at the stroke’ was afraid that an angry scene would follow, but Feisal
merely made room for the messenger on the carpet and said, ‘Come and
give us more of your Arabian Nights’ Entertainment: amuse us.’ The man,
falling into the spirit of the joke, began to describe young Zeid in
flight, the terror of a certain famous brigand with him, and, greatest
disgrace of all, how the venerable father of Ali ibn el Hussein had
lost his coffee-pots; one of the ‘children of Harith’ too!
At Feisal’s camp the routine was simple. Just before dawn a man with
a harsh powerful voice who was prayer leader for the whole army would
climb to the top of the little hill above the sleeping army and utter
a tremendous call to prayers, which went echoing down the valley. As
soon as he ended, Feisal’s own prayer-leader called gently and sweetly
from just outside the tent. In a minute, Feisal’s five slaves (who were
actually freedmen, but preferred to go on serving) brought cups of
sweetened coffee. An hour or so later, the flap of Feisal’s sleeping
tent would be raised, his invitation to private callers. Four or five
would be present and after the morning’s news came a tray of breakfast.
Breakfast was mainly dates; sometimes Feisal’s Circassian grandmother
would send up a batch of her famous spiced cakes from Mecca, sometimes
a slave would cook biscuits. After breakfast little cups of syrupy
green tea and bitter coffee went round while Feisal dictated the
morning’s letters to his secretary. Feisal’s sleeping tent was an
ordinary bell-tent furnished merely with a camp-bed, cigarettes, two
rugs and a prayer carpet.
At about eight o’clock Feisal would buckle on his ceremonial
dagger and walk across to the big reception tent, which was open at
one side. He sat at the end of this, his principal men spreading out
to left and right with their backs against the sides of the tent.
The slaves regulated the crowd of men who came with petitions or
complaints. If possible, business was over by noon.
Feisal and his household, which included Lawrence, then went back to
the other of his two private tents, the living tent, where dinner
was brought. Feisal ate little but smoked much. He pretended to be
busy with the beans, lentils, spinach, rice, or sweet cakes until he
judged that his guests had eaten. He then waved his hand and the tray
disappeared. Slaves came forward to wash the eaters’ hands with water:
the desert Arabs use their fingers for eating. After dinner there was
talk, with more coffee and tea. Then till two o’clock Feisal retired
to his living tent and pulled down the flap to show that he was not
to be disturbed, after which he returned to the reception tent to
the same duties as before. Lawrence never saw an Arab come away from
Feisal’s presence dissatisfied or hurt; and this meant not only tact
on Feisal’s part but a very long memory. In giving judgment he had
to recall exactly who every man was, how he was related by birth or
marriage, what possessions, what character he had, the history and
blood feuds of his family and clan; and Feisal never seemed to stumble
over facts. After this was over, if there was time, he would go out
walking with his friends, talking of horses or plants, looking at
camels or asking someone the names of rocks and ridges and such-like in
the neighbourhood.
At sunset came the evening prayer and afterwards, in his living
tent, Feisal planned what patrols and raiding parties were going out
that night. Between six and seven came the evening meal: it was like
dinner except that cubes of boiled mutton were mixed in the great tray
of rice. Silence was kept until the meal was over. This meal ended the
day except for occasional glasses of tea. Feisal did not sleep till
very late and never hurried his guests away. He relaxed in the evening
and avoided work as much as he could. He would send for some local
sheikh to tell stories of tribal history; or the tribal poets would
sing their long epics, stock pieces which, with the change of names
only, did service for every tribe in Arabia. Feisal was passionately
fond of Arabic poetry and would often provoke competitions, judging
and rewarding the best verses of the night. Very rarely he would play
chess—the game was brought to Europe first by the Arabs—swiftly and
brilliantly. Sometimes he told stories of what he had seen in Syria, or
scraps of Turkish secret history, or family affairs. Lawrence learned
from him a great deal about people and parties among the Arabs that was
useful to him later.
Feisal asked Lawrence if he would wear Arab dress like his own while
in the camp: it was more comfortable, and more convenient because
the tribesmen only knew khaki as Turkish uniform and every time
that Lawrence went into Feisal’s tent and strangers were there an
explanation had to be made. Lawrence gladly agreed and Feisal’s slave
fitted him out in splendid white silk wedding-garments embroidered with
gold which had lately been sent to his master, possibly as a hint, by
a great-aunt in Mecca. Arab clothes were not a novelty to Lawrence. He
had frequently worn them in Syria before the War.
