Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  In Rabegh, ‘Ali quickly discovered the answer to this last question: the supplies had been stolen by Sheikh Hussain ibn Mubeiriq of the Zebayd Harb, who had been put in charge of the port. Ibn Mubeiriq, who had an old blood-feud with the Hashemites, was secretly a Turkish sympathizer. ‘Ali sent word to his youngest brother, Zayd, who arrived with Ahmad bin Mansur and a troop of his Bani Salem, took possession of ibn Mubeiriq’s villages by force and seized the stores, driving the ‘traitor’ and his men out into the hills where they lingered like malevolent spirits. Instead of returning to the field, however, ‘Ali and Zayd settled down to wait for al-Masri and Nuri as-Sa’id to build up their forces, leaving Feisal to face the Turks alone. The situation was fast becoming critical. Feisal, who had taken up a position on the Darb Sultani – the main road to the coast – had under his command 4,000 irregulars with rifles and the Egyptian artillery, whose ancient field-pieces were far outranged by the Turks’ Krupp mountain-guns. In Medina, Fakhri’s forces now amounted to twelve battalions with sixteen mountain-guns and two heavy field-pieces – thanks to the railway, fresh troops were arriving all the time. Feisal’s forces were unable to meet the Turks head-on, and the Sharif sent camel-mounted raiding-parties, under the ferocious young Sharif ‘Ali ibn Hussain of the Harith, to harass them by night, hitting guard-posts and convoys and fading back into the hills. These pinpricks were hardly felt by the enemy, but they were costly in Arab lives, and Feisal’s Bedu were melting rapidly back to their tents and villages. Feisal could not prevent them: they were hired on a daily rate, and he had no money to pay them with. He was obliged at one point to have a chest filled with heavy stones and put a guard on it at night to convince his troops that he was still solvent. Feisal felt that at the very most he could hold out for three weeks, but to push the Turks back to Medina was now impossible. At the end of August he rode down to the coast, where at Yanbu’ he met Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Wilson, who had been posted to jeddah as British representative. Wilson, who was actually Governor of the Red Sea Province of the Sudan, was spokesman for Sir Reginald Wingate, the officer responsible for supplying the Hashemites from neighbouring Port Sudan. This had been Feisal’s first meeting with a British officer, and he had complained volubly about the lack of ammunition and supplies, which were supposed to be reaching him from the beach-head at Rabegh. He wanted machine-guns, modern artillery and aircraft, as well as a contingent of British troops at Rabegh. The Turks were clearly building up for an advance on Mecca, for which Rabegh, as the major source of water on the Darb Sultani, would be a vital stepping-stone. The Arab regulars at Rabegh were not yet ready to hold it, and the Bedu could not hold it either. Feisal felt that the only solution was to land a seasoned British brigade. Hussain agreed that such a landing was necessary, but thought it should be limited to 300 men. He feared to allow Christian soldiers – or even Muslim soldiers in Christian pay – to land en masse on sacred soil, for the Turks, who had now appointed a rival Sharif, ‘Ali Haydar, as Emir of Mecca in his place, were already declaring that Hussain had ‘sold out’ to the British infidels. On recapturing Mecca, their first act would be to hang Hussain publicly as a traitor and install ‘Ali Haydar as Emir. Feisal met Wilson for a second time in early September, together with Lieutenant-Colonel A. C. Parker – now posted to the Hejaz as intelligence officer – and repeated his urgent request for British troops at Rabegh. Wilson and Parker were convinced that the Arab Revolt was about to collapse, and had rushed to Cairo on the Dufferin to persuade Murray to send a British force. As September faded into October, though, no such force arrived. The weather grew cooler and a Turkish advance on Mecca looked increasingly imminent. All that stood in the way of the juggernaut was the thin, ragged band of Feisal’s Bedu, hidden in the hills.

