Lawrence of Arabia Read online

  The chief military asset of the Arabs lay in their power of strategic mobility—their ability to move long distances at short notice without the encumbrances that clog an orthodox force. But this power had more limitations than are usually realized. Only a small proportion of the Arabs—barely a tenth of Feisal’s original force—were camel-men. The fact that the bulk moved on foot aggravated their problem of feeding themselves if they moved far from home. Thus food was a factor only second to family in tethering them to their own tribal area. It meant that if operations were transferred to a new area the strategist had largely to depend on raising new forces from the tribes there. This “localization” of the Arab armies has an interesting analogy with the cramping effect of the English county militias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or the state militias during the American Civil War—the Georgia militia, for example, were only brought to the battlefield of Grahamville by the amusing ruse of switching their train on to a branch line that took them over the South Carolina border in the dark, so that they fought next day in blissful ignorance of die fact that they were defending the soil of another state.

  When the first enthusiasm waned, the maintenance of the Arab rising depended on the Sherif’s power to feed his followers and also to compensate them for the loot they were now failing to secure from the Turks. Here Britain’s help was the decisive factor. The supply-ships that came into Jidda and Rabegh were the backbone of the revolt. Through them, and them alone, the Sherif was able to feed his forces and their families. With British money he was able to pay two pounds a month for a man and four for a camel. As Lawrence has remarked—“Nothing else would have performed the miracle of keeping a tribal army in the field for five months on end.”

  Less happily, those who were nearest the ships and so farthest from the fighting front tended to fare best. Thus in an accentuated form the familiar tendency of civilized armies was witnessed here. And as these tribal armies had no discipline to check them, the natural consequence was a reflux towards the base that drained the fighting forces.

  Ali and Feisal found that only a trickle of supplies was reaching them. And no money. To maintain the martial ardour of his men Feisal hit on the ruse of filling a chest with clinking stones, “had it locked and corded carefully, guarded on each daily march by his own slaves, and introduced meticulously into his tent each night.”

  But these devices could not suffice for long. So Ali, exercising an elder brother’s privilege, went down to Rabegh to find out why the British were not fulfilling their promises. He found that the local chief had preferred to take the chance of a quick profit in the expectation that the Turks would settle the Sherif’s account, and leave his clear of debt. Sending for Zeid, who brought reinforcements from Jidda, Ali made a show of force. The conscience-stricken chief took to the hills, while Ali took possession of Rabegh, where he discovered a fine hoard of British supplies. The brothers decided to take a prolonged rest at Rabegh.

  Thus Feisal was left to play a lone hand in the hills near Medina, striving to hold together his force, which was now melting as well as shifting. The sheikhs told him: “You promise arms and food and none come”; tired of waiting they slipped away. And while the war languished the Turks were not only gathering weight at Medina, and strengthening their grip on the railway northward, but were collecting transport and supplies from their particular desert ally, the Emir of Hail, as well as from the north. The Arab rising might soon be extinguished unless Britain contributed something more than the sinews of war.

  Such was the view of the men, with one notable exception, who came in close touch with the situation. But there was a multiplicity of factors and a complexity of direction that hindered their views from having effect.

  The external control of Arab affairs was a tangled skein, even before French threads were woven into it. The political side was directed by the High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, whose appreciation of the value of the Arab movement was matched by his courage in espousing it. At his elbow was Mr. Ronald Storrs, whose versatility matched his variety of interests. Storrs had been Oriental Secretary to the British Agency at Cairo since 1909, and reinforced his chief with a knowledge of the people on the other side of the Red Sea, and a knack of smoothing out difficulties nearer home. But the High Commissioners sphere of influence was limited because the Government of India still kept responsibility for the affairs of Arabia south of the Hejaz. And his powers of action were limited because he depended for the means of action upon the Commander of the forces in Egypt, now Sir Archibald Murray, who was not only saturated in the conventional doctrine of concentration but had the soldier’s traditional sensitiveness to the appearance of political interference. Murray in turn was governed by the General Staff in London, while McMahon was under the Foreign Office.

  But the actual control of any military moves across the Red Sea was vested in a third person, the Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate. He had been appointed to “the command of operations in the Hejaz,” which meant that he was responsible for advising the Sherif as to the Arab operations and for the employment of any British forces that might be sent. His sympathy with the Arab rising was equalled by his eagerness to exploit the opportunity, but he was a general without an army, for his own forces in the Sudan were scanty, and still occupied in quenching the embers of revolt in Darfur. The problem of giving long-distance advice to the Sherif was hardly less difficult, and was exceeded by the difficulty of securing its acceptance.

  To ease this, Wingate sent Lieut.-Colonel C. E. Wilson, Governor of the Red Sea Province of the Sudan, across to Jidda as his representative. It was a high responsibility, but a happy choice. For a time Wilson had to work unaided at the task of comforting, counselling and reconciling the various Arab leaders, but in the end he acquired an ascendency over them that was only less remarkable than the confidence he inspired in the suspicious Sherif. This was due not to diplomatic cleverness, but to the fact that he was so open and honourable that the Arabs, who do not lack penetration, came to place a trust in him that they would never have given to a subtler counsellor. But they perhaps forgot, to their own detriment later, that he was the man on the spot, and not the man at the top.

