From Beyrouth the united British and Arab forces pushed on north to Baalbek, the City of the Sun, where, in the days of the decline of the Roman Empire, men had erected the mightiest temple on earth, the columns of which still remain one of the wonders of the world.
Still unsatisfied, Allenby’s armored cars and Feisal’s racing camelmen under the dashing Arab general, Nuri Said, swept on north until they had driven the Turks out of Aleppo, one of the most important strategical points in the East, so far as the Great War was concerned. And then, if the Turks had not put down their arms, they would have been driven north into the Golden Horn.
When Allenby and Lawrence captured Damascus and Aleppo and then cut the Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway, the dream of the kaiser and the Junkers for a Mitteleuropa reaching from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf vanished into thin air!
When Turkey threw in her lot with the kaiser, she asserted that she could mobilize an army of over a million men. But of that million some fifty per cent were of Arab stock, and from the outbreak of the Arabian revolution to the final collapse of Turkey it is estimated that approximately four hundred thousand of them deserted! The phenomenal number of desertions was due mainly to two factors: the Arab Nationalist propaganda which Lawrence and his associates had spread throughout the Near East, and the brilliant success of the Arabian revolution. In fact, the desertions alone more than repaid the Allies for backing the Shereefian cause.
In our swift journey north from Akaba to Aleppo with Lawrence, we have made no reference to the sacred city of Medina and the fate of the important Turkish garrison there. Although Holy Arabia was now no longer under Turkish rule, Ottoman forces still occupied the city famed for the tomb of the Prophet. To be sure, Feisal’s brother, Emir Abdullah, had long kept it surrounded with an army; and indeed the fact that the Turks had managed to hold on to Medina had proved to be one of the blessings of Allah for the Arabs because all of the supplies required by the garrison were shipped down across the desert from Syria, and Lawrence had seen to it that a very considerable part went to the Arabs instead of the intended destination. In fact Lawrence’s crop of tulips, planted along the Damascus-Medina railway, had brought forth a bountiful harvest of Turkish food-supplies, ammunition, and other military stores.
In explaining the reason for not driving the Turks out of Medina, writing in “The Army Quarterly,” Colonel Lawrence said: “ . . . we were so weak physically that we could not let the metaphysical weapon rust unused. We had won a province when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom; the presence or absence of the enemy was a secondary matter.
“These reasonings showed me that the idea of assaulting Medina, or even starving it quickly into surrender, was not in accord with our best strategy. We wanted the enemy to stay in Medina and in every other harmless place in the largest numbers. The factor of food would eventually confine him to the railways, but he was welcome to the Hedjaz railway, and the trans-Jordan railway, and the Palestine and Damascus and Aleppo railways, for the duration of the war, so long as he gave us the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the Arab world. If he showed a disposition to evacuate too soon, as a step to concentrating in the small area which his numbers would dominate effectively, then we would have to try and restore his confidence, not harshly, but by reducing our enterprises against him. Our ideal was to keep his railway just working, but only just, with the maximum of loss and discomfort to him.”
In fact, so little of what was sent down from Syria ever reached the garrison that for months prior to the Armistice this isolated Turkish force in Medina had been reduced to a diet of nothing but dates, gathered from the palms for which the oasis is celebrated. Even the roofs of all the houses in the city had been torn down and used for fuel. But still the garrison would not give in, for the commander, Fakhri-ed-din, was a courageous, determined, stubborn, and fanatical general.
Even when the news reached him that the combined British and Arab armies had captured Damascus and Aleppo, and the Turkish forces in Syria had been completely overwhelmed and compelled to sign an armistice, and even though Fakhri Pasha knew that it was futile for him to attempt to hold out any longer, since the war was all over and he and his garrison were isolated in the midst of the desert a thousand miles from Constantinople, still this Turkish tiger refused to acknowledge defeat.
