Part 6

He wrote to his father to wait until England grew stronger and Turkey still weaker. Unfortunately England, quite apart from the difficulties of the _Entente_, was in a very bad position in the Near East, forced to withdraw from the Dardanelles after losses as heavy as the Turks had suffered. The English politicians were content to take the blame for not having landed troops at Alexandretta, the one really sensible place, rather than give away their French colleagues; and the rumour went round England ‘The Greeks let us down.’ Bulgaria, too, had lately joined with the Turks and Germans, so that the French insisted on the Dardanelles troops being landed not at Alexandretta, even this time, as had been intended, but at Salonica. To make matters worse, a British Army was surrounded and starving in the town of Kut, on the Mesopotamian front. Feisal’s own position grew very dangerous. He had to live at Damascus as the guest of Jemal Pasha, the Turkish general in command of the forces in Syria, and being himself an officer in the Turkish army had to swallow whatever insults the bullying Jemal threw at the Arabs in his drunken fits. Feisal had, moreover, been president of the secret freedom society in Syria before the War and was at the mercy of its members; if he was denounced by any of these—perhaps a condemned man might try to buy his life with the information—he was lost. So Feisal had to stay anxiously with Jemal at Damascus, and spent his time rubbing up his military knowledge. His elder brother Ali was now raising troops down in Arabia, giving as the excuse that he and Feisal intended to lead them in an attack against the English in Egypt. But the troops were really intended for use against the Turks as soon as Feisal gave the word. Jemal with his brutal Turkish humour would send for Feisal and take him to see the hanging of his Syrian revolutionary friends. The doomed men dared not show that they knew what Feisal’s real intentions were, for fear that he and his family would share their fate—Feisal was the one leader in whom Syria had confidence. Nor could Feisal show them what his feelings were by word or look; he was under the watchful eye of Jemal. Only once did his agony make him lose self-possession; he burst out that these executions would cost Jemal all that he was trying to avoid. Then it took the strongest efforts of his friends at Constantinople, the leading men of Turkey, to save him from paying the price of these rash words.

Feisal’s correspondence with his father in Mecca was an extremely dangerous one: old family retainers were used to take messages up and down the pilgrims’ railway, messages hidden in sword hilts, in cakes, sewn between the soles of sandals, or written in invisible ink on the wrappers of harmless packages. In all his letters Feisal begged his father to wait, to delay the revolt until a wiser time. But Hussein trusted in God rather than in military common sense and decided that the soldiers of his province were able to beat the Turks in fair fight. He sent a message to Feisal with the news that all was now ready. Ali had raised the troops and they were waiting for Feisal’s inspection before starting for the front.

Feisal told Jemal of his father’s message (without, of course, explaining its hostile significance) and asked permission to go down to Medina. To his dismay Jemal replied that Enver Pasha, the Turkish Commander-in-Chief, was now on his way to the province and that Enver, Feisal and himself would attend the inspection together. Feisal had planned to raise his father’s crimson banner of revolt as soon as he arrived in Medina and so take the Turks unawares: but now he was saddled with two uninvited guests, the two chief generals of his enemy, to whom, by the Arab laws of hospitality, he could do no harm. They would probably delay his action so long that the secret of the revolt would be given away.

In the end, however, everything passed off well, though the irony of the review was almost unbearable. Enver, Jemal and Feisal watched the troops manœuvring in the dusty plain outside the city gate, rushing up and down in sham camel-fights or playing the ancient Arab game of javelin-throwing on horseback. At last Enver turned to Feisal and asked, ‘Are these all volunteers for the Holy War?’ ‘Yes,’ said Feisal, with another Holy War in mind. ‘Willing to fight to the death against the enemies of the faithful?’ ‘Yes,’ said Feisal again, and then the Arab chiefs came up to be presented, and one of the prophet’s family drew Feisal aside privately, whispering, ‘My lord, shall we kill them now?’ Feisal answered, ‘No, they are our guests.’

