The friendly Head of the Arab Bureau, to which Lawrence was now transferred, told him that his place was with Feisal as his military adviser. Lawrence protested that he was not a real soldier, that he hated responsibility, and that regular officers were shortly being sent from London to direct the war properly. But his protest was overruled. The regular officers might not arrive for months, and meanwhile some responsible Englishman had to be with Feisal. So he went and left his map-making, his Arab Bulletin (a secret record of the progress of the revolutionary movements) and his reports about the whereabouts of the different Turkish divisions, to other hands, to play a part for which he felt no inclination.
IX
In December he went by ship to Yenbo, which on his advice had been made the special base for landing supplies for Feisal’s army. Here he found a British officer, Captain Garland of the Royal Engineers, teaching the Arabs the proper use of dynamite for destroying railways. Garland spoke Arabic well and knew the quick ways both of destruction and of instruction. From him Lawrence, too, learned not to be afraid of high explosive: Garland would shovel detonators, fuse and the whole bag of tricks into his pocket and jump on his camel for a week’s ride to the pilgrims’ railway. He had a weak heart and was constantly ill, but he was as careless of his health as of his detonators and kept on until he had derailed the first Turkish train and broken the first bridge. Shortly after this he died.
The general position was now this: The advanced tribes this side of Medina were keeping up the pressure on the Turks and every day sent in to Feisal captured camels or Turkish rifles or prisoners or deserters, for which he paid at a fixed rate. His brother Zeid was taking his place in Harb territory while he made sure of the tribes who were covering Yenbo. His other brother Abdulla had moved up from Mecca to the east of Medina, and by the end of November 1916 was cutting off the city’s supplies from the central oases. But he could only blockade Medina, he could not make the joint attack with Feisal and Ali and Zeid because he had with him only three machine-guns and ten almost useless mountain-guns captured from the Turks at Taif and Mecca. At Rabegh four British aeroplanes had arrived and twenty-three guns, mostly obsolete and of fourteen different patterns, but still, guns. There were now three thousand Arab infantry with Ali, of whom two thousand belonged to the new regular army which Aziz was training: also nine hundred camel corps and three hundred troops from the Egyptian army. French gunners were promised. At Yenbo, Feisal was also having his peasants, slaves and paupers organized into regular battalions in imitation of Aziz’s model. Garland held bombing classes there, fired guns, repaired machine-guns, wheels and harness, and the rifles of the whole army.
Lawrence had decided that the next thing to be done was to attack Wejh, a big port two hundred miles away from Yenbo up the Red Sea. The chief Arab tribe in those parts was the Billi; Feisal was in touch with these, and had thoughts of asking the Juheina tribe, whose territory was between Yenbo and Wejh, to make an expedition against the place. Lawrence said he would go to help raise the tribe and would give military advice. So he rode inland in company with Sherif Abd el Kerim, a half brother of the Emir of the Juheina. Lawrence was surprised at the sherif’s colour; Abd el Kerim was a coal-black Abyssinian, son of a slave girl whom the old Emir had married late in life. He was twenty-six years old, restless and active, and was very merry and intimate with, every one. He hated the Turks, who despised him for his colour (the Arabs had little colour-feeling against Africans: much more against the Indians). He was also a famous rider and made a point of taking his journeys at three times the usual speed. On this occasion Lawrence, since the camel he was riding was not his own and the day was cool, did not object.
They started in the early afternoon from Yenbo at a canter which they kept up for three hours without a pause. Then they stopped and ate bread and drank coffee while Abd el Kerim, who made no pretence at dignity, rolled about on his carpet in a dog-fight with one of his men: after this he sat up exhausted, and they exchanged comic stories until they were rested enough to get up and dance. At sunset they remounted and an hour’s mad race in the dusk brought them to the end of the flat country and a low range of hills. Here the panting camels had to walk up a narrow winding valley, which so annoyed Abd el Kerim that when he reached the top he galloped the party downhill in the dark at break-neck speed; in half an hour they reached the plain on the other side, where were the chief date gardens of the Southern Juheina. At Yenbo it had been said that these gardens and Nakhl Mubarak, the village beside them, were deserted, but as they came up they saw the flame-lit smoke of camp-fires and heard the roaring of thousands of excited camels, the shouting of lost men, volleys of signal shots, squealing of mules. Abd el Kerim was alarmed. They quietly rode into the village and, finding a deserted courtyard, hobbled the camels inside out of view. Then Abd el Kerim loaded his rifle and went on tiptoe down the street to find out what was happening; the others waited anxiously. Soon he returned to say that Feisal had arrived with his camel corps and wished to see Lawrence.
THE VILLAGE OF DATE PALMS
(Nakhl Mubarak)
Copyright
They went through the village and came on a wild noisy confusion of men and camels: pressing through these they suddenly found themselves in a dry but still slimy river-bed where the army was encamped, filling the valley from side to side. There were hundreds of fires of crackling thorn-wood with Arabs eating or making coffee or sleeping close together muffled in their cloaks. Camels were everywhere, couched or tied by one leg to the ground, with new ones always coming in and the old ones jumping up on three legs to join them, roaring with hunger and alarm. Caravans were being unloaded, patrols going out, and dozens of Egyptian mules were bucking angrily in the middle of the scene. In a calm region in the middle of the river-bed was Feisal, sitting on his carpet with Maulud the Mesopotamian patriot and a silent cousin, Sharraf, who was the chief magistrate of Taif. Feisal was dictating to a kneeling secretary while at the same time another secretary was reading the latest reports aloud by the light of a silvered lamp held by a slave.