Part 10

Lawrence thought that he saw the game. The Frenchman was afraid that if the Revolt were carried farther north to Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, the Arabs might capture these cities from the Turks and keep them after the War; and they were cities that France wanted to add to her colonial empire. Moreover, in the Sykes-Picot Treaty, made between France, England and Russia in 1916 for dividing up the Turkish Empire after the War, the French had actually agreed that independent Arab governments, though in the French ‘sphere of influence,’ should be established in these cities if they were freed by the Arabs themselves—an event that none of the signatories thought possible at the time; it was a matter of form, merely, to suggest it. At the time Lawrence knew nothing of this treaty, which was a secret one, but he suspected the Frenchman, and he had no intention of letting the Arabs down for the sake of the _Entente Cordiale_. The Colonel, hearing of Lawrence’s and Feisal’s intention to continue with the plan of attacking Wejh that had been interrupted by the Turkish advance, did his best to discourage it. On his honour as a staff-officer (and he had a very distinguished record) he said that it was suicide to make such a move; and gave many reasons. Lawrence brushed him aside. He believed that the Arabs had a chance now of a wide and lasting success, and Wejh was the first step.

The Turks meanwhile were being hard pressed by the Juheina who, split up in small parties, made their lives wretched by constant raids, sniping, and looting of supplies: and British seaplanes began bombing their camp in the palm-groves of Nakhl Mubarak. They decided to attack Rabegh. There Feisal’s brother Ali, who had now nearly seven thousand men, was ready to advance against them, and Feisal and the younger brother Zeid planned to move round inland behind the Turks and take them in a trap. Feisal had difficulty with the Emir of the Juheina, whom he asked to move forward with him; the Emir was jealous of Feisal’s growing power with the tribes. But Feisal made them move without their Emir. He then rode south to raise the Harb. All was going well until he heard from Ali that his army had gone a little way forward when, hearing false reports of treachery, it had rushed back in disorder to Rabegh. Feisal could do nothing, he could not even count for certain on the Harb, who might join the Turks if they got the chance and whose territory ran down south of Rabegh.

Then Colonel Wilson, who was British representative in the province, came up to Yenbo from Jiddah and begged Feisal to leave the Turks alone and make the attack on Wejh. The plan was now to move up with the whole Juheina fighting force and the regular battalions from Yenbo; the British Fleet would give all the help it could. Feisal saw that Wejh could be taken in this way, but Yenbo was left defenceless; he pointed out that the Turks were still able to strike and that Ali’s army seemed to have little fight in it, and might not even defend Rabegh, which was the bulwark of Mecca. However, Colonel Wilson gave Feisal his word that Rabegh would be kept safe with naval help until Wejh had fallen, and Feisal accepted it. He saw that the attack on Wejh was the best diversion that the Arabs could make to draw the Turks off Mecca, and started at once; at the same time sending his brother Abdulla machine-guns and stores and asking him to move to the impregnable hills sixty miles north of Medina, Juheina territory, where his forces could both threaten the railway and continue to hold up the eastern supply caravans.

The Turks were still making for Rabegh, but very slowly, and with an increasing sick list among the men and animals, due to overwork and poor food. They were also losing an average of forty camels a day and twenty men killed and wounded in raids by the Harb tribes in their rear. They were eighty miles from Medina and, as Lawrence had foreseen, each mile that they went forward made their lines of communication more exposed to attack. Their pace got slower and slower till it was no more than five miles a day, and on the eighteenth of January 1917 they withdrew, when still thirty miles from Rabegh. It was Feisal’s and Abdulla’s new moves which finally recalled the expedition to Medina, and for the next two years until the War ended and the Holy City surrendered, the Turks were kept sitting helplessly in trenches outside it, waiting for an attack which never came.

XI

On New Year’s Day 1917 Feisal and Lawrence, who was still rather a foreign adviser than an actual fighter in the Arab cause, sat down at Yenbo to consider the Wejh expedition. The army now consisted of six thousand men, most of them mounted on their own camels. The first fierce eagerness had left them but they had gained in staying power, and the farther away they moved from their homes, the more regular their military habits became. They still worked independently, by tribes, only bound by goodwill to Feisal’s command, but when he came by, they now at least fell into a ragged line and together made the bow and sweep of the arm to the lips which was the Arab salute. They kept their weapons in good enough order, though they did not oil them, and looked after their camels properly. In mass they were not dangerous: in fact their use in battle lessened as their numbers increased. A company of trained Turks could defeat a thousand Arabs in open fighting, yet three or four Arabs in their own hills could hold up a dozen Turks.

