Part 11

The success at Wejh stirred the British in Egypt to realize suddenly the value of the Revolt: the Commander-in-Chief remembered that there were more Turks fighting the Arabs than were fighting him. Gold, rifles, mules, more machine-guns and mountain-guns were promised: and in time sent, all except the mountain-guns, which were the most urgent need of all. Field-guns were no use because of the hilly roadless country of Western Arabia, but the British Army could, it seemed, spare no mountain-guns except a sort that fired only ten-pound shells, useless except against bows and arrows. It was maddening that the Turks should always be able to outrange the Arabs by three or four thousand yards. The French Colonel had some excellent mountain-guns at Suez with Algerian gunners, but would not send them unless an Allied brigade was landed at Rabegh to take over the conduct of the war from the Arabs. These guns were kept at Suez for a year; but then the French Colonel was recalled and his successor sent them; with their help the final victory was made possible. Meanwhile a great deal of harm was done to the reputation of the French, for every Arab officer passing through Suez on his way to Egypt or back saw these idle guns as a proof of French hostility to the Revolt.

But while the news of the taking of Wejh was still fresh, the French Colonel called on Lawrence at Cairo to congratulate him; he said that the success confirmed his opinion of Lawrence’s military talent and encouraged him to expect help in extending the success. He wanted to occupy Akaba with an Anglo-French force and naval help. Akaba was the port at the very extreme point of the Red Sea on the opposite side of the Sinai peninsula from Suez, and a brigade landed there might advance eighty miles inland towards Maan. Maan was an important town on the pilgrims’ railway about two hundred miles south of Damascus, and on the left flank of the Turkish army opposing the British on the borders of Palestine. Lawrence, who knew Akaba from his surveying days in the winter of 1913, told the Colonel that the scheme was impossible, because, though Akaba itself could be taken, the granite mountains behind it could be held by the Turks against any expedition trying to force the passes. The best thing was for Bedouin Arabs to take it from behind without naval help.

Lawrence suspected that the Colonel wanted to put this Anglo-French force in as a screen between the Arabs and Damascus, to keep them in Arabia wasting themselves in an attack on Medina. He himself, on the other hand, wanted to take them into Damascus and beyond. Both men knew what the other’s intention was, but there was a natural concealment of the real issue. At last the Colonel, rather unwisely, told Lawrence that he was going to Wejh to talk to Feisal, and Lawrence, who had not warned Feisal about French policy, decided to go too. By hurrying he was able to get there first and also to see and warn Newcombe.

When the Colonel arrived at Wejh eight days after Lawrence, he began by presenting Feisal with six Hotchkiss automatic guns complete with instructors. This was a noble gift, but Feisal asked for the quick-firing mountain-guns at Suez. The Frenchman put him off by saying that guns were no real use in Arabia; the thing to do was for the Arabs to climb about the country like goats and tear up the railway. Feisal was annoyed by the ‘goats,’ which is an insult in Arabic, and asked the Colonel if he had ever tried to ‘goat’ himself. The Colonel spoke of Akaba, and Feisal, who had had Lawrence’s account of the geography of the place, told him that it was asking too much of the British to get them to risk heavy losses over such an expedition. The Colonel, annoyed by Lawrence’s Oriental smile where he sat in a corner, pointedly asked Feisal to beg the British at least to spare the armoured cars which were at Suez. Lawrence smiled again and said that they had already started. Then the Colonel went away, defeated, and Lawrence returned to Cairo, where he begged the Commander-in-Chief not to send the brigade that was already waiting to be sent to Akaba. The Commander-in-Chief was delighted to find that this ‘side-show,’ too, was unnecessary.

Back again in Wejh a few days later Lawrence began hardening himself for his coming campaign, tramping barefoot over the coral or burning-hot sand. The Arabs wondered why he did not ride a horse, like every other important man. Feisal was busy with politics, winning over new tribes to the cause, keeping his father at Mecca in good humour, and his brothers in their places. He had to put down a small mutiny: the Ageyl had risen against their commander for fining and flogging them too heavily. They looted his tent and beat his servants, and then getting more excited remembered a grudge that they had against the Ateiba tribe and went off to do some killing. Feisal saw their torches and rushed to stop them, beating at them with the flat of his sword; his slaves followed. They subdued the Ageyl at last, but only by firing rockets from pistols among them, which set fire to their robes and frightened them. Only two men were killed; thirty were wounded. The commander of the Ageyl then resigned and there was no more trouble.

