XI
On New Year’s Day 1917 Feisal and Lawrence, who was still rather a foreign adviser than an actual fighter in the Arab cause, sat down at Yenbo to consider the Wejh expedition. The army now consisted of six thousand men, most of them mounted on their own camels. The first fierce eagerness had left them but they had gained in staying power, and the farther away they moved from their homes, the more regular their military habits became. They still worked independently, by tribes, only bound by goodwill to Feisal’s command, but when he came by, they now at least fell into a ragged line and together made the bow and sweep of the arm to the lips which was the Arab salute. They kept their weapons in good enough order, though they did not oil them, and looked after their camels properly. In mass they were not dangerous: in fact their use in battle lessened as their numbers increased. A company of trained Turks could defeat a thousand Arabs in open fighting, yet three or four Arabs in their own hills could hold up a dozen Turks.
After the battle of the date-palms it was decided not to mix Egyptian troops with Arabs. They did not go well together. The Arabs were apt to let the Egyptians do more than their share of the fighting because they looked so military; they would even wander away in the middle of a battle and leave them to finish it. So the Egyptian gunners were sent home (and went gladly), while their guns and equipment were handed over to Rasim, Feisal’s own gunner, and to Feisal’s machine-gun officer; who in their place formed Arab detachments mostly of Turk-trained Syrian and Mesopotamian deserters. Maulud got together a force of fifty mule-mounted men whom he called cavalry and, since they were townsmen and not Bedouin, soon made regular soldiers of them. They were so useful that Lawrence telegraphed to Egypt for fifty mules more.
Now although the Arabs were of less use in mass than in small groups, it was necessary to make this march on Wejh a huge parade of tribes to impress all Arabia. Feisal decided to take all the Juheina tribe and add enough of the Harb, Billi, Ateiba and Ageyl to make it the biggest expedition in Arab memory. It would be clear that the Revolt was now a real national movement, and when Wejh was taken and the tribes returned home with the news, there would be no more petty jealousies and desertions of clans to hinder the campaign. Feisal and Lawrence did not expect any hard fighting at Wejh because the Turks had no spare troops to send to its defence or time to send them. It would take them weeks to withdraw their Rabegh expedition—the hindering of which with Harb help was now Zeid’s occupation—and if the Arab army could reach Wejh in three weeks’ time, they would surely take it unprepared.
Lawrence was anxious to take part in a small raid on the Turks, just to get the feel of it for future information, so on January the second 1917 he set out with thirty-five tribesmen. They rode some miles south-east until they came to a valley near the Turkish lines of communication. Ten men stayed guarding the camels, while Lawrence and the remaining twenty-five climbed over the sharp-edged crumbling cliffs on the farther side of the valley to another valley, where a Turkish post was known to be. There they waited shivering for hours in the mist. When dawn came they saw the tips of a group of Turkish bell-tents, three hundred yards below, just showing over a small spur that lay between. They put bullets through these tent-tops, and when the Turks rushed out to man their trenches, shot at them; but the Turks ran so fast that probably few were hit. From the trenches the Turks fired back wildly and rapidly in all directions as if signalling for help to the nearest big Turkish garrison—there were garrisons strung all along the road for eighty miles back. As the enemy was ten times their number already, the raiders might soon have been cut off. Lawrence decided to do no more: they crawled back over the hill to the first valley, where they stumbled over two stray Turks and carried them back to Yenbo as prisoners.
That morning the army started for Weih, first making for a group of wells fifteen miles north of Yenbo. At their head rode Feisal dressed in white, his cousin beside him on the right in a red headcloth and reddish-yellow tunic and cloak, Lawrence on the left in white and scarlet. Next came three standard-bearers carrying an Arab flag of faded crimson silk with gilt spikes. Then the drummers playing a march, then the wild mass of Feisal’s bodyguard, twelve hundred bouncing well-fed camels, with coloured trappings, packed closely together, their riders dressed in every possible combination of bright colours. This bodyguard was of camel-men called the Ageyl. They were not a desert tribe but a company of young peasants from the oasis country of Central Arabia. They had signed on for a term of years first of all for service with the Turkish Army but had soon gone over in a body when the Revolt started. Having no blood enemies in the desert and being the sons of desert traders they were most useful in the later campaign.
Beside the road were lined the rest of the army, tribe by tribe, each man standing beside his couched camel waiting his turn to join the procession. They saluted Feisal in silence, and Feisal cheerfully called back ‘Peace be with you!’ and the head sheikhs returned the phrase. The procession swelled, the broad column filled the valley in length as far as the eye could see, and, the drums beating, every one burst into a loud chant in praise of Feisal and his family.
Lawrence went back on his racing camel to Yenbo: he had to make sure that the naval help for the attack on Wejh would be properly timed. But first of all, feeling anxious about a possible Turkish attack on deserted Yenbo, he got a big British vessel, the Hardinge, formerly a troopship, to take on board all the principal stores of the town, including eight thousand rifles, three million cartridges, thousands of shells, two tons of high explosive, quantities of rice and flour. Boyle promised to lend the Hardinge as a supply ship for the force on its way up the coast, landing food and water wherever needed. This solved the chief problem, which was how to maintain ten thousand men with only a small supply column; and, for the rest, Boyle promised that half the Red Sea fleet would mass at Wejh; landing-parties were already being trained.
