The Arab Bureau therefore supported the Arab rebellion with crates of weaponry delivered by the Royal Navy: 54,000 rifles and 20 million rounds of ammunition in the first six months. They also sent the so-called ‘cavalry of St George’, British gold sovereigns, £1 sterling coins, each of which bore the mounted figure of the dragon-slayer on the obverse. The first £10,000 had been delivered to Jeddah early in June 1916 on board HMS Dufferin. The field treasury that doled out later instalments was a small stone and cement building in Akaba, piled up to the ceiling with dozens of squat ammunition boxes. Each box contained five canvas bags; each sealed bag held £1,000. Peake Pasha of the Egyptian Camel Corps described signing a chit and getting a special leather holster to carry the jingling swag back to his tribal mercenaries. In all, Great Britain spent some £11 million bribing Arabs in WW1.
A high-level British mission arrived from Egypt across the Red Sea in mid-October 1916 to ginger up the Arab Revolt. The party was led by Ronald Storrs, the waspish diplomat whom T. E. Lawrence called ‘the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East’ (but whom Aubrey Herbert dubbed ‘the Monster of the Levant’). Wearing tropical whites stained scarlet up the back from sweating on a red leather seat, he had been engaged in pistol practice against bottles on the deck of the ship with Abdul Aziz el-Masri, an Arab Nationalist who had defected from the Turkish Army and was now, briefly, a General for Sharif Hussein.
Captain Lawrence, now a 28-year-old intelligence officer, had taken ten days’ leave to come along for the jaunt. Storrs described him in his contemporaneous diary as ‘little Lawrence my supercerebral companion’. This voyage to Jeddah by ship was the beginning of Lawrence’s first visit to Arabia.
But when at last we anchored in the outer harbour, off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and smote us speechless. It was mid-day; and the noon sun in the East, like moonlight, put to sleep the colours. There were only lights and shadows, the white houses and black gaps of streets: in front the pallid lustre of the haze shimmering upon the inner harbour: behind, the dazzle of league after league of featureless sand, running up to an edge of low hills, faintly suggested in the far away mist of heat.
Chapter VIII, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s account of the Arab Revolt, is subtitled ‘A Triumph’, but it is really an epic romance of failure. Like most aspects of Lawrence’s life, it is the subject of burning debate: Robert Irwin thinks it a ‘great work’ best considered as a novel. Its attitude to the truth is not journalistic, but literary. Edward Said suggested it was more literature than history. Lawrence himself felt ‘one craving all my life – for the power of self-expression in some imaginative form’. In the introductory chapter to Seven Pillars that he later suppressed, Lawrence says that the book was written as a work of suasion to inspire: ‘a designed procession of Arab freedom from Mecca to Damascus … an Arab war waged and led by Arabs for an Arab aim in Arabia’. The book became a work of Arab propaganda, and it required the appropriate Arab hero.
Lawrence met the sons of Sharif Hussein. ‘I found Abdulla too clever, Ali too clean, Zeid too cool.’ On 23 October 1916, Lawrence says that he found his man. The third son, the patient and self-controlled Feisal (portrayed by Alec Guinness in David Lean’s classic film about Lawrence), was the one required to regenerate the Revolt. Feisal had the fire and character to become the leader that the Arabs needed, and he also had the necessary political flexibility to support British interests. Lawrence lobbied Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdar in Khartoum who was the GOC in Hijaz during the Arab Revolt, got approval from his line-manager in Intelligence, Gilbert Clayton in Cairo, and then went back to Arabia to play his part as Feisal’s military adviser and liaison officer.
In chapter XX of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Feisal suddenly asks Lawrence to start wearing Arab clothes like his own while in the desert camp, and Lawrence agrees ‘at once, very gladly’. His willingness to step into costume in December 1916 distinguishes the fluid Lawrence from the more rigid Captain Shakespear who had negotiated on Britain’s behalf with Ibn Saud two years earlier. Shakespear was killed in a tribal clash, wearing his Lancers’ khaki uniform and pith helmet, because he insisted on staying put, taking panoramic photographs with his clockwork mechanical plate-glass camera, rather than entering the ebb and flow of Arab battle.
In August 1917, the Arab Bulletin published ‘Twenty-Seven Articles’, Lawrence’s advice to other liaison officers and advisers who might work with the Bedu or Hijaz Arabs. What strikes the reader today is its wise humility. It advocates paying attention to the Arabs, fitting in judiciously, not giving orders, and never manhandling them: ‘It is difficult to keep quiet when everything is being done wrong, but the less you lose your temper the greater the advantage.’ The first article begins ‘Go easy for the first few weeks. A bad start is difficult to atone for,’ and the second says: ‘Learn all you can about your Ashraf and Bedu. Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads. Do all this by listening and by indirect inquiry. Do not ask questions. Get to speak their dialect of Arabic, not yours.’ The following nine articles are about deferential management, unobtrusively dealing with the leader: ‘Wave a Sherif in front of you like a banner and hide your own mind and person.’
