met in Feisal’s camp, now half-way to Wejh, to discuss the advance. It
was decided to break the army up into sections and send them forward
one after the other, because of the difficulty of watering a whole
army at the same time at the few wells or ponds on the line of march.
These sections should then meet on the twentieth of January at a place
fifty miles from Wejh where there was water, and make the last stage
together. Boyle agreed to land tanks of water two days later at a
small harbour only twelve miles from Wejh. On the twenty-third the
attack was to be made; the Arab landing-party would go ashore from
the _Hardinge_ north of the town while Feisal’s mounted men cut all
the roads of escape south and east. It all looked very promising and
there was no news from Yenbo that was not good. Abdulla was moving
up to his position north of Medina, and news came that he had just
captured a well-known Turkish agent, a former brigand, who was going
with bribes among the desert tribes, and was on his way to Yemen far
down in the south where a Turkish garrison was cut off. Abdulla took
with this man twenty thousand Turkish pounds in gold, robes of honour,
costly presents, some interesting papers and camel loads of rifles and
pistols. It was the greatest good fortune.
In the tent with Vickery and Boyle, Lawrence had forgotten his usual
calm and said that in a year the Arab army would be tapping on the
gates of Damascus. There was no response from Vickery, who was angered
at what he thought was a romantic boast that could only come from
a man like Lawrence who did not know his job as a soldier. Lawrence
was disappointed in Vickery, who was so much a soldier that he did not
realize what the Arab Revolt was. It was not like a war in which large
trained armies, with complicated modern equipment, manœuvre from town
to town, seeking each to destroy or cut off the other. It was more
like a general strike over an immense area. The only big army was the
Turkish and even that was not free to move about as it liked, because
of the difficulties of the country. Lawrence knew that his boast had
not been a vain one; five months later he was secretly in Damascus
arranging for the help of its townsmen when Feisal’s forces should
arrive to free them. And a year later he did in fact enter the city in
triumph and become temporary governor. Vickery had not seen that with
a grand alliance of Semites, an idea and an armed prophet, anything
might happen. Had Lawrence only had a sounder military training than
the casual reading of military history for his degree at Oxford (and in
his teens the occasional captaincy of a non-militaristic Church Lads’
Brigade when his brother needed a substitute!) and if now he had been
given a free hand, it would have been Constantinople and not Damascus
that the Arabs should have reached. The conflict between Vickery and
Lawrence, however, was not as between two British military advisers
with different views. It was really as between a British military
adviser and a white Arab; for though it was not quite clear yet to
himself, this was what Lawrence was becoming.
The next morning there was trouble with the second batch of fifty
mules which had arrived for Maulud and was landed by the _Hardinge_
along with the other stores. The mules were sent without halters,
bridles or saddles, and once ashore stampeded into the little town near
by, where they took possession of the market-place and began bucking
among the stalls. Fortunately among the stores taken for safety from
Yenbo were spare ropes and bits, so that after an exciting tussle the
mules were captured and tamed. The shops were reopened and the damage
paid for.
Lawrence remained with Feisal’s army for the rest of the advance. From
this half-way halt they started on January the eighteenth at midday.
The Ageyl rode spread out in wings for two or three hundred yards to
the right and left of Feisal’s party. Soon there came then a warning
patter of drums from the right wing—it was the custom to set the poets
and musicians on the wings—and a poet began to sing two rhyming lines
which he had just invented, about Feisal and the pleasures that he
would provide for the army at Wejh. The men with him listened carefully
and took up the verse in chorus, repeating it three times with pride
and satisfaction and challenge. Before they could sing it a fourth
time, the rival poet of the left wing capped it with a rhyme in the
same metre and sentiment. The left cheered with a roar of triumph, then
the drums tapped again, the standard-bearers spread out their great
crimson banners, and the whole bodyguard right, left and centre broke
simultaneously into the Ageyl marching song. The Ageyl sang of their
own towns left behind and the women whom they might never see again,
and of the great perils ahead of them. The camels loved the rhythm
of the song and quickened their pace, while it lasted, over the long
desolate sand-dunes between mountains and sea.
