Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  A breakdown of Fahreddin’s command, prepared by Lawrence’s Cairo section at the end of September, gave him 12,000 men and two aircraft based on Medina.15 A division of 2,400 infantry and 1,000 camelry held Bir Abas to the south-west, and a unit of 800 with two field pieces and four machine-guns occupied Bir al Mashi. These outlying detachments were thought to be the advance guard for offensives against Rabigh and Mecca which were expected in the last week of November. To oppose the Turkish advance, there were three Arab armies, commanded by Hussain’s three eldest sons, the amirs Ali, Zaid and Faisal. Each army was in a permanent state of deliquescence, since the tribal warrior insisted on bouts of extended leave with his family. Morale was low. The Arabs were short of artillery and machine-guns and, in spite of a stiffening of Egyptian infantry and gunners, Wilson and Parker believed they would crumble before a Turkish attack. Lawrence was setting out for Hejaz when the Arab movement faced its gravest crisis.

  The steamer Lama took two days to reach Jiddah. Lawrence enjoyed the relaxation of the cruise, during which he explained the mysteries of cipher to Storrs and listened while the diplomat discussed the merits of Debussy and Wagner with al Mizri. Then and later Lawrence talked with al Mizri and gently questioned him about his plans for the future. These largely concerned Syria and Lawrence passed on what he heard to Clayton.

  Aziz [al Mizri] has not taken me into his confidence, but is enormously interested in the Hejaz railway North of Maan. I cannot get him worked up to consider the Ula-Medina stretch at all. Also his questions are about the Hawran, Karak, and the Nabk-Salamieh region: even Aleppo sometimes. I fancy he may be trying to get up into the Rwallah-Hawran country, not to do very much perhaps, but to sound out the people, and cut the line. He will not take troops with him from Hejaz.16

  What is remarkable about this revelation was that al Mizri had outlined the very programme of railway sabotage and canvassing support for the Arab movement in Syria which Lawrence undertook during the second part of 1917. He approached the Syrian Arabs as the emissary of Faisal, whereas al Mizri, if he had stayed true to his ideals, would have represented the radical nationalists whom Lawrence held in contempt. For this reason, as well as the present impracticality of long-range operations, Lawrence tried to deflect al Mizri towards attacking the railway closer to Medina, which was what Murray and Wingate wanted.

  Once al Mizri had represented a dynamic force within Arab nationalism, and when Lawrence made his foray into Iraq on his behalf he was regarded as a future leader with extensive influence. With his taste for Irish whiskey and soda and modern ideas, al Mizri felt uncomfortable in orthodox and feudal Hejaz. He confided to Storrs that he really wanted to pull out and marry his German fiancée, who lived in Switzerland. Hussain and his sons distrusted al Mizri’s ambitions, fearing that he might push them aside and become another Enver. They were therefore pleased when he resigned in 1917 and returned to Cairo, where he proffered his services to the British and promised to foment mutinies among Turkish troops in Syria and Palestine.17 The offer was turned down, partly because of suspicions that it was a vehicle for al Mizri’s personal ambitions.

  Lawrence was in buoyant mood when he landed at Jiddah. His new surroundings fascinated him. In a letter to Clayton he classified the local architecture as ‘gimcrack Elizabethan exaggerated’ and noted that ‘The tone of public opinion in Jiddah is rollicking goodhumour towards foreigners.’ Bad humour marked his first encounter with Wilson. Within two days of his arrival, he wired Clayton, ‘There are some personal remarks here about Colonel Wilson which I won’t write down. Will you please ask Storrs a few leading questions about him? Consider me as prejudiced.’18 Wilson did not pussy-foot and on 22 October cabled Clayton:

  Lawrence wants kicking and kicking hard at that, then he would be [illegible] all present. I look on him as a bumptious young ass who spoils his undoubted knowledge of Syrian Arabs &c. by making himself out to be the only authority on war, engineering, HM’s ships and everything else. He put every single person’s back up I’ve met from the Admiral [Wemyss] down to the most junior fellow on the Red Sea.19

  The immodest, doctrinaire young man was also a slovenly soldier. When they first met at Port Sudan at the beginning of November, Colonel Pierce Joyce, one of the team of staff officers newly appointed to the Hejaz Force, was appalled by Lawrence’s appearance. He recalled ‘an intense desire ... to tell him to get his hair cut and that his uniform and dirty buttons sadly needed the attention of his batman’.20 Cairo’s forbearance towards clever graduates masquerading as soldiers did not extend to the Arabian war zone.

