To which, after a pause, Lawrence replied, “Well; but it is far from Damascus.”
To quote Lawrence, his words fell “like a sword into their midst,” and all those in the room held their breath for a silent moment. Damascus was their dream—the capital of an Arab state, or nation, that would stretch from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
Then Feisal smiled, and said, “Praise be to God, there are Turks nearer us than that.”
What Feisal thought of Lawrence was—and would always be—harder to know. The bond between them would grow stronger than either of them could have foreseen that day, but Feisal’s personality was of necessity farmore opaque than Lawrence’s—he was a prince, of a great and proud ruling family trapped between its Arab rivals in the desert (of whom the most dangerous was the future king of Saudi Arabia, ibn Saud*), and its Turkish overlords in Constantinople. Feisal was a politician, a man skilled at hiding his emotions and veiling his thoughts, hardly one to trust a stranger, and certainly not one who would imagine that a British officer might put Arab interests before those of his own country. At their very first meeting, Feisal took in Lawrence’s admiration for his own person, his unusual knowledge of Arab ways, his lack of racial prejudice toward Arabs, and his undisguised enthusiasm for the Arab cause; but Feisal was cautious by nature, not impulsive, except in the heat of battle, and he cannot initially have been sure why this young Englishman had been sent to him. Yet Feisal came quickly to feel affection, trust, and respect for Lawrence, and from the first instant was encouraged by his arrival at Wadi Safra, as might not have been the case had Lawrence been a more conventional British officer. The British were powerful friends and allies, but that is not to say Feisal trusted them completely, any more than he trusted any other European colonial power with ambitions in the Near East—France, for example.
The two men were close in age—Lawrence was twenty-eight, Feisal thirty-three—but Feisal had grown up in a world of cruelty, treachery, and deceit, where the penalty for anti-Turkish activity ranged from exile to torture and public hanging. He had been educated in Constantinople, sat as a member in the Turkish parliament, served as his father’s emissary to the Turkish government, and been a combination of guest and hostage for his father’s good behavior to Ahmed Jemal Pasha, one of the triumvirate that ruled Turkey, as well as the Turkish overlord of Syria and all those parts of the Ottoman Empire in which the Arabs were a majority. (Jemal Pasha was known among Arabs as al-Saffah—the blood shedder, or the butcher.) Feisal had seen his friends and coconspirators, fellow members of Arab secret societies proscribed by the Turks, executed in mass hangings carried out in public by Jemal’s order, and had been obliged to watch them die without shedding a tear or letting his expression betray his emotions.* His was neither a simple nor a transparent character.
Nor, of course, was Lawrence’s; this is perhaps why they got on well from the beginning. Even to somebody as congenitally suspicious as Feisal, it was at once obvious that Lawrence was not a spy in any conventional meaning of the word. He was there to report what he saw, certainly, but his sympathy was already for the Arabs, and his attitude was supportive. A more professional military man might have dwelled on the fact that Feisal’s army had been retreating ever since its humiliating failure to take Medina, which—together with the devastating effects of Turkish artillery, machine guns, and aircraft on poorly armed mounted tribesmen with no experience of the power of modern weapons and high explosives†—had deeply shaken the morale and self-confidence of Feisal’s troops. Lawrence, on the contrary, was sympathetic rather than critical. He understood that supplies were slow to reach Feisal’s army partly because neither Abdulla in Mecca nor Ali in Rabegh had any sense of urgency or any professional supply officers to organize efficiently the flow of flour, ammunition, and gold; and that because Feisal lacked machine guns, mortars, and mountain artillery (which could be broken down into pieces, and carried by camels), he could hardly hope to meet the Turks on equal terms. Had Lawrence himself been a spit-and-polish regular, the state of the Arab army might have dismayed or appalled him, but he was not.