Two horsemen came riding after them. Lawrence knew one of these as
the Emir of the Juheina, the other he could not make out. But
soon he recognized the red face, strong mouth and staring eyes of his
old friend Colonel Newcombe of the Sinai surveying party, who was
now come here as the chief British military adviser to the Arabs.
Newcombe quickly became friendly with Feisal, and the rest of the
journey was made even happier by his enthusiasm. Lawrence, comparing
notes with him, was glad to find that they both had the same general
views. The march was uneventful. Water was the one problem, and though
water-scouts went ahead to find what they could, the advance was
delayed by its scarcity, so that it was clear that Feisal would be two
days late for the rendezvous with the _Hardinge_ on the twenty-second.
Newcombe rode ahead on a fast camel to ask the _Hardinge_ to come again
with its water-tanks on the twenty-fourth, and to delay the naval
attack if possible until the twenty-fifth.
Many helpers joined Feisal during his advance; the Billi chiefs met
him at their tribal boundary, and later Nasir rode up, the brother of
the Emir of Medina. His family was respected in Arabia only second to
the Sherifs of Mecca, being also descended from the Prophet but from
the younger son of Mohammed’s only daughter. Nasir was the forerunner
of Feisal’s movement; he had fired the first shot at Medina and was to
fire the last shot beyond Aleppo, a thousand miles north, on the day
that the Turks asked for an armistice. He was a sensitive, pleasant
young man who loved gardens better than the desert and had been forced
unwillingly into fighting since boyhood. He had been here blockading
Wejh from the desert for the last two months. He and Feisal were close
friends. His news was that the Turkish camel-corps outpost barring the
advance had been withdrawn that day to a position nearer to the town.
The last three days of the advance were painful; the animals were
without food for nearly three days, and the men came the last fifty
miles on half a gallon of water and with nothing to eat: many of them
were on foot. The _Hardinge_ was at the rendezvous on the twenty-fourth
and landed the water promised; but this did not go far. The mules were
allowed first drink, and what little was left was given to the more
thirsty of the foot-men. Crowds of suffering Arabs waited all that
night at the water-tanks, in the rays of the search-lights, hoping for
another drink if the sailors came again. But the sea was too rough for
the ship’s boat to make another trip.
From the _Hardinge_ Lawrence heard that the attack on Wejh had already
been made the day before; for Boyle was afraid that the Turks would run
away if he waited. As a matter of fact the Turkish Governor had already
addressed the garrison saying that Wejh must be held to the last drop
of blood: after his speech he had got up on his camel and ridden off in
the darkness with the few mounted men whom he had with him, making for
the railway a hundred and fifty miles inland across the mountains. The
two hundred Turkish infantry left behind decided to follow his orders
rather than his example, but they were outnumbered three to one and the
fleet shelled them heavily. The landing was made by the sailors and the
Arab force, and Wejh was taken. But the _Hardinge_ had come away before
the end, so the advancing force could not be sure whether it would find
the town still in Turkish hands.
At dawn on the twenty-fifth the leading tribes halted at a spot a few
miles from the town and waited for the others to come up. Various
small scattered parties of Turks were met; most surrendered, only
one put up a short fight. When they reached the ridge behind which
Wejh lay, the Ageyl bodyguard dismounted, stripping off all their
clothes except their cotton drawers, and advanced to the attack: their
nakedness was protection against bullet wounds, which would strike
cleaner this way. They advanced company by ♦company, at the run, and
in good order with an interval of four or five yards between each man.
There was no shouting. Soon they reached the ridge-top without a shot
fired. So Lawrence watching knew that the fighting was over.
♦ “comany” replaced with “company”
The Arab landing-party was in possession of the town, and Vickery,
who had directed the battle, was satisfied. But when Lawrence found
that twenty Arabs and a British flying officer had been killed, he was
not at all pleased. He considered the fighting unnecessary; the Turks
would soon have had to surrender for want of food if the town had been
surrounded, and the killing of dozens of Turks did not make up for the
loss of a single Arab. The Arabs were not pressed men accustomed to
be treated as cannon-fodder like most regular soldiers. The Arab army
was composed rather of individuals, and its losses were not reckoned
merely by arithmetic. And because kinship is so strong a force in the
desert, twenty men killed meant a far wider range of mourning than a
thousand names in an European casualty list. Moreover, the ships’ guns
had smashed up the town badly, which was a great loss to the Arabs, who
needed it as a base for their future attacks inland on the railway. The
town’s boats and barges, too, had been sunk, so the landing of stores
was a difficulty, and all the shops and houses had been looted by the
Arab landing-party as a compensation for their losses. The townsmen
were mostly Egyptians who could not make up their minds in time to
join the Arab cause.
