Lawrence of Arabia Page 7

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  1 in taking this decision Hussein appears to have been influenced and was undoubtedly strengthened, by the attitude of Ibn Sa‘ud, whom he consulted in January, 1915, when pressed by the Turks to proclaim a Jihad. Ibn Sa‘ud’s reply was to the effect that Hussein should evade the Turkish demand by pleading fear of British reprisals against the Hejaz ports. Before sending it, Ibn Sa‘ud discussed the issues with Captain Shakespear, a British political officer then at his camp, who stood high in his esteem. Seven days later Shakespear was killed in a tribal battle between Ibn Sa‘ud and Ibn Rashid, the pro-Turk Emir of Hail.

  BOOK III

  THE ARAB REVOLT

  INTRODUCTION TO BOOK III

  For those who prefer to skip the historical prologue in Book II.

  THE humour of history is nowhere better illustrated than in the relations between Britain and Turkey during the 19th Century. Supported in arms when her immunity—particularly from a Russian bear-hug—coincided with Britain’s interests, Turkey was scolded and chastised between times for her moral lapses. But as the 20th Century dawned, this paternal relationship was altered by the intrusion of a wooer who offered Turkey a strong arm to rest upon without the accompaniment of moral homilies. Turkey proved susceptible to such advances. And when the new friend came to blows with the old guardian, on the outbreak of the World War in August, 1914, fear of Russia combined with faith in Germany’s strength to draw Turkey into arms against Britain, at the end of October.

  This was a valuable gain for Germany and Austria. It locked the Black Sea door by which Russia’s manpower might have been supplied with munitions, helped to cover their own Balkan back door, and promised to divert part of the British and Russian forces. On the other hand, Turkey herself was disquietingly vulnerable. Her head and neck, on the edge of Europe, lay dangerously exposed to a severing cut, while her sprawling body in Asia was predisposed to paralysis.

  The Dardanelles guarded the approach to Constantinople, but their defences were out of date and incomplete, while Turkey’s only two munition factories lay on the shore beyond, easy of destruction by an enemy who forced the passage. As for the Turkish Empire, its weakness lay, first, in its long drawn out and brittle communications; secondly, in the restlessness of its subject peoples, especially the Arabs. The railway system formed an immense , of which the horizontal line, from Constantinople through Aleppo to Baghdad, was still far from being completed; the thousand mile vertical line ran down through Syria to the Hejaz, on the eastern shores of the Red Sea, having its terminus at Medina.

  The course of the struggle would largely depend on how far Turkey’s opponents profited by her inherent weaknesses to diminish the damage caused by her entry into the war against them. That issue, in turn, was largely determined by the grip of a century-old German theory on their minds—Clausewitz’s doctrine that all efforts and all forces should as far as possible be concentrated in the main theatre against the main enemy. Because of their strict and strait allegiance to a doctrine which had hardened with time into dogma, the Allied strategists neglected the opportunity offered by Turkey’s weaknesses, allowing her time to cover these and to develop her own activities. In consequence, with fateful irony, their determination to avoid diverting their strength to secondary ends led them eventually to dissipate their strength more lavishly, for tertiary ends—in safeguarding themselves, especially in Egypt, against danger from the Turks.

  The first year witnessed the British attempts to open the Dardanelles with forces that were always too late and too few for the time of their action. When a withdrawal was decided on in the autumn of 1915, an alternative plan of severing the railway near its joint was conceived. But this Ayas Bay project was still-born, the objections of the General Staff at home being reinforced by a French political veto on British intrusion into Syria.

  Early in 1916, after the evacuation of Gallipoli, the British forces in Egypt rose to over a quarter of a million men, a large proportion of whom remained. They were kept there by fear for the safety of the Suez Canal, Britain’s Imperial artery to India. They were kept idle by the General Staffs reluctance to embark on fresh “side-shows.” Such passivity invited the pin-pricks which came from the Turks on both the eastern and the western frontiers of uneasy Egypt.

  The need of providing an outside distraction to the Turks was perceived by the High Commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon. Several months of long-range negotiation with Hussein, the Sherif of Mecca, ended in an agreement that the Arabs in the Hejaz were to rise against the Turks, when the time was ripe, while Britain guaranteed, with certain reservations, the independence of the Arab lands that then formed part of the Turkish Empire.