  12. Fallen Like a Sword into Their Midst

  First Mission to the Hejaz October 1916

  In 1916 Jeddah was a tiny walled port, only half a mile square. Today it is a thriving metropolis, covering an area several hundred times larger, served by two international airports, and almost drowned under a continually rolling stream of motor cars. I flew there in high summer and when I arrived the wetness in the air clung to me like a sweater. I was pleased, though, to find that odd bits of the old port survived. The lagoon, still stinking of sulphur, was no longer used as a harbour, but along the wharfs there were the fractured hulls of sambuks, and the old sea-gate, by which Lawrence had entered the town, had been restored as a monument to the past. Among the air-conditioned shopping malls and the marble walkways, I came across examples of the baroque coral-and-limestone skyscraper houses Lawrence had described in Seven Pillars. Some were on a modest scale, listing dangerously from exhaustion into the narrow alleys of the suq, while others were vast and palatial, with heavy doors of carved teak, rambling façades of timbered bow windows, tiers of ornate latticework, mock balconies and balustrades, mashrubat slats like huge light-filters, great edifices of shutters and crosspoles, curving around the entire front of the building. In the pedestrian precinct of the Old Town, I drifted along in the sauna-heat, blessedly far from the noise of cars, amid the smells of cinnamon, coffee and sherbet, among men in scarlet Mosul headcloths, and women flitting like faceless shadows in black, and tried to imagine for an instant that I had stepped back in time. In 1916, of course, these alleys would have been dark, earth-floored conduits, shaded with sacking through which the light strobed in golden shafts, obstructed by donkeys and laden camels, and – during the Pilgrim season – crowded with shaven-pated men of almost every conceivable race – Turks, Baluch, Indians, Pharsees, Malays, Javanese, Africans from Zanzibar and the Sudan. That October, though, Lawrence had found Jeddah almost deserted: ‘hushed, strained, furtive’ he wrote – a ghost town, where doors shut silently as he approached. Dodging traffic, I followed his route from the stinking wharfs, and came upon the house that had once been the British Agency – a squarish block with well-carved lattice-windows, shining brilliantly with white paint, but sadly devoid of the rambling asymmetry which had made some of the old houses in the suq attractive. It had been restored overzealously as the Municipal Museum, and stood on a triangular island in the harbour ring-road, opposite a vast glass-fronted shopping mall and dwarfed by the towering concrete-and-glass blade of the National Commercial Bank.

  Lawrence and Storrs had arrived at this building at 9.30 on the morning of 16 October 1916, to find Cyril Wilson seated in a darkened room behind an open lattice. He had welcomed them politely but without much enthusiasm. He was essentially an honest, honourable and forthright man, who thought Storrs effete and devious, and Lawrence, whom he had once met in Cairo, a know-it-all and ‘a bumptious young ass’. He knew that they did not share his opinion that a British force should be landed at Rabegh, and was embarrassed that his promises to Feisal had not been fulfilled. He had arranged a meeting with ‘Abdallah, who, fresh from his victory at Ta’if, had pitched his tents near Eve’s Tomb, four miles outside the town. That morning, Wilson and Storrs rode out to meet the Sharif, and in the afternoon ‘Abdallah returned the compliment, riding through the Mecca gate on a white mare with an escort of slaves. Stylishly turned out in a yellow silk headcloth, a camel’s-hair cloak, a white silk shirt and knee-length boots of patent leather, he dismounted at the Agency and was shown into a meeting consisting of Storrs, Wilson, Lawrence, and two Arab officers – Aziz ‘Ali al-Misri, the Hashemite Chief of Staff, who had travelled down in the Lama with Storrs – and Lawrence, and Sayyid ‘Ali Pasha, the Egyptian general commanding the artillery with Feisal in the hills. After describing conditions in the Hejaz, ‘Abdallah revealed his concern about the danger to Rabegh. A Turkish advance now might take away all the Arabs’ hard-won victories: the urban population was not undivided in its support for the Hashemites, and even among the Bedu there were elements of the Harb, the Billi – and some of the Juhayna – who were not entirely to be trusted, and who might easily go over to the enemy. He asked anxiously about the possibility of landing the British force, which had more than on
ce been promised. This was the moment Storrs had secretly been dreading. In a conference at Ismaeliyya on 12 September, which both he and Wilson had attended, Sir Archibald Murray, the G O C, had savaged the idea of sending British soldiers. Murray needed his troops for the serious business of protecting the Suez Canal, and was wary of ‘sideshows’ which, like the Gallipoli campaign, could quickly escalate out of all proportion and swallow men and arms needed elsewhere. Murray was also of the opinion that the Hashemites had botched the revolt: ‘The Sharif, as might have been expected, has muddled the business,’ he wired to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Robertson, in London; ‘it is not unlikely that, in spite of the numbers against them, the Turks will suppress the rising… I do not think we should send British troops… if we begin by sending a Brigade of infantry the demands will never cease – we shall begin with infantry, then artillery, then engineers … followed by …the whole impedimenta of a campaign in the desert …’1 Wilson and Parker were pushing hard for a British landing, and Murray had an orthodox soldier’s instinctive dislike for such ‘experts’: ‘I have little faith in the judgement on a military question of any officer who has spent the best part of his life in this country [i.e. Egypt],’ he wrote. ‘Men like Wilson and Parker, now with the Sharif, are good Arabic scholars and know the habits and customs of the country, but their recommendations as to the military action are often futile and impossible of solution.’2 Murray had firmly rejected their recommendations, and in London Robertson had supported his decision. It was Storrs’s embarrassing task to explain to ‘Abdallah that not only would the promised troops not be sent after all, but that the £10,000 granted was to be withheld, and the flight of aircraft which had already been dispatched to Rabegh to be withdrawn. ‘Abdallah, Storrs knew, would view this as tantamount to treachery. Though Storrs was relieved that he ‘took it like a fine gentleman’, he wrote in his diary: ‘The moment when we had to explain that the withdrawal of our promise of the Brigade included the aeroplanes was not pleasant and I do not wish to have to show H M Government to an Arab a second time in that light.’3 In fact, ‘Abdallah was astonished and angry, and after the meeting went straight to the French Agency to talk to Lieutenant-Colonel Bremond, who had just arrived to take charge of a tiny French military mission. ‘Abdallah hinted to Bremond that because the British had refused to help, the Hashemites might be forced to sue for peace with the Turks. Bremond felt that if the Arabs withdrew from the conflict, then, in the event of victory, the British alone would claim the lands of the Near East. The French could not spare large numbers of troops from the Western Front, and only his small contingent in Jeddah would ensure a place at the Peace Conference afterwards. If that mission had to retire, then all French hopes in Syria might be dashed. Bremond later hurried round to Wilson with the news, and after a flurry of cables, the British agreed to reconsider the question.