In fact, the only signs of spit and polish in sight were the professionally neat rows of tents of an Egyptian army unit sent from the Sudan by General Wingate to support the Arabs with machine guns and some antiquated short-range light artillery, no match for the Turks’ modern German field guns and howitzers. The Egyptians had been picked because they were Muslims and it was thought that the Arabs would resent their presence less than that of British troops, but in fact the Arabs thought them effete townsmen, over-disciplined by their officers, and too easily upset when Arabs stole from them,* for the Egyptians received ample British army rations. For their part, the Egyptian regulars greatly preferred the Turks to the desert vagabonds, whom they held in contempt. The Egyptians’ esprit de corps was not improved by the fact that the Turks had a reputation for cutting the throat of any wounded left behind by Feisal’s army, without necessarily discriminating between Egyptians and Arabs.
Lawrence took careful notes of everything he saw—the unhappiness of the Egyptians; the shortage of rice, barley, and flour; the number of men still armed with ancient muzzle loaders or single-shot rifles rather than modern bolt-action British Lee-Enfields or Turkish Mausers. Had he been educated at Sandhurst instead of Jesus College, Oxford, his eye for military detail and deficiencies could hardly have been sharper. He got from Feisal and Feisal’s officers a detailed account of the failed attack on Medina, including the fact—which Feisal did not mention, but those around him did—that when the Turkish artillery had opened fire, driving the Arabs into retreat, Feisal himself had ridden up and down through the barrage trying to rally the fleeing tribesmen, a gesture worthy of Bonaparte’s at the crossing of the Rivoli, but in this case unsuccessful. The attack on Medina had been “a desperate measure,” Lawrence concluded, more desperate than was appreciated in Cairo and London. When one of the local tribes, the Beni Ali, discouraged by the Turkish artillery fire, had offered to surrender “if their villages were spared,” the Turkish commander, Fakhri Pasha, had heard them out patiently, carrying on a long, polite, slow negotiation in the eastern manner, while in the meantime his troops assaulted one of the Beni Ali villages, raped the women, murdered “everything within its walls"—men, women, and children—then set fire to the houses and threw the bodies of the hundreds they had killed into the flames.
Fakhri Pasha and his troops had played a significant role in the bloody Turkish genocide of the Armenians; they were now determined to teach an equally harsh lesson to the Arabs. Though the Arabs were capable of great cruelty, it was a strict rule of desert warfare that the women and children of your enemy were spared. This was a new kind of war to them.
Feisal talked strategy to Lawrence, and found that their minds worked as one. Like Lawrence, he could see very clearly the routes the Turks could use to isolate Rabegh and advance on Mecca, once they concentrated their forces. Neither Lawrence nor Feisal was a professional soldier, but Lawrence had a good knowledge of strategy; and Feisal was a realistic judge of what his own troops could do (as well as what they could not), and knew how to lead and to keep together the different tribes who would otherwise have been at one another’s throat. Feisal was confident that, given better weapons and modern artillery, he could stop the Turks from taking Mecca, but he still imagined that if he moved in concert with Ali from Rabegh and Abdulla from Mecca, Medina could be taken by a three-pronged attack. Lawrence already doubted the wisdom of this, and would soon think of Medina not as a danger spot to be eliminated, but as a fatal trap for the Turks.
The two days that Lawrence spent with Feisal’s army in Wadi Safra were of critical importance both to him and to the future of the Arab Revolt. First, he was the only British officer who had actually seen Feisal’s Arab army “in the field"; second, he had made his mind up about Feisal—here was the prophetlike figure he had been searching for and had failedto find in Feisal’s brothers. Perhaps most important, Lawren
ce had established himself in Feisal’s mind as the one man who could and would persuade the British to send the equipment, supplies, and instructors that the Arab army so desperately needed. Lawrence was very frank about what he thought could (and could not) be had from Cairo, but he also, rather recklessly, took on himself the responsibility for artillery, light machine guns, and so on to the Arabs—an amazingly bold commitment for a temporary second-lieutenant and acting staff captain.
Despite the fact that the two men got along well together, there were still areas of difficulty that lay unplumbed between them. Feisal, for example, wished aloud somewhat wistfully that Britain was not such a “disproportionate” ally, and remarked that while the Hejaz might look barren, so did the Sudan, yet the British had taken it anyway. “They hunger,” he said, “for desolate lands.” The Arabs, he pointed out, had no desire to exchange being Turkish subjects for becoming British subjects. There also hovered between them the much thornier subject of British, French, and Russian ambitions in the Middle East.