  Meantime, however, another representative of the Foreign Office, Sir Mark Sykes, had been independently engaged with the French in carving up the Turkish Empire, on a different plan. This Sykes-Picot Treaty contained the germ of future trouble with the Arabs.

  TURKEY’S LIFE-LINE

  A fourth party, the Turks, now intervened by sending forces south to forestall trouble to themselves. The news of their dispatch hastened the Arab rising, which began in June, 1916.

  CHAPTER V

  THE TOCSIN RINGS

  June, 1916

  “The rising suffers from lack of organization—The Arabs seize Mecca and the coast, but the Turks maintain their hold on Medina—Reaction sets in, and depression grows—There is a manifest need for British aid, but this is hindered by internal complications.

  Lawrence’s career in the opening months of the war—He is sent to Egypt where he is employed on intelligence work and also on certain special missions—Difficulties with his superiors pave the way to a greater opportunity

  THE Sherif himself had organized the revolt. The results were less apparent than the evidence of disorganization. Wingate’s comment on the Sherif’s forces was a fair verdict—“His army is practically a rabble and run on Dervish lines.” There were some fifty thousand Arabs available, but with less than ten thousand rifles among them, and of these only a proportion were modern rifles. There were no guns or machine-guns. Worse still, no arrangements had been made by Hussein to keep his forces fed and maintained in the field. Feisal had only slipped away from Damascus in time for the rising, but in any case neither he nor his brothers appear to have been consulted by their father over the details of the plan. They simply received his orders to begin the revolt. If cautiously shrewd, he was a vain and self-willed “autocrat of the breakfast table,” jealous of his prerogatives.

  But the Turks promised to provide tough fare, hard to bite and large to swallow. The garrison of the Hejaz was mainly provided by the Turkish 22nd Division, whose three regiments had their headquarters at Mecca, Jidda, and Medina—the last being now reinforced by Khairi Bey’s mobile column. In addition battalions of the 21st Division, which had its headquarters in Asir, occupied Lith and Qunfideh, along the coast south of Jidda, the port of Mecca. The total force in the Hejaz was probably over 15,000 strong, and it had not only the advantage of fortified positions but the traditional Turkish capacity for defending them.

  On June 5th, All, the Sherif’s eldest son, and Feisal raised the crimson banner of revolt on the outskirts of Medina in obedience to their father’s orders. Some thirty thousand Arabs had assembled in response to the call. Next day Ali moved north through the mountains to cut the railway near Medain Saleh, 180 miles distant, while Feisal attempted to take the city by storm. Those of the Arabs who gained an entry were soon ejected; they were not the equals of the Turk in close quarter fighting. And at longer range they were exposed to the Turkish artillery whose shells provided a nerve-shattering new experience. In vain Feisal, who knew from Gallipoli experience the comparative innocuousness of such fire, rode about the plain in an effort to calm the tribesmen. The Ageyl and Ateiba tribesmen went to ground and stayed there. The Beni Ali had already tipped the scales by running away. For the next month Feisal had to content himself with establishing a loose blockade, and then even that was broken.
Perchance in reflection it did not seem altogether auspicious to have begun the revolt at the place where Mahomet went originally as a fugitive and ultimately to rest in his tomb.

  MAP 4 THE HEJAZ

  Elsewhere, however, the rising had opened with a string of scintillating successes. From Mecca the bulk of the garrison had moved to their summer-station at Taif, seventy miles to the south-east. The skeleton that was left comprised only a thousand men, some of whom were quartered in barracks within the hill-girdled city while the others occupied the forts on the heights outside. The Turkish commander, moreover, despite his uneasiness over the menacing appearance of armed Bedouin, was taken by surprise when the actual attack came on June 9th. It developed by degrees, and with amusing naivety he telephoned to the Sherif—“The Bedouin have revolted against the Government. Find a way out.” Enjoying the joke, Hussein answered with veiled irony—“Of course we shall.” He promptly ordered a general attack. The Turks put up a stout defence for three days, but on the 12th the Arabs succeeded in setting fire to the barracks, and thus smoked out their occupants. They followed up this success and by the next evening the whole of the defences had been overcome and the garrisons captured, save those of two small forts outside the city. These defied all efforts, and a month passed before they surrendered. But in their resistance they contributed to the Sherif’s wider success by committing the folly of shelling the mosque that contained the Ka‘aba. Their shells only missed the supremely sacred Black Stone by a few feet, and they set the Kiswa on fire. The lives of a handful of worshippers was a cheap price for the moral that Hussein was able to draw for the enlightenment of the Moslem world in a proclamation which Lawrence took and turned into majestic English.