X
He decided to go back to Yenbo to organize the defence because Feisal’s
stand could not be more than a short pause. With the hills undefended
the Turks could strike where and when they pleased, and they were much
better armed and better trained than Feisal’s Arabs. So Feisal lent
him a fine bay camel and he raced back by a more northerly route, for
fear of Turkish patrols that were reported to have pushed round to
the road by which he had come. He arrived at Yenbo just before dawn,
in time to see Zeid’s beaten army ride in, about eight hundred camel
fighters, without noise but apparently without any sense of shame at
their defeat. Zeid himself pretended to be less concerned about it than
anyone else: as he rode in he remarked to the Governor, ‘Why! your
town is half in ruins. I must telegraph to my father for forty masons
to repair the public buildings,’ and this he actually did. Meanwhile
Lawrence had telegraphed to Captain Boyle at Jiddah that Yenbo was
threatened and Boyle promptly replied that he would come there at once
with his fleet. Then came more bad news: Feisal had been attacked
in force before his troops had recovered from their fright: after a
short fight he had broken off and was falling back on Yenbo. It seemed
that the war was nearly over, the Revolt crushed. With Feisal were
two thousand men, but Lawrence saw at once that the Juheina tribe was
absent: there must have been treachery, a thing that neither Lawrence
nor Feisal had believed possible from the Juheina.
Lawrence, though dead tired after three days with hardly any sleep,
went to see Feisal at once and heard the news. The Turks had broken in
from the south and threatened to cut Feisal off from Yenbo: their
guide was a Juheina chief, hereditary lawgiver to the tribe, who had
a private quarrel with the Emir of the Juheina. They had seven useful
guns with which they shelled Feisal’s camp. Feisal, undismayed, held
his ground and sent round the Juheina to work down the great valley
to the left and fall on the Turkish right wing. He then posted the
Egyptian gunners on the right and began to shell the palm groves,
where the Turkish centre was concealed, with his own two guns. These
guns were a present from Egypt, old rubbish, but good enough, it was
thought, for the wild Arabs—like the sixty thousand rifles also sent
which had been condemned as useless for the British Army after hard
service at the Dardanelles.
A Syrian Arab, Rasim, who had once been in command of a Turkish
battery, was working these guns but without sights, range-finder,
range-tables or high explosive. He was using shrapnel, old stock left
over from the Boer War, the copper fuses green with mould. Most of
it burst short if it burst at all. However, Rasim had no means of
getting his ammunition away if things went wrong, so he blazed away
at full speed, shouting with laughter at this way of making war. The
tribesmen were much impressed with the noise and smoke and Rasim’s
laughter. ‘By God,’ said one, ‘those are the real guns: the importance
of their noise!’ Rasim swore that the Turks were dying in heaps. The
Arabs charged forward happily. Feisal was hoping for a big victory when
suddenly the Juheina on his left under their Emir and Abd el Kerim, his
brother, halted and finally turned and rode back to the camping-ground.
The battle was lost: he called to Rasim to save the guns at least, and
Rasim yoked up his teams and trotted off to the right towards
Yenbo. After him streamed the centre and right, Feisal and his
bodyguard bringing up the rear and leaving the cowardly or treacherous
Juheina to look after themselves.
As the tale was still being told, and Lawrence was joining in the
general curse against the Emir of the Juheina and Abd el Kerim, there
was a stir at the door and who should come running in but Abd el Kerim
himself! He kissed Feisal’s head-rope in greeting and sat down. Feisal
stared and gasped and said ‘How?’ Abd el Kerim answered that the
Juheina had been dismayed at Feisal’s sudden flight: he and his brother
had been left to fight the Turks for the whole night alone, without
artillery, and the gallant tribesmen had resisted until they were
forced out of the date-palms by weight of numbers. Half the tribe were
just coming along with his brother, the other half had gone inland, for
water. ‘But why did you retreat to the camping-ground behind us during
the battle?’ asked Feisal. ‘Only to make ourselves a cup of coffee: we
had fought all day and it was dusk: we were very tired and thirsty.’