Articles 17–20 are specifically about clothing: ‘Wear an Arab head-cloth when with a tribe. Bedu have a malignant prejudice against the hat,’ is the opening. ‘Disguise is not advisable,’ he goes on to say. ‘Except in special areas, let it be clearly known you are a British officer and a Christian.’ But then Lawrence thinks that ‘Arab kit’ will help you to ‘acquire their trust and intimacy to a degree impossible in uniform. It is, however, dangerous and difficult.’ Allowances are not made, he says, nor breaches of etiquette condoned: ‘You will be like an actor in a foreign theatre, playing a part day and night for months, without rest, and for an anxious stake.’ It is perhaps easier to stay in British uniform: ‘Also then the Turks will not hang you, when you are caught.’ But, he suggests, if you can pay the psychological price of the change of clothing, the prize of success may be far greater. ‘If you wear Arab things, wear the best,’ he states, and ‘If you wear Arab things at all, go the whole way. Leave your English friends and customs on the coast, and fall back on Arab habits entirely.’
And so Seven Pillars of Wisdom relates how Lawrence, dressed in the fine white silk wedding robes that later became his emblem, begins to enter the desert Arabs’ harder, harsher world. The water gave him dysentery; he endured lice, fleas, ticks, heat. In chapter XXXIII, weak with illness, he was confined to a tent for ten days, dozing and dreaming about the algebra, the biology and the psychology of war. In his smelly, sweaty tent, a theory of guerrilla warfare began to cohere in his mind.
Lawrence, a classical scholar who later translated the Odyssey, now remembered a useful parallel from the ancient world. In book three of Xenophon’s Anabasis, a group of Greek mercenaries find themselves near Baghdad, a thousand miles from home, their generals and captains all treacherously murdered, surrounded by Persians thirsting for their blood. Xenophon steps forward, dressed in his finest clothes, to address the survivors. He is not a soldier like them but a leisured gentleman, a pupil of Socrates who has come along for the ride, in order to see the world and to report on it. Xenophon tells the Ten Thousand what he thinks they will have to do to get back to Hellas: first burn the wagons, the tents and all their baggage; carry only food, water and weapons, and live off the land. Thus freed to react fast, and to improvise new weapons and tactics, the Greeks fight through and survive.
Lawrence, considering his own situation late in 1916, germinated his own ideas about guerrilla warfare. This became the subject of his brilliant post-war essay ‘The Evolution of a Revolt’ which appeared in October 1920 in the first issue of The Army Quarterly, a journal founded and edited by Guy Dawnay,
the intelligence officer who sent Compton Mackenzie to Lesbos. It is one of the most important things that Lawrence ever wrote. Later reworked by Liddell Hart as ‘Science of Guerrilla Warfare’ for the 13th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and incorporated into chapter XXXIII of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the piece overturns conventional military thinking and analyses irregular warfare in a new way for the modern age:
Suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed.
In 1916, the Turks had moved their soldiers down by train to Medina and were advancing the 250 miles south towards Mecca. Lawrence soon grasped that the Arab tribesmen were not strong enough to attack the Turkish front lines head on and were quite incapable of defending fixed positions, so he attempted neither. Instead, he moved a force northwards behind the Turks to threaten the 800-mile Hijaz railway line. This threw the enemy on the defensive: the Turks recoiled and retreated to Medina, then split their force, one half to garrison and fortify the holy city, the other half to protect their supply line. Lawrence realised there was no point in taking Medina in a conventional battle of pointless bloodshed: if the Turks could be made to stay in their fort it would turn into their prison. So let the Turkish soldier languish there, consuming his own supplies and eating his transport animals, harmless and helpless without a target to shoot. ‘He would own the ground he sat on, and what he could poke his rifle at.’ This left 99 per cent of the Hijaz to the Arabs.
Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.
‘The Evolution of a Revolt’ describes what is now called ‘asymmetric warfare’. Fighting the Arab rebellion, Lawrence says, would be messy and slow for the Turks, ‘like eating soup with a knife’. There would be no pitched battles, because the Arab irregulars – all valuable individuals, not mere units – could not afford casualties; there would be no contact, because Lawrence’s Arabs would instead wage ‘a war of detachment: we were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked’. The Arabs would not engage Turkish troops but only attack empty stretches of the Hijaz railway line. They blew up the tracks not to destroy them permanently but to give the Turks maximum aggravation in protection and repair. Cutting the telegraph wires had an intelligence purpose: it made the Turks use the wireless more, which the British could then intercept and listen to. Waging mobile warfare with Bedouin irregulars required the best intelligence, and careful attention to the tribesmen’s mood and morale.
Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power, and these gave us strategical rather than tactical strength. Range is more to strategy than force. The invention of bully-beef has modified land-war more profoundly than the invention of gunpowder.
Guerrilla sorties in the desert were more like naval operations, with camel raiding parties as self-contained as ships. Each man carried six weeks’ frugal supply of food on his camel, a hundred rounds for his rifle and a pint of water to last him between wells. Ranging over a thousand miles, the tactics were ‘always tip and run, not pushes, but strokes … We used the smallest force, in the quickest time, at the farthest place.’
