O Father of Mercies and Lord of the Earth, greetings from thy son:
Thy heroic army awaits but the command for its victorious advance upon the Turks. Yet for lack of one mere detail are we delayed. Our valorous officers swear that it would be futile for them to advance without swords. Wherefore I implore thee to send thirty of thy Damascus blades in scabbards of beaten gold in order that they may be satisfied.
THY SLAVE.
But fortunately Colonel Joyce proved himself capable of coping with the thousand and one unexpected difficulties that arose, for in addition to his ability to speak Arabic he had many other valuable qualifications. For instance he was tactful and cool and utterly imperturbable, could not be hustled under any circumstances, was painstaking, and above all patient beyond the normal vanishing-point of patience as practised in the Occident. So while Lawrence spent his time with his Bedouin rabble, Joyce demonstrated his military ability by building up the auxiliary force of regulars from the medley of Syrians, Palestinians, and Bagdadis who were attracted to the Shereefian banner. But he also now and then found time to join Lawrence on a raid or to lead a demolition expedition of his own. In fact on one occasion he destroyed seven small bridges and tore up two thousand rails on the Turkish railway, between the stations of Toweira and Hedia.
There were a number of other officers who fought with the Arabs and took part in the fascinating game of planting tulips and blowing up the Turkish railway. Among these were Lieutenant-Colonel W. F, Stirling, Major P. G. W. Maynard of the Irish Rifles, who had been a judge in a remote corner of the Sudan, Major H. W. Young, Major William E. Marshall, Captain E. Scott Higgins, Captain H. S. Hornby, and Lieutenant H. Garland, who taught demolition to the Arabs. Nearly all of the men who fought in Arabia had annexed various military honors long before they were selected to play a part in the war in the Land of the Arabian Nights, but none had been quite so generously decorated as Stirling, who not only was a veteran of the South African War but had found time to serve with high distinction in the Royal Flying Corps before he crashed and nearly lost his life while on a reconnaissance flight over one of the most inhospitable corners of Arabia. Doomed to serve the remainder of the war on the ground, he was selected as the right type of man for the Hedjaz show. He joined the Arabs just as they were about to invade Syria and was with Lawrence when the latter reached Damascus. Young, formerly of the Intelligence Department in Mesopotamia, was another who reveled in the manipulation of high explosives. During the final stage of the campaign he took over the all-important job of organizing the transport system, but among his numerous achievements by no means the least was the success he met in raising a silky beard that was the envy of his colleagues and which transformed him into an idea] sheik.
Perhaps the most universally liked, both by British and Arabs, of all the Europeans who took part in the desert war was Lawrence’s tent-mate and intimate friend, an optimistic Scot of the Royal Army Medical Corps with a Highland brogue thicker than Harry Lauder’s, who divided his affections between his bacillus menagerie and tulip-planting. Under him were two other medical men, Captains Ramsay and McKibbin. But Major Marshall, although a quiet, shy man of science whose whole life had been devoted to the realm of test-tubes, microscopes, and a search for mysterious microbes in the jungles of tropical Africa, had proved himself enough of a soldier to win the Military Cross in the battle of the Somme and other honors in Arabia. When Lawrence was away on an expedition Marshall would transform their tent at Akaba into a zoo for cholera, typhus, and plague bacillus. Incidentally he usually managed to contract most of the diseases the mysteries of which he sought to solve. Then on his trips into the desert he would fill his stretchers with high explosives and after a raid would throw out all the remaining dynamite and substitute the wounded. After inflicting casualties among the Turks he would proceed to bandage them up. So successful was he as a combined medical officer and soldier that after the war he was appointed adviser to the king of the Hedjaz and for several years remained at Jeddah as the British resident.
But of all the tulip-planters there was certainly none more daring than Captain H. S. Hornby, who like Newcombe had been an engineer. He had received his preliminary schooling in adventure on the Gold Coast, in the heart of the Congo, and in other out-of-the-way corners of the earth, and so reckless was he that even the wild Bedouins regarded him as stark mad. But his career as a dynamiter of trains came to an untimely end when a part of a mine exploded in his face, leaving him partially blind and deaf. The Arabs who were with him had great difficulty in getting him back to Akaba alive, and from then on he spent his time in administrative work.