  Meantime, in ignorance of these dramatic events, Hogarth and other members of the Arab Bureau had come across the Red Sea to meet the Sherifs representative. Expecting to discuss the future revolt, they found it in being. When they landed at a point near Jidda on June 6th, they were met, to their surprise, by the Sherif’s youngest son, Zeid, instead of by Abdulla. Zeid explained that his elder brothers were engaged in more active business. But what the British officers could glean as to the situation did not impress them with the Sherif’s capacity to sustain a prolonged effort. Hogarth carried back to Egypt the Sherifs urgent appeal for another ten thousand rifles at least, and above all for some mountain artillery—which must be manned by Moslem crews. This rooted objection to any infidels coming near the Holy Cities, even in their protection, was for a time to be no small handicap to the Arab cause.

  Wingate grasped the situation and rose to the emergency at once. He realized the risk of using Egyptian troops to aid Arabs in driving out Turks, but he was a man of vision as well as of decision—and an Arab confederacy had long been his pet vision. He saw that the politico-strategic issues outweighed the politico-tactical risks. Two mountain-batteries under their own Moslem officers, together with a battery of four machine-guns were embarked at Port Sudan under a senior Egyptian officer. Three ships, carrying this “fire-brigade” as well as three thousand rifles, and a large supply of food and ammunition, sailed on June 27th and arrived next day at Jidda.

  This port had just been opened through British leverage. It had originally been attacked by the Sheikh of the Harb tribe with four thousand of his followers on the same day that Hussein struck at Mecca. But here once again, as at Medina, shell and machine-gun fire proved too much for the Arabs. Nevertheless, by cutting off the water supply they made the garrison’s position hopeless. Two days later the cruisers Fox and Hardinge, the latter belonging to the Indian Marine, shelled the Turkish positions north of the town.

  As at Gallipoli, naval gunnery had little effect on entrenched Turks, whose positions could not be accurately observed. But on the evening of the 15th the British sea-plane carrier Ben-my-Chree appeared on the scene, and her only three available aircraft lew over the port dropping bombs on various targets. The bombardment was about to be resumed next morning when, at dawn, the white iag went up and the garrison of 1,400 men surrendered to the Arabs. As the Fox signalled to the Ben-my-Chree, “probably the sea-planes decided the matter.”

  This important success was soon followed by others—that gave an ironical tinge to the German wireless communiqué of June 27th: “We are in a position to deny absolutely that there has been any rebellion in the Hejaz at all.” Rabegh, a hundred miles north of Jidda, was lightly held and easily taken. On July 27th, Yanbo, a hundred miles beyond Rabegh, also surrendered. Of the ports along the Hejaz coast, only Wejh in the extreme north remained in Turkish hands. Inland, the hill-station of Taif, five thousand feet above sea-level, was still untaken. Abdulla, with a force of some five thousand tribesmen, had invested it, but avoided any such rashness as an assault. With its well-entrenched garrison of three thousand Turks and ten Krupp field-guns, Taif was a hard nut to crack. Abdulla waited until the nut-crackers arrived.

  They comprised an Egyptian mountain-battery of four guns that had been brought from the Sudan, and a howitzer captured from the Turks—a fact which lent irony to its present use and influence. For, opening fire on July 16th, this artillery speedily dominated the Turkish field-guns, moving gradually closer in. The Arabs watched with exultation, delighted with the noise even more than the effect, but they preferred to remain admiring spectators, risking no assault. Their leader, Abdulla, already somewhat fat for his thirty-five years, had too much shrewdness and perhaps a too keen sense of humour to indulge in audacious ventures, especially when time was so palpably on his side and the tables were so amusingly turned on the Turks. His discretion was justified when the garrison of 2,000 men finally surrendered unconditionally on September 22nd, after the Governor, Ghalib Pasha, had been badly frightened by several shells falling upon his residence. This capture brought the Sherif’s bag of prisoners to over five thousand Turkish soldiers. Many of the Arabs and Syrians among them volunteered to enter his service, and later formed the nucleus of a regular force.

