CHAPTER XXVII
JOYCE & CO., AND THE ARABIAN KNIGHTS OF THE AIR
The forces of the king of the Hedjaz, as previously stated, included both regulars and irregulars; the latter were Bedouins mounted on camels and horses, while the former were deserters from the Turkish army, men of Arab blood conscripted into the Ottoman armies and afterward captured by the British in Palestine and Mesopotamia. There were nearly twenty thousand regulars specially trained as infantry to attack those fortified positions which could not be taken by Lawrence’s irregulars; they were under the leadership of Lieutenant-Colonel P. C. Joyce, who like Lawrence was an Irishman, and who next to Lawrence probably played a more important rôle in the campaign than any one else. Unlike Lawrence, Joyce was a soldier by profession, an officer in the Connaught Rangers with a splendid record for service in the Boer War and in Egypt and the Sudan. Physically there was a further difference between them, for while Lawrence stood barely five feet three his colleague loomed well over six feet three. None but the largest ship of the desert could navigate under Joyce’s bulk, so that he seldom mounted a camel. But when he did, it looked like one mountain on top of another.
Colonel Joyce spent nearly a year building up an army to send against the strongly fortified city of Medina. It was to be under the leadership of Emir Ali. At last, when by the grace of Allah all seemed in readiness, a courier from Emir Ali handed a message to Joyce to be forwarded on to his Majesty the king in Mecca with all possible despatch. The message read:
O Father of Mercies and Lord of the Earth, greetings from thy son:
Thy heroic army awaits but the command for its victorious advance upon the Turks. Yet for lack of one mere detail are we delayed. Our valorous officers swear that it would be futile for them to advance without swords. Wherefore I implore thee to send thirty of thy Damascus blades in scabbards of beaten gold in order that they may be satisfied.
Thy Slave.
But fortunately Colonel Joyce proved himself capable of coping with the thousand and one unexpected difficulties that arose, for in addition to his ability to speak Arabic he had many other valuable qualifications. For instance he was tactful and cool and utterly imperturbable, could not be hustled under any circumstances, was painstaking, and above all patient beyond the normal vanishing-point of patience as practised in the Occident. So while Lawrence spent his time with his Bedouin rabble, Joyce demonstrated his military ability by building up the auxiliary force of regulars from the medley of Syrians, Palestinians, and Bagdadis who were attracted to the Shereefian banner. But he also now and then found time to join Lawrence on a raid or to lead a demolition expedition of his own. In fact on one occasion he destroyed seven small bridges and tore up two thousand rails on the Turkish railway, between the stations of Toweira and Hedia.
There were a number of other officers who fought with the Arabs and took part in the fascinating game of planting tulips and blowing up the Turkish railway. Among these were Lieutenant-Colonel W. F. Stirling, Major P. G. W. Maynard of the Irish Rifles, who had been a judge in a remote corner of the Sudan, Major H. W. Young, Major William E. Marshall, Captain E. Scott Higgins, Captain H. S. Hornby, and Lieutenant H. Garland, who taught demolition to the Arabs. Nearly all of the men who fought in Arabia had annexed various military honors long before they were selected to play a part in the war in the Land of the Arabian Nights, but none had been quite so generously decorated as Stirling, who not only was a veteran of the South African War but had found time to serve with high distinction in the Royal Flying Corps before he crashed and nearly lost his life while on a reconnaissance flight over one of the most inhospitable corners of Arabia. Doomed to serve the remainder of the war on the ground, he was selected as the right type of man for the Hedjaz show. He joined the Arabs just as they were about to invade Syria and was with Lawrence when the latter reached Damascus. Young, formerly of the Intelligence Department in Mesopotamia, was another who reveled in the manipulation of high explosives. During the final stage of the campaign he took over the all-important job of organizing the transport system, but among his numerous achievements by no means the least was the success he met in raising a silky beard that was the envy of his colleagues and which transformed him into an ideal sheik.
Perhaps the most universally liked, both by British and Arabs, of all the Europeans who took part in the desert war was Lawrence’s tent-mate and intimate friend, an optimistic Scot of the Royal Army Medical Corps with a Highland brogue thicker than Harry Lauder’s, who divided his affections between his bacillus menagerie and tulip-planting. Under him were two other medical men, Captains Ramsay and McKibbin. But Major Marshall, although a quiet, shy man of science whose whole life had been devoted to the realm of test-tubes, microscopes, and a search for mysterious microbes in the jungles of tropical Africa, had proved himself enough of a soldier to win the Military Cross in the battle of the Somme and other honors in Arabia. When Lawrence was away on an expedition Marshall would transform their tent at Akaba into a zoo for cholera, typhus, and plague bacillus. Incidentally he usually managed to contract most of the diseases the mysteries of which he sought to solve. Then on his trips into the desert he would fill his stretchers with high explosives and after a raid would throw out all the remaining dynamite and substitute the wounded. After inflicting casualties among the Turks he would proceed to bandage them up. So successful was he as a combined medical officer and soldier that after the war he was appointed adviser to the king of the Hedjaz and for several years remained at Jeddah as the British resident.