At the base-camp in Akaba were two other officers, Major T. H. Scott, of the Inniskilling Fusiliers, and Captain Raymond Goslett. Scott specialized in mirth and money, while Goslett dispensed everything from boots to flour. In Scott’s tent were boxes of sovereigns, gold conscripted from every corner of the Empire to help arouse enthusiasm in the breasts of the temperamental Bedouins whenever the spirits of those rather fickle gentlemen began to flag. The only guardian of all these boxes of golden “goblins” was a dog about the size of a squirrel, which Major Scott called his Bulgarian weasel-hound. His associate, Captain Goslett, was the czar of the supply and commissary department, excepting when Auda Abu Tayi or some of Lawrence’s other brigands could no longer resist the temptation of looting their own base-camp.
Then there were the officers in command of the armored cars and light mobile artillery: Captains Gillman, Dowsett, and Brodie, and Lieutenants Greenhill, Wade, and Pascoe. Although seriously handicapped by lack of roads, they somehow managed to scale the barren mountains and get into action on many occasions, and they were mixed up in innumerable thrilling adventures during the latter stages of the campaign.
But of all the unpleasant jobs, surely the airmen who were sent down to satisfy the Arabs, who insisted that their army like the Turks should have birds that laid explosive eggs, were the least to be envied. With Akaba as their base-camp they would sally forth to locate approaching Turkish patrols and bomb the enemy garrisons along the Damascus-Medina Railway. Nowhere in the world have aviators ever taken greater risks except perhaps in East Africa and on the Afghan frontier. When a plane left Akaba the pilot and observer knew full well that if they encountered engine-trouble they were in for it, because they were constantly flying over unexplored, unmapped country, as uninviting as the mountains of the moon. On one occasion when we were trekking across the mountains of the Edom on our way to the “rose-red city of Petra,” we heard the drone of a battle-plane overhead, and as we gazed about at that jagged, unfriendly landscape, with the blue Arabian sky punctured everywhere by sharp lava mountains, our admiration for those reckless British Elijahs, soaring thousands of feet above us, increased appreciably.
These sheiks of the air were first under a Captain Harold Furness-Williams; although during the later stages of the campaign an embryo parson, Captain Victor Siddons, became the flight-commander. On one occasion Furness-Williams flew from Egypt to Arabia, by way of the Sinai desert. Hung around the fuselage and back struts he carried a precious cargo consisting of four dozen bottles of Bass, which his fellow-sufferers in that thirsty land had commissioned him to bring. But under the eyes of his expectant friends the unfortunate aviator made a bad landing, the plane turned over, and every bottle was smashed. They told him that they would sooner have seen his blood soaking into the sands of the desert than that priceless liquid.
Captain Furness-Williams and his associates spent a portion of their spare time in taking the Arab chiefs for joy-rides. They gave old Auda Abu Tayi his first “flip,” and that cheerful chieftain, who had already demonstrated his courage by marrying twenty-eight wives, with the inborn poetic spirit of the desert declared upon his return to earth that he deeply regretted he had failed to take his rifle aloft with him. Never, he said, had he had such a splendid opportunity for taking pot-shots at all his “friends” in Akaba.
Among the Arabian knights of
the air were Lieutenants Divers, Makins, Oldfield, Sefi, and several others, but the only one of them who went right through the campaign to Damascus was Lieutenant Junor, who dropped bombs during nearly every Arab battle and survived to play a similar rôle on the equally wild Afghan Frontier in India long after the World War.
In the southern area were a number of other officers of whom I saw little or nothing, men like Colonel A. C. Parker, a nephew of Kitchener, who was on the Red Sea coast for a short time and then appointed governor of the vast mountain and desert region called the Sinai Peninsula, where the children of Israel wandered for forty years. There also was Lieutenant-Colonel J. R. Bassett, transferred to Arabia from the War Office in London, who was second in command to Colonel Wilson at. Jeddah, and Major H. J. Goldie, who described his headquarters in Jeddah as so hot that nothing could live there but human beings, and they could just gasp. Over around Medina, where Emir Abdullah’s army made things lively for the large Turkish garrison, were two more demolition experts, Majors W. A. Davenport and H. St. J. Garrood.