A wireless signalling set was mounted at Wejh by the Navy, and the two armoured cars from Suez arrived. They had just been released from the campaign in East Africa. The Arabs were delighted with the cars and with the motor-bicycles that were sent with them. They called the motor-bicycles ‘devil horses,’ the children of the cars, which were themselves the sons and daughters of the trains on the pilgrims’ railway. About this time came Jaafar, a Mesopotamian Arab from Bagdad, whom Feisal at once made commander-in-chief of the regular Arab forces under him. Jaafar had been in the Turkish army and had fought well against the British. He had been chosen by Enver to organize the Senussi tribes in the desert west of Egypt, and going by submarine had made the wild men into a good fighting force. The British captured him at last and he was imprisoned at Cairo. He tried to escape one night from the Citadel there, slipping down a blanket rope, but fell, hurt his leg, and was recaptured. Later in hospital he read a newspaper account of the Sherif’s Revolt and of the executions of Arab nationalists in Syria; he suddenly realized that he had been fighting on the wrong side.

Feisal’s politics were going well. The Billi tribe and the Moahib joined him and the Howeitat and Beni Atiyeh beyond, so that he now had control of the whole country between the railway and the sea from a point a hundred and fifty miles north of Wejh right down to Mecca. Beyond the Howeitat and Beni Atiyeh, to the north, and spreading over the wide gravel and lava desert to the borders of Mesopotamia lived the powerful Ruwalla tribe, whose Emir Nuri was one of the four great Arabian princes, the others being Ibn Saud of Nejd in the central oases, the Emir of Jebel Shammar, and the Sherif of Mecca. Nuri was a hard old man whose word was law and who could not be either bullied or coaxed; he had won his supremacy by the murder of two brothers. Fortunately he had been on good terms with Feisal for years, and Feisal’s messengers going to him to ask permission for the Arab army to pass through Ruwalla territory met Nuri’s messengers already on the way with a valuable gift of baggage camels for Feisal. Nuri could not give armed help at present because if the Turks suspected him they would half-starve his tribesmen in three months; but Feisal could count on him, when the right time came, for armed help too. It was most important to have Nuri friendly because he controlled Sirhan, the one great chain of camping-grounds and water-holes across the northern desert to the Syrian border, where lived the famous tribe, the Howeitat. One Howeitat clan, the Abu Tayi, was ruled by Auda, the greatest fighting man in Northern Arabia; and to get in touch with Auda had been Feisal’s and Lawrence’s ambition for months. With Auda friendly it should be possible to win over all the tribes between Maan and Akaba, and then, after taking Akaba, to carry revolt farther north still behind the Turkish lines in Syria. And Auda did prove friendly; his cousin came in with presents on the seventeenth of February 1917, and the same day arrived a chief of another Howeitat clan that was settled near Maan. Further arrivals that day were Sherarat tribesmen from the desert between Wejh and the railway with a gift of ostrich eggs, Nuri’s son with the gift of a mare, and the chief of another Howeitat clan from the coast south of Akaba. This last chief brought Feisal the spoils of the two Turkish posts on the Red Sea which he had just taken.

The roads to Wejh swarmed with messengers and volunteers and great sheikhs riding in to swear allegiance, and the Billi, who had hitherto only been lukewarm in the cause, caught the enthusiasm of the rest. Feisal’s way of swearing in new converts was to hold the Koran between his hands, which they kissed and promised ‘We shall wait while you wait and march when you march. We shall yield obedience to no Turk. We shall deal kindly with all who speak Arabic whether Arabians, Mesopotamians, Syrians or others. We shall put Arab independence above life, family or goods.’ When the chiefs came to Feisal it happened sometimes that blood-enemies met in his presence, when he would gravely introduce them and later act as peacemaker, striking a balance of profit and loss between them. He would even help things on by contributing from his own purse for the benefit of the tribe that had suffered most loss. For two years this peace-making was Feisal’s daily task, the combining of the thousands of hostile forces in Arabia against a common enemy. There was no feud left alive in the districts through which he passed, and no one ever questioned his justice. He was recognized as a power above tribal jealousies and quarrels, and finally gained authority over the Bedouin from Medina in the south to a point far beyond Damascus.

