Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

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.

V

At the outbreak of the War Lawrence had of course to give up the idea of continuing at Carchemish, which was in Turkish territory. He was, at the time, in Oxford—it was the off-season for digging—and he much resented this interruption of what had been to him a nearly perfect life. He tried to join an Officers’ Training Corps at Oxford, but without success. He tried again in London; but it was no good. It has been incorrectly said that he was marked as ‘physically below fighting standard’: this would, however, be quite believable. Perhaps the only other man in England who was Lawrence’s equal in physical strength and endurance was Jimmy Wilde, the fly-weight boxer, a World’s champion who not only beat every other man of his own weight but for years was unbeaten by boxers weighing a whole stone heavier than himself. Wilde was rejected as being of ‘emaciated physique’ and not fit for active service. But in Lawrence’s case it was only a temporary glut of recruits that was responsible for his being turned away. Dr. Hogarth heard that Lawrence was at a loose end and got him given a week’s trial, as a favour, by Colonel Hedley, the head of the Geographic Section of the General Staff at Whitehall. Three weeks later Hogarth met Hedley and asked him, ‘Did you find young Lawrence any use?’ ‘He’s running my entire department for me now,’ said Hedley shortly. Lawrence’s task here was making maps of Sinai, Belgium and France.

Four months later, on Turkey’s entering the War, Lord Kitchener ordered all members of the Sinai Survey expedition of 1913—14 to be sent immediately to Egypt, where their knowledge would be useful in view of a possible Turkish invasion of Egypt. General Maxwell wired that they were not wanted. Kitchener wired back that they were already on their way. In Cairo Lawrence naturally went to the Military Map Department of the Intelligence Service, where again he made his presence felt. About certain parts of Syria and Mesopotamia he knew even more than the Turks themselves. At the same time he was engaged in general intelligence as staff-captain at General Headquarters, Egypt. He was charged with making out a periodic report to the General Staff as to the position of the various divisions and smaller units of the Turkish Army: this information came from spies or from prisoners captured on the various fronts. Although a most valuable officer he was not popular with the senior military officers about him, particularly with those fresh from England who did not believe that a civilian like Lawrence was competent to talk about military subjects. There was annoyance, for instance, when he interrupted two generals discussing a reported movement of Turkish troops from So-and-So to Such-and-Such by saying: ‘Nonsense; they can’t make the distance in twice the time you give them. The roads are bad and there’s no local transport. Besides, their commanding officer is a very lazy fellow.’ Also he was looked on with disfavour for going about without a military belt, in patent-leather shoes, and not wearing the right-coloured socks or tie. His reports, too, were not written in the style favoured. The War Office handbook of information about the Turkish Army, of which he was joint editor for fourteen editions, contained such comments as ‘General Abd el Mahmoud commanding the —th Division is half-Albanian by birth and a consumptive; an able officer and a gunnery expert; but a vicious scoundrel, and will accept bribes.’ These personal comments were thought unnecessary: the theory held by the British was that their officer opponents were gallant fellows entitled to every courtesy. An objection was also raised to such scholarly footnotes as a comparison between the new Boy Scout movement in Turkey and the Corps of Pages kept in Egypt in the time of the Janissaries. The General Staff disliked history and suspected a joke. Among Lawrence’s other tasks was questioning suspected persons; he had the gift of being able to tell at once from small points in a man’s dress and from the dialect he spoke more or less what he was and where he came from. Two recorded examples will serve. An ugly-looking ruffian was caught on the Suez Canal, suspected of being a spy. He said he was a Syrian. Lawrence, overcoming his usual aversion to looking a man in the face, said ‘He’s lying; look at his little pig eyes! The man’s an Egyptian of the pedlar class.’ He spoke sharply in the pedlar’s dialect, and the man admitted who he was. On another occasion, but later in the War, when Lawrence had greatly improved his accuracy, a fine-looking Arab came in with information. Lawrence’s colleague said: ‘Here’s one of the real Bedouin come to see you.’ Lawrence said, ‘No! He’s not got the Bedouin walk or style. He’s a Syrian Arab farmer living under the protection of the Beni Sakhr tribe,’ and so it proved.

In 1915 Cairo got so full of generals and colonels with nothing to do but send unnecessary messages about and get in the way of the few people who were doing any work, that it was mere comic opera. No less than three General Staffs fully officered were collected in Egypt, and it was impossible for any one of them to define exactly where its duties began and ended. There was current a wicked parody of an old Egyptian-Christian creed, in which occurred the phrase, ‘And yet there are not three Incompetents but one Incompetent.’ One of the most intimate glimpses we get of Lawrence in 1915 is of a small grinning second-lieutenant, with hair of unmilitary length and no belt, hiding behind a screen in the Savoy Hotel with another equally unmilitary colleague, softly counting ‘One, two, three, four!’ ... through a hole in the screen. They were counting generals. An important conference was going on in the room, for generals only. His colleague swears to me that Lawrence counted up to sixty-five. He himself only made it sixty-four, but one of the Brigadier-Generals may have moved.