But this brief enumeration of the other Europeans who played a part in the desert war would not be complete without reference to the French. Early in September, 1916, the French indicated their faith in the Arab cause by sending a mission to Jeddah under the leadership of a Colonel Bremond. The French were at a great disadvantage simply because their Government could not give them sufficient backing and the British had to furnish nearly everything for them. This made it difficult for them to get a strong hold over the Arabs, because the latter were aware of the circumstances. But Captain Pisani, who led a detachment of French Algerians throughout the campaign, had had unlimited experience in the Moroccan Desert and did splendid sporting work against the Turkish railway in 1917, and again in the final operations around Deraa in 1918.
The only other foreigners in the Hedjaz were some mixed Egyptian troops and a Mohammedan machine-gun section from India.
One of the finest sporting achievements during the war in the Near East was accomplished by a British civilian official, a Mr. H. St. John Philby, who played no part in the Hedjaz campaign, but who startled King Hussein one day by turning up in Bedouin costume at his summer capital of Taif. Philby had been sent on a secret mission to the court of Ibn Saud in the very heart of Central Arabia, and he had accomplished the remarkable feat of trekking right across Arabia from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through a totally unknown region. Lawrence was so impressed with Philby’s achievement and his skill in dealing with the Bedouins, that after the war he was instrumental in having Philby appointed adviser to the sultan of Transjordania.
Perhaps the most genuine-looking brigand of all the Europeans who fought in the Arab rebellion was the Earl of Winterton. He wore a huge beard and an Arab head-cloth and rode a tall racing-camel bedecked with gorgeous trappings. Lord Winterton turned out to be as much of a fire-eater in the field as he was back home in the House of Commons when on one occasion a member from the Whitechapel district interrupted him while he was making a speech. The earl wheeled round, gave the disturber a withering look, and shouted, “Silence in the Ghetto,” and the House simply howled.
In the desert the noble earl managed to look as disreputable as possible and in appearance was as successful a brigand as Auda Abu Tayi himself. One day Lord Winterton in his sheik’s regalia came riding along on his camel on his way from Jaffa to Allenby’s headquarters near Ramleh. There is a particularly attractive stretch of road between those two Palestinian cities, but during the war all natives on camels or donkeys or on foot were instructed to take a side path so that the road could he reserved for the interminable caravans of motor-lorries and whizzing staff cars. Right up the middle of that sacred motor highway came Lord Winterton, ambling along on his camel on a mission from the Arab army to Allenby. A military police sergeant, on point duty directing traffic, saw him and shouted, “Get off the road, you black bounder!” Winterton placidly continued on his way; he was not accustomed to being addressed with such levity and naturally assumed that the sergeant was speaking to some one else. But the latter shouted again: “I say, you black beggar,——,——, can’t you hear me talking to you? I said get off this road and over there where you belong.”
Winterton pulled up his dromedary at this and replied as only one of his social standing could reply: “Evidently, old chap, you don’t know who I am. I am a major, a member of Parliament, and an earl!” Whereupon the sergeant nearly collapsed but managed to salute weakly and stammer: “Proceed, my lord, proceed,” or words to that effect.
The most of the officers in Arabia were either colonels, lieutenant-colonels, or majors. But rank made very little difference, and there was a freemasonry among them such as did not exist on any other front. Saluting was taboo, and in addressing each other titles were dispensed with. Even when Lawrence had the opportunity to become a general he declined the honor and gave as his reason that he preferred not to be elevated in rank beyond his associates. Each man had his own task and went his own way. Each was a free-lance and conducted himself with much the same freedom as did the knights of old.