  While he offended some by his dogmatism, Lawrence carried out his instructions thoroughly in a way which would eventually impress Murray. On 18 October he joined a conference at Jiddah attended by Storrs, Wilson and the Amir Abdullah. The main purpose of the meeting was to inform Abdullah that, guided by Robertson, the War Committee in London had turned down the request for a British brigade at Rabigh. The news upset him: as Lawrence tartly observed, he showed every sign of having suffered a ‘heavy blow (mostly I think to his ambition)’. However, its harshness was softened by £10,000 in gold sovereigns delivered by Storrs. As the exchanges progressed, Lawrence learned how power was exercised in Hejaz. Abdullah had twice to consult his father by telephone and Lawrence concluded that the ‘old dear’ Hussain ‘looks upon his sons as boys not quite fit to act independently’.

  For his part, Abdullah was amazed by Lawrence’s disclosures about the activities of the Turkish army, which were based upon British intelligence material. ‘Is this man God to know everything?’ was the Prince’s reaction, and Lawrence, then re–reading the Morte d‘Arthur, may have been reminded of how Merlin had used his supernatural powers to reveal to Arthur what his enemies were doing.21 As the conversation turned towards the situation in Rabigh it soon became clear that ‘Nobody knew the real situation,’ and so it was agreed that Lawrence and al Mizri would visit the port the next day.

  In the Seven Pillars version of the conference, Lawrence wrote that by the time it was over he had realised that Abdullah, Hussain’s Foreign Secretary and Commander–in–Chief, was not the leader he sought. This charming, sophisticated sybarite with a taste for European opera acquired in Cairo was not the Arab Garibaldi. He was:

  too cool, too humorous to be a prophet: especially the armed prophet, who, if history is true, succeeded in revolutions.... During the physical struggle, when singleness of eye and magnetism, devotion and self–sacrifice were needed, Abdullah would be a tool too complex for a single purpose.

  Having found that Hussain’s second son did not match up to his rigorous standards, Lawrence was left with the choice between his eldest, Ali, and third, Faisal. The fourth, Zaid, was too young and his mother’s Turkish blood disqualified him as an Arab nationalist leader. There were no other alternatives, since Hussain’s uprising was a revolution from the top, led by the aristocratic Hashemite family which was determined to keep power in its own hands. Of course if Lawrence went beyond the traditionalist Hashemites, he would be forced to consider Syrian and Iraqi nationalists, whose modernism and European radicalism were distasteful to him. What he really wanted was a pliant Arab susceptible to his own peculiar views of the national movement and what it should achieve.

  After the conference, Lawrence’s party joined Abdullah for dinner at the French Consulate, where their host was Colonel Edouard Brémond, the head of the French military mission which had arrived in Hejaz five weeks before. Brémond ‘is a sahib and I like him’ was Wilson’s reaction to his counterpart. The burly, bearded veteran of several North African campaigns found Wilson ‘a most agreeable brother-in-arms’, which was something of a distinction, since nearly every other British officer he had met in Egypt and Hejaz offered him a façade of politeness which never quite covered their francophobia.

  With Lawrence there was no attempt to hide his anti-French feelings. Looking back on their acquaintanceship, Brémond wrote, ‘He had an abundance of antipathies: he disliked armi
es; the occupation of the English soldier seemed to him “abject”. He did not like the French, nor the Catholics, nor Jerusalem.’ Lawrence was not to be trusted. When he returned from his visit to Faisal’s camp, Lawrence told Brémond that the Arabs were not unnerved by Turkish aircraft, but the Colonel, who had heard otherwise from reliable eyewitnesses, was not convinced and suspected an attempt to mislead him.22