Lawrence already knew of the existence of the Sykes-Picot agreement. Although it was supposedly secret, it was the kind of thing that was impossible to hide in the close world of military and political intelligence in Cairo, where everybody knew everyone else and the atmosphere was that of a Senior Common Room at Oxford. Lawrence may not, at this stage, have known every detail of the agreement, but he certainly knew that in May 1916 Sir Mark Sykes, a wealthy Conservative member of Parliament who was something of a passionate traveler in the Ottoman Empire, and François Georges-Picot, a French diplomat who at the outbreak of war was the French consul in Beirut, had negotiated a Franco-British agreement apportioning to their respective countries large areas of the Ottoman Empire. France was to get an area (the Blue Zone) consisting of what is now Lebanon and a “zone of influence” including Syria and extending eastward to include Mosul, in what is now Iraq, and a large area to the north; Britain was to get an area (the Red Zone) thatwould include the rest of what is now Iraq, from Baghdad to Basra, as well as the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms and a “zone of influence” extending westward to include what is now Jordan.
Once Sykes and Picot brought the agreement to Petrograd for the approval of the czarist government, they found themselves obliged to cut the Russians in on the deal—imperial Russia insisted on fulfilling its old ambition of annexing Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, as well as much of Armenia, and also insisted that control of the Holy Land—i.e., Palestine—be shared among the three powers, so as to place the Christian holy sites under the protection of France (nominally Catholic), Russia (representing the Russian, Greek, and Serbian Orthodox churches), and Great Britain (Protestant) and thus to satisfy religious opinion in the three major Christian faiths. In November 1917 the situation would be further complicated by two events. First, immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they published all of imperial Russia’s secret treaties, to the great embarrassment of the French and the British. Second, in London the Times published Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild, stating publicly that the British government would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This letter injected a further religious and racial element into an area which also contained Muslim holy sites and a largely Muslim population, and which most Arabs believed was part of the territory they were fighting for.
Though both Lawrence and Feisal would later claim ignorance of the Sykes-Picot agreement, this was certainly not true of the former, and probably not true of the latter. The British, in their endless negotiations with Sharif Hussein, had always been careful to avoid agreeing to any specific frontiers for “the Arab nation,” and had pointed out, though without much emphasis or detail, that France and Britain had certain “historic” claims to territory in the Ottoman Empire that would have to be respected. This insistence that the division of the spoils should come after the Allies’ victory was intended in part to get the Arabs fighting. The idea left floating delicately in the air, and expressed withexquisite diplomatic tact by Kitchener, Wilson, Storrs, and others, was that the harder the Arabs fought, the more they might hope to claim at the peace table; but it was also a reaction to Sharif Hussein’s breathtaking and meticulously detailed demand to be made king of an Arab nation stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and including all of what is now Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
Eager to get the Arabs to start fighting the Turks, the British did not deny the sharif’s claims; they merely cautioned him that they and the French would have to be satisfied, and that discussion of the exact frontiers of an Arab nation would have to wait until the peace conference following the Allies’ victory. In the meantime, Britain had already taken and occupied a sizable part of Mesopotamia, including Basra and Baghdad, in part to ensure a steady supply of oil for the Royal Navy, and also wanted control of the approaches to the Suez Canal; France had, or claimed, strong historic ties with Lebanon and Syria going back to the days of the Crusades; and neither country wished to see Jerusalem in Arab hands.
The sharif of Mecca was only too well aware of the fact that Britain, France, and Russia would have to be satisfied, as was his son Abdulla, who had been directly involved in the negotiations, so it seems likely that some hint of the problem would have made its way to Feisal, though the sharif’s policy toward his allies and his sons was to simply ignore what he didn’t want to hear. In much the same way, the sharif affected to ignore the fact that his rivals in the Arabian Peninsula, particularly ibn Saud, as well as the educated and highly politicized elite in Damascus, were hardly likely to accept him as their king.
