Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

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.