  When he had first come to Hejaz, Brémond had hoped that Anglo–French co–operation would be the basis for the advancement of civilisation throughout the Middle East. What he heard and saw in Cairo and Jiddah soon disillusioned him. By the time he met Lawrence, he secretly feared that the Arabs would renege on their agreements with the Allies and do a deal with the Turks, and he was alarmed that, if Medina fell, the Arabs would move northwards and fan the nationalist fires in Syria, which would make it impossible for his government to assert its claims there after the war. Although Lawrence repeatedly claimed in the Seven Pillars that the Arabs were innocent of Anglo–French agreements on the future of Syria, the possibility of partition and French occupation was well known in Hejaz. Shortly before Lawrence’s visit, Brémond complained that Egyptian troops were disseminating anti–French propaganda, presumably picked up from the Cairo press, which speculated freely and usually accurately about what was in store for Syria.23

  Lawrence and the anti–French party (which included McMahon, Wingate, Wemyss, Murray and Clayton) objected to what they considered to be French meddling in a British affair. Brémond’s mission had been foisted on them by the Foreign Office in the interests of the alliance and its thinly disguised purpose was to ensure that French imperial interests in the Middle East would not be ignored or overridden. The French government considered Syria its legitimate prize, already won by the 26,000 French casualties during the Gallipoli campaign. This feeling was ignored by British officers like Lawrence who tried to pretend that the French dimension was immaterial or could be by-passed. For this reason, Brémond had not been invited to the conference with Abdullah, even though his government was offering the Arabs the service of Algerian Muslim troops.

  On 19 October, Lawrence and al Mizri took ship for Rabigh. When they landed the next morning, they found Colonel Parker at his wits’ end and expecting a catastrophe. There was, he told Wingate, an ‘utter lack of any organisation and co–ordination among the Arabs’ and they would shortly be overcome by the Turks, who ‘have the advantage of cohesion and single command as well as the custom of defeating Arabs’.24 Only British troops could save the port. The local Arab commander, the Amir Ali, was not, Lawrence quickly discovered, the natural leader he was seeking. He was a ‘pleasant gentleman, conscientious, without any great force of character, nervous and rather tired’–which exactly fits a general having the utmost difficulty in getting his men to dig trenches. Nevertheless, had Faisal failed to fulfil Lawrence’s ideal of a national leader, he confessed that he would have chosen Ali.

  Thanks to Abdullah’s intercession, Hussain had granted Lawrence permission to travel inland and meet Faisal. It was an extremely risky enterprise, since Lawrence would have to pass through the lands of the pro-Turkish Masruh Harb, and the Turks had been encouraging Arabs to assassinate British officers, whom they rightly identified as the mainstay of Arab resistance.25 The journey was also very uncomfortable, for Lawrence, still unused to such transport, rode a camel.

  He reached Faisal’s camp at al Hamra after an eighty-mile journey and by 24 October his first report was being wired from Rabigh to Cairo with details of Turkish preparations for their march on Rabigh. Three identified regiments were massing south-west of Medina and arrangements were in hand to lay a road between Medina and Bir Abas, the main Turkish base fifteen miles north-east of Faisal’s camp. The morale of Faisal’s 4,000 irregulars was sagging for, despite help from an Egyptian artillery battery, they were outgunned by the Turks. ‘Turkish artillery,’ Lawrence noted, ‘appears the most formidable to Faisal’s Arabs and they fear aeroplanes.’ The Arabs’ immediate requirements were mountain guns and Lewis light machine-guns with which they could arm mobile units that would harass the extended Turkish lines of communication.26 As Lawrence knew from the Arab Bureau wireless decrypts, Fahreddin was disturbed by the vulnerability of his communications, especially his lifeline to Damascus, the Hejaz railway.27

  In subsequent reports, Lawrence evaluated the Arab forces, assessed their potential and emphasised the harmful consequences which were bound to follow direct British intervention.28 Taking first the condition of the Arab armies, his confidence contrasted with the gloom of Parker and Wilson:

  Their morale is excellent, their tactics and manner of fighting admirably adapted to the very difficult country they are defending, and their leaders fully understand that to provoke a definite issue now is to lose the war, and to continue the present guerre de course is sooner or later to wear out the Turkish power of resistance, and force them back on a passive defence of Medina and its railway communication.

