Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Later that afternoon Lawrence saw Feisal again, and this time they got on much better. If Feisal’s plan to distract them failed, Lawrence thought, the Turks’ next move would probably be to advance on Mecca through Rabegh. In this case the Bedu irregulars could best be used to hold the Subh hills around the Wadi Safra, which formed a natural defensive line. The Turkish army would have no choice but to advance through the wadis, and their twists and turns would be a godsend for guerrilla troops. Even the Turkish artillery would not benefit them much in the hills. He thought that the Arabs should be strengthened with Lewis machine-guns, and some modern field artillery for the sake of their morale, and that they needed technical advisers, better liaison with the British GHQ, and even wireless sets. Though the tribal force would never be capable of an offensive, he thought, it would make a strong defensive screen behind which a regular field-force recruited from slaves, townsfolk and peasants could be built up. Lawrence felt that if Feisal could just hold out in these hills for two months, then al-Masri could train up his column of Arab regulars in Rabegh. As for landing British troops there, Lawrence thought that nothing would be more certain to destroy the Hashemite cause. He noted in his report that Feisal and his aides had no sympathy with the Arab Nationalists hanged in Damascus and Beirut, because they had been in league with the French, hinting strongly to his superiors that the Arabs had no intention of handing their country over to another foreign master, and would thus be highly suspicious of any massed landing of British troops. The intuition was correct, but the facts were almost certainly a fabrication – in Feisal’s case at least, for there are eye-witness reports that he was outraged by the Nationalist hangings when he heard about them in Damascus. In his reports, Lawrence also misrepresented the tribesmen as being intensely nationalistic: in fact they were chauvinistic, xenophobic and fanatically anti-Christian. A British landing would be certain to shatter Hashemite prestige, and drive the tribes into the arms of the Turks. He left at four o’clock in the afternoon of 24 October, with an escort of fourteen tribesmen of the Juhayna, heading for Yanbu’, not expecting to see the Sharif again. He was satisfied that in Feisal the British had a hero they could influence and manipulate, or as he put it, with characteristic ambiguity, a leader ‘with reason to give effect to our science’. He was also confident that he had solved the conundrum of Rabegh: ‘I told my chiefs,’ he wrote, ‘that Mecca was defended not by the obstacle of Rabegh, but by the flank threat of Feisal in [the Subh hills].’22

  13. Not an Army But a World is Moving upon Wejh

  Yanbu’ and Wejh December 1916 – January 1917

  It was wishful thinking, of course. The Bedu had never been defensive fighters, and when Fakhri Pasha finally emerged from Medina that December with three full brigades, he outflanked the Bani Salem holding the Wadi Safra and sent them scattering to their villages without a fight. Despite Lawrence’s assurances, they had never received either machine-guns or artillery, and the Turks broke through into the coastal plain within twenty-four hours, proving what Lawrence later dignified as ‘The Second Theorem of Irregular War’ – ‘that irregular troops are as unable to defend a point or line as they are to attack it’.1 Professional soldiers such as Sir Reginald Wingate had been saying this from the beginning without any elaborate ‘theorem’, which was why British troops had been thought necessary to defend Rabegh in the first place. By then, though, it was too late. Lawrence had returned from the mountains like Moses, with the solution to the problem of Rabegh graven in stone. If a British force had landed in the Hejaz, he said later, not a single Arab would have remained with the Sharif. This, as he well knew, was exactly what General Murray wanted to hear, and the provision of machine-guns, artillery and military advisers Lawrence requested seemed to the GOC a small price to pay for the conservation of one or two brigades. Lawrence’s star was suddenly in the ascendant at GHQ, and he realized that he was in a uniquely powerful position. No one had been to the front before him, and none followed him: he was the only British officer who had seen the conditions there for himself. By presenting the evidence, carefully pruned to suit his own objectives, he had now become a major player in the Arab Revolt. His information had also given him a private channel to the other players. On his way back to Cairo, he had not only met Admiral Wemyss, commanding the Red Sea Fleet, who was, like Murray, an opponent of intervention, but had also called at Khartoum to be debriefed by Wingate, who was a staunch supporter of it. That he had managed to convince both parties that each was right was a tribute to his shape-shifting power. After the debriefing, Wingate – who was shortly to move to Cairo as High Commissioner in place of McMahon – wrote: ‘I understood him to agree that in an emergency the Arabs would welcome [a British Brigade] … and cling to this hope of success rather than acquiesce in the certain defeat that failure to hold Rabegh would mean.’2 Lawrence had not – as far as he was concerned – agreed to any such thing, and Wingate was enraged when later he read Lawrence’s memorandum on the subject. But by then the die was cast, and Clayton managed to convince the Sirdar that Murray had obliged Lawrence to write the document, anyway.

