Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  The hardest facet of Bedu life for a stranger to grasp was not its physical aspect, but its spiritual one. The Bedu lived in a different space-time continuum from the European – a world which was flat, a world in which the sun crossed the sky, a world in which the stars were merely lights in the heavens, a world which could not be measured by kilometres or miles. They inhabited a world in which everything – every tree, stone or pool – had its individual spirit, but in which everything was related in God: in which a man must accept what befell him because it was the will of God. The Bedu had no lust to explain, no thought to solve, no notion to improve – the answer to every question lay not in reason but in faith. They lived in a world without physical security, where death – from raiders, thirst, hunger, accident or disease – might strike at any moment. Yet they possessed existential security – like the medieval European, they had an absolute knowledge of who they were, a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense that God moved everything for the best, a sense of belonging to the earth and to the universe, which modern Europeans had lost.

  Johan Lutwig Burckhardt and Richard Burton had penetrated Mecca and Medina disguised as Muslims in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Charles Doughty had travelled in forma pauperis in Arabia in the 1870s. Yet of the land itself, little was known to the outside world: ‘Up to 1914,’ David Hogarth would tell the Royal Geographical Society in 1920, ‘our best knowledge of the Peninsula of Arabia was everywhere sketchy, and of more than half of its great area… it scarcely amounted to anything worth mention. The virtually unknown regions lay in the centre – especially on its western half … The greater part of this last region had been barred as a Holy Land to European explorers unless they would risk themselves in furtive disguise which hindered, if it did not absolutely preclude, them from observing and recording facts and features of geographical interest.’1 The Tihama, or Red Sea coast of the Hejaz, was still as little mapped as the Antarctic. The British had no reliable map of the interior, could not say for certain how far the Hejaz railway lay from the coast, and could not even enumerate its stations south of al-‘Ula. For the 200-mile stretch between there and Mecca, they could not fix the longitude of any given point, and indeed, did not know exactly where Medina lay nor what it looked like. The only plan they had of the town was a sketch made by Burton seventy years previously. When Lawrence stepped ashore at Jeddah on 19 October 1916, he was aware that he was entering terra incognita.

  The revolt was then four months old, and dangerously near crisis. The initiative had been regained by the Turks. It seemed to the British that the Sharif had acted precipitately, though Hussain himself had seen no other choice. In January 1916 he had sent his son Feisal to Damascus, accompanied by a bodyguard of forty tribesmen, to foment mutiny among Arab Divisions of the Ottoman army in Syria and Mesopotamia. To his dismay, Feisal had found that there were no longer any Arab Divisions in Syria, for the resourceful Jamal Pasha – the Military Governor – had sent them off to other fronts and replaced them with Osmanli Divisions. Jamal’s new policy was repressive. In April, he had ordered the public hanging of twenty-one Arab nationalists – including prominent magistrates, writers and intellectuals – in Damascus and Beirut. He was also on the point of dispatching Khairy Bey with an additional 3,500 specially picked and trained soldiers to the Hejaz, ostensibly on their way to the Yemen, to escort a German field mission under Baron Othmar von Stotzingen, but actually to strengthen his hold on the Hejaz. Hussain recognized that the executions symbolized a new confidence on the part of the Turks, encouraged by their successes in Gallipoli and Kut, and suspected that the true purpose of the Khairy Bey mission was to depose him. He knew that he must act before the fresh troops reached Medina. He had already taken the Sheikhs of the Harb, the ‘Utayba, the Juhayna and others into his confidence, and knew he could count on Bedu levies. He had his own trained and blooded camelry of ‘Agayl mercenaries and his Bishah tribal police – highlanders from the hills of the fertile Assir – but virtually no regular troops and no modern equipment, particularly machine-guns or artillery. Nevertheless, Hussain felt confident of his Bedu troops, and only one factor stayed his hand: his son Feisal was still in Syria, and would be seized by jamal as soon as word of hostilities leaked out. Feisal solved the problem cleverly by gulling Jamal into believing that he was returning to the Hejaz only to bring back a force of volunteers for the Turkish army. On 16 May he left Damascus, putting his forty men under the command of his friend Nasib al-Bakri of al-Fatat, with instructions to flee as soon as they received a coded password. By the third week in May he was back in Medina, and the Sharif was free to strike.

