IV
Four years before the War, Abdul Hamid was deposed by a political party known as the Young Turks. The Young Turks believed in Western political ideas learned from the American schools founded in Turkey, and in military methods learned from their advisers, the Germans; but French culture and government gave them their clearest model to imitate. They objected to Abdul Hamid’s idea of a religious empire ruled by a Sultan who was both head of the State and spiritual ruler. They favoured the Western idea of a military state—Turkey—ruling its subject races merely by the sword, with religion a matter of less importance. As part of this policy they sent Hussein and his family back to Mecca. This nationalist movement in Turkey was really one of self-protection. Already Western ideas about the rights of subject races to govern themselves had begun to crumble up the Turkish Empire. The Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, Persians and others had broken away and set up their own governments. It was time for the Turks to protect what was left by adopting the same nationalist policy.
After their first success against the Sultan the Young Turks began to behave foolishly. They preached ‘Turkish brotherhood’; meaning no more than to rally together all men of Turkish blood. Turkey should be the absolute mistress of a subject empire in the modern French style; not merely the chief state of a religious Empire only bound together by the Arabic language and the Koran. They also hoped to get back into their state the Turkish population which was at the time under Russian rule in Central Asia. But the subject races, who far outnumbered the Turks, did not understand this. Seeing that the Turks even in their own country were dependent on Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians, Persians and others for the running of all their government offices and doing all their business except the simple military part, they thought that the Young Turks meant to have an Empire something like the white part of the British Empire, one in which Turkey was to be the head of a number of free states, self-governed but contributing to the general expenses of the Empire. The Young Turks saw their mistake and immediately made their intentions quite plain. Led by Enver, the son of the late Sultan’s chief furniture-maker, and a soldier-politician who had worked his way up, it was said, by murdering in turn every superior officer who stood in his way, they stopped at nothing. The Armenians began to take up arms for freedom. The Turks crushed them—the Armenian leaders failed their followers—and massacred men, women and children in hundreds of thousands. They massacred them not because they were Christians but because they were Armenians and wanted to be independent. Such wholesale barbarity was made possible for Enver and his friends by the nature of the Turkish private soldier, who has been described as the best natural soldier in the world. This means that he is brave, enduring and so obedient that he allows himself to have no feelings except those that he is ordered to have. He will butcher and burn even in his own country if so ordered, and will be merciful and affectionate if so ordered. He merely tries to do his duty.
The Arabs, who had also begun to talk of freedom, were more difficult to deal with because more numerous and because being (unlike the Armenians) Semites they were more powerfully affected by the idea. For Semites can be swung on an idea as on a cord (the phrase is Lawrence’s). The Syrian Arabs, since they were nearest to Europe, first caught fire, and the Young Turks took what measures they dared to take short of massacre. The Arab members of the Turkish Congress were scattered, Arab political societies were suppressed. The public use of the Arabic language except for strictly religious purposes was forbidden all over the Empire. Any talk of Arab self-government was a punishable offence. As a result of this oppression, secret societies sprang up of a more violently revolutionary kind. One of these, the Syrian society, was numerous, well organized, and kept its secret so well that the Turks, though they had suspicions, could not find any clear evidence of its leaders or membership, and without evidence dared not begin another reign of terror of the Armenian kind for fear of European opinion. Another society was composed almost entirely of Arab officers serving in the Turkish army, who were sworn to turn against their masters as soon as a chance offered. This society was founded in Mesopotamia and was so fanatically pro-Arab that its leaders would not even have dealings with the English, French and Russians, who might otherwise have been their allies, because they did not believe that if they accepted European help they would be allowed to keep any freedom that they might win. They preferred a single bad tyranny which they knew well to a possible new tyranny of several nations whom they did not know so well; and at the end of the War members of the society were still commanding Turkish divisions against the English. The Syrian society, however, looked for help to England, to Egypt, to the Sherif of Mecca, to anyone in fact who would do the Arabs’ work for them.
These freedom societies grew until in 1914 the War broke out: then European opinion did not matter much and the Turks, with the power given them by the general mobilization of the Army, could act. Nearly one-third of the original Turkish Army was Arabic-speaking, and after the first few months of the War when they had recognized the danger the Turks took good care to send Arab regiments as far away as possible from their homes, to the northern battle fronts, and there put them into the firing line as quickly as possible. But before this, a few Syrian revolutionaries were found to have been appealing to France for help in their campaign for freedom, and here was an excuse for a reign of terror. Arab Mohammedans and Arab Christians were crowded into the same prisons, and by the end of 1915 the whole of Syria was united by a cause that suppression only made stronger.