Days went by, and then weeks elapsed. The Medina garrison was now reduced to worse straits than the British at Kut-el-Amara before the surrender of Townsend. Of the twenty thousand men who had made up the defending force, less than eleven thousand now remained. But still Fakhri Pasha swore on the Koran that rather than surrender to the Arabs and British he would blow up the Tomb of Mohammed and wipe out himself and all of his men. The British even guaranteed Fakhri that he and his troops would be protected from any possible rapacity of the Bedouin, but still the old tiger stood like adamant.
His troops, however, were not so fanatical and longed to get back to their homes in Anatolia. So they finally mutinied, arrested their gallant commander-in-chief, and surrendered the city to Emir Abdullah on January 10, 1919, months after the war was all over. Surely the name of General Fakhri-ed-din deserves a high place in Turkish history; for generations to come Arab mothers of Medina will use it as a means of hushing their babes.
After the dramatic surrender of Medina, Fakhri Pasha was no longer heard of in the Near East and seemed to have completely vanished from the picture. But sometime afterward, when we were traveling in little known parts of Central Asia, I encountered the defender of Medina in the city of Kabul, at the court of the emir of Afghanistan. He apparently had lost none of his fire, and in his capacity of Turkish ambassador to the Afghans was reported to be doing his utmost to keep the emir of Afghanistan from becoming friendly with the British in India.
If Turkey had a million fighting men with the fighting spirit of Fakhri-ed-din, she not only could regain all of her old provinces but could conquer the Near East and build up an empire that would surpass the ancient glory of the Great Moguls.
CHAPTER XXVI
TALES OF THE SECRET CORPS
ALTHOUGH none played quite so spectacular a part as Lawrence, there were at least a score of other dashing officers who distinguished themselves in Arabia, and a volume might well be, and in fact should be, written about the exploits of each.
All of Britain’s cooperation with the Arabs was arranged by a secret service department, the Near Eastern Intelligence Corps, created in the days when Sir Henry McMahon was still high commissioner for Egypt. Upon his retirement the control of this branch of the service passed on to his successor, Sir Reginald Wingate, and to Sir Edmund (now Field-Marshal Viscount) Allenby. Although these three distinguished men each personally encouraged the Arabs and took an active interest in the Shereefian revolt, no man among those who did not actually visit Arabia deserves more credit for the success of the revolution than Sir Gilbert F. Clayton, the organizer of this secret corps.
During the early days of the operations in the Near East, General Clayton made his headquarters in Cairo. There he gathered together a group of brilliant men who were each intimately acquainted with some corner of the Near East and with some one particular group of its bewildering mosaic of peoples. Among them were students of political affairs, men like Mark Sykes and Aubrey Herbert; then there was Hogarth, the famous antiquarian and geographer; Cornwallis and Joyce, veterans from the Sudan; Woolley and Lawrence, who were engaged in archaeology in Mesopotamia; and many others, including an engineer-adventurer of reckless daring by the name of Newcombe, whom Lawrence described to me as “the most devastatingly energetic person in the world.”
Although Colonel Lawrence had more train demolitions to his credit than any one else, he was not the man who first introduced the gentle sport of tulip-planting in Arabia. That honor must go to Lieutenant-Colonel S. F. Newcombe, who might even have exceeded Lawrence’s record as a train-wrecker and railway-demolisher had not his fearless spirit and love of fighting r
esulted in his spending the final stages of the war in a Turkish prison.
Prior to 1914 Newcombe had earned the reputation of being the ablest engineer in the British army. The railway line which crosses the Sudan Desert from the valley of the Nile to the Red Sea was one of his efforts. Always a pioneer, he had surveyed and blazed trails in Abyssinia, Persia, and various other regions that are mere blobs on the map to most of us.