  At first light on 10 June, the voice of a single muezzin rang out from the minaret of the Grand Mosque at Mecca. It was still cool at that hour, but already the sky was clear as a burning-glass and the eddyless air held the threat of furnace heat. There were dark figures in the streets, Bedu wrapped in cloaks and mantles, with their headcloths tightly knotted across their faces, mingling, hardly noticed, with townsmen hurrying to perform their prayers. At the Jirwal barracks on the Jeddah road, where the garrison commander had spent the night, the Turks slept on, confident in the belief that they were protected by the sentries and guns of the Jiyad fortress – a massive, many-towered redoubt squatting on a stump of shale above the town. The troops were few – less than 1,500 men – for during the sweltering summer season, the Governor moved to cooler quarters in Ta’if with the bulk of the garrison. In the Hamdiyya building, which housed the Ottoman Government Offices, the Vice-Governor, who was already awake and making his ablutions, paused for an instant to take in the beauty of the muezzin’s song. Not far away, in the Hashemite palace, Sharif Hussain was listening carefully to the same clear notes, gazing out of the window, and observing the slowly milling figures in the streets. The Call to Prayers finished abruptly, and for a second there was silence. Then the Sharif picked up his rifle, and, with slow deliberation, fired from the window the shot which officially opened the Arab Revolt.

  It was the signal the tribesmen had been waiting for. Instantly, they threw off their cloaks, and let rip a hail of bullets at the three Turkish fortresses, the barracks, the guard-posts and the offices. The troops at the Jirwal awoke to find bullets buzzing through their windows like flies, and, rolling out of bed, the Commander looked about him in confusion. He was under attack, but he had no idea by whom. He listened attentively for the boom of artillery or the rattle of machine-guns which would have accompanied an Allied assault, but heard only the coarser crack and thump of musketry. Glancing out of the window, he saw a scarlet flag flying from the Hashemite palace, but did not distinguish it as the Hashemite emblem, for the Imperial Ottoman banner was also scarlet. Quickly, he cranked the telephone and spoke to the Commander of the battery in the Jiyad fort. Almost at once a terse order brought the gunners to their posts. Puffs of smoke appeared at the gun-ports of the fortress, followed by the crashing roar of shells bursting in the streets. To the Bedu attackers, the guns sounded like thunder-demons. They were armed only with muzzle-loading muskets, and had never heard artillery before. At the Jirwal barracks the Turks had recovered from their initial surprise, and, emboldened by the artillery barrage, were now firing back vigorously. The Commander next telephoned the Sharif: ‘We are under attack by the Bedu,’ he reported. ‘Can you do something about it?’ ‘Certainly,’ Hussain replied calmly, and gave the signal for a renewed attack.