  Rabigh would fall only if the hill tribes who occupied the territory between it and Medina collapsed or shifted sides. At that moment they were ‘terribly afraid of the English occupation of Hejaz’ and so, if British troops landed, the movement would in all likelihood fall apart. If this happened, Lawrence feared that the French would intervene and make themselves sole protectors of Hussain. The Arabs, Lawrence insisted, ‘are our very good friends while we respect their independence’, but their knowledge of recent Middle East history was enough to make them apprehensive about British imperialism. This fear did not extend to British technology and they were ready to welcome all kinds of material assistance. Aeroplanes were ‘delightful toys’ which they wanted, as well as artillery and armoured cars, an addition to the Arab arsenal which had already been proposed by Colonel Parker.29

  Passing to political matters, Lawrence stressed the Arabs’ sense of political identity. ‘Tribal opinion in Hejaz struck me as intensely national, and more sophisticated than the appearance of the tribesmen led one to expect,’ and there was ‘little trace’ of Muslim fanaticism. Such observations were reassuring to his superiors who, like him, had hoped to divert Arab passions away from potentially harmful religious enthusiasm towards secular nationalism, which it was safe for Britain to patronise. Wearing his khaki uniform and, like all other European officers attached to the Hejaz Force, an Arab qalifeh, Lawrence found that some Arabs mistook him for a Syrian officer who had defected from the Turkish army. Exploiting their misunderstanding and speaking Arabic with a Syrian accent, Lawrence acted the part and talked to them about Syrian nationalism. ‘In my capacity as a Syrian’, Lawrence offered a sympathetic account of the recent executions of nationalists in Damascus, but got a stony response from his audience. ‘These men had sold their country to the French’ was their common reaction.

  As to future tribal loyalties, Lawrence considered the Harb and Juheina lukewarm towards Hussain while their neighbours, the Billi, held back ‘because they fear that the sharif means the British’, which of course strengthened his case against direct intervention. Disunity remained a stumbling-block and Hussain’s overall control was weak, since ‘One thing of which the tribes are convinced is that they have made an Arab Government and consequently each of them is it.’ Maybe Lawrence with his anarchist tendencies privately approved, but he felt obliged to add that, without careful British direction, the outcome of the rising might be a ‘discordant mosaic of provincial administration’.

  Lawrence found Faisal chary about allowing the creation of an Arab Bureau intelligence network in the region. This was a nuisance, but Lawrence thought that, if he stayed in the camp, information would be passed to him directly by Faisal’s spies. Faisal was ‘very difficult’ to advise, but his confidence and co-operation could be obtained with patience.30

  So much for Lawrence’s appreciation of what he had seen and heard in Hejaz. Clear, informative and freshly written, his reports had the authority of a perceptive man on the spot and therefore carried much weig
ht with his superiors. They also did much to put Lawrence in the way of the career he had chosen for himself as Faisal’s military and political counsellor. Their first meeting was described in the Seven Pillars in a passage heavy with historical significance.

  I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek–the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Faisal looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brown head-cloth bound with brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were dropped: and his black beard and colourless face were like a mask against the strange watchfulness of his body. His hands were crossed in front of him on his dagger.31

  The formalities of introductory small-talk over, Lawrence tested the warrior’s mettle.

  ‘And do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?’

  ‘Well: but it is far from Damascus.’

  The word had fallen like a sword in their midst. There was a quiver. Then everybody present stiffened where he sat, and held his breath silent for a minute. Some, perhaps, were dreaming of far–off success: others may have thought it a reflection of their latest defeat. Faisal at length lifted his eyes, smiling at me, and said, ‘Praise be to God, there are Turks nearer us than that.’

  This was the answer of the authentic paladin, the man whom Lawrence had been seeking. Whatever the truth of this exchange, the Prince, whom Storrs described as a personification of the ‘legendary noble Arab’, appealed to the romantic in Lawrence, who once compared his features to those of his hero, Richard the Lionheart, as they appeared on his tomb in Fonterevault Abbey.

  Lawrence also sensed Faisal’s latent qualities of leadership, especially over Arab tribesmen. He was not the first to recognise them for, as Faisal later told him, in October 1915 he had been singled out by von Oppenheim as a potential figurehead for a directed Pan–Islamic movement and the leader of an anti-British revolt in the Sudan. As late as March 1915, Faisal was considered sufficiently sympathetic to the Turco-German cause to be entrusted with letters of introduction to his father on behalf of the von Stotzingen mission.32