The Arab irregular volunteers were contracted by honour, not discipline, and their war was conceived as one-on-one. Ideally every action was a series of single combats, in which good-quality fighters kept cool, and used speed, concealment and accuracy of fire to prevail. Lawrence reckoned that ‘Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge’.
The Armistice arrived before Lawrence could prove the idea that a war might be won without fighting battles, but he was moving that way. These simple ideas have become conventional nowadays, but then they were as revolutionary as quantum mechanics. After all, in 1916–17, the British thought it normal to lose 60,000 men in a single day on the Somme, or 142,000 in four days at Arras, or 275,000 in four months at Passchendaele. ‘The Evolution of a Revolt’ ends:
Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents …
That formula has had an almost incalculable historical effect around the world ever since. Communist insurgents, including the Vietnamese, learned the lesson well. The entire first printing of Robert Taber’s study of Guerrilla Warfare Theory and Practice, The War of the Flea (1964–5), was bought up by the US military during the Vietnam War. Forty years later, there are still lessons being learned in Iraq; the sort of American military officers who read Small Wars Journal also possess well-thumbed copies of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
In December 2006, the US Army issued its new field manual on Counter-Insurgency, written by General David Petraeus and Colonel Conrad Crane, advocating a radical change from conventional American heavy-handedness and massive firepower towards a more ‘hearts-and-minds’ approach. The third of its source notes cites T. E. Lawrence’s ‘Evolution of a Revolt’; the sixth refers to his ‘Twenty-Seven Articles’ from the Arab Bulletin of 20 August 1917, of which Article 15 reads:
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better that the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are there to help them, not to win it for them.
8
The Twice-promised Land
Military deception and bluff would play a key role in the WW1 Palestine campaign. In June 1917, Lawrence accompanied the warrior Sheikh Audah abu Tayi (the colourful character played by Anthony Quinn in the film Lawrence of Arabia) in a surprise attack on the Arabian Red Sea port of Akaba. This was defended by the Turks against attack from the sea, from which an assault by the French or British was expected, but they did not anticipate attack from the desert behind. Lawrence swept in from the hinterland with several hundred Arab irregulars in a camel charge. Having secured another port for the Royal Navy to land supplies, successful Lawrence went up to Cairo to meet for the first time the newly arrived British commander-in-chief, General Edmund Allenby (played by Jack Hawkins in the film). Moths had chewed up Captain Lawrence’s khaki uniform, so he was still dressed in his Arab gear. Lawrence described him in Seven Pillars:
Allenby was physically large and confident … He sat in his chair looking at me – not straight as his custom was, but sideways, puzzled. He was newly from France, where for years he had been a tooth of the great machine grinding the enemy. He was full of Western ideas of gun power and weight – the worst training for our war – but, as a cavalryman, was already half persuaded to throw up the new school, in this different road of Asia, and accompany Dawnay and Chetwode along the worn road of manoeuvre and movement; yet he was hardly prepared for anything so odd as myself – a little bare-footed silk-skirted man offering to hobble the enemy by his preaching if given stores and arms and a fund of two hundred thousand sovereigns to convince and control his converts.
Allenby studied the map while Lawrence told him about Eastern Syria and its inhabitants. If given guns and gold, this strange little man seemed to be promising him useful diversionary help against the Turks on the right flank. ‘At the end [Allenby] put up his chin and said quite directly, “Well, I will do for you what I can”, and that ended it.’
Allenby’s mission from Lloyd George was to conquer Palestine from Egypt, drive out the Ottoman Turks and take Jerusalem. He soon moved his headquarters from the fleshpots of Cairo up to the spartan desert front north of Rafa and, restlessly moving about among his men (which made him popular with the Australians), resupplied and reorganised his three corps for a major battle with the Turks entrenched at Gaza in Palestine where two previous British frontal attacks had failed.
Allenby’s intelligence achieved more than his famed bullishness as a general. He was a cavalryman,
and because he used thousands of horses and camels it is possible to think of his campaign as old-fashioned, but in fact it was also innovatory, making intelligent use of state-of-the-art technology in aviation, photography, mechanisation and wireless to deceive and outmanoeuvre the enemy. In her 2007 study, Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt, Polly A. Mohs considers it ‘the first modern intelligence war’.
Palestine in 1917 was the last great campaign in the annals of war where horses and camels were used strategically en masse. It was an utterly different context from trench warfare in France where artillery was everything and cavalry were useless. In Palestine, Harry Chauvel’s Australian Light Horse fought thirty-six battles against the Turks in thirty months and won them all. Two of Allenby’s three corps in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force were commanded by cavalrymen, including the brilliant tactician Philip Chetwode of XX Corps.
Chetwode’s chief staff officer on the advance from Egypt was Brigadier Guy Dawnay, the merchant banker involved in deception in the Dardanelles. ‘Dawnay was not the man to fight a straight battle’ wrote T. E. Lawrence in chapter LXIX of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was Dawnay and Chetwode who persuaded Allenby that the Third Battle of Gaza should not be head on.
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