So engrossed did he become in each job that he also gained renown for his forgetfulness as well as for his daring. After the capture of El Wedj, in the early days of the Hedjaz revolt, he was placed in temporary command of that port. Living with him were several other officials, but as the colonel happened to be the only one who had a servant they were all obliged to depend upon him for mess arrangements. But Newcombe attended to this unimportant phase of his day’s activity in the most casual manner, if at all, and when one o’clock came around and some one suggested, “Now for a bit of lunch,” it usually developed that Newcombe had forgotten to give instructions; and as a result they would have to compromise by telescoping lunch and tea at two o’clock.
Colonel Newcombe played a meteoric part in Arabian affairs for seven months and initiated the methods of railway destruction which Lawrence afterward applied so effectively. Although he donned Arab garb he was utterly un-Oriental in his ways and plunged headlong into his work both day and night at such a furious pace that no one could keep up with him. Then at the end of seven months in the desert he rejoined the British army in Palestine and in the attack on Beersheba carried out one of the most daring actions of the war.
Allenby’s cavalry and infantry were closing in on Beersheba from the west, south, and east. But to the north of that ancient home of Abraham runs the Beersheba-Hebron-Jerusalem Road, in those days the main artery of the Turkish line of communications. Newcombe, and one hundred Australians who had volunteered to follow him, crept through the Turkish lines by night just before the attack on Beersheba was launched. Their job was to attempt to cut the Hebron Road and hold up all Turkish supplies and reinforcements until Allenby and his army had routed the Turkish forces and taken Beersheba. It was a desperate thing to attempt, but for three days and nights Newcombe and his band of Australians remained astride that road and outfought fifty times their number. Eventually they were surrounded on a hill-top, and the few lucky enough to he still alive were captured.
It happened that Colonel Newcombe was the highest ranking British officer whom the Turks had thus far captured in Palestine, and so they made quite a fuss over him when he was paraded through the streets of Jerusalem on his way to prison in Anatolia.
But months later, after having survived smallpox and all of the other luxuries of Turkish prison life, the colonel escaped from his cell in Constantinople through the aid of a beautiful Syrian girl, who then concealed him in her home. This was shortly before the Turkish collapse, and Newcombe, preferring the thrills of life in disguise in Constantinople to the monotony that might follow complete escape from Turkey, remained in Stamboul in order to start an underground bureau of propaganda right in the heart of enemy territory. So successful was he that eventually he got into touch with a group of prominent Turks who were opposed to the pan-German policy of Talaat and Enver, and he even helped them arrange the Armistice which resulted in Turkey’s dropping out of the war. Then, as any born hero of melodrama would be expected to do as the climax to his romantic career, he married the beautiful Syrian girl who had helped him escape—and we hope lived happily ever after.
Among the men most actively engaged in arranging British aid for the Arabs and in advising them on military matters were Colonel C. E. Wilson, Colonel K. Cornwallis, Lieutenant-Colonel Allan Dawney, and Commander D. G. Hogarth. Colonel Wilson was the governor of the Red Sea Province of the Sudan when Shereef Hussein and his sons first overthrew the Turks in Mecca, and he engineered considerable surreptitious gun-running to keep the revolt alive until the Allies had time to make up their minds officially to help the Arabs. Colonel Wilson loaded British ships with ammunition and rifles at Port Sudan and then transferred them to sailing dhows in the middle of the Red Sea. These dhows then landed the supplies secretly along the Arabian coast, where they were distributed to the Bedouins. But after the fall of Mecca and Jeddah he left his administrative work in the Sudan and crossed over to Jeddah, where he remained in charge of British activities in the southern Hedjaz and as adviser to Shereef Hussein until the termination of the war. In fact it was Colonel Wilson, in company with General Clayton and Ronald Storrs, the Oriental secretary to the high commissioner for Egypt, who opened up the first negotiations between Britain and the leaders of the Arab revolt. In spite of poor health Colonel Wilson did particularly fine work.