The chiefs protested that it must be done, for so the war could be ended in two blows. They tried to force Feisal’s hand, and he had actually to go among them, just out of hearing of Enver and Jemal, to plead for the lives of these two uninvited guests of his, monsters who had murdered his best friends. In the end he had to make excuses and take the party quickly back into the town under his personal protection and from there escort them all the way to Damascus with a guard of his own slaves to save them from death on the way. He explained this action as being merely great courtesy shown to distinguished guests. But Enver and Jemal were most suspicious of what they had seen and at once sent large Turkish forces by the railway to garrison the holy cities. They wanted to keep Feisal captive at Damascus; but telegrams came from the Turks at Medina asking for him to return at once to prevent disorder, and Jemal reluctantly let him go. Feisal was forced, however, to leave his suite behind as hostages.

Feisal found Medina full of Turks, an entire Army Corps of them, and his hope of a surprise rush, winning success with hardly a shot fired, had become impossible. His chivalry had ruined him. However, he had been prudent too long now. On the same day that Feisal’s suite escaped from Damascus, riding out into the desert to take refuge with a desert chief, Feisal showed his hand: he raised the banner of revolt outside Medina.

His first rush on Medina was a desperate business. The Arabs were badly armed and short of ammunition, the Turks were in great force. In the middle of the battle one of the principal Arab tribes broke and ran, and the whole force was driven outside the walls into the open plain. The Turks then opened fire on them with artillery and machine guns. The Arabs, who only used muzzle-loading guns in their tribal battles, were terrified: and thought that the noise of the bursting shells was equalled by their killing powers. Feisal as a trained soldier knew better, and with his kinsman, young Ali ibn el Hussein, rode about on his mare among the shell-bursts to show that the danger was not so great as the tribesmen feared. But not even Feisal could draw the Arabs to the charge. Part of the tribe that had first broken approached the Turkish commander and offered to surrender if its villages were spared. There was a lull in the fighting and the Turkish general invited the chiefs to talk over the matter; secretly at the same time he sent troops to surround one of the suburbs of the city which he singled out for his object lesson in Turkish terror. While the conference was in progress these Turks were ordered to carry the suburb by assault and massacre every living creature in it. It was done, horribly. Those who were not butchered were burned alive—men, women and children together. The Turkish general and these troops had served together in Armenia and such methods were not new to them.

The massacre sent a shock of incredulous horror across Arabia. The first rule of Arab war was that women and children too young to fight must be spared and that property which could not be carried off in fair raiding should be left undamaged. Feisal’s men realized what Feisal knew already, that the Turks would stick at nothing, and they fell back to consider what must now be done. They were in honour bound, because of the massacre, to fight to the last man; and yet their arms were plainly worth nothing against modern Turkish (and German) rifles and machine-guns and artillery. The Turks in Medina realizing that they were henceforward in a state of real or threatened siege, made their situation better by driving out into the desert many hundreds of the poorer Arab townsmen whom they would otherwise have had to feed.

* * * * *

Feisal’s attack on Medina had been timed to the day of his father’s attempt on the Turks at Mecca. Hussein was more successful; he succeeded in capturing the city itself at the first rush, but it was some days before he could silence the Turkish forts that commanded the city from the hills outside. The Turks were foolish enough to shell the holy Mosque which was the goal of the yearly pilgrimage. It contained the Kaaba, a cubical shrine into whose walls was built the sacred black stone worshipped there as a rain-bringing charm long before Mohammed’s time and the one exception that Mohammed was forced to make in his orders against the worshipping of idols. The black stone was said to have fallen from Heaven and what is more, probably had; it is apparently a meteorite. In the bombardment a Turkish shell killed several worshippers praying before the Kaaba itself and a second shudder of horror ran through the Mohammedan world. Jiddah, the port of Mecca, was also captured with the assistance of the British Navy; and the whole province with the exception of Medina, was after a time cleared of Turks.