  Lawrence continued to see himself working from his office in Cairo, helping to direct the Revolt from a safe distance. His expedition up the Wadi Safra had done nothing to convince him that he was a field officer. He was now formally transferred to the Arab Bureau under Clayton, who assigned him the post of Propaganda Officer – a role for which he was well suited. Wingate, however, had other ideas. The Sirdar felt that his exceptional knowledge of the Arabs would be wasted in Cairo, and told Clayton to send him back to the Hejaz as liaison officer with Feisal. Clayton was loath to let him go. Lawrence, who learned of the posting on 19 November, also objected strongly, arguing that he was not cut out to be a man of action, and had no experience in leadership. This argument was not entirely true, for he had emerged from his four years at Carchemish with formidable management skills. He also maintained that Feisal was headstrong and almost impossible to advise – a claim which he himself later revealed as spurious. He was desperate to stay away from the fighting, and was prepared to use all his rhetorical skills to do so. Yet it was to no avail. The Sirdar had ordered it, and the Sirdar would have his way. Wingate conceded only that Stewart Newcombe, now promoted Lieutenant-Colonel, should take over his posting at Yanbu’ – Feisal’s current base – as soon as he was available, releasing Lawrence once again for the Arab Bureau. Lawrence realized that the time for action had come. Fate had decreed that he should go into the field, and there was no avoiding it. Once he had accepted it, he summoned all the willpower he had built up in his youth, and galvanized himself for action. He feared that his nerve would not hold out in the face of danger, yet he drew on those long years of self-punishment, the close acquaintance with pain and deprivation he had forced upon himself, and hoped desperately that it would be enough. On 25 November, he sailed once more for the Hejaz.

  He arrived in the eye of the gravest crisis the Revolt had suffered so far. On 1 December, Fakhri Pasha’s outriders had found an unguarded road into the Wadi Safra, and pushed quickly up behind the Bani Salem units guarding the wadi. Finding Turks behind them, the tribesmen had simply fled, anxious for their villages, and Feisal’s youngest brother, Zayd, who had been in command of the regular force of Egyptian soldiers lent by Wingate, had pushed forward to Hamra and had been stopped by a hail of machine-gun fire. Zayd himself had only narrowly escaped capture. He was retreating towards Yanbu’ on the coast, and the Turks, now occupying the Wadi Safra, were in a position to threaten both Yanbu’ and Rabegh. When the Turkish breakthrough had occurred, Feisal had been up-country recruiting a force of juhayna to march north along the coast and attack the port of Wejh, which remained in Turkish hands. The capture of the Wadi Safra had not only cut him off from Mecca and Rabegh, but had also robbed him of his support among the Bani Salem. He was left with only the Juhayna, whose loyalty, he thought, would certainly not survive the capture of Yanbu’ and Rabegh. His spy-system had broken down, a
nd wildly contradictory reports were coming into his camp. On 2 December he dashed to Nakhl Mubarak – a large palm oasis in the Wadi Yanbu’ – with 4,000 tribesmen, ready to repel any Turkish threat to Yanbu’ port, which was now his last refuge.