The Billi tribesmen who lived about Wejh were friendly and knew moreover that if they did not welcome Feisal’s army it would be the worse for them, so it seemed certain now that Wejh would be taken. Boyle promised to take on board the Hardinge an Arab landing-party of several hundred Harb and Juheina tribesmen. While this was being settled Lawrence heard that the three regular British officers who had been instructed to help Feisal direct the campaign were now on their way from Egypt. One of these, Vickery, arrived first. He was an artillery officer, with a good knowledge of Arabic; and what Lawrence thought that the Arabs needed, a trained staff officer.
On the sixteenth of January Vickery, Boyle, Feisal, Maulud, Lawrence, met in Feisal’s camp, now half-way to Wejh, to discuss the advance. It was decided to break the army up into sections and send them forward one after the other, because of the difficulty of watering a whole army at the same time at the few wells or ponds on the line of march. These sections should then meet on the twentieth of January at a place fifty miles from Wejh where there was water, and make the last stage together. Boyle agreed to land tanks of water two days later at a small harbour only twelve miles from Wejh. On the twenty-third the attack was to be made; the Arab landing-party would go ashore from the Hardinge north of the town while Feisal’s mounted men cut all the roads of escape south and east. It all looked very promising and there was no news from Yenbo that was not good. Abdulla was moving up to his position north of Medina, and news came that he had just captured a well-known Turkish agent, a former brigand, who was going with bribes among the desert tribes, and was on his way to Yemen far down in the south where a Turkish garrison was cut off. Abdulla took with this man twenty thousand Turkish pounds in gold, robes of honour, costly presents, some interesting papers and camel loads of rifles and pistols. It was the greatest good fortune.
In the tent with Vickery and Boyle, Lawrence had forgotten his usual calm and said that in a year the Arab army would be tapping on the gates of Damascus. There was no response from Vickery, who was angered at what he thought was a romantic boast that could only come from a man like Lawrence who did not know his job as a soldier. Lawrence was disappointed in Vickery, who was so much a soldier that he did not realize what the Arab Revolt was. It was not like a war in which large trained armies, with complicated modern equipment, manœuvre from town to town, seeking each to destroy or cut off the other. It was more like a general strike over an immense area. The only big army was the Turkish and even that was not free to move about as it liked, because of the difficulties of the country. Lawrence knew that his boast had not been a vain one; five months later he was secretly in Damascus arranging for the help of its townsmen when Feisal’s forces should arrive to free them. And a year later he did in fact enter the city in triumph and become temporary governor. Vickery had not seen that with a grand alliance of Semites, an idea and an armed prophet, anything might happen. Had Lawrence only had a sounder military training than the casual reading of military history for his degree at Oxford (and in his teens the occasional captaincy of a non-militaristic Church Lads’ Brigade when his brother needed a substitute!) and if now he had been given a free hand, it would have been Constantinople and not Damascus that the Arabs should have reached. The conflict between Vickery and Lawrence, however, was not as between two British military advisers with different views. It was really as between a British military adviser and a white Arab; for though it was not quite clear yet to himself, this was what Lawrence was becoming.
The next morning there was trouble with the second batch of fifty mules which had arrived for Maulud and was landed by the Hardinge along with the other stores. The mules were sent without halters, bridles or saddles, and once ashore stampeded into the little town near by, where they took possession of the market-place and began bucking among the stalls. Fortunately among the stores taken for safety from Yenbo were spare ropes and bits, so that after an exciting tussle the mules were captured and tamed. The shops were reopened and the damage paid for.
Lawrence remained with Feisal’s army for the rest of the advance. From this half-way halt they started on January the eighteenth at midday. The Ageyl rode spread out in wings for two or three hundred yards to the right and left of Feisal’s party. Soon there came then a warning patter of drums from the right wing—it was the custom to set the poets and musicians on the wings—and a poet began to sing two rhyming lines which he had just invented, about Feisal and the pleasures that he would provide for the army at Wejh. The men with him listened carefully and took up the verse in chorus, repeating it three times with pride and satisfaction and challenge. Before they could sing it a fourth time, the rival poet of the left wing capped it with a rhyme in the same metre and sentiment. The left cheered with a roar of triumph, then the drums tapped again, the standard-bearers spread out their great crimson banners, and the whole bodyguard right, left and centre broke simultaneously into the Ageyl marching song. The Ageyl sang of their own towns left behind and the women whom they might never see again, and of the great perils ahead of them. The camels loved the rhythm of the song and quickened their pace, while it lasted, over the long desolate sand-dunes between mountains and sea.