  This was to come later. For the moment ‘Abdallah sat out the meeting stoically. Lawrence, who had spoken little, had taken an immediate dislike to him. The Sharif, he admitted later, was ‘too clever’. He knew that ‘Abdallah was his father’s right-hand man, and highly popular among the Arabs. He had been the prime mover in the revolt from the beginning – indeed, in many ways it might be said that ‘Abdallah had created the Arab Revolt. Cheerful, extrovert, highly cultured and sophisticated, he did not fit Lawrence’s concept of the ‘noble savage’, and bore no relation to his ‘innocent’ Dahoum. He was of strong character – highly intelligent, worldly-wise, experienced, blooded in battle, and a superb chess-player – more than a match for Lawrence’s manipulation. If the British were to influence the situation to their advantage, Lawrence realized, they must find and set up as a figurehead a leader who was more malleable and susceptible to their design. He had been monitoring affairs in the Hejaz closely since June, and knew that the situation was critical. The revolt, he said, was ‘standing still, which, with an irregular war, was a prelude to disaster’.4 Secretly, though, he was against sending British troops, but for other reasons than those argued by Murray. First, as an arch-propagandist, he was aware that guerrilla wars were fought partly on an ideological level, and to have infidel soldiers in the Hejaz would make Hussain look like a Muslim renegade ready to hand over the Holy Cities to unbelievers. Secondly – and to Lawrence even more important – if the British were to fight Arab battles for them, the Arabs would have little claim, at the end of the war, to an independent state. They must, at least, be seen to be conducting their own revolt. Lawrence had a passionate belief in the cause of Arab freedom, but though he wished to see the Arabs free of the Ottoman Turks, it is unlikely that he ever believed they could be entirely independent. From the beginning he envisaged not a single Arab state but a congeries of petty states, nominally independent but actually under the benevolent aegis of the British Empire, which would naturally fill the vacuum in the Near East left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The war had to be won, and British and Arab interests dovetailed at this point: both wanted victory against the Turks. Lawrence could therefore happily serve both the cause of British victory and Arab independence, satisfied that, for now, there was no conflict between them. If such a conflict arose, though, he had no doubt where his true loyalties lay: ‘I’m strongly pro-British and also pro-Arab,’ he would tell Clayton later, ‘France takes third place with me: but I quite recognize that we might have to sell our small friends to pay our big friends, or sell our future security in the Near East to pay for our present victory in Flanders.’5 Though he may secretly have divined that the Hashemite problem lay in poor leadership, and privately decided that he could provide the guidance they needed, he was a committed intelligence officer, and never saw himself ‘leading from the front’. Indeed, he had not expected, nor wished, to be sent into the field. He firmly believed that his place was behind a desk, and in the past months had done an excellent job in designing and having printed a set of Hejaz postage stamps whose object was to establish before the eyes of the world that the Hejaz was, in fact, already independent.