luxurious gardens. They were all built upon mounds of earth
twenty feet high, which had been carefully piled up, basket-full by
basket-full, in the course of generations. These mounds became
islands in the rainy season, with the flood-water rushing between them.
At the village where they had just been there were scores of similar
islands, but hundreds more had been washed away and their occupants
drowned in a cloudburst some years before; an eight-foot wall of
water had raced down the valley and carried everything before it. The
guide led on to the top of one of these mounds where they made their
camels kneel by the yard-gate of a long low house. A slave with a
silver-hilted sword in his hand took Lawrence to an inner court. The
account of Lawrence’s meeting there with Feisal can best be given in
Lawrence’s own words:
‘On the farther side of the inner court, framed between the uprights
of a black doorway, stood a white figure waiting tensely for me. I
felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to
seek—the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Feisal
looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white silk
robes and his brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold
cord. His eyelids were dropped; and his black beard and colourless
face were like a mask against the strange still watchfulness of his
body. His hands were crossed in front of him on his dagger.
‘I greeted him. He made way for me into the room and sat down on his
carpet near the door. As my eyes grew accustomed to the shade, they
saw that the little room held many silent figures, looking at me or
at Feisal steadily. He remained staring down at his hands, which were
twisting slowly about his dagger. At last he enquired softly how I had
found the journey. I spoke of the heat and he asked how long from
Rabegh, commenting that I had ridden fast for the season.
‘“And do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?”
‘“Well; but it is far from Damascus.”
‘The word had fallen like a sword into their midst. There was a
quiver. Then everybody present stiffened where he sat, and held his
breath for a silent minute. Some, perhaps, were dreaming of far-off
success: others may have thought it a reflection on their late defeat.
Feisal at length lifted his eyes, smiling at me, and said, “Praise be
to God, there are Turks nearer us than that.” We all smiled with him,
and I rose and excused myself for the moment.’
Any reader, by the way, who prefers Mr. Lowell Thomas’s version of
these incidents is welcome to his choice:
‘On arrival at Jiddah, Lawrence succeeded in getting permission from
Grand Shereef Hussein to make a short camel journey inland to the camp
of Emir Feisal, third son of the Grand Shereef who was attempting to
keep the fires of revolution alive. The Arab cause looked hopeless.
There were not enough bullets left to keep the army in gazelle meat
and the troops were reduced to John the Baptist’s melancholy desert
fare of locusts and wild honey.
‘After exchanging the usual Oriental compliments over many sweetened
cups of Arabian coffee, the first question Lawrence asked Feisal
was, “When will your army reach Damascus?” The question evidently
nonplussed the Emir, who gazed gloomily through the tent-flap at the
bedraggled remnants of his father’s army. “In sh’ Allah,” replied
Feisal, stroking his beard. “There is neither power nor might save in
Allah, the high, the tremendous! May He look with favour upon our
cause. But I fear the gates of Damascus are farther beyond our reach
at present than the gates of Paradise. Allah willing, our next step
will be an attack on the Turkish garrison at Medina where we hope to
deliver the tomb of the Prophet from our enemies.”’
VII
Lawrence visited the Egyptian gunners, who seemed unhappy. Egyptians
are a home-loving race and they were fighting against the Turks,
for whom they had a sentimental feeling, among the Bedouins, whom
they thought savages. Under British officers they had learned to be
soldierly, to keep themselves smart, to pitch their tents in a regular
line, to salute their officers smartly. The Arabs were always laughing
at them for all this, and their feelings were hurt. Next Lawrence had
a long talk with Feisal and his supporter Maulud, an Arab who had
been an officer in the Turkish army and had twice been degraded for
talking of Arab freedom. Maulud had been captured by the British while
commanding a Turkish cavalry regiment against them in Mesopotamia.