After the battle of the date-palms it was decided not to mix Egyptian troops with Arabs. They did not go well together. The Arabs were apt to let the Egyptians do more than their share of the fighting because they looked so military; they would even wander away in the middle of a battle and leave them to finish it. So the Egyptian gunners were sent home (and went gladly), while their guns and equipment were handed over to Rasim, Feisal’s own gunner, and to Feisal’s machine-gun officer; who in their place formed Arab detachments mostly of Turk-trained Syrian and Mesopotamian deserters. Maulud got together a force of fifty mule-mounted men whom he called cavalry and, since they were townsmen and not Bedouin, soon made regular soldiers of them. They were so useful that Lawrence telegraphed to Egypt for fifty mules more.

Now although the Arabs were of less use in mass than in small groups, it was necessary to make this march on Wejh a huge parade of tribes to impress all Arabia. Feisal decided to take all the Juheina tribe and add enough of the Harb, Billi, Ateiba and Ageyl to make it the biggest expedition in Arab memory. It would be clear that the Revolt was now a real national movement, and when Wejh was taken and the tribes returned home with the news, there would be no more petty jealousies and desertions of clans to hinder the campaign. Feisal and Lawrence did not expect any hard fighting at Wejh because the Turks had no spare troops to send to its defence or time to send them. It would take them weeks to withdraw their Rabegh expedition—the hindering of which with Harb help was now Zeid’s occupation—and if the Arab army could reach Wejh in three weeks’ time, they would surely take it unprepared.

Lawrence was anxious to take part in a small raid on the Turks, just to get the feel of it for future information, so on January the second 1917 he set out with thirty-five tribesmen. They rode some miles south-east until they came to a valley near the Turkish lines of communication. Ten men stayed guarding the camels, while Lawrence and the remaining twenty-five climbed over the sharp-edged crumbling cliffs on the farther side of the valley to another valley, where a Turkish post was known to be. There they waited shivering for hours in the mist. When dawn came they saw the tips of a group of Turkish bell-tents, three hundred yards below, just showing over a small spur that lay between. They put bullets through these tent-tops, and when the Turks rushed out to man their trenches, shot at them; but the Turks ran so fast that probably few were hit. From the trenches the Turks fired back wildly and rapidly in all directions as if signalling for help to the nearest big Turkish garrison—there were garrisons strung all along the road for eighty miles back. As the enemy was ten times their number already, the raiders might soon have been cut off. Lawrence decided to do no more: they crawled back over the hill to the first valley, where they stumbled over two stray Turks and carried them back to Yenbo as prisoners.

That morning the army started for Weih, first making for a group of wells fifteen miles north of Yenbo. At their head rode Feisal dressed in white, his cousin beside him on the right in a red headcloth and reddish-yellow tunic and cloak, Lawrence on the left in white and scarlet. Next came three standard-bearers carrying an Arab flag of faded crimson silk with gilt spikes. Then the drummers playing a march, then the wild mass of Feisal’s bodyguard, twelve hundred bouncing well-fed camels, with coloured trappings, packed closely together, their riders dressed in every possible combination of bright colours. This bodyguard was of camel-men called the Ageyl. They were not a desert tribe but a company of young peasants from the oasis country of Central Arabia. They had signed on for a term of years first of all for service with the Turkish Army but had soon gone over in a body when the Revolt started. Having no blood enemies in the desert and being the sons of desert traders they were most useful in the later campaign.

Beside the road were lined the rest of the army, tribe by tribe, each man standing beside his couched camel waiting his turn to join the procession. They saluted Feisal in silence, and Feisal cheerfully called back ‘Peace be with you!’ and the head sheikhs returned the phrase. The procession swelled, the broad column filled the valley in length as far as the eye could see, and, the drums beating, every one burst into a loud chant in praise of Feisal and his family.

Lawrence went back on his racing camel to Yenbo: he had to make sure that the naval help for the attack on Wejh would be properly timed. But first of all, feeling anxious about a possible Turkish attack on deserted Yenbo, he got a big British vessel, the _Hardinge_, formerly a troopship, to take on board all the principal stores of the town, including eight thousand rifles, three million cartridges, thousands of shells, two tons of high explosive, quantities of rice and flour. Boyle promised to lend the _Hardinge_ as a supply ship for the force on its way up the coast, landing food and water wherever needed. This solved the chief problem, which was how to maintain ten thousand men with only a small supply column; and, for the rest, Boyle promised that half the Red Sea fleet would mass at Wejh; landing-parties were already being trained.

The Billi tribesmen who lived about Wejh were friendly and knew moreover that if they did not welcome Feisal’s army it would be the worse for them, so it seemed certain now that Wejh would be taken. Boyle promised to take on board the _Hardinge_ an Arab landing-party of several hundred Harb and Juheina tribesmen. While this was being settled Lawrence heard that the three regular British officers who had been instructed to help Feisal direct the campaign were now on their way from Egypt. One of these, Vickery, arrived first. He was an artillery officer, with a good knowledge of Arabic; and what Lawrence thought that the Arabs needed, a trained staff officer.