Feisal and Lawrence lay back and laughed; and then went to see what
could be done to save Yenbo.
The first thing was to send the Juheina back to join their fellows and
keep up a constant pressure on the Turkish communications with raids
and sniping. The Turks would have to leave so many men behind, strung
out in small garrisons, to guard their supplies, that by the time
they reached Yenbo the defenders would be stronger than themselves.
Yenbo was easy to defend by day at least; the town was on the top of
a flat coral reef twenty feet above the sea, surrounded on two sides
by water, and on the other two by a flat stretch of ♦sand without any
cover for the attackers. Guns were being landed from Boyle’s
ships, of which he had brought five, and the Arabs were delighted
with their size and number, and were much impressed by the fleet. All
day long the whole army worked hard under Garland’s direction at the
task of fortification, using the old town-wall as a rampart for the
Arabs to defend under the protection of the naval guns. Barbed-wire
entanglements were strung outside and machine-guns grouped in the
bastions of the wall. There was great excitement and confidence, and
nearly every one sat up all night. Lawrence himself was sound asleep on
one of the ships.
♦ “stand” replaced with “sand”
There was one alarm that night at about eleven o’clock. The Arab
outposts had met the Turks only three miles from the town. The garrison
was roused by a crier and every man took his place quietly on the wall
without a shout or a shot fired. The search-lights of the ships, which
were anchored close to the town, crossed and re-crossed over the plain.
But no further alarm was given and when dawn came it was found that
the Turks had turned back. They had been frightened, it was discovered
later, by the search-lights and the blaze of lighted ships crowding the
harbour, and by the silence of the usually noisy Arabs. Yenbo was saved.
A few days later Boyle dispersed his ships, promising to bring them
back at an hour’s notice to Yenbo if the Turks tried again. In one
of these ships Lawrence went down to Rabegh, where he met the French
Colonel. The Colonel was still trying to get a mixed British and French
brigade landed to help the Arabs, and tried to convert Lawrence to his
views. He said that so soon as Mecca was safe the Arabs ought not to
be encouraged to go on further with the war, which the Allies could
manage far better than they. His plan apparently was that if the
brigade were landed at Rabegh, the Arab tribes would suspect Hussein of
selling his province to the English and French and stop fighting for
him. This brigade would then be his main defence against the Turks,
and when the war against the Turks was won on the other battlefields,
Hussein could be confirmed as King of Mecca and Medina as a reward for
his loyalty. The Colonel’s general attitude seemed to be ‘We Allies
must stick together and outwit these Arabs who are savages not worth
the consideration of us Westerners.’
Lawrence thought that he saw the game. The Frenchman was afraid that
if the Revolt were carried farther north to Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul,
the Arabs might capture these cities from the Turks and keep them after
the War; and they were cities that France wanted to add to her colonial
empire. Moreover, in the Sykes-Picot Treaty, made between France,
England and Russia in 1916 for dividing up the Turkish Empire after the
War, the French had actually agreed that independent Arab governments,
though in the French ‘sphere of influence,’ should be established in
these cities if they were freed by the Arabs themselves—an event that
none of the signatories thought possible at the time; it was a matter
of form, merely, to suggest it. At the time Lawrence knew nothing of
this treaty, which was a secret one, but he suspected the Frenchman,
and he had no intention of letting the Arabs down for the sake of the
_Entente Cordiale_. The Colonel, hearing of Lawrence’s and Feisal’s
intention to continue with the plan of attacking Wejh that had been
interrupted by the Turkish advance, did his best to discourage it. On
his honour as a staff-officer (and he had a very distinguished record)
he said that it was suicide to make such a move; and gave many
reasons. Lawrence brushed him aside. He believed that the Arabs had a
chance now of a wide and lasting success, and Wejh was the first step.