Two horsemen came riding after them. Lawrence knew one of these as the Emir of the Juheina, the other he could not make out. But soon he recognized the red face, strong mouth and staring eyes of his old friend Colonel Newcombe of the Sinai surveying party, who was now come here as the chief British military adviser to the Arabs. Newcombe quickly became friendly with Feisal, and the rest of the journey was made even happier by his enthusiasm. Lawrence, comparing notes with him, was glad to find that they both had the same general views. The march was uneventful. Water was the one problem, and though water-scouts went ahead to find what they could, the advance was delayed by its scarcity, so that it was clear that Feisal would be two days late for the rendezvous with the Hardinge on the twenty-second. Newcombe rode ahead on a fast camel to ask the Hardinge to come again with its water-tanks on the twenty-fourth, and to delay the naval attack if possible until the twenty-fifth.
Many helpers joined Feisal during his advance; the Billi chiefs met him at their tribal boundary, and later Nasir rode up, the brother of the Emir of Medina. His family was respected in Arabia only second to the Sherifs of Mecca, being also descended from the Prophet but from the younger son of Mohammed’s only daughter. Nasir was the forerunner of Feisal’s movement; he had fired the first shot at Medina and was to fire the last shot beyond Aleppo, a thousand miles north, on the day that the Turks asked for an armistice. He was a sensitive, pleasant young man who loved gardens better than the desert and had been forced unwillingly into fighting since boyhood. He had been here blockading Wejh from the desert for the last two months. He and Feisal were close friends. His news was that the Turkish camel-corps outpost barring the advance had been withdrawn that day to a position nearer to the town.
The last three days of the advance were painful; the animals were without food for nearly three days, and the men came the last fifty miles on half a gallon of water and with nothing to eat: many of them were on foot. The Hardinge was at the rendezvous on the twenty-fourth and landed the water promised; but this did not go far. The mules were allowed first drink, and what little was left was given to the more thirsty of the foot-men. Crowds of suffering Arabs waited all that night at the water-tanks, in the rays of the search-lights, hoping for another drink if the sailors came again. But the sea was too rough for the ship’s boat to make another trip.
From the Hardinge Lawrence heard that the attack on Wejh had already been made the day before; for Boyle was afraid that the Turks would run away if he waited. As a matter of fact the Turkish Governor had already addressed the garrison saying that Wejh must be held to the last drop of blood: after his speech he had got up on his camel and ridden off in the darkness with the few mounted men whom he had with him, making for the railway a hundred and fifty miles inland across the mountains. The two hundred Turkish infantry left behind decided to follow his orders rather than his example, but they were outnumbered three to one and the fleet shelled them heavily. The landing was made by the sailors and the Arab force, and Wejh was taken. But the Hardinge had come away before the end, so the advancing force could not be sure whether it would find the town still in Turkish hands.
At dawn on the twenty-fifth the leading tribes halted at a spot a few miles from the town and waited for the others to come up. Various small scattered parties of Turks were met; most surrendered, only one put up a short fight. When they reached the ridge behind which Wejh lay, the Ageyl bodyguard dismounted, stripping off all their clothes except their cotton drawers, and advanced to the attack: their nakedness was protection against bullet wounds, which would strike cleaner this way. They advanced company by company, at the run, and in good order with an interval of four or five yards between each man. There was no shouting. Soon they reached the ridge-top without a shot fired. So Lawrence watching knew that the fighting was over.
The Arab landing-party was in possession of the town, and Vickery, who had directed the battle, was satisfied. But when Lawrence found that twenty Arabs and a British flying officer had been killed, he was not at all pleased. He considered the fighting unnecessary; the Turks would soon have had to surrender for want of food if the town had been surrounded, and the killing of dozens of Turks did not make up for the loss of a single Arab. The Arabs were not pressed men accustomed to be treated as cannon-fodder like most regular soldiers. The Arab army was composed rather of individuals, and its losses were not reckoned merely by arithmetic. And because kinship is so strong a force in the desert, twenty men killed meant a far wider range of mourning than a thousand names in an European casualty list. Moreover, the ships’ guns had smashed up the town badly, which was a great loss to the Arabs, who needed it as a base for their future attacks inland on the railway. The town’s boats and barges, too, had been sunk, so the landing of stores was a difficulty, and all the shops and houses had been looted by the Arab landing-party as a compensation for their losses. The townsmen were mostly Egyptians who could not make up their minds in time to join the Arab cause.
Still, Wejh was taken, the coast was cleared of Turks, and the march had been a great advertisement. Abd el Kerim of the Juheina who had come to Lawrence a week before to beg for a mule to ride, and had been put off with the promise ‘when Wejh is taken,’ had said almost regretfully, ‘We Arabs are a nation now’; the regret was for the good old days of tribal wars and raids which now were at an end. Feisal had very luckily stopped a private war between the Juheina and Billi just in time; the Juheina, seeing some camels grazing, had of old habit ridden out and driven them off. Feisal was furious and shouted to them to stop, but they were too excited to hear. He snatched his rifle and shot at the nearest man, who tumbled off his camel in fear; then the others checked their course. Feisal had the men up before him, beat the leaders with a camel-stick and restored the camels to the Billi. More than a nation the Arab army seemed to some of the tribesmen. ‘The whole world is moving up to Wejh,’ said one old man.
FEISAL’S ARMY ENTERING WEJH
Copyright
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.