From their camp to the west of Medina, Feisal and Ali sent messenger after messenger to the Red Sea port, Rabegh, which was on the roundabout road between Medina and Mecca. They knew that the British, at their father’s request, were landing military stores there. Yet they got nothing from Rabegh but a little food and a consignment of Japanese rifles, rusty relics of the fighting at Port Arthur ten years before, which burst as soon as fired. Their father remained in Mecca.

Ali went at last to see what was happening: he found that the local chief at Rabegh had decided that the Turks were bound to win and so had decided to join them. Ali made a demonstration and got help from another brother, Zeid, and the chief fled as an outlaw to the hills. Ali and Zeid took possession of his villages and found in them great stores of arms and food landed from the British ships. The temptation to settle down for a spell of ease and comfort was too much for them. They stopped where they were.

Feisal was left to carry on the war alone a hundred and fifty miles away inland. In August 1915 he visited another port on the Red Sea farther north than Rabegh, called Yenbo, where the British Navy had landed a force of marines and captured the Turkish garrison. Here he met a British colonel who was acting under orders of the High Commissioner in Egypt, and asked him for military help. After some time he was sent a battery of mountain guns and some maxims which were to be handled by Egyptian Army gunners. The Arabs with Feisal rejoiced when the Egyptians arrived outside Medina, and thought that they were now the equal of the Turks. They went forward in a mob and drove in first the Turkish outposts and then the supports, so that the commander in the city was alarmed. He reinforced the threatened flank, bringing up heavy guns which opened long-range fire on the Arabs. One shell burst close to Feisal’s tent where he was sitting with his Staff. The Egyptian gunners were asked to return the fire and knock out the Turkish guns: but they had to admit that they were helpless. The Turkish guns were nine thousand yards away and their own—twenty-year-old Krupp guns—only had a range of three thousand. The Arabs laughed scornfully and retreated again to their defiles in the hills.

Feisal was greatly discouraged. His men were tired; he had had heavy losses. Money was running short and his army was gradually melting away. He did not like having to carry on entirely by himself while his brother Abdulla remained in Mecca and Ali and Zeid at Rabegh. He fell back with his main body to a position nearer the coast, leaving local tribes to carry on his policy of sudden raids on Turkish supply columns and night attacks on the outposts. It was at this point in the history of the Revolt that Lawrence appeared and turned the tide.

V

At the outbreak of the War Lawrence had of course to give up the idea of continuing at Carchemish, which was in Turkish territory. He was, at the time, in Oxford—it was the off-season for digging—and he much resented this interruption of what had been to him a nearly perfect life. He tried to join an Officers’ Training Corps at Oxford, but without success. He tried again in London; but it was no good. It has been incorrectly said that he was marked as ‘physically below fighting standard’: this would, however, be quite believable. Perhaps the only other man in England who was Lawrence’s equal in physical strength and endurance was Jimmy Wilde, the fly-weight boxer, a World’s champion who not only beat every other man of his own weight but for years was unbeaten by boxers weighing a whole stone heavier than himself. Wilde was rejected as being of ‘emaciated physique’ and not fit for active service. But in Lawrence’s case it was only a temporary glut of recruits that was responsible for his being turned away. Dr. Hogarth heard that Lawrence was at a loose end and got him given a week’s trial, as a favour, by Colonel Hedley, the head of the Geographic Section of the General Staff at Whitehall. Three weeks later Hogarth met Hedley and asked him, ‘Did you find young Lawrence any use?’ ‘He’s running my entire department for me now,’ said Hedley shortly. Lawrence’s task here was making maps of Sinai, Belgium and France.