  Another fortunate chance lay in the fact that the command of the sea was exercised by a sailor so free from red-tape and so ready in cooperation as Vice-Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, commanding the East Indies Station. He truly fulfilled the role of godfather to the Revolt, in the military sphere, until the infant was able to take care of itself.

  There was a human link between these several authorities in Gilbert Clayton, a brigadier-general at forty-one, who combined in his person the triple office of Sudan Agent, head of the Military Intelligence in Egypt, and head of the Political Intelligence. He was also in liaison with the staff of the Naval Commander-in-Chief and supervised the Arab Bureau. He not only played many parts but possessed the gifts to develop them. Although seemingly casual, and even lazy, he had a knack of keeping touch with all relevant matters, together with a capacity to smile at troubles that often helped to allay them. His sense of humour was of no less value in dealing with his variegated subordinates than in composing the differences between superiors, and it was especially called on to protect one of the former from the frequent wrath of senior officers whose sense of dignity had quenched their sense of humour. Without the support and understanding of Clayton, as well as of Hogarth, the seeds of Lawrence’s genius might have withered in a stony soil.

  When the War came, in August, 1914, Lawrence had been back at Oxford, working on his part of a record of the Sinai trip which he had made with Woolley. Undisturbed by the general upset of life in England Lawrence continued work on this book, which was published in 1915 by the Palestine Exploration Fund under the title of The Wilderness of Zin.

  Lawrence’s action may suggest that he was more interested in finishing the book than in a war which most young men thought was likely to be over before they had a chance to fight. But
although he was to be the Drake of the desert, and later to be a familiar sight on Plymouth Hoe, he did not continue his book in August, 1914, from the same reason that Drake had continued his bowls. The real cause lay in Kitchener’s anxiety to avoid offence to Turkey so long as a chance remained of keeping her out of the war. “Turkey was sore about the Sinai survey, which it felt had been a military game. K. (the only begetter of the survey) insisted on the Palestine Exploration Fund’s bringing out its record of our archaeological researches, p.d.q., as whitewash. Woolley and I had instructions to get it done instanter.”

  The task did not take long to complete, and Lawrence promptly took the initiative in finding a place in the military system where his particular knowledge could be of real service. It has been said that he tried to enlist and was rejected on the ground of poor physique; this has the piquant irony that makes a good story, but here happens to be untrue. But there is still a delicate flavour in the actual fact that owing to the glut of recruits the height standard was raised to a level beyond, Lawrence’s stature—five feet five inches. Napoleon, also, would have been rejected by the British Army in August, 1914.

  What happened next is best told in Lawrence’s own words to me—“Woolley and I wrote to Newcombe, when the book was finished, and asked his advice about a war job. They were difficult to get. Newcombe told Cox, of the Intelligence, about us, and got our names on the waiting list.” Woolley grew tired of waiting and obtained a commission in the artillery. “I asked Hogarth (prominent in the R.G.S.) if he could expedite me something.” Hogarth suggested that the Geographical Section of the General Staff was the right place, and apparently spoke about Lawrence through some intermediary channel. Anyhow, Lawrence received word from Hogarth to call on Colonel Hedley at the War Office.

  Sir Coote Hedley has told me that he has no recollection of being approached on Lawrence’s behalf and that he was surprised when one day in September a War Office messenger ushered into his room a young man, hatless and in grey flannels, who “looked about eighteen.” His name, however, dispelled any doubts, as Hedley was well aware of his work in Sinai and had heard some good stories about him from Newcombe. Thus he readily took Lawrence into his office. Lawrence had appeared at an opportune moment, as all save one of the officers in the Geographical Section, Newcombe among them, had been called away to active service on the outbreak of war. And the only one left, Captain Walter Nugent, was within a week of departing to France. “Nugent hurriedly instructed me in my G.S.G.S. duties and Hedley and I were left alone in the office.” Among other important work left unfinished was that on the 1/250,000 maps of the Sinai Peninsula, which were to connect the maps of Palestine, surveyed and published by the Palestine Exploration Fund, with those of the Sinai Peninsula, prepared by the Geographical Section, which started from the Egyptian end.

  Lawrence began work while still a civilian, and his change into uniform was precipitated through the shock his appearance gave to Sir Henry Rawlinson, who had just been appointed to command the new expedition to the relief of the Belgian Army. Lawrence went to show the newly printed maps of Belgium to Rawlinson who “nearly had a it when he saw me,” and exclaimed, “I want to talk to an officer.” Hedley then said to Lawrence, “We must get you a commission”; this was arranged without the formality of any medical examination—which was obviously superfluous after the practical tests of endurance he had already passed triumphantly in Syria and Sinai. It was more important than he should be in uniform, so he went off to the Army and Navy Stores and fitted himself out with a second-lieutenant’s uniform without waiting until his appointment was gazetted.