  At nine o’clock, when the lambent heat of the day could already be felt in the tight streets, the Commander asked for a parley. The local Arab civil officer marched up to the barracks under a white flag, and informed him: ‘This country has declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire. Hostilities will only cease when your force evacuates the barracks and surrenders its entire armoury to the Arab commander.’2Startled by the revelation, but determined to hold out now he knew whom he was fighting, the Commander at once ordered the Jiyad battery to open up. Firing continued sporadically all that day and all throu
gh the night, and the next morning a wedge of Bedu, screaming warcries and brandishing daggers and scimitars which flashed venomously in the sunlight, rushed the main guard-house near the Grand Mosque, stove in its doors, and captured its defenders. The following day they attacked the Hamidiyya Building, where the Vice-Vali had by now entrenched himself with his escort. All night he and his men had kept up a withering fire at anyone who came within range, and had shot dead a number of people who were merely plodding to prayer at the mosque. Worming their way from door to door, the Bedu suddenly launched a charge from close range, leaping out of the shadows screaming like banshees. The Turkish soldiers, cowed by their ferocity, dropped their rifles and raised their hands in fright. They were marched up to the Hashemite palace, from where the Vice-Governor sent letters ordering the troops at Jirwal and Jiyad to surrender. The Turkish units adamantly refused to budge, and kept up a continual, rhythmic barrage of shells, ranging them so indiscriminately into the town that they set fire to the Kiswa – the embroidery covering the sacred Ka’aba – the holiest shrine in Islam. They also managed to damage the shrine of Abraham, and to splinter a bas-relief commemorating the life of the Khalif Othman. All of these acts provided excellent propaganda against them, and the last was held up as an ominous sign of their disfavour, since the name Othman was linked with the eponymous ancestor of the Ottoman Turks. The situation was now stalemate, however. The Arabs could not attack the Jiyad with its deadly batteries, and the Turks were unable or unwilling to sally forth. The situation remained static until the beginning of July, when two batteries of mountain-guns arrived with a detachment of Egyptian artillerymen under the command of Sayyid ‘Ali Pasha. Though the guns were archaic, sent hurriedly by Sir Reginald Wingate, Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, from Port Sudan, they were effective at close quarters. Almost at once the batteries knocked out some of the Turkish guns in the Jiyad, and breached the walls, so that the Bedu, who had scaled the surrounding heights, were able to hurl themselves into the fort, where they cut down or captured the entire garrison. They also took five artillery-pieces, 8,000 rifles, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition. The mountain-guns were then turned on the Jiwal barracks, and a shell-burst set the building ablaze, spreading poisonous smoke through it. The Turks, who had no water to put out the blaze, surrendered on 9 July. In a month’s fighting the Arabs had killed and wounded almost 300 Turks, and had captured the rest. The opening gambit in the Arab Revolt had been an astounding success.

  Jeddah, Mecca’s port, had long since been taken. Here, Hussain had used gold to raise a section of the Harb – notorious freebooters and highway brigands – under Muhsin ibn Mansour, a brave and highly respected Sharif. The Harb were recalcitrant and unruly, and not entirely to be trusted, but they fought for gold. For days they had massed around Jeddah, and on the morning of 10 June, 3,000 tribesmen had mounted their camels and horses and raced recklessly towards the city gates. The Turks began to rake the plain with artillery, planting great mushrooms of smoke among the running camels, and spattering the vanguard with machine-gun fire. The Harb turned abruptly and withdrew out of range, and Muhsin sent a squadron of camel-riders around to the north-west side of the town to cut off the water supply to the Ottoman garrison, which stood outside the walls. The following day, the Indian Marine ship Hardinge and the light cruiser Fox of the British Red Sea Patrol Squadron beat into the harbour and scourged the garrison with concentrated fire, killing three Turkish gendarmes. The bombardment was repeated daily, until, on 16 June, the carrier Ben-My-Chree dropped anchor off the reef and disgorged a flight of seaplanes which soared over the town walls dropping anti-personnel bombs. The Turkish garrison was demoralized and thirsty. On receiving advice that no reinforcements were on their way, the Commander surrendered to Sharif Muhsin. There was similar success at other ports along the Red Sea Coast. Medina’s port, Yanbu’, and Rabegh – about 120 miles north of Jeddah – were taken by the end of July. Lith and Qunfidhdha, to the south, were captured about the same time, and at Umm Lujj the Turkish troops fled in the desert when Fox put a round up the mainstreet of the town and holed the fort. Ta’if, in the Hejaz highlands seventy-five miles south-east of Mecca, however, had proved a harder nut to crack.