Four months later, on Turkey’s entering the War, Lord Kitchener ordered all members of the Sinai Survey expedition of 1913—14 to be sent immediately to Egypt, where their knowledge would be useful in view of a possible Turkish invasion of Egypt. General Maxwell wired that they were not wanted. Kitchener wired back that they were already on their way. In Cairo Lawrence naturally went to the Military Map Department of the Intelligence Service, where again he made his presence felt. About certain parts of Syria and Mesopotamia he knew even more than the Turks themselves. At the same time he was engaged in general intelligence as staff-captain at General Headquarters, Egypt. He was charged with making out a periodic report to the General Staff as to the position of the various divisions and smaller units of the Turkish Army: this information came from spies or from prisoners captured on the various fronts. Although a most valuable officer he was not popular with the senior military officers about him, particularly with those fresh from England who did not believe that a civilian like Lawrence was competent to talk about military subjects. There was annoyance, for instance, when he interrupted two generals discussing a reported movement of Turkish troops from So-and-So to Such-and-Such by saying: ‘Nonsense; they can’t make the distance in twice the time you give them. The roads are bad and there’s no local transport. Besides, their commanding officer is a very lazy fellow.’ Also he was looked on with disfavour for going about without a military belt, in patent-leather shoes, and not wearing the right-coloured socks or tie. His reports, too, were not written in the style favoured. The War Office handbook of information about the Turkish Army, of which he was joint editor for fourteen editions, contained such comments as ‘General Abd el Mahmoud commanding the —th Division is half-Albanian by birth and a consumptive; an able officer and a gunnery expert; but a vicious scoundrel, and will accept bribes.’ These personal comments were thought unnecessary: the theory held by the British was that their officer opponents were gallant fellows entitled to every courtesy. An objection was also raised to such scholarly footnotes as a comparison between the new Boy Scout movement in Turkey and the Corps of Pages kept in Egypt in the time of the Janissaries. The General Staff disliked history and suspected a joke. Among Lawrence’s other tasks was questioning suspected persons; he had the gift of being able to tell at once from small points in a man’s dress and from the dialect he spoke more or less what he was and where he came from. Two recorded examples will serve. An ugly-looking ruffian was caught on the Suez Canal, suspected of being a spy. He said he was a Syrian. Lawrence, overcoming his usual aversion to looking a man in the face, said ‘He’s lying; look at his little pig eyes! The man’s an Egyptian of the pedlar class.’ He spoke sharply in the pedlar’s dialect, and the man admitted who he was. On another occasion, but later in the War, when Lawrence had greatly improved his accuracy, a fine-looking Arab came in with information. Lawrence’s colleague said: ‘Here’s one of the real Bedouin come to see you.’ Lawrence said, ‘No! He’s not got the Bedouin walk or style. He’s a Syrian Arab farmer living under the protection of the Beni Sakhr tribe,’ and so it proved.

In 1915 Cairo got so full of generals and colonels with nothing to do but send unnecessary messages about and get in the way of the few people who were doing any work, that it was mere comic opera. No less than three General Staffs fully officered were collected in Egypt, and it was impossible for any one of them to define exactly where its duties began and ended. There was current a wicked parody of an old Egyptian-Christian creed, in which occurred the phrase, ‘And yet there are not three Incompetents but one Incompetent.’ One of the most intimate glimpses we get of Lawrence in 1915 is of a small grinning second-lieutenant, with hair of unmilitary length and no belt, hiding behind a screen in the Savoy Hotel with another equally unmilitary colleague, softly counting ‘One, two, three, four!’ ... through a hole in the screen. They were counting generals. An important conference was going on in the room, for generals only. His colleague swears to me that Lawrence counted up to sixty-five. He himself only made it sixty-four, but one of the Brigadier-Generals may have moved.