  Hedley found his new assistant more efficient even than he had hoped. Indeed, there is a story that some weeks later Hogarth asked Hedley how his new apprentice was doing, and received the answer, not unmixed with humour—“He’s running my entire department for me now.” With a public-spirited generosity that is not too common in the departmental machine, Hedley told Callwell, the Director of Military Operations and intelligence, that he had in his office “the ideal officer” for Egyptian intelligence work. Meantime, realizing that he would soon lose Lawrence’s help, he tried to get the Sinai maps finished as soon as possible. Lawrence needed no prompting. If he had not been restrained he “would have worked all through the night,” for “he hardly noticed what time it was.”

  In December, after Turkey had entered the War, it was decided to strengthen the Intelligence Service in Cairo. Newcombe was called back from France, and told that he was to go out to Egypt as assistant to Clayton. Among the officers he was to take with him were George Lloyd, Aubrey Herbert, Leonard Woolley, and Lawrence—they became known in Egypt as “the five musketeers.” Newcombe and Lawrence left London on December gth ahead of the others and travelled by rail to Marseilles, where they embarked on a French liner for Egypt, thereby enjoying a jest at the expense of the others, who followed in discomfort on a troopship.

  In Cairo the fountainhead for information about the Turkish Army was another civilian, still uncommissioned. This was Philip Graves, who had been Times Correspondent in Constantinople before the war. Foreseeing the coming conflict, he had turned himself into a military expert, keeping watch on the progress of the Turkish Army reorganization that followed the Balkan War, and studying both measures and men with a closeness that the British official intelligence failed to approach. Thus when Turkey aligned herself with the enemy in 1914 the War Office handbook was as out of date as Graves’s knowledge, from superior sources, was up to date. The contrast gives rise to the reflection that there is a type of official mind which would rather die—or let others die—through ignorance than conquer through unofficial information.

  On going to Cairo, however, after Turkey’s entry into the war, Graves found in Clayton a man who was ready to profit by his unique knowledge of the opposing army. It was the more valuable because it embraced not merely the personnel but the personalities of the opposing commanders, their virtues and vices. Thus he was able to furnish illuminating appreciations that sometimes ran like this—“A rather oily young Turk . . . Is quite unreliable, fairly unscrupulous, but not inefficient. Supposed to have made a good deal of money out of brothel-keepers, though his friends say that this was for the benefit of party funds. Frequented Diplomatic Society, especially French circles. Reputed to live pretty fast.”

  The knowledge that Lawrence possessed of the lower social strata in the Turkish Empire, and also of the Arab secret societies, made him an apt complement to Graves. Hence his services were utilized not only in preparing maps but in helping Philip Graves to compile the enemy’s “Order of Battle”—the disposition of the various Turkish divisions and detachments, as pieced together from the reports of our agents and from the examination of prisoners. In this task he was helped by past exercise of his habit of gathering odd trifles of information and his extraordinary perceptiveness of details which other men missed. If Conan Doyle had been born a generation later he would have found in Lawrence an apt model from which to create Sherlock Holmes.

  This flair led to a further extension of Lawrence’s duties, that of examining suspects who were brought in. He frequently confounded them, and dumbfounded the Watsons, by his deductions from points of dress, manner and speech. To his fellows Lawrence’s success in eliciting Information seemed uncanny. His own explanation is “I always knew their districts, and asked about my friends in them. Then they told me everything.” After seeing the man and listening to his first few words, Lawrence was usually able to “put him within twenty miles of his home,” and would then remark—“Oh, you come from Aleppo. How is——?”

  In Egypt, as formerly at Carchemish, Lawrence’s many-sidedness made him a general handyman. In conjunction with Graves he produced successive fresh editions of the Turkish Army handbook and supervised the printing of them himself. He was employed in gathering Information about the seditious movement in Egypt, wherein the readiness of the conspirators to betray each other gave a relieving touch of humour to a sordi
d business. He was sent on a mission to the Western Desert. He was sent on a mission to Greece, to get in touch with the British secret agents there. This was appreciated by him still more as a chance to feel the magic of that “landscape of extraordinary purity of line,” to feed his eyes once more on the shape and colours of die Greek hills—“conscious works of art.” it was like a cleansing shower between one cesspool and another.

  In the spring of 1916 he had a long-range hand in a more important matter, the “capture” of Erzerum by the Russian Caucasus Army after a curiously half-hearted defence—readers of John Buchan’s subsequent novel, Greenmantle, may find it worth while to remember that fiction has often a basis of fact.

  The immediate effect of this success in the Caucasus was that it stimulated the War Office to attempt a repetition in essentially different conditions, and in consequence Lawrence was sent on a secret mission to Mesopotamia. Ostensibly he went there on behalf of the Intelligence in Cairo as a step towards Improving the preparation and printing of maps for the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, and, in particular, to give advice on the compilation of maps from air photographs, a new art in which he had become expert while it was still a mystery to the Indian authorities. But although most of his fellows knew only that this task had been given him, he had received confidential instructions direct from the War Office that he was to accompany Captain Aubrey Herbert, M.P., on an embassy to Khalil Pasha, in command of the Turkish Army then besieging Townshend’s force in Kut.