On the sixteenth of January Vickery, Boyle, Feisal, Maulud, Lawrence, met in Feisal’s camp, now half-way to Wejh, to discuss the advance. It was decided to break the army up into sections and send them forward one after the other, because of the difficulty of watering a whole army at the same time at the few wells or ponds on the line of march. These sections should then meet on the twentieth of January at a place fifty miles from Wejh where there was water, and make the last stage together. Boyle agreed to land tanks of water two days later at a small harbour only twelve miles from Wejh. On the twenty-third the attack was to be made; the Arab landing-party would go ashore from the _Hardinge_ north of the town while Feisal’s mounted men cut all the roads of escape south and east. It all looked very promising and there was no news from Yenbo that was not good. Abdulla was moving up to his position north of Medina, and news came that he had just captured a well-known Turkish agent, a former brigand, who was going with bribes among the desert tribes, and was on his way to Yemen far down in the south where a Turkish garrison was cut off. Abdulla took with this man twenty thousand Turkish pounds in gold, robes of honour, costly presents, some interesting papers and camel loads of rifles and pistols. It was the greatest good fortune.

In the tent with Vickery and Boyle, Lawrence had forgotten his usual calm and said that in a year the Arab army would be tapping on the gates of Damascus. There was no response from Vickery, who was angered at what he thought was a romantic boast that could only come from a man like Lawrence who did not know his job as a soldier. Lawrence was disappointed in Vickery, who was so much a soldier that he did not realize what the Arab Revolt was. It was not like a war in which large trained armies, with complicated modern equipment, manœuvre from town to town, seeking each to destroy or cut off the other. It was more like a general strike over an immense area. The only big army was the Turkish and even that was not free to move about as it liked, because of the difficulties of the country. Lawrence knew that his boast had not been a vain one; five months later he was secretly in Damascus arranging for the help of its townsmen when Feisal’s forces should arrive to free them. And a year later he did in fact enter the city in triumph and become temporary governor. Vickery had not seen that with a grand alliance of Semites, an idea and an armed prophet, anything might happen. Had Lawrence only had a sounder military training than the casual reading of military history for his degree at Oxford (and in his teens the occasional captaincy of a non-militaristic Church Lads’ Brigade when his brother needed a substitute!) and if now he had been given a free hand, it would have been Constantinople and not Damascus that the Arabs should have reached. The conflict between Vickery and Lawrence, however, was not as between two British military advisers with different views. It was really as between a British military adviser and a white Arab; for though it was not quite clear yet to himself, this was what Lawrence was becoming.

The next morning there was trouble with the second batch of fifty mules which had arrived for Maulud and was landed by the _Hardinge_ along with the other stores. The mules were sent without halters, bridles or saddles, and once ashore stampeded into the little town near by, where they took possession of the market-place and began bucking among the stalls. Fortunately among the stores taken for safety from Yenbo were spare ropes and bits, so that after an exciting tussle the mules were captured and tamed. The shops were reopened and the damage paid for.

Lawrence remained with Feisal’s army for the rest of the advance. From this half-way halt they started on January the eighteenth at midday. The Ageyl rode spread out in wings for two or three hundred yards to the right and left of Feisal’s party. Soon there came then a warning patter of drums from the right wing—it was the custom to set the poets and musicians on the wings—and a poet began to sing two rhyming lines which he had just invented, about Feisal and the pleasures that he would provide for the army at Wejh. The men with him listened carefully and took up the verse in chorus, repeating it three times with pride and satisfaction and challenge. Before they could sing it a fourth time, the rival poet of the left wing capped it with a rhyme in the same metre and sentiment. The left cheered with a roar of triumph, then the drums tapped again, the standard-bearers spread out their great crimson banners, and the whole bodyguard right, left and centre broke simultaneously into the Ageyl marching song. The Ageyl sang of their own towns left behind and the women whom they might never see again, and of the great perils ahead of them. The camels loved the rhythm of the song and quickened their pace, while it lasted, over the long desolate sand-dunes between mountains and sea.

Two horsemen came riding after them. Lawrence knew one of these as the Emir of the Juheina, the other he could not make out. But soon he recognized the red face, strong mouth and staring eyes of his old friend Colonel Newcombe of the Sinai surveying party, who was now come here as the chief British military adviser to the Arabs. Newcombe quickly became friendly with Feisal, and the rest of the journey was made even happier by his enthusiasm. Lawrence, comparing notes with him, was glad to find that they both had the same general views. The march was uneventful. Water was the one problem, and though water-scouts went ahead to find what they could, the advance was delayed by its scarcity, so that it was clear that Feisal would be two days late for the rendezvous with the _Hardinge_ on the twenty-second. Newcombe rode ahead on a fast camel to ask the _Hardinge_ to come again with its water-tanks on the twenty-fourth, and to delay the naval attack if possible until the twenty-fifth.

