Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  Of course, as Lawrence realised, the Indian government’s policy for Iraq’s future would easily have been compromised by enlistment of Arab support, even had it been readily available. At the outbreak of the war an alliance of a kind had been made through Captain Shakespeare with Ibn Saud of Riyadh, but he wanted British backing only for his private tribal war against Ibn Rashid, who was the Ottoman government’s pawn.48 Subsequent claims that Ibn Saud might have been employed against the Turks in the same way as Hussain rest on the assumption that he would have been happy to fight the Sultan, which he was not.

  The evidence of ambivalent Arab loyalties and a common willingness to fight alongside the Turks was found on the Sinai front as well as in Iraq. Arabs had attacked reconnaissance patrols in November 1914 and their continued hostility provoked a small-scale punitive expedition in February 1916. The Turks took heart from this and were arming them with modern rifles. On the eve of the first British advance into the region, intelligence at Ismailia assessed the local Arabs as ‘a source of danger rather than security’, a conclusion which no one in Iraq would have quarrelled with.49

  A further clue to why the Iraq political and military authorities challenged Lawrence’s scenario for an Arab uprising against the Turks lay in its sources. There was there, if not in Cairo, a healthy scepticism about pledges of Arab support. On 3 April, Beach examined a report, forwarded by Cairo, compiled by agent ‘Mustafa’ who had just completed a tour of Syrian and Palestinian towns and cities. What he had heard and seen convinced him that the anti-Turkish sentiments of the Syrians and Beduin were sapping the loyalty of Arab officers and that local sheiks were willing to help the British. Nuri Shalaan of the Rwallah had written to the Iraqi Beduin and urged them to restrain their attacks on the British. Beach wondered whether ‘the natural wish of the Agent to make out a case for allied action in Syria’ had coloured his conclusions.50

  Turning to the Arab mutinies, a careful appraisal of interviews with Arab deserters on all fronts shows that the usual reasons for their flight were sparse rations and maltreatment by officers. ‘I deserted because I was tired of having little to drink and not sufficient to eat’ was the explanation of one determined man who had crossed Sinai in April 1915 and was probably questioned by Lawrence or Lloyd.51 For every man who crossed to British lines in January 1917, many more crept off to their homes and families.52 A general unwillingness to endure the harsh regime of the Turkish army was not the same thing as a desire to fight against the Ottoman empire alongside Britain and France. This was soon obvious during the winter of 1916—17 when efforts were under way to recruit Arab POWs for Hussain’s army.

  This truth was understood by von Sandars. By the end of 1917, when desertions were put at 300,000, he commented that the truants were ‘not men that go over to the enemy, but for the most part return to the country in the rear to rob and plunder’. The Arabs were no worse than any other race. ‘A large part of the Arabs may be made into good usable soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘if from the very beginning of their service they are treated with fairness and justice.’53

  Lawrence and his colleagues were both easily misled and anxious to believe any snippet of information which seemed to confirm general Arab disaffection. Even the plausible and in part substantiated evidence of al Faruqi that his regiment, the 142nd, was defeatist and disaffected was deceptive. In November 1915 it fought hard and well in the battle of Ctesiphon.54 Those like Lawrence who placed their faith in the Arab Revolt almost always took it for granted that the Arabs’ exasperation with Ottoman government automatically meant that they wanted British assistance to overthrow and replace it. Once the revolt had started, they assumed that every discontented Arab would identify with Hussain and his movement.

  Lawrence had been sent to win converts in Iraq and had come away with none. Nor had he ignited Arab uprisings or mutinies. But in terms of routine intelligence duties, he had been successful and he had handled the local officials calmly and sensitively. He now held the local rank of captain and had measured up well to the duties of gathering and collating intelligence. As a man, he remains an obscure figure during this period, something of a recluse who had chosen to cut himself off from the common pastimes of his brother officers. Little of his personality emerges from the private letters and diaries of Deedes, Lloyd or Dawnay, and Weldon never mentioned him. What emerges from fragments in these sources and his letters home is a clever, agreeable and hard-working officer given to eccentricities.

  This would soon change, for a few days after his return to his Cairo desk uprisings occurred in Jiddah and Mecca. Undismayed by his setback in Iraq, Lawrence was impatient to get to Hejaz and set his mark on the movement. At last the chance had come for him both to take the field and to help the Arabs, although he was far from clear how. He was, however, confident in his abilities and the opportunities open for unorthodox warfare. He was certain of one thing: fresh amateur ideas would serve better than the stale, conventional thinking he had encountered in the ‘blunderland’ of Iraq.

  PART THREE

  WITH THE ARABS AT AQABA

  June 1916—July 1917

  I

  A Man of Destiny

  When Captain Lawrence came ashore at Rabigh on 16 October 1916, the Arab Revolt was four and a half months old and languishing. His commanding officer, General Murray, believed that the Arab movement was on the point of extinction. Lawrence disagreed; he had followed its wayward course, analysed its problems and was convinced that he was its saviour. Recounting his arrival in the Seven Pillars, he presented himself as a man of destiny who alone understood the historical forces he was about to encounter and knew how they could be effectively harnessed. To fulfil his private vision, Lawrence had to discover another man of destiny whom, like Merlin, he would identify and then guide as the ‘once and future’ king of the Arabs. Hitherto they had lacked a leader with ‘the flame of enthusiasm’ which ‘would set the desert on fire’. ‘My visit,’ Lawrence continued, ‘was mainly to find the yet unknown master-spirit of the affairs, and measure his capacity to carry the revolt to the goal I had conceived for it.’1 This was the liberation of Syria and the establishment there of an independent Arab kingdom under British tutelage.