Early in the same year the Young Turks were convinced by arguments and pressure from the part of their German Allies that in order to win their war, which was pressing them very hard, they must work up some religious enthusiasm, proclaim a Holy War. In spite of their former decision to give religion an unimportant position in the empire, Holy War was necessary for more than one reason; they wanted the support of the religious party in Turkey; they wanted their soldiers, now badly fed and badly equipped, to fight bravely in the confidence of going straight to Paradise if they were killed; and they also wanted to encourage Mohammedan soldiers in the French and British armies to throw down their arms. In India particularly, such a proclamation was expected to have an immense effect. The Holy War was therefore proclaimed at Constantinople and the Sherif of Mecca was invited, or rather ordered, to confirm the proclamation.
If Hussein had done so the course of the War might have been very different. But he did not wish to take the step. He hated the Turks, whom he knew for bad Mohammedans without honour or good feelings, and he believed that a true Holy War could only be a defensive one, and this was clearly aggressive. Besides, Germany, a Christian ally, made a Holy War look absurd. He refused.
Hussein was shrewd, honourable and deeply pious. His position, however, was difficult. The yearly pilgrimage ended with the outbreak of war and with it went a great part of his revenues. As he was for the Allies an enemy subject, there was danger of their stopping the usual food-ships from India. And if he angered the Turks they might stop food from coming to him by the desert railway; and his own province could not grow food enough for its population. So having refused to proclaim the Holy War he begged the Allies not to starve his people out for what was not their fault. The Turks, in reply to his refusal, began a partial blockade of Hussein’s province by controlling the traffic on the railway. The British, on the other hand, allowed the food vessels to come as usual. This decided Hussein. He decided to revolt (as his neighbour Ibn Saud of the central oases had successfully done four or five years previously) and had a secret meeting with a party of British officers on a deserted reef on the Red Sea coast near Mecca. He was given assurance that England would give him what help he needed in guns and stores for his war. He had also just been secretly asked for his support by leaders of both secret societies, the Syrian and the Mesopotamian. A military mutiny was proposed in Syria. Hussein undertook to do his best for them. He therefore sent Feisal, his third son, to report to him from Syria what were the chances of a successful revolt.
Feisal, who had been a member of the Turkish Government and was therefore able to travel about freely, went and reported that prospects were good in Syria, but that the war in general was going against the Allies; the time was not yet. If, however, the Australian divisions then in Egypt were landed, as was expected, at Alexandretta in Syria, a military mutiny of the Arab divisions then stationed in Syria would certainly be successful. The Arabs could make a quick peace with the Turks, securing their freedom, and after this even if Germany won the world-war they might hold what they had won.
But he was not in touch with Allied politics. The French were afraid that if British forces were once landed in Syria, they would never leave it; and Syria was a country in which they were themselves interested. A joint French and British expedition would not have been so bad, but the French had no troops to spare. So, as it has been responsibly stated, the French Government put pressure on the British to cancel their arrangements for the Alexandretta landing. After much delay the Australians were landed with numerous other British and Indian troops and a small French detachment to give an Allied colouring, not in Syria, but the other side of Asia Minor, at the Dardanelles. It was an attempt, nearly successful, to capture Constantinople and so end the eastern war at a blow. After the landing the English asked Hussein to begin his revolt; on Feisal’s advice he replied that the Allies must first put a screen of troops between him and Constantinople; the English, however, were no longer able to find troops for a landing in Syria even with French consent.
THE EMIR FEISAL
and his Negro Freedmen
Copyright
Feisal went up to the Dardanelles to watch how things went. After several months the Turkish army, though successful in holding its position, had been crippled by enormous losses. Feisal, seeing this, returned to Syria, thinking that the time was at last come for the mutiny, even without Allied help. But there he found that the Turks had broken up all the Arab divisions, sending them to the various distant war-fronts; and his Syrian revolutionary friends were all either under arrest or in hiding, and numbers had already been hanged on various political charges. He had lost his opportunity.
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.