  Ta’if, lying on a sandy plain amid fruit orchards and olive groves, 5,000 feet above sea-level, was a walled town which served as a market for the ‘Utayba – one of the most powerful Bedu tribes of central Arabia – as well as a number of smaller semi-nomadic tribes. ‘Abdallah had been sent there with seventy ‘Agayl riders on 1 June, as soon as Hussain had heard the news of Khairy Bey’s advance. He had made a camp near the town, and informed the local Commander, Ahmad Bey, that he was on a raid against the Baqqum, a nomadic tribe of 500 tents inhabiting the wadis of the Assir. Ahmad Bey had been suspicious, but had reckoned that whatever it was the young Sharif was up to, with only seventy poorly armed ‘Agayl he offered very little threat to the Turks, who numbered 3,000, and possessed ten mountain-guns. ‘Abdallah proceeded to send messengers to the camps of the ‘Utayba and other tribes, inviting them to join him, offering money and arms. The Bedu arrived in their camels in small unobtrusive parties over the next few days, and with astonishing speed ‘Abdallah built up his force from seventy to 5,000 men. Ahmad Bey, who visited his camp every evening, watched the foregathering of tribesmen and camels with disquiet. Within a week, the Sharif was ready to order the attack. Then, on the eve of his planned strike, his presence was suddenly requested by Ghalib Pasha, the Governor of the Hejaz. ‘Abdallah’s chiefs counselled caution, but the Sharif rode boldly to Ghalib’s palace escorted by only two Bedu, whom he posted outside the office, instructing them quietly that if anyone tried to arrest him they were to hold off any threat from outside while he dealt with the Vali. ‘Abdallah swept into the Governor’s presence, and found that Ghalib simply wanted to advise him against carrying out his raid on the Baqqum: ‘Rumours are about,’ the Governor said, ‘that a revolt may take place any day now. You see how the people of Ta’if are leaving their homes with their children.’3 ‘Let me carry out the raid,’ ‘Abdallah protested, ‘and the people will regain their confidence.’ At that moment Ahmad Bey entered the room, looking grave, and ‘Abdallah tensed himself for action. The Commander whispered to Ghalib, confessing his suspicions and suggesting that he should arrest ‘Abdallah forthwith. The Sharif watched anxiously, fingering his revolver beneath his cloak. After a few minutes, though, the Governor waved his Commander aside, and ‘Abdallah left freely. No sooner had he regained his camp than he sent his ‘Agayl to cut the telegraph wires to Mecca, and ordered his scouts to stop any messengers leaving or entering Ta’if, by shooting them dead if necessary. On the night of 10 June, his forces surrounded the northern quarter of the city. They were easily repelled, however, for Ahmad Bey had strengthened the town walls with earthworks and trenches. ‘Our attack was made with great violence,’ ‘Abdallah wrote. ‘In the centre our riflemen made a raid and returned with some prisoners and loot. At sunrise the Turkish artillery began to shell us heavily. We were fortunate there was no infantry offensive as well.’4 Over the next few days, the Arabs tried continually to raid individual positions, only to find themselves scattered by the noise of the Turkish guns. The Bani Sa’ad – a local cultivating tribe – were so unnerved that they abandoned the Sharif and decamped for their villages. ‘Abdallah bided his time patiently, however, until, in mid-July, the Egyptian mountain-guns arrived, having been carried in pieces up the Wadi Fatima from Mecca, together with a howitzer the Arabs had captured there. Yet the stand-off continued. ‘Abdallah said later that he had not made as much use of the artillery as he should have done, while the Egyptian gunners later told Hubert Young that the Bedu had been afraid to attack, and had never taken advantage of their bombardments. Eventually, the Sharif’s patience paid off, however: the garrison at Ta’if surrendered on 22 September, and the Governor was taken prisoner.

  With a little assistance from the Royal Navy, but with few trained troops and little modern equi
pment, the Hashemites had captured most of the vital towns of the Hejaz, taking some 6,000 prisoners and a vast amount of military hardware. More than this, they had scored a brilliant propaganda success: Turco-German dreams of a Jihad or Holy War were dead. Jamal Pasha admitted as much publicly in a speech, in which he called Hussain a ‘traitor’ and a ‘vile individual’. For the Arabs, the problem was that Medina, not Mecca, was the key to the Hejaz, and they had not captured it. Medina was not only a self-supporting oasis, far beyond the range of British naval guns, but it was also linked directly to the outside world by the Hejaz railway. By June it had a large garrison of at least 12,000 men under a gifted, resolute and ruthless commander named Fakhri Pasha, the notorious ‘Butcher of Urfa’. Hussain and his sons slowly realized that they had underestimated the power of the railway. While Medina remained in Turkish hands, the Turks could move any amount of men and material into the Hejaz at will, and launch a counter-attack at their leisure.