The Turks meanwhile were being hard pressed by the Juheina who, split
up in small parties, made their lives wretched by constant raids,
sniping, and looting of supplies: and British seaplanes began bombing
their camp in the palm-groves of Nakhl Mubarak. They decided to
attack Rabegh. There Feisal’s brother Ali, who had now nearly seven
thousand men, was ready to advance against them, and Feisal and the
younger brother Zeid planned to move round inland behind the Turks
and take them in a trap. Feisal had difficulty with the Emir of the
Juheina, whom he asked to move forward with him; the Emir was jealous
of Feisal’s growing power with the tribes. But Feisal made them move
without their Emir. He then rode south to raise the Harb. All was
going well until he heard from Ali that his army had gone a little
way forward when, hearing false reports of treachery, it had rushed
back in disorder to Rabegh. Feisal could do nothing, he could not even
count for certain on the Harb, who might join the Turks if they got the
chance and whose territory ran down south of Rabegh.
Then Colonel Wilson, who was British representative in the province,
came up to Yenbo from Jiddah and begged Feisal to leave the Turks alone
and make the attack on Wejh. The plan was now to move up with the whole
Juheina fighting force and the regular battalions from Yenbo; the
British Fleet would give all the help it could. Feisal saw that Wejh
could be taken in this way, but Yenbo was left defenceless; he pointed
out that the Turks were still able to strike and that Ali’s army
seemed to have little fight in it, and might not even defend Rabegh,
which was the bulwark of Mecca. However, Colonel Wilson gave Feisal
his word that Rabegh would be kept safe with naval help until Wejh had
fallen, and Feisal accepted it. He saw that the attack on Wejh was the
best diversion that the Arabs could make to draw the Turks off Mecca,
and started at once; at the same time sending his brother Abdulla
machine-guns and stores and asking him to move to the impregnable hills
sixty miles north of Medina, Juheina territory, where his forces could
both threaten the railway and continue to hold up the eastern supply
caravans.
The Turks were still making for Rabegh, but very slowly, and with an
increasing sick list among the men and animals, due to overwork and
poor food. They were also losing an average of forty camels a day and
twenty men killed and wounded in raids by the Harb tribes in their
rear. They were eighty miles from Medina and, as Lawrence had foreseen,
each mile that they went forward made their lines of communication
more exposed to attack. Their pace got slower and slower till it was
no more than five miles a day, and on the eighteenth of January 1917
they withdrew, when still thirty miles from Rabegh. It was Feisal’s and
Abdulla’s new moves which finally recalled the expedition to Medina,
and for the next two years until the War ended and the Holy City
surrendered, the Turks were kept sitting helplessly in trenches outside
it, waiting for an attack which never came.
XI
On New Year’s Day 1917 Feisal and Lawrence, who was still rather a
foreign adviser than an actual fighter in the Arab cause, sat down
at Yenbo to consider the Wejh expedition. The army now consisted of
six thousand men, most of them mounted on their own camels. The first
fierce eagerness had left them but they had gained in staying power,
and the farther away they moved from their homes, the more regular
their military habits became. They still worked independently, by
tribes, only bound by goodwill to Feisal’s command, but when he came
by, they now at least fell into a ragged line and together made the bow
and sweep of the arm to the lips which was the Arab salute. They kept
their weapons in good enough order, though they did not oil them, and
looked after their camels properly. In mass they were not dangerous: in
fact their use in battle lessened as their numbers increased. A company
of trained Turks could defeat a thousand Arabs in open fighting, yet
three or four Arabs in their own hills could hold up a dozen Turks.
After the battle of the date-palms it was decided not to mix Egyptian
troops with Arabs. They did not go well together. The Arabs were apt
to let the Egyptians do more than their share of the fighting because
they looked so military; they would even wander away in the middle of a
battle and leave them to finish it. So the Egyptian gunners were sent
home (and went gladly), while their guns and equipment were handed over
to Rasim, Feisal’s own gunner, and to Feisal’s machine-gun officer; who
in their place formed Arab detachments mostly of Turk-trained Syrian
and Mesopotamian deserters. Maulud got together a force of fifty
mule-mounted men whom he called cavalry and, since they were townsmen
and not Bedouin, soon made regular soldiers of them. They were so
useful that Lawrence telegraphed to Egypt for fifty mules more.