But as soon as he heard of the Sherif’s Revolt he had volunteered to
fight the Turks, and many other Arab officers with him. So now he began
to complain bitterly that the Arab army was being utterly neglected:
the Sherif sent them thirty thousand pounds a month for expenses but
not enough barley, rice, flour, ammunition or rifles, and they got no
machine-guns, mountain-guns, technical help or information. Lawrence
stopped Maulud and said that he came for the very purpose of hearing
and reporting to the British in Egypt what was needed, but that he must
first know exactly how the campaign was going. Feisal gave him the
history of the Revolt from the very beginning, as it has been told in a
previous chapter, and mentioned mischievously among other things that
in the fighting with the Turkish outposts, which took place usually
at night because the Turkish artillery was then blinded, the battle
would begin with curses, insults and foul language: and this wordy
warfare reached its climax when the Turks in a frenzy called the Arabs
‘English!’ and the Arabs screamed back ‘Germans!’ There were no Germans
in the Holy Province and Lawrence was the first Englishman: but this
final foul insult was always the signal for hand-to-hand fighting.
Lawrence asked Feisal his plans and Feisal said that until Medina fell
they had to remain on guard, for the Turks were certainly intending to
recapture Mecca. He did not think that the Arabs would want to defend
the hill-country between Medina and Rabegh merely by sitting still and
sniping from the hills. If the Turks moved, he proposed to move too. He
favoured an attack on Medina from four sides at once with four armies
of tribesmen, with himself and his three brothers each at the head of
an army. Whatever the success of the attack, it would check the advance
on Mecca and give his father time to arm and train regular troops.
For without regular troops a steady war against the Turks was
impossible; the tribesmen could not be persuaded to stay away from
their families more than a month or two at a time, and soon got bored
with the war it there was no chance of exciting camel-charges and loot.
Feisal talked at some length and Maulud, who had sat fidgeting, cried
out, ‘Don’t write a history of us. The only thing to be done is to
fight and fight and kill them. Give me a battery of mountain-guns and
machine-guns and I will finish this war off for you. We talk and talk
and do nothing.’
Feisal was dead tired: his eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks hollow.
He looked years older than thirty-one. For the rest, he was tall,
graceful, vigorous, with a royal dignity of head and shoulders, and
beautiful movements. He knew of these gifts and therefore much of his
public speech was by sign and gesture. His men loved him, and he
lived for nothing but his work. He always overtaxed his strength and
Lawrence was told how once after a long spell of fighting in which
he had to guard himself, lead the charges, control and encourage his
men, he had collapsed in a fit and been carried away from the victory
unconscious with foam on his lips.
At supper that night there was a mixed company of sheikhs of many
desert tribes, Arabs from Mesopotamia, men of the Prophet’s family from
Mecca. Lawrence, who had not revealed himself except to Feisal and
Maulud, spoke as a Syrian Arab and introduced subjects for argument
which would excite the company to speak their minds. He wished to
sound their courage at once. Feisal, smoking continual cigarettes,
kept control of the conversation even at its hottest, and without
seeming to do so stamped his mind on the speakers. Lawrence spoke with
sorrow of the Syrian Arabs whom the Turks had executed for preaching
freedom. The sheikhs took him up sharply. The men, they said, had got
what they deserved for intriguing with the French and English: they
had been prepared, if the Turks were beaten, to accept the English or
French in their place. Feisal smiled, almost winked at Lawrence, and
said that though proud to be allies of the English, the Arabs were
rather afraid of a friendship so powerful that it might smother them
with over-attention. So Lawrence told a story of how the guide’s son
on the ride from Rabegh had complained of the British sailors there.
They came ashore every day. Soon, the guide’s son had said, they would
stay overnight and settle down and finally take the country. Lawrence
then had spoken of the millions of Englishmen fighting in France and
had said that the French were not afraid that they would stop
for ever. (As a matter of fact this was not quite true: the French
peasants did have the same fear, but Lawrence had not been in France.)
The guide’s son had scornfully asked whether Lawrence meant to compare
France with the Holy Province.