  Lawrence arrived at Nakhl Mubarak with ‘Abd al-Karim al-Baydawi, a Sharif of the Juhayna, just before midnight, to find a scene of utter confusion. The wadi was full of woodsmoke, and echoing with the bleating and roaring of thousands of camels. Half-naked tribesmen were running about barefoot, babbling, cursing and firing off rifles. Lawrence’s party warily hid their camels in a disused yard, and ‘Abd al-Karim went to investigate. He returned with the news that Feisal had just arrived, and shortly they found the Sharif sitting calmly amongst the madness, on a rug in the wadi, dictating letters by lamplight. With him were his aide Maulud al-Mukhlis, and Sharif Sharraf, the Hashemite Governor of Ta’ if – his second in command. Feisal was relieved to see Lawrence. The whole camp was on the verge of panic, and messengers were coming and going constantly, couching and rousing their camels around the Sharif’s tiny island on the rug. Bedu patrols loped into camp or scattered into the night noisily. Baggage trains were being unloaded, mules and horses bucked and shied, and as they talked, a recalcitrant baggage-camel bolted and dropped its load, showering them with hay. Feisal listened to every messenger, petitioner and plaintiff patiently, and spoke to his men with dignity and composure. He was fighting a desperate internal battle, Lawrence realized. He had been shocked by the suddenness of his brother’s retreat, and was privately ‘most horribly cut up’ about it. Publicly, though, he was magnificent. Lawrence watched him address the Sheikhs of a troop of Bedu he was sending out to picket the Turks: ‘He did not say much,’ Lawrence wrote. ‘No noise about it, but it was exactly right, and the people rushed over one another to kiss his headrope when he finished.’3 Once again, Feisal blamed lack of artillery for the Turkish success, and feared that the defection of the Bani Salem would have a domino effect on the other tribes: ‘Henceforward, much of the Harb will have to be ruled out,’ Lawrence wrote to Clayton. ‘The Hawazim [the section of the tribe which had run from the Turks] are most openly wrong, and all the other Bani Salem will tend to hedge, and try to make peace with the people occupying their palm groves.’4 Lawrence and Feisal snatched some sleep and were up only an hour later, in the chill of dawn, to the ringing of the coffee-mortar. Lawrence made a reconnaissance of the camp and talked to the Bedu, particularly the Juhayna, whom he thought unsettled and uneasy. Later that day Feisal’s force moved out of the wadi, which they suspected might soon flood, and made camp to the north. The whole army mounted together, making a swath for Feisal to ride through on his mare, followed by his lieutenants and Sharifs, his standard-bearer, and a bodyguard of 800 armed ‘Agayl and Bishah on camels. Despite the desperate situation, Lawrence was thrilled by the pageant of an Arab tribal army on the move.

  It was at this point, Lawrence claimed, that Feisal invited him to wear Arab dress, and presented him with a gold-laced dishdasha his aunt had recently sent him from Mecca. Feisal’s reason for this move, Lawrence said, was because the Bedu did not feel at ease with khaki uniforms which hitherto they had only seen being worn by the Turks. It is doubtful if Feisal ever used this argument, because the Egyptian artillerymen and the Arab regular officers such as Maulud al-Mukhlis, Nuri as-Sa’id and Aziz ‘Ali al-Masri all wore khaki. It is more likely that the idea was Lawrence’s own. He had become accustomed to wearing native dress in Syria, and his natural sense of empathy, now applied to Feisal in particular, demanded that he wear the same clothes. Not only was it a compliment to the Arabs, it also gave him a psychological advantage, for by wearing the rich robes of a Sharif of Mecca, his status would be more obvious to the rank and file. In Syria he had escaped notice in local dress among the plethora of races, but not even Lawrence believed that anyone would mistake his rosy, clean-shaven English face for that of an Arab. There was also a practical element: Arab clothes were far more comfortable for camel-riding and living in the desert than anything Europeans had designed. The long, loose shirt enabled a layer of cool air to circulate around the body, and the thick headcloth, which could be knotted around the head, or across the face in a sandstorm, used as a towel, a blanket, a rope, a water-strainer, or a bandage, was eminently versatile. The long skirts also provided a screen when answering the call of nature, often necessary in the open desert. In sum, the adoption of Arab clothes was in both practical and ideological senses an excellent idea.

  Lawrence remained with Feisal long enough to lay out a crude runway near his camp for the RFC flight which would shortly be operating out of Yanbu’. The Turks were on their way, and he was convinced that Feisal’s shaken army would not stand and fight. They would have no alternative but to flee to Yanbu’ port, where Major Herbert Garland of the Royal Engineers was busy training the Bedu for attacks on the railway. The port was poorly defended, and if it was to be held at all, Lawrence knew, it could only be with the aid of the Royal Navy. On 4 December he mounted his camel and rode back to Yanbu’, arriving at half past three in the morning, exhausted after three almost sleepless nights. At once, he cabled to Captain Boyle of the Red Sea Patrol Squadron, and finally he wired Clayton in Cairo, blaming his pessimistic tone on his tiredness, but adding, ‘All the same, things are bad.’5