Now although the Arabs were of less use in mass than in small groups,
it was necessary to make this march on Wejh a huge parade of tribes to
impress all Arabia. Feisal decided to take all the Juheina tribe and
add enough of the Harb, Billi, Ateiba and Ageyl to make it the biggest
expedition in Arab memory. It would be clear that the Revolt was now a
real national movement, and when Wejh was taken and the tribes returned
home with the news, there would be no more petty jealousies and
desertions of clans to hinder the campaign. Feisal and Lawrence did not
expect any hard fighting at Wejh because the Turks had no spare troops
to send to its defence or time to send them. It would take them weeks
to withdraw their Rabegh expedition—the hindering of which with Harb
help was now Zeid’s occupation—and if the Arab army could reach Wejh in
three weeks’ time, they would surely take it unprepared.
Lawrence was anxious to take part in a small raid on the Turks, just
to get the feel of it for future information, so on January the
second 1917 he set out with thirty-five tribesmen. They rode some
miles south-east until they came to a valley near the Turkish lines
of communication. Ten men stayed guarding the camels, while Lawrence
and the remaining twenty-five climbed over the sharp-edged crumbling
cliffs on the farther side of the valley to another valley, where a
Turkish post was known to be. There they waited shivering for hours
in the mist. When dawn came they saw the tips of a group of Turkish
bell-tents, three hundred yards below, just showing over a small
spur that lay between. They put bullets through these tent-tops, and
when the Turks rushed out to man their trenches, shot at them; but the
Turks ran so fast that probably few were hit. From the trenches the
Turks fired back wildly and rapidly in all directions as if signalling
for help to the nearest big Turkish garrison—there were garrisons
strung all along the road for eighty miles back. As the enemy was ten
times their number already, the raiders might soon have been cut off.
Lawrence decided to do no more: they crawled back over the hill to the
first valley, where they stumbled over two stray Turks and carried them
back to Yenbo as prisoners.
That morning the army started for Weih, first making for a group of
wells fifteen miles north of Yenbo. At their head rode Feisal dressed
in white, his cousin beside him on the right in a red headcloth and
reddish-yellow tunic and cloak, Lawrence on the left in white and
scarlet. Next came three standard-bearers carrying an Arab flag of
faded crimson silk with gilt spikes. Then the drummers playing a march,
then the wild mass of Feisal’s bodyguard, twelve hundred bouncing
well-fed camels, with coloured trappings, packed closely together,
their riders dressed in every possible combination of bright colours.
This bodyguard was of camel-men called the Ageyl. They were not a
desert tribe but a company of young peasants from the oasis country of
Central Arabia. They had signed on for a term of years first of all for
service with the Turkish Army but had soon gone over in a body when the
Revolt started. Having no blood enemies in the desert and being the
sons of desert traders they were most useful in the later campaign.
Beside the road were lined the rest of the army, tribe by tribe,
each man standing beside his couched camel waiting his turn to join
the procession. They saluted Feisal in silence, and Feisal cheerfully
called back ‘Peace be with you!’ and the head sheikhs returned the
phrase. The procession swelled, the broad column filled the valley in
length as far as the eye could see, and, the drums beating, every one
burst into a loud chant in praise of Feisal and his family.
Lawrence went back on his racing camel to Yenbo: he had to make sure
that the naval help for the attack on Wejh would be properly timed.
But first of all, feeling anxious about a possible Turkish attack on
deserted Yenbo, he got a big British vessel, the _Hardinge_, formerly
a troopship, to take on board all the principal stores of the town,
including eight thousand rifles, three million cartridges, thousands of
shells, two tons of high explosive, quantities of rice and flour. Boyle
promised to lend the _Hardinge_ as a supply ship for the force on its
way up the coast, landing food and water wherever needed. This solved
the chief problem, which was how to maintain ten thousand men with only
a small supply column; and, for the rest, Boyle promised that half the
Red Sea fleet would mass at Wejh; landing-parties were already being
trained.
The Billi tribesmen who lived about Wejh were friendly and knew
moreover that if they did not welcome Feisal’s army it would be the
worse for them, so it seemed certain now that Wejh would be taken.
Boyle promised to take on board the _Hardinge_ an Arab landing-party
of several hundred Harb and Juheina tribesmen. While this was being
settled Lawrence heard that the three regular British officers who had
been instructed to help Feisal direct the campaign were now on
their way from Egypt. One of these, Vickery, arrived first. He was an
artillery officer, with a good knowledge of Arabic; and what Lawrence
thought that the Arabs needed, a trained staff officer.