Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

Lawrence thought that he saw the game. The Frenchman was afraid that if the Revolt were carried farther north to Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, the Arabs might capture these cities from the Turks and keep them after the War; and they were cities that France wanted to add to her colonial empire. Moreover, in the Sykes-Picot Treaty, made between France, England and Russia in 1916 for dividing up the Turkish Empire after the War, the French had actually agreed that independent Arab governments, though in the French ‘sphere of influence,’ should be established in these cities if they were freed by the Arabs themselves—an event that none of the signatories thought possible at the time; it was a matter of form, merely, to suggest it. At the time Lawrence knew nothing of this treaty, which was a secret one, but he suspected the Frenchman, and he had no intention of letting the Arabs down for the sake of the Entente Cordiale. The Colonel, hearing of Lawrence’s and Feisal’s intention to continue with the plan of attacking Wejh that had been interrupted by the Turkish advance, did his best to discourage it. On his honour as a staff-officer (and he had a very distinguished record) he said that it was suicide to make such a move; and gave many reasons. Lawrence brushed him aside. He believed that the Arabs had a chance now of a wide and lasting success, and Wejh was the first step.

The Turks meanwhile were being hard pressed by the Juheina who, split up in small parties, made their lives wretched by constant raids, sniping, and looting of supplies: and British seaplanes began bombing their camp in the palm-groves of Nakhl Mubarak. They decided to attack Rabegh. There Feisal’s brother Ali, who had now nearly seven thousand men, was ready to advance against them, and Feisal and the younger brother Zeid planned to move round inland behind the Turks and take them in a trap. Feisal had difficulty with the Emir of the Juheina, whom he asked to move forward with him; the Emir was jealous of Feisal’s growing power with the tribes. But Feisal made them move without their Emir. He then rode south to raise the Harb. All was going well until he heard from Ali that his army had gone a little way forward when, hearing false reports of treachery, it had rushed back in disorder to Rabegh. Feisal could do nothing, he could not even count for certain on the Harb, who might join the Turks if they got the chance and whose territory ran down south of Rabegh.

Then Colonel Wilson, who was British representative in the province, came up to Yenbo from Jiddah and begged Feisal to leave the Turks alone and make the attack on Wejh. The plan was now to move up with the whole Juheina fighting force and the regular battalions from Yenbo; the British Fleet would give all the help it could. Feisal saw that Wejh could be taken in this way, but Yenbo was left defenceless; he pointed out that the Turks were still able to strike and that Ali’s army seemed to have little fight in it, and might not even defend Rabegh, which was the bulwark of Mecca. However, Colonel Wilson gave Feisal his word that Rabegh would be kept safe with naval help until Wejh had fallen, and Feisal accepted it. He saw that the attack on Wejh was the best diversion that the Arabs could make to draw the Turks off Mecca, and started at once; at the same time sending his brother Abdulla machine-guns and stores and asking him to move to the impregnable hills sixty miles north of Medina, Juheina territory, where his forces could both threaten the railway and continue to hold up the eastern supply caravans.

The Turks were still making for Rabegh, but very slowly, and with an increasing sick list among the men and animals, due to overwork and poor food. They were also losing an average of forty camels a day and twenty men killed and wounded in raids by the Harb tribes in their rear. They were eighty miles from Medina and, as Lawrence had foreseen, each mile that they went forward made their lines of communication more exposed to attack. Their pace got slower and slower till it was no more than five miles a day, and on the eighteenth of January 1917 they withdrew, when still thirty miles from Rabegh. It was Feisal’s and Abdulla’s new moves which finally recalled the expedition to Medina, and for the next two years until the War ended and the Holy City surrendered, the Turks were kept sitting helplessly in trenches outside it, waiting for an attack which never came.

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.