In a letter written home from Arabia during the latter part of the desert war by Colonel R. V. Buxton, who was in command of the Camel Corps sent over from Palestine to cooperate with the Shereefian force, this army officer said of Lawrence: “He is the most wonderful of fellows and is our guide, philosopher, and friend. Although he is only a boy to look at and has a very quiet manner, he is known to every Arab in this country for his exploits. He lives entirely with them, wears their clothes, and eats only their food. He always travels in spotless white and in fact reminds one of the Prophet. He has practically started all this movement here and is a wonderful enthusiast.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
FEISAL AND LAWRENCE AT THE BATTLE OF PARIS
AFTER the fall of Damascus and the complete overthrow of the Turkish armies, and after he had helped establish a provisional government for his friend Emir Feisal, young Lawrence laid aside the curved gold sword of a prince of Mecca, packed his pure white robes and his richly brocaded ones, in which he had been received with all the honor due an Arab shereef, and hurried to London. His penetrating eyes had pierced to the end of an epoch-making perspective, involving empires and dynasties and a new balance of power in the Near East. He had achieved the seemingly impossible; had united desert tribes that had sworn eternal enmity to one another; had won them over to the Allied cause and helped Allenby put an end to German and Turkish ambitions for Near Eastern mastery.
But Lawrence realized that his work was not yet finished. He was determined that the great powers should not forget the promises made to their Arab allies. The battle of the peace conference was still to be fought. So Lawrence returned to Europe to prepare for the arrival of the Arab delegates.
An amusing incident occurred when Lawrence passed through Marseilles, where he landed in order to travel overland to London. He stepped into the British railway transport officer’s headquarters at the station to inquire the time of the next through train to Le Havre. It was a drizzly day, and Lawrence was wearing a dingy trench-coat, without insignia, over his uniform. Although Lawrence was a full colonel at this time, he still looked like an insignificant shave-tail lieutenant. The R.T.O. happened to be a lieutenant-colonel, a huge fellow, with a fierce mustache. When his visitor asked quietly about trains, the R.T.O. glanced up, gave Lawrence a withering look, and blusteringly told him that he could n’t be bothered and that Lawrence should see his assistant. Without a word Lawrence walked out, but in the next room he took off his water-proof, and strolled right back into the R.T.O.’s august presence again, this time saying even more quietly than before, “What time did you say the next rapid leaves for Le Havre?” For the moment the R.T.O. looked as though he would like to wring Lawrence’s neck, but, catching a glimpse of the crown and two stars on his caller’s shoulder, he jumped to his feet, saluted, and stammered:
“I beg your pardon, sir. I beg your pardon.”
&nbs
p; Nothing delights Lawrence more than to take a self-important man down a peg or two. There is no fuss and flurry or pomposity in his own make-up, and it amuses him when he occasionally encounters a blusterer who tries to play up stage.
Emir Feisal and staff were transported across the Mediterranean on board H.M.S. Gloucester as the guests of his Imperial Britannic Majesty. The French were considerably perturbed when they heard that an Arabian delegation was on its way to the peace conference, and they objected to its being recognized. France coveted Syria and realized that Feisal and his persistent young British grand vizir would attempt to thwart them. But Feisal started for Paris despite the coolness of the French.
Like all orthodox Mohammedans, the emir never touches intoxicants, and complications were narrowly averted on board the Gloucester because of the fact that several of the members of Feisal’s staff, unlike their prince, were not ardent prohibitionists. Although they could not regale themselves publicly for fear of incurring the emir’s displeasure, they would spend half an hour or so in the ward-room with the ship’s officers before dinner; and General Nuri Bey, who had been Feisal’s foremost strategist during the desert war, even ventured to take his glass to the table, and, although he sat opposite the emir, he cleverly concealed it behind the water-bottle so that Feisal could not see it.
On the voyage from Alexandria to Marseilles the Arab delegation was accompanied by Lawrence’s tent-mate, Major Marshall, who wondered just how the French were going to receive his charges upon arrival in port. When the Gloucester steamed into Marseilles there was an official French mission on the dock, but no British representatives; and the French indicated by their attitude to Marshall that further British interest in Feisal would not be welcomed and that all matters concerning Syria were purely the affairs of France. So Marshall sent a wire of inquiry to the British Embassy in Paris, and a few hours later Lawrence turned up. With his usual tact he avoided friction with the French by borrowing Marshall’s Arabian head-dress and attaching himself to Feisal’s delegation as a member of the emir’s personal staff and not as a British officer.
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 24