  After raising the flag on 5 June, ‘Ali and Feisal had divided their force of Bedu into three detachments, one of which had torn up the railway tracks north of Medina with their bare hands and flung the rails down the embankment. This achieved nothing, for without explosives they could do no permanent damage, and the Turks, who had repair teams in their fortress-stations, had no shortage of spare track. Muhit was the first station on the railway, thirteen miles northwest of Medina, a solid building of black basalt, guarded by a massive blockhouse, standing under a crust of low hills. On the morning of 8 June, ‘Ali’s snipers poured fire into the buildings from concealed places in the surrounding hills, while another detachment skirmished across the open plain towards the position. The Turks were well-entrenched and easily turned back the advance with a clatter of machine-gun fire. Worse, a large force of infantry under the personal leadership of Fakhri Pasha had sallied forth from Medina, and fell on them from the rear. The Arabs retreated into the hills and regrouped, making a massed sortie against Medina which was again met with a solid wall of fire from artillery and machine-guns. The noise of the cannon so terrified the Bedu that they turned and ran. The ‘Utayba and the ‘Agayl took shelter among the black stones of a lava scree and refused to budge. Feisal, riding a white mare and dressed conspicuously in his finest Sharifian robes, paced up and down steadily through a rain of Turkish bullets and bursting shells trying to rally them. It was to no avail; the Bedu had no experience of this kind of carnage. Feisal had been relying on the Bani ‘Ali, a tribe of cultivators who inhabited the village of ‘Awali outside the town walls, to hold the city’s water supply. But the roar of the guns and the flight of the Bedu irregulars were too much for them. They asked the Turks for a truce, and while they were parleying, Fakhri’s men encircled the village. Then, on a signal, they moved in with fixed bayonets and massacred every man, woman and child, burning the houses and setting machine-guns at the gates to cut down the fleeing victims as they ran out. Feisal and a handful of Bedu who came to the rescue too late were appalled. This wanton butchery of women and children was an atrocity which they would never forget. It was the final nerve-shattering blow to their morale, and the Hashemites were obliged to retreat, first to Bir Mashi, south of the city, and then to Wadi Aqiq. The Turks pursued them as doggedly as bloodhounds, driving them from place to place, until they split up, Feisal taking his troops to Yanbu ‘an-Nakhl – a palm oasis in the hills on the Medina-Yanbu’ road – and ‘Ali to Wadi Ithm, about thirty miles to the south-west of Medina, where, almost out of food, he barely managed to hang on. The Turks now began to push forward relentlessly, collecting camels from the surrounding tribes for transport, capturing and fortifying wells and strong-points. The Arab forces were almost out of supplies and ammunition, and what little they had was reaching them from Mecca, rather than from the beach-head at Rabegh. In mid-July ‘Ali’s force was increased by a detachment of regular Arab soldiers – former members of Ottoman Divisions seized by the British as prisoners-of-war, and released from prison-camps in Egypt as volunteers for the Arab cause. They were under the command of a highly capable young Iraqi artillery officer called Nuri as-Sa’id, who, on reaching ‘Ali’s position, saw that his situation was hopeless. ‘Ali had no information about the enemy’s movements, and Nuri had to locate the three Turkish battalions tracking him by sending out his men as decoys to draw fire. Ammunition was low, and the Turks were in possession of the nearest water sources. Nuri felt that the Bedu troops were incapable of holding a Turkish advance, and advised ‘Ali to withdraw to the coast, where, in the comforting shelter of British naval guns, the nucleus of a regular Arab army might be formed under the command of Aziz ‘Ali al-Masri – another distinguished and brilliant Arab defector from the Turks, who had fought with the Senussi in the Libyan desert, and had now devised a detailed strategy for the Arab Revolt. Al-Masri proposed to form a ‘flying column’ of trained Arab volunteers 8,000 strong, which, with eight mountain-guns, would move north from the Hejaz into Syria, wrecking the railway but never fighting pitched battles with the Turks. The scheme, later to be adapted by Lawrence, was scotched by Hussain, who was suspicious of his Syrian officers and felt that such a ‘flying column’ would be beyond his control. Indeed, the guerrilla strategist al-Masri was later sacked by the Sharif – an irreplaceable loss to the revolt. For now, however, Nuri advised ‘Ali to withdraw to Rabegh. In doing so, the Sharif could also find out why none of the thousands of rifles and tons of supplies the British had landed there had reached them in the field.