Many helpers joined Feisal during his advance; the Billi chiefs met him at their tribal boundary, and later Nasir rode up, the brother of the Emir of Medina. His family was respected in Arabia only second to the Sherifs of Mecca, being also descended from the Prophet but from the younger son of Mohammed’s only daughter. Nasir was the forerunner of Feisal’s movement; he had fired the first shot at Medina and was to fire the last shot beyond Aleppo, a thousand miles north, on the day that the Turks asked for an armistice. He was a sensitive, pleasant young man who loved gardens better than the desert and had been forced unwillingly into fighting since boyhood. He had been here blockading Wejh from the desert for the last two months. He and Feisal were close friends. His news was that the Turkish camel-corps outpost barring the advance had been withdrawn that day to a position nearer to the town.

The last three days of the advance were painful; the animals were without food for nearly three days, and the men came the last fifty miles on half a gallon of water and with nothing to eat: many of them were on foot. The _Hardinge_ was at the rendezvous on the twenty-fourth and landed the water promised; but this did not go far. The mules were allowed first drink, and what little was left was given to the more thirsty of the foot-men. Crowds of suffering Arabs waited all that night at the water-tanks, in the rays of the search-lights, hoping for another drink if the sailors came again. But the sea was too rough for the ship’s boat to make another trip.

From the _Hardinge_ Lawrence heard that the attack on Wejh had already been made the day before; for Boyle was afraid that the Turks would run away if he waited. As a matter of fact the Turkish Governor had already addressed the garrison saying that Wejh must be held to the last drop of blood: after his speech he had got up on his camel and ridden off in the darkness with the few mounted men whom he had with him, making for the railway a hundred and fifty miles inland across the mountains. The two hundred Turkish infantry left behind decided to follow his orders rather than his example, but they were outnumbered three to one and the fleet shelled them heavily. The landing was made by the sailors and the Arab force, and Wejh was taken. But the _Hardinge_ had come away before the end, so the advancing force could not be sure whether it would find the town still in Turkish hands.

At dawn on the twenty-fifth the leading tribes halted at a spot a few miles from the town and waited for the others to come up. Various small scattered parties of Turks were met; most surrendered, only one put up a short fight. When they reached the ridge behind which Wejh lay, the Ageyl bodyguard dismounted, stripping off all their clothes except their cotton drawers, and advanced to the attack: their nakedness was protection against bullet wounds, which would strike cleaner this way. They advanced company by ♦company, at the run, and in good order with an interval of four or five yards between each man. There was no shouting. Soon they reached the ridge-top without a shot fired. So Lawrence watching knew that the fighting was over.

♦ “comany” replaced with “company”

The Arab landing-party was in possession of the town, and Vickery, who had directed the battle, was satisfied. But when Lawrence found that twenty Arabs and a British flying officer had been killed, he was not at all pleased. He considered the fighting unnecessary; the Turks would soon have had to surrender for want of food if the town had been surrounded, and the killing of dozens of Turks did not make up for the loss of a single Arab. The Arabs were not pressed men accustomed to be treated as cannon-fodder like most regular soldiers. The Arab army was composed rather of individuals, and its losses were not reckoned merely by arithmetic. And because kinship is so strong a force in the desert, twenty men killed meant a far wider range of mourning than a thousand names in an European casualty list. Moreover, the ships’ guns had smashed up the town badly, which was a great loss to the Arabs, who needed it as a base for their future attacks inland on the railway. The town’s boats and barges, too, had been sunk, so the landing of stores was a difficulty, and all the shops and houses had been looted by the Arab landing-party as a compensation for their losses. The townsmen were mostly Egyptians who could not make up their minds in time to join the Arab cause.

Still, Wejh was taken, the coast was cleared of Turks, and the march had been a great advertisement. Abd el Kerim of the Juheina who had come to Lawrence a week before to beg for a mule to ride, and had been put off with the promise ‘when Wejh is taken,’ had said almost regretfully, ‘We Arabs are a nation now’; the regret was for the good old days of tribal wars and raids which now were at an end. Feisal had very luckily stopped a private war between the Juheina and Billi just in time; the Juheina, seeing some camels grazing, had of old habit ridden out and driven them off. Feisal was furious and shouted to them to stop, but they were too excited to hear. He snatched his rifle and shot at the nearest man, who tumbled off his camel in fear; then the others checked their course. Feisal had the men up before him, beat the leaders with a camel-stick and restored the camels to the Billi. More than a nation the Arab army seemed to some of the tribesmen. ‘The whole world is moving up to Wejh,’ said one old man.