Lawrence’s guilt at encouraging the Arabs to fight even though he knew they were not going to get what they wanted (and what they thought they had been promised) would become increasingly severe as the war went on and as his place in the Arab Revolt increased in importance. It was the reason why he would refuse to accept any of the honors and decorations he was awarded; it was at the root of his self-disgust and shame;it would eventually make him follow a strategy of his own, urging Feisal and the Arabs on in an effort to reach Damascus before the British or the French entered the city, and declare an independent Arab nation whose existence could not be denied at the peace conference—a grand, sublime gesture would, he hoped, render the Sykes-Picot agreement null and void in the eyes of the world.
Lawrence’s mention of Damascus when he first met Feisal was thus both a challenge and the equivalent of a knowing wink: an indication that here, at least, was one Englishman who understood what Feisal really wanted—a so-called “Greater Syria,” long the ambition of Arab nationalists, which would include Lebanon (and its ports) as its Mediterranean seacoast and, of course, Damascus as its capital. Attacking Medina, even taking it, would hardly get Feisal any nearer to Damascus than he was at Wadi Safra. Medina was more than 800 miles from Damascus, and so long as Feisal’s army was stuck in the desert halfway between Medina and Mecca, with no roads or railway to supply it, Damascus might as well have been on the moon. The British—accompanied by just enough French officers and French Muslim North African specialist units to stake out France’s claim to Lebanon and Syria when they got there—were still trying to break through the Turkish lines at Gaza, which was only 175 miles away from Damascus as the crow flies. It was not enough for Feisal and his brothers merely to defend Mecca against Fakhri Pasha. If the Arab army, whatever its deficiencies, could not move north, leapfrogging past Medina, and win some highly publicized victories along the way, Hussein’s claim to a kingdom and the hopes of Arab nationalists would both be stillborn.
Lawrence and Feisal understood each other on this point, but it was not yet clear to Feisal how to accomplish the goal with the ill-armed and unreliable forces at his command. It was Lawrence’s strategic imagination, and his determination to make the British high command in Cairo not only accept his vision but finance and support what most of this command thought was unlikely o
r impossible, that would make himself and Feisal famous within a year and start Feisal on a path that would reshapethe Middle East and lead to the creation of new nations and frontiers that are still in place today, for better or for worse.*
At the end of their second long talk together, Lawrence promised to return, if he was allowed to, after he had seen to Feisal’s needs, and requested from Feisal an escort to take him to Yenbo, rather than back to Rabegh. This was an interesting decision, since it shows how Lawrence’s mind worked. The port of Yenbo was in Arab hands, though lightly and precariously held, but it was more than 100 miles north of Rabegh, and in fact actually behind Medina. The ride to Yenbo was considerably longer and more difficult than the ride back to Rabegh, but it was at Yenbo that he had arranged to be picked up by the Royal Navy.
He left Hamra at sunset, accompanied by an escort of fourteen handpicked tribesmen; rode down the Wadi Safra back to the village of Kharma in the darkness; then turned right and climbed up a steep “side valley,” full of thorn and brushwood, onto an ancient stone causeway, an old pilgrim route, until they reached a well and a ruined fort, where they rested. At daylight they moved on again through a lunar landscape of hardened lava, “huge crags of flowing surface but with a bent and twisted texture, as though it had been played with oddly while soft,” set in a sea of shifting sand dunes. They began riding quickly—to Lawrence’s great discomfort, for he was not yet accustomed to the motions of a swiftly moving camel—onward into the intense heat of the day over “glassy sand mixed with shingle,” where the reflected sunlight soon became unbearable, and each drop of sweat coursing down his face was a torture.
From there they traveled on to Wadi Yenbo, a deep, wide valley, scoured by flash floods, where heat mirages shimmered before their eyes. They rested during the worst heat of the day under the sparse branches ofan acacia tree, then rode on through sand and shingle until they halted for the night, and felt at last like a balm “a salt wind from the sea blowing over our chafed faces.” After baking bread and boiling coffee, they rested until two in the morning, then moved on over rough country—hard, slow going until they arrived at a salt flat, which they raced over, reaching the gates of Yenbo, perched high above the salt flat on a coral cliff, at six in the morning.
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