Still, Wejh was taken, the coast was cleared of Turks, and the march
had been a great advertisement. Abd el Kerim of the Juheina who had
come to Lawrence a week before to beg for a mule to ride, and had
been put off with the promise ‘when Wejh is taken,’ had said almost
regretfully, ‘We Arabs are a nation now’; the regret was for the good
old days of tribal wars and raids which now were at an end. Feisal had
very luckily stopped a private war between the Juheina and Billi just
in time; the Juheina, seeing some camels grazing, had of old habit
ridden out and driven them off. Feisal was furious and shouted to them
to stop, but they were too excited to hear. He snatched his rifle and
shot at the nearest man, who tumbled off his camel in fear; then the
others checked their course. Feisal had the men up before him, beat the
leaders with a camel-stick and restored the camels to the Billi. More
than a nation the Arab army seemed to some of the tribesmen. ‘The whole
world is moving up to Wejh,’ said one old man.
[Illustration:
description: Photo wide shot of large troop of people on camels
caption: FEISAL’S ARMY ENTERING WEJH
_Copyright_
]
The success at Wejh stirred the British in Egypt to realize suddenly
the value of the Revolt: the Commander-in-Chief remembered that there
were more Turks fighting the Arabs than were fighting him. Gold,
rifles, mules, more machine-guns and mountain-guns were promised: and
in time sent, all except the mountain-guns, which were the most urgent
need of all. Field-guns were no use because of the hilly roadless
country of Western Arabia, but the British Army could, it seemed,
spare no mountain-guns except a sort that fired only ten-pound shells,
useless except against bows and arrows. It was maddening that the Turks
should always be able to outrange the Arabs by three or four
thousand yards. The French Colonel had some excellent mountain-guns at
Suez with Algerian gunners, but would not send them unless an Allied
brigade was landed at Rabegh to take over the conduct of the war from
the Arabs. These guns were kept at Suez for a year; but then the French
Colonel was recalled and his successor sent them; with their help the
final victory was made possible. Meanwhile a great deal of harm was
done to the reputation of the French, for every Arab officer passing
through Suez on his way to Egypt or back saw these idle guns as a proof
of French hostility to the Revolt.
But while the news of the taking of Wejh was still fresh, the French
Colonel called on Lawrence at Cairo to congratulate him; he said that
the success confirmed his opinion of Lawrence’s military talent and
encouraged him to expect help in extending the success. He wanted to
occupy Akaba with an Anglo-French force and naval help. Akaba was the
port at the very extreme point of the Red Sea on the opposite side
of the Sinai peninsula from Suez, and a brigade landed there might
advance eighty miles inland towards Maan. Maan was an important town
on the pilgrims’ railway about two hundred miles south of Damascus,
and on the left flank of the Turkish army opposing the British on the
borders of Palestine. Lawrence, who knew Akaba from his surveying days
in the winter of 1913, told the Colonel that the scheme was impossible,
because, though Akaba itself could be taken, the granite mountains
behind it could be held by the Turks against any expedition trying to
force the passes. The best thing was for Bedouin Arabs to take it from
behind without naval help.
Lawrence suspected that the Colonel wanted to put this Anglo-French
force in as a screen between the Arabs and Damascus, to keep
them in Arabia wasting themselves in an attack on Medina. He
himself, on the other hand, wanted to take them into Damascus and
beyond. Both men knew what the other’s intention was, but there was
a natural concealment of the real issue. At last the Colonel, rather
unwisely, told Lawrence that he was going to Wejh to talk to Feisal,
and Lawrence, who had not warned Feisal about French policy, decided to
go too. By hurrying he was able to get there first and also to see and
warn Newcombe.