  Garland, whom he had hoped to find in Yanbu’, was sleeping aboard a ship in the harbour, but Lawrence found his house anyway, and fell asleep on a hard bench. He was up in time to see Zayd’s defeated column of 500 troops from Wadi Safra marching in, and thought it remarkable that they displayed no obvious shame at having endangered the future of the revolt. Zayd himself seemed ‘finely indifferent’, he thought. Within twenty-four hours, five ships of the Red Sea Patrol steamed into harbour, including the battleship Dufferin, and M.31 – an amphibious assault vessel with a shallow draught, specially designed for offshore bombardment. They arrived none too soon, for on the 9th Feisal’s ‘Agayl, Bishah and Hudheil – his household troops – came streaming into the town having withdrawn from Nakhl Mubarak. Lawrence went to take a photograph of the defeated Sharif riding in, and noticed that the Juhayna irregulars were not with him. Wondering if they had finally gone over to the Turks, he hurried to meet Feisal, who told him that the enemy had arrived suddenly the previous day, with three battalions of infantry, some Mule Mounted companies, a host of Bedu camelry, and a guide from the Juhayna’s ruling family, Dakhilallah ibn Baydawi. They had shelled Nakhl Mubarak with seven field-guns, he said, against which Feisal’s tiny battery of two archaic German fifteen-pounders without sights or range-finders had been powerless, except to encourage the tribesmen by their noise. His Syrian chief of artillery, Rasim Sardast, had blasted off salvo after useless salvo with profligate abandon, and the din alone had sent the Bedu forward. Things had been looking well, Feisal claimed, when the Juhayna on his left flank had turned tail and retreated until they were behind his household forces, for no obvious reason. Scenting treachery, Feisal had ordered Rasim to save the guns, and had pulled back with his own troops – the ‘Agayl, Bishah, and others – all the way to the sea. Lawrence wrote that a Sheikh arrived at Feisal’s house in Yanbu’ the following day, though, to report that his Juhayna had only retired to ‘make themselves a cup of coffee’, and had fought on for another twenty-four hours after Feisal had left. Feisal and Lawrence had rolled with laughter when they heard the story, though whether it was the irony of the defeat or the lameness of the excuse which amused them, Lawrence does not say. Certainly, it was the kind of aristocratic tale that he loved: the Bedu had not fled the Turks, but had been so unruffled in the face of the enemy that they had merely taken a coffee-break when it suited them. It was a very English tale – Aubrey Herbert fighting at Mons with an alpenstock, and taking charge of a Turkish company that had lost its way – but was it the truth?

  The Egyptian artillery officers who had been eye-witnesses to the battle at Nakhl Mubarak told a different story. They said that the Turks had no
t come in force, and had opened fire with only three mountain-guns and a machine-gun battery. The Bedu, they reported, had put up no fight at all, and many of the Juhayna had simply fled back to their villages in the Wadi Yanbu’ without firing a shot. Having taken Feisal’s shilling, they had evaporated at the first sign of trouble, just as the Bani Salem had done before them in the Wadi Safra. This story must have been generally known at the time, for when Ronald Storrs met Feisal a few days later, he countered his complaint about the lack of artillery by suggesting that ‘the courage of his Arab tribesmen stood in some need of vindication in the eyes of the world; even if they were for the moment unable to face their foes in the open field, their intimate knowledge of their own mountainous country would surely render them more redoubtable enemies in guerrilla warfare’.6 Storrs was looking at the situation, however, as if the Juhayna and Harb were British regiments under a rigid chain of command. As Feisal well knew, the Bedu were far from being cowards. In fact, when they felt their tribal honour to be at stake, they were capable of the most heroic valour. In the Arab Revolt, though, they were fighting as mercenaries: their aim was simply to be on the winning side. To Englishmen like Storrs this might not seem quite honourable, but to the Bedui, whose whole world was his tribe, it was eminently so. What mattered to the Juhayna was the survival of the Juhayna, not the survival of the Hashemites, who were – in the end – just another tribe. Feisal knew that Storrs credited his family with more control over the tribes than they actually had – the Bedu would always suit themselves. In fact, he was now virtually bereft of tribal support, and despaired for the future of the revolt, which he thought would peter out within three weeks. He wrote a bitter note to General Murray, stating that many of the Turkish units that had come against him had been withdrawn from the Sinai front, in the British zone of operations: ‘The relief to you should be great,’ the message ran, ‘but the strain upon us too great to endure. I hope your situation will permit you to press sharply towards Beersheba, or feign landing in Syria, as seems best, for I think the Turks hope to crush us soon, and then return against you.’7 In forwarding the message, Lawrence added as a postscript, ‘I infer Sharif had been offended.’8