Lawrence went on several journeys to the Suez Canal, where a weak Turkish attack had been made and a strong one was always expected, and one to the Senussi Desert in the West of Egypt (I believe to discover the whereabouts of British prisoners captured by the hostile Arabs there). He was also sent to Athens to get contact with the Levant group of the British Secret Service, whose agent in Egypt he was for a time until the work grew too important for an officer of his low rank to perform. He also was engaged in getting information about the anti-British revolutionary societies in Egypt and, because the Egyptians are not as loyal in their secret societies as the Syrians and Mesopotamians, was always having visitors; one party after another came offering to betray the names of its fellow-members until he had seen nearly the whole society. Lawrence’s chief difficulty was to prevent the various parties meeting each other on the office-stairs. Social life in Egypt bored him. ‘It’s a bad life this,’ he wrote at the end of March 1915, ‘living at close quarters with a khaki crowd very intent on “Banker” and parades and lunch. I am a total abstainer from all of these and so a snob.’ In April 1916 he was sent to Mesopotamia. He had an official task in which he was not much interested and a private intention known only to a few colleagues whom he could trust.

In Mesopotamia an army composed of mixed Indian and British troops had been marching up the Tigris from the Persian Gulf and had at first met with success, but sickness, transport difficulties, bad strategy and strong Turkish forces had held up the advance, which became a retreat: and soon General Townshend with a large force was cut off and besieged in the town of Kut. Provisions were failing and the fall was believed to be a certainty because reinforcements could not arrive from India in time. Lawrence’s official task given him direct from the War Office at London was to go as member of a secret mission to the Turkish commander who was besieging Kut: to persuade him not to press the siege. It was thought possible that a large bribe might work because it was known that the Turks were themselves in difficulties. They had few troops—the Arabic-speaking regiments were openly mutinous—and a Russian army to the North had just captured the town of Erzeroum, the capital of Kurdistan, in the famous snow battle. The Russians were pressing on towards Anatolia, the Turks’ home province; so that at any moment the siege might collapse. As a matter of fact the capture of Erzeroum had been ‘arranged’—Colonel Buchan’s novel Greenmantle has more than a flavour of truth—and the War Office hoped that the same success could be repeated at Kut. Nevertheless bribes would be useless, Lawrence had told those who sent him, and would only encourage the Turks. The Turkish commander, being a nephew of Enver, the chief Young Turk, never needed to worry about money.

The British Generals in Mesopotamia were not pleased with the idea of this conference. Two of them told Lawrence that his intentions (which they did not know) were dishonourable, and unworthy of a soldier (which he never acknowledged himself to be). Now, this Mesopotamian Army was under the orders of the Government of India and though Lord Kitchener, who was in general command of the Imperial British Forces, had early in the War approached two leaders of the secret freedom society of Mesopotamia to offer to help in a mutiny which might have cleared Mesopotamia of the Turks at a single blow, his hand had been held. The Indian Government was afraid that if the Arabs mutinied it would be not able to grant Mesopotamia those benefits of British protection which had been granted to Burma some years before; the Arabs would want to remain free. So the help that Kitchener would have given was withheld and the mutiny did not come about. Instead, an army was sent from India to act without the Arabs: with disastrous results. The British and Indians were looked upon as invaders as unwelcome as the Turks and were not only given no help but were constantly being raided and robbed by the local Arab tribes.

Lawrence’s private intention, which was the real reason of his coming, had been to see whether the situation in Mesopotamia would allow of local co-operation on Nationalist lines between the British and the Euphrates tribes, whom he knew well from his Carchemish days. Some of these were already in revolt—he hoped further to get in touch with the great Ruwalla tribe of the Northern Syrian desert—and with his assistance might soon have cut all Turkish communications by holding up river traffic and raiding supply columns until the army before Kut would be in a state of siege itself. Kut could hold out until he had made his preparations; if only eight more aeroplanes could be found for dropping provisions into the town. But he found that it was hopeless. The policy of wresting Mesopotamia without Arab help and making it part of the Empire was to be stubbornly maintained; sooner, almost, than recognize the Arabs as a political force the English would leave the country to the Turks. The result was that Lawrence did not do what he intended.