When the Colonel arrived at Wejh eight days after Lawrence, he began
by presenting Feisal with six Hotchkiss automatic guns complete
with instructors. This was a noble gift, but Feisal asked for the
quick-firing mountain-guns at Suez. The Frenchman put him off by saying
that guns were no real use in Arabia; the thing to do was for the Arabs
to climb about the country like goats and tear up the railway. Feisal
was annoyed by the ‘goats,’ which is an insult in Arabic, and asked the
Colonel if he had ever tried to ‘goat’ himself. The Colonel spoke of
Akaba, and Feisal, who had had Lawrence’s account of the geography of
the place, told him that it was asking too much of the British to get
them to risk heavy losses over such an expedition. The Colonel, annoyed
by Lawrence’s Oriental smile where he sat in a corner, pointedly
asked Feisal to beg the British at least to spare the armoured cars
which were at Suez. Lawrence smiled again and said that they had
already started. Then the Colonel went away, defeated, and Lawrence
returned to Cairo, where he begged the Commander-in-Chief not to send
the brigade that was already waiting to be sent to Akaba. The
Commander-in-Chief was delighted to find that this ‘side-show,’ too,
was unnecessary.
Back again in Wejh a few days later Lawrence began hardening himself
for his coming campaign, tramping barefoot over the coral or
burning-hot sand. The Arabs wondered why he did not ride a horse, like
every other important man. Feisal was busy with politics, winning over
new tribes to the cause, keeping his father at Mecca in good humour,
and his brothers in their places. He had to put down a small mutiny:
the Ageyl had risen against their commander for fining and flogging
them too heavily. They looted his tent and beat his servants, and then
getting more excited remembered a grudge that they had against the
Ateiba tribe and went off to do some killing. Feisal saw their torches
and rushed to stop them, beating at them with the flat of his sword;
his slaves followed. They subdued the Ageyl at last, but only by firing
rockets from pistols among them, which set fire to their robes and
frightened them. Only two men were killed; thirty were wounded. The
commander of the Ageyl then resigned and there was no more trouble.
A wireless signalling set was mounted at Wejh by the Navy, and the
two armoured cars from Suez arrived. They had just been released from
the campaign in East Africa. The Arabs were delighted with the cars
and with the motor-bicycles that were sent with them. They called
the motor-bicycles ‘devil horses,’ the children of the cars, which
were themselves the sons and daughters of the trains on the pilgrims’
railway. About this time came Jaafar, a Mesopotamian Arab from Bagdad,
whom Feisal at once made commander-in-chief of the regular Arab forces
under him. Jaafar had been in the Turkish army and had fought
well against the British. He had been chosen by Enver to organize the
Senussi tribes in the desert west of Egypt, and going by submarine had
made the wild men into a good fighting force. The British captured
him at last and he was imprisoned at Cairo. He tried to escape one
night from the Citadel there, slipping down a blanket rope, but
fell, hurt his leg, and was recaptured. Later in hospital he read a
newspaper account of the Sherif’s Revolt and of the executions of Arab
nationalists in Syria; he suddenly realized that he had been fighting
on the wrong side.
Feisal’s politics were going well. The Billi tribe and the Moahib
joined him and the Howeitat and Beni Atiyeh beyond, so that he now
had control of the whole country between the railway and the sea from
a point a hundred and fifty miles north of Wejh right down to Mecca.
Beyond the Howeitat and Beni Atiyeh, to the north, and spreading over
the wide gravel and lava desert to the borders of Mesopotamia lived
the powerful Ruwalla tribe, whose Emir Nuri was one of the four great
Arabian princes, the others being Ibn Saud of Nejd in the central
oases, the Emir of Jebel Shammar, and the Sherif of Mecca. Nuri was a
hard old man whose word was law and who could not be either bullied
or coaxed; he had won his supremacy by the murder of two brothers.