XII

Early in March information came to Lawrence from Egypt that Enver the Turkish Commander-in-Chief had ordered the Turks to leave Medina at once. The message had been intercepted on the pilgrims’ railway, where Newcombe and Garland were already busy with Arab help blowing up bridges and tearing up the rails. The Turks were ordered to march out in mass along the line with railway trains enclosed in their columns; they were to go for four hundred miles north to a station (Tebuk) below Maan where they would form a strong left flank to the army facing the British. As the Turks in Medina were a whole Army-Corps of the best Anatolian troops with a great deal of artillery, the British were anxious to keep them away. So Feisal was therefore begged (and Lawrence instructed) either to take Medina at once or to destroy the garrison on its way up the line. Feisal replied that he would do his best, though the Turkish message was days old and the move was already timed to begin. Feisal’s forces were, at the moment, all moving forward to harry the railway inland from Weih along a length of a hundred and fifty miles; so that the second part of the demand from Egypt was being met. If it was not too late to catch the Turks coming out it might be possible to destroy the whole force. The Arabs would damage the railway line until it was too hopelessly broken for the store trains to pass, and the Turks would therefore be without supplies to take them farther. When they turned back they would find the line broken behind them too. Lawrence himself decided to go to Abdulla, who had now moved to a position just north-west of Medina, to find out whether it was possible, if the Turks were still in Medina, to attack them there.

When he started he was very weak with dysentery brought on by drinking the bad water at Wejh: he had a high temperature and also boils on his back which made camel-riding painful. With a party of thirteen men, of various tribes, including four Ageyl and a Moor, he set out at dawn through the granite mountains on his hundred and-fifty-mile ride. He had two fainting fits on the way and could hardly keep in the saddle. At one point on the journey the ill-assorted party began to quarrel and the Moor treacherously murdered one of the Ageyl. A hurried court-martial was held and the Moor was privately executed, with general consent, by a member of the party who had no kin for the other Moors in Feisal’s army to start a blood-feud against.

One can well imagine Lawrence’s loneliness on this ride. He was no longer merely a British officer; his enthusiasm for the Revolt on its own account had cut him off from that. Nor was he a genuine Arab, as his tribelessness reminded him only too strongly. He hovered somewhere midway between the one thing and the other like Mohammed’s coffin in the fable. More immediately disturbing was the possibility of being too ill to ride further, and so of falling into the hands of desert tribesmen whose idea of medicine was to burn holes in the patient’s body to let the evil spirits out: when the patient screamed they would say that it was the devil in him protesting. Eventually he reached Abdulla’s camp just in time to stave off the collapse. He gave Abdulla Feisal’s message and then went off to lie in a tent where his weakness kept him helpless for the next ten days.

This forced idleness had important results: though his body was weak, his brain cleared and he began to think about the Arab Revolt more carefully than he had yet done. It was something to do to keep his mind off his physical condition. Hitherto he had acted from instinct, never looking more than a step or two ahead at a time: now he could exercise his reason. He remembered the military writers whose works he had read at Oxford: he had not been required by his tutors to become acquainted with any campaigns later than Napoleon’s, but he had, it seems, out of curiosity read most of the more modern military writers, such as the great Clausewitz, and von Moltke and the recent Frenchmen, including Foch (whose _Principes de la Guerre_ had impressed him much until he found that Foch had, without acknowledgment, lifted many of his chief principles from an Austrian report on the 1866 campaign). He began by recalling the main principle on which all these writers agreed, that wars were won by destroying the enemy’s main army in battle. But somehow it would not fit the Arab campaign; and this worried him.

He began to ask himself why they were bothering to attack Medina. What was the good of it to the Arabs if they captured it? It was no longer a threat as it had been when there were troops in it to spare for the attack on Mecca. It was no use as a base or a store-house. The Turks in it were powerless to harm the Arabs, and were now eating their own transport animals which they could no longer feed. Why not let them keep the town? Why do more than continue to blockade it? What of the railway, which used up a vast quantity of men in guard posts all down the line and yet was too long to be properly defended? Why not be content with frequent raids on it, between guard posts, blowing up trains and bridges, and yet allowing it to be just—only just—kept in working order, so that it would be a continual drain on the Turks to the north to keep it going and to feed the troops in Medina? To cut it permanently would be a mistake. The surrender of Medina would mean that the captured Turks would have to be fed, many of the troops guarding the railway would make their way back north, and the drain on the Turks of men and trains and food would stop. The Allied cause would, in fact, be best served by attracting and keeping as many Turkish troops as possible in this unimportant theatre of war, and by using as many Arabs as possible in the important theatre of war, which was Palestine.