Lawrence went on several journeys to the Suez Canal, where a weak Turkish attack had been made and a strong one was always expected, and one to the Senussi Desert in the West of Egypt (I believe to discover the whereabouts of British prisoners captured by the hostile Arabs there). He was also sent to Athens to get contact with the Levant group of the British Secret Service, whose agent in Egypt he was for a time until the work grew too important for an officer of his low rank to perform. He also was engaged in getting information about the anti-British revolutionary societies in Egypt and, because the Egyptians are not as loyal in their secret societies as the Syrians and Mesopotamians, was always having visitors; one party after another came offering to betray the names of its fellow-members until he had seen nearly the whole society. Lawrence’s chief difficulty was to prevent the various parties meeting each other on the office-stairs. Social life in Egypt bored him. ‘It’s a bad life this,’ he wrote at the end of March 1915, ‘living at close quarters with a khaki crowd very intent on “Banker” and parades and lunch. I am a total abstainer from all of these and so a snob.’ In April 1916 he was sent to Mesopotamia. He had an official task in which he was not much interested and a private intention known only to a few colleagues whom he could trust.

In Mesopotamia an army composed of mixed Indian and British troops had been marching up the Tigris from the Persian Gulf and had at first met with success, but sickness, transport difficulties, bad strategy and strong Turkish forces had held up the advance, which became a retreat: and soon General Townshend with a large force was cut off and besieged in the town of Kut. Provisions were failing and the fall was believed to be a certainty because reinforcements could not arrive from India in time. Lawrence’s official task given him direct from the War Office at London was to go as member of a secret mission to the Turkish commander who was besieging Kut: to persuade him not to press the siege. It was thought possible that a large bribe might work because it was known that the Turks were themselves in difficulties. They had few troops—the Arabic-speaking regiments were openly mutinous—and a Russian army to the North had just captured the town of Erzeroum, the capital of Kurdistan, in the famous snow battle. The Russians were pressing on towards Anatolia, the Turks’ home province; so that at any moment the siege might collapse. As a matter of fact the capture of Erzeroum had been ‘arranged’—Colonel Buchan’s novel _Greenmantle_ has more than a flavour of truth—and the War Office hoped that the same success could be repeated at Kut. Nevertheless bribes would be useless, Lawrence had told those who sent him, and would only encourage the Turks. The Turkish commander, being a nephew of Enver, the chief Young Turk, never needed to worry about money.

The British Generals in Mesopotamia were not pleased with the idea of this conference. Two of them told Lawrence that his intentions (which they did not know) were dishonourable, and unworthy of a soldier (which he never acknowledged himself to be). Now, this Mesopotamian Army was under the orders of the Government of India and though Lord Kitchener, who was in general command of the Imperial British Forces, had early in the War approached two leaders of the secret freedom society of Mesopotamia to offer to help in a mutiny which might have cleared Mesopotamia of the Turks at a single blow, his hand had been held. The Indian Government was afraid that if the Arabs mutinied it would be not able to grant Mesopotamia those benefits of British protection which had been granted to Burma some years before; the Arabs would want to remain free. So the help that Kitchener would have given was withheld and the mutiny did not come about. Instead, an army was sent from India to act without the Arabs: with disastrous results. The British and Indians were looked upon as invaders as unwelcome as the Turks and were not only given no help but were constantly being raided and robbed by the local Arab tribes.

Lawrence’s private intention, which was the real reason of his coming, had been to see whether the situation in Mesopotamia would allow of local co-operation on Nationalist lines between the British and the Euphrates tribes, whom he knew well from his Carchemish days. Some of these were already in revolt—he hoped further to get in touch with the great Ruwalla tribe of the Northern Syrian desert—and with his assistance might soon have cut all Turkish communications by holding up river traffic and raiding supply columns until the army before Kut would be in a state of siege itself. Kut could hold out until he had made his preparations; if only eight more aeroplanes could be found for dropping provisions into the town. But he found that it was hopeless. The policy of wresting Mesopotamia without Arab help and making it part of the Empire was to be stubbornly maintained; sooner, almost, than recognize the Arabs as a political force the English would leave the country to the Turks. The result was that Lawrence did not do what he intended.