  But if the sun shone at Taif, it had become still more clouded in the northern area. The railway service from Damascus had been restored after momentary interruption, and trains were running about twice a week into Medina, taking four days on the journey. The command at Medina had now been taken over by Fakhri Pasha, who had risen to fame as organizer of the Adana massacres in 1909; an expert in such forms of reprisal and intimidation, he was not long in sustaining his reputation. Disheartened by the original failure, part of the Beni Ali had tried to make terms with the Turks. The subsequent negotiations gave Fakhri an opportunity which he exploited in a way that had a reminiscent flavour of the trick brought off by the Romans and their Numidian allies against the Carthaginian camps near Utica in 203 B.C. He made a sudden sortie on June 27th, drove off Feisal and surrounded the suburb which Feisal had occupied. After their successful assault his men sacked and burnt the place, massacring the inhabitants, men, women and children, with few exceptions. After rape, the females were thrown into the flames as a variant to death by mutilation.

  This experience of the Turkish mode of war made the more impression because of its breach of the Arab code of war, which rules not only that women and children should be spared, but also material property, if it cannot be removed as loot. The Arab’s chivalry is guided by a sound business morality. He kills for cash and not for charity. If this relative immunity from the blood-lust that sweeps over more animal races is testimony to his good sense, it does not make him good material for a “Crusade”—which demands a fanatical enthusiasm. As it in part explains his past subjection to the Turk, so it also helps us to understand the difficulties that were to be met by those who cherished the dream of inspiring him to a supreme and selfless effort for freedom and empire. A Cavalcade was more in his line than a Crusade.

  But battles have often been won by bluff, and wars more often by movement than by slow murder. There was a military value inherent even in a cavalcade for those who knew how to use it. This only awaited the martial genius who could understand
the strength of weakness and turn the limitations of the Arab into assets. By strange contrast, this dynamic realist was to reveal himself in the man to whom the Arabs had been a romantic ideal.

  In midsummer, 1916, there was still a hard road to travel before the right way was reached. Honour might urge the Arabs to avenge the massacre of their people but their lucidity of mind dissuaded them from throwing their bodies against machine-guns. They fell back out of range. Ali also withdrew from the railway and linked up with Feisal. The Arab forces now contented themselves with guarding the tracks that ran through the hills to Mecca.

  Even here they were not long left in peace. On August 3rd the Turks took the offensive again, and drove Ali twenty miles south of Medina after a running fight that lasted for a day and a night. The rocky hills, so helpful to solitary snipers, were the main check on a continued advance. But at this moment of Arab depression the newly arrived mobile column might well have pushed through to Mecca. The Turks’ lack of a time-sense came to the relief of the Arabs. The Turkish commander chose to wait until fresh reinforcements reached him at Medina and permitted him to undertake a thorough subjugation of the Hejaz. Eight battalions were being sent, as well as a new Sherif, Ali Haidar, ready to make a triumphal entry into Mecca, with the Turkish holy carpet. The flavour of such a vengeance was too good to lose by hurry. Thus the Turks forfeited the best chance of nipping the revolt in the bud.

  Time was allowed for the Arabs to gain the prestige of successful revolt as the news spread in widening ripples over the sands of the desert, gathering a volume greater than the reality in its passage.

  Time was also allowed for the Arabs to repair their preparatory omissions and to improve their defective organization. But they took little advantage of the respite. Organization did not come naturally to the town-Arab or peasant-Arab, still less to the Bedouin. Nor did it fit their family basis. If they came together in force, that force became as shifting as the sands. It frequently happened that each member of a family would serve in turn for a few days, using the family rifle, and then be replaced by a brother. Those who were married were accustomed to divide their time between war and their wives. And the fluctuations of the family system prevailed a stage higher in the tribal. An entire contingent of a clan would sometimes go home for a spell. These disorganizing influences were accentuated by the sensitiveness and suspicion of the Arabs, and their inter-tribal feuds. The tie of a common enemy was often insufficient to bear for long the strain of a mutual dislike. Lines of division, indeed, were innumerable. The absence of horizontal distinctions which has appealed to so many foreign observers, Lawrence among them, was offset by a superabundance of vertical intersections.