Fortunately he had been on good terms with Feisal for years, and
Feisal’s messengers going to him to ask permission for the Arab army
to pass through Ruwalla territory met Nuri’s messengers already on the
way with a valuable gift of baggage camels for Feisal. Nuri could not
give armed help at present because if the Turks suspected him they
would half-starve his tribesmen in three months; but Feisal could
count on him, when the right time came, for armed help too. It
was most important to have Nuri friendly because he controlled Sirhan,
the one great chain of camping-grounds and water-holes across the
northern desert to the Syrian border, where lived the famous tribe,
the Howeitat. One Howeitat clan, the Abu Tayi, was ruled by Auda, the
greatest fighting man in Northern Arabia; and to get in touch with
Auda had been Feisal’s and Lawrence’s ambition for months. With Auda
friendly it should be possible to win over all the tribes between Maan
and Akaba, and then, after taking Akaba, to carry revolt farther north
still behind the Turkish lines in Syria. And Auda did prove friendly;
his cousin came in with presents on the seventeenth of February 1917,
and the same day arrived a chief of another Howeitat clan that was
settled near Maan. Further arrivals that day were Sherarat tribesmen
from the desert between Wejh and the railway with a gift of ostrich
eggs, Nuri’s son with the gift of a mare, and the chief of another
Howeitat clan from the coast south of Akaba. This last chief brought
Feisal the spoils of the two Turkish posts on the Red Sea which he had
just taken.
The roads to Wejh swarmed with messengers and volunteers and great
sheikhs riding in to swear allegiance, and the Billi, who had hitherto
only been lukewarm in the cause, caught the enthusiasm of the rest.
Feisal’s way of swearing in new converts was to hold the Koran between
his hands, which they kissed and promised ‘We shall wait while you wait
and march when you march. We shall yield obedience to no Turk. We shall
deal kindly with all who speak Arabic whether Arabians, Mesopotamians,
Syrians or others. We shall put Arab independence above life, family
or goods.’ When the chiefs came to Feisal it happened sometimes
that blood-enemies met in his presence, when he would gravely introduce
them and later act as peacemaker, striking a balance of profit and loss
between them. He would even help things on by contributing from his own
purse for the benefit of the tribe that had suffered most loss. For two
years this peace-making was Feisal’s daily task, the combining of the
thousands of hostile forces in Arabia against a common enemy. There was
no feud left alive in the districts through which he passed, and no one
ever questioned his justice. He was recognized as a power above tribal
jealousies and quarrels, and finally gained authority over the Bedouin
from Medina in the south to a point far beyond Damascus.
XII
Early in March information came to Lawrence from Egypt that Enver
the Turkish Commander-in-Chief had ordered the Turks to leave Medina
at once. The message had been intercepted on the pilgrims’ railway,
where Newcombe and Garland were already busy with Arab help blowing up
bridges and tearing up the rails. The Turks were ordered to march out
in mass along the line with railway trains enclosed in their columns;
they were to go for four hundred miles north to a station (Tebuk)
below Maan where they would form a strong left flank to the army
facing the British. As the Turks in Medina were a whole Army-Corps of
the best Anatolian troops with a great deal of artillery, the British
were anxious to keep them away. So Feisal was therefore begged (and
Lawrence instructed) either to take Medina at once or to destroy the
garrison on its way up the line. Feisal replied that he would do his
best, though the Turkish message was days old and the move was already
timed to begin. Feisal’s forces were, at the moment, all moving forward
to harry the railway inland from Weih along a length of a hundred and
fifty miles; so that the second part of the demand from Egypt was being
met. If it was not too late to catch the Turks coming out it might
be possible to destroy the whole force. The Arabs would damage the
railway line until it was too hopelessly broken for the store trains to
pass, and the Turks would therefore be without supplies to take them
farther. When they turned back they would find the line broken behind
them too. Lawrence himself decided to go to Abdulla, who had now moved
to a position just north-west of Medina, to find out whether it was
possible, if the Turks were still in Medina, to attack them there.
When he started he was very weak with dysentery brought on by drinking
the bad water at Wejh: he had a high temperature and also boils on
his back which made camel-riding painful. With a party of thirteen
men, of various tribes, including four Ageyl and a Moor, he set out
at dawn through the granite mountains on his hundred and-fifty-mile
ride. He had two fainting fits on the way and could hardly keep in the
saddle. At one point on the journey the ill-assorted party began to
quarrel and the Moor treacherously murdered one of the Ageyl. A hurried
court-martial was held and the Moor was privately executed, with
general consent, by a member of the party who had no kin for the other
Moors in Feisal’s army to start a blood-feud against.