Cornwallis, Dawney, and Hogarth spent the most of their time at headquarters in Cairo at what was known as the Arab Bureau. Colonel Cornwallis, who after the war was sent to Mesopotamia as one of the principal British advisers to Feisal when that emir was proclaimed king in Bagdad, was in charge of the Arab Bureau. He personally superintended the political side of the work which cooperation with the Arabs entailed, such as official negotiations between Britain and the newly established government of the kingdom of the Hedjaz, and the important business of the subsidy which was granted to King Hussein to enable him to continue his campaign. In addition Colonel Cornwallis supervised the extremely important work of winning recruits for the Shereefian army from the Ottoman troops of Arab blood who were in the prison-camps of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. Lawrence often referred to the genius of Cornwallis and seemed to regard him as indispensable to Arab success.
Another brilliant officer who divided his time between the Arab Bureau in Cairo, the desert, and Allenby’s headquarters in Palestine was Lieutenant-Colonel Allan Dawney of the Coldstream Guards. Although responsible for putting the Arabian campaign on a proper and efficient military basis for personnel and service of supply, Dawney’s main task was that of keeping Emir Feisal, Colonel Lawrence, and the other leaders in Arabia in constant touch with Allenby. Lawrence and he were intimate friends and worked in perfect harmony. Dawney did everything possible to wangle the equipment and everything else that Lawrence required. He also saw to it that his own visits to Arabia allowed him enough time to take part in a few raids, for he too was an ardent tulip-planter.
But so unusual was the nature of the desert war that it required the diplomatic genius of at least one man to act as an intermediary between Arabia and the Imperial Government in London. This delicate task was left to a scholarly man of international re-noun whose suggestions could therefore hardly be disregarded even by a prime minister and his War Cabinet. Sir Gilbert Clayton here again proved himself a genius at selecting men by choosing D. G. Hogarth, head of the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford, for this post, and in Hogarth he not only picked a man famous as an antiquarian and archaeologist but one who had long been looked upon as the foremost living authority on Arabia. Here again Lawrence was favored by fortune in being associated with one who could hardly have been more ideally qualified, for Commander Hogarth (he was given an honorary naval commission to increase his official prestige) had known Lawrence from childhood and had given him his start in the field of archæology. Throughout the campaign Commander Hogarth was looked upon by Lawrence and his colleagues as their counselor, philosopher, and mediator whose delicate task it was to justify the various steps taken in Arabia to the General Staff and the War Cabinet. He also edited the secret publication at headquarters in Cairo called “The Arab Bulletin,” of which only about four copies per edition were printed: one for Lloyd George and his Cabinet, one for Allenby and staff, one for Lawrence and associates in the desert, and one for the file at the Arab Bureau.
CHAPTER XXVII
JOYCE & CO., AND THE ARABIAN KNIGHTS OF THE AIR
THE forces of the king of the Hedjaz, as previously stated, included both regulars and irregulars; the latter were Bedouins mounted on camels and horses, while the former were deserters from the Tu
rkish army, men of Arab blood con scripted into the Ottoman armies and afterward captured by the British in Palestine and Mesopotamia, There were nearly twenty thousand regulars specially trained as infantry to attack those fortified positions which could not be taken by Lawrence’s irregulars; they were under the leadership of Lieutenant-Colonel P. C. Joyce, who like Lawrence was an Irishman, and who next to Lawrence probably played a more important rôle in the campaign than any one else. Unlike Lawrence, Joyce was a soldier by profession, an officer in the Connaught Rangers with a splendid record for service in the Boer War and in Egypt and the Sudan. Physically there was a further difference between them, for while Lawrence stood barely five feet three his colleague loomed well over six feet three. None hut the largest ship of the desert could navigate under Joyce’s bulk, so that he seldom mounted a camel. But when he did, it looked like one mountain on top of another.
Colonel Joyce spent nearly a year building up an army to send against the strongly fortified city of Medina. It was to be under the leadership of Emir Ali. At last, when by the grace of Allah all seemed in readiness, a courier from Emir Ali handed a message to Joyce to be forwarded on to his Majesty the king in Mecca with all possible despatch. The message read:
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 23