When Lawrence got better, therefore, and left his stinking, fly-swarmed tent he did not urge Abdulla to attack Medina but suggested a series of pin-pricking raids against the railway, offering to set an example in these himself. Abdulla was more a politician than a man of action and more interested in field sports and practical joking than in generalship. However, he permitted Sherif Shakir, his picturesque half-Bedouin cousin, to make a raid against the nearest station on the railway, a hundred miles away, with a party of Ateiba tribesmen and one of the mountain-guns which the Egyptian gunners had left with Feisal and which Feisal had lately sent to Abdulla as a present. Lawrence, convalescent, went with Shakir, and, on the twenty-seventh of March, laid his first mine, an automatic one, on the railway. Because it was his first it was not very successful. He caught the front wheel of a train all right, but the charge was not big enough to do serious damage. Nor did Shakir succeed in his raid beyond killing a score of Turks, damaging the water-tower and station buildings with his gun, and setting a few wagons on fire; there was, that is to say, no looting. The chief dramatic interest of the raid seems to have centred round a shepherd boy who was captured by the Arabs and tied up while his sheep, Turkish property, were eaten before his unhappy eyes. However, Lawrence went again a day or two later with a party of Juheina to experiment further in automatic mines: he was fortunate enough to have a preliminary failure. A long train from Medina, full of women and children, ‘useless mouths’ whom the Turks could not feed and so were sending up to Syria, passed over the mine without exploding it. There had been a cloudburst the day before, in which Lawrence and his men had been caught, and the mechanism, owing probably to the slight sinking of the ground after the rain, was not in touch with the rails. He adjusted this when night came and, blowing up a few rails and a small bridge to explain plausibly to the Turks (who had seen them and were firing and blowing bugles all down the line) what he and the tribesmen were about, went away and left the mine behind. It caught the expected repair-train. Most of this story, the episodes of the two months, March and April 1917, which are left blank in _Revolt in the Desert_, are accessible, in greater detail, to inquisitive readers. The _World’s Work_ magazine published them as an article in America in 1921. The fees for this contribution and three others following went not to Lawrence but to keep a poet, who had lost money in an attempt to start a grocery-shop, from the bankruptcy court. Lawrence took great care, for some reason, not to let them appear in England; and as I was the poet, and this book has the same text for England and America, the details will not be given by me now.

The fruits of Lawrence’s visit to Abdulla, measured in action, were small. Abdulla did not have his brother Feisal’s energy and military keenness, and had been allotted an unattractive part in the campaign, the blockade of Medina, which encouraged the inactive side of his character. (The siege of the city was never pressed and dragged on until after the Armistice in October 1918 when the commander, Fakhri Pasha, was given orders from Constantinople to hand Medina over to the Arab forces; and did so, compelled by a mutiny of his chief staff-officers.) But, apart from action, Lawrence’s visit to Abdulla was of considerable importance; it marked a turning-point in the Arab campaign. His fortnight’s solitary thinking in that tent gave him convictions: he decided on the tactics and strategy necessary if his party were to achieve that success in the north which he regarded as essential to justify the Arab Revolt. We find him acting hereafter with great deliberation and confidence, in striking contrast to his previous hesitating attitude as adviser to Feisal in the Yenbo and Wejh operations. He had been right before, but more or less by luck.

On April the tenth Lawrence returned to Wejh by leisurely stages. Abdulla had been very hospitable, but Lawrence preferred the atmosphere of Feisal’s camp, where there was a more energetic spirit and a determination to win the war with as little Allied help as possible. A good way farther north on the railway than he had laid his mines there were now two parties doing demolitions (Garland’s and Newcombe’s, and Hornby’s), but the Turks would find it just a shade less difficult to keep the railway going between Damascus and Medina than to arrange for the long and dangerous march-out of the Medina garrison. At Wejh he found things going on well. More armoured cars had come from Egypt, and Yenbo and Rabegh had been emptied of their stores and men as a proof that the Revolt was now safe in the south and was moving north. The aeroplanes under Major Ross were here and also a new machine-gun company of amusing history. When Yenbo was abandoned there were left behind some heaps of broken weapons and two English armourer-sergeants. Also thirty sick and wounded Arabs. The armourer-sergeants, finding things boring, had dosed and healed the men and mended the machine-guns, and combined them into a company. The sergeants knew no Arabic but trained the men so well by dumb-show that they were as good as the best company in the Arab army.

XIII

Lawrence was about to withdraw from Feisal’s tent at Wejh after the exchange of news and greetings, when there was a stir of excitement. A messenger came in and whispered to Feisal. Feisal turned to Lawrence with shining eyes, trying to be calm, and said: ‘Auda is here.’ The tent-flap was drawn back, and a deep voice boomed out salutations to ‘Our Lord, the Commander of the Faithful,’ then entered a tall strong figure, with a haggard face, passionate and tragic. It was Auda; and with him Mohammed, his only surviving son, a boy of eleven years old, already a fighting man. Feisal had sprung to his feet, an honour not due to Auda on account of his rank, for nobler chiefs had been received sitting, but because he was Auda, the greatest fighting man in Arabia. Auda caught Feisal’s hand and kissed it; then they drew aside a pace or two and looked at each other, a splendidly unlike pair, Feisal the prophet, and Auda the warrior, each true to his type. They had an immediate understanding and liking for each other at this first meeting.