  In his version of the beginning of his Arabian quest, Lawrence had engineered the time and place of his decisive arrival in Hejaz. After a summer of sulking during which he had made himself intolerable to his colleagues, he got ten days’ leave and unofficially attached himself to Ronald Storrs, then about to embark from Suez for Rabigh. While full of dramatic effect, this narrative is misleading.

  The truth was that, disappointed by the failure of his Iraq mission, he had been desperately eager to become directly involved in the Hejaz campaign, which for all its shortcomings offered the only means by which he could help the Arab national movement. Nevertheless when he finally got his way, he went to Hejaz as a result of circumstances beyond his own control and he travelled, not as a free agent guided by his own will, but as the instrument of others. He was sent to Rabigh by Murray and Clayton with specific orders to collect vital information about the situation in Hejaz, the Arab armies and their leaders. The revolt had lurched from crisis to crisis and his superiors were striving to find the means by which it could be kept alive without the commitment of British troops.

  According to Lawrence’s version of his first visit to Hejaz, he was still employed as a staff officer based in Cairo where, after his return from Iraq, he continued his now despised routine duties. In his absence there had been a number of changes which were not to his liking. His section, 1a, had been split between Cairo and operational HQ at Ismailia, and from 20 June he was under the command of an ex-gunner, Major G.V.W Holdich.2 Lawrence had previously got on well with Holdich, but the continued thwarting of his wish for secondment to Hejaz made him testy and they soon squabbled. He also showed his pique by correcting the spelling, punctuation and grammar of reports written by his superiors.3

  Lawrence kept in touch with developments in He
jaz throughout these months of frustration, making special use of the on-the-spot reports sent back by Ruhi, Storrs’s Persian agent. He had a further, tenuous link with the affairs of the province since, as the officer responsible for printing the army’s maps, he was given charge of the production of a set of Hejaz postage stamps which appeared in October. As they were officially regarded as propaganda which advertised to the world the birth of an independent Islamic state, Lawrence had traditional Muslim patterns included in the designs as well as the inscription ‘Mecca the Blessed’ in Arabic.

  While he oversaw the printing of the Hejaz stamps and bickered with his colleagues, a more serious row was under way over the future of the Arab Revolt. This wrangle between generals and proconsuls gave him the chance he had been waiting for, an opportunity to visit Hejaz. The issue in question was how far Britain should go to help the Arabs when they faced a counter-attack from Turkish forces known to be regrouping at Medina. The matter had first been raised at a policy conference at Ismailia on 12 September attended by Murray, Admiral Wemyss, McMahon, Storrs,, Clayton and Colonel Cyril Wilson, the British Consul at Jiddah and Hussain’s chief military adviser. Wilson had first-hand knowledge of what was happening, was strongly pro-Arab and served as Wingate’s mouthpiece. He told the meeting that the Arabs would be swamped by the Turkish offensive, a disaster which could be prevented only if a brigade of British infantry was sent to Rabigh. Murray was furious; he challenged Wilson’s assessment of the situation and pointed out that he needed every man he could get in Egypt for operations in Sinai. He added that an Arabian sideshow would inevitably get out of control. ‘You start with a brigade, that brigade wants some artillery, then aeroplanes,’ and then ‘comes a request that the force may be moved to another point which it is absolutely essential to hold’.4

  Robertson stood by Murray’s refusal to send men to Hejaz. His first reaction was to draw attention to the unhappy experiences of the Gallipoli and Iraq campaigns, which ‘should have been quite enough proof of this futility’. He also queried whether the presence of Christian troops so close to Mecca would not provoke a fanatic response from the local Arabs which would wipe out for ever the propaganda value of the revolt. This was later Lawrence’s view and it made sense, since Hussain had already banned a company of the Warwickshires from landing at Jiddah to pick up Turkish POWs and was very reluctant to allow British staff officers to travel inland.5

  Murray and Robertson prevailed, but they had to resist continuous pressure from McMahon and Wingate. Wingate was coming more and more to the forefront on Arab affairs. On 4 October he took full charge of the small group of technicians, staff officers and Egyptian troops which comprised the Hejaz Force and, in December, he was appointed High Commissioner in Egypt in succession to McMahon. By the end of the year this forceful pro-consul had secured control over both the political and military affairs of the Arab movement, which he wanted to prosper. What always mattered most to Wingate was the imperial dimension: if the Arabs faltered or were stifled, British prestige would plummet and Mecca would become the powerhouse for Pan-Islamic subversion against the Sudan and Egypt. For this reason Wingate ceaselessly badgered Murray and Robertson for British troops.

  Lawrence followed the exchange of memoranda and telegrams with deep interest. As a partisan of the Arabs he was dismayed by the indifference to their fate shown by his fellow staff officers, whose minds were concentrated on operations in Sinai. Murray was dismissive of the Arab movement and doubted whether its forces, which had already fired 2 million rounds of ammunition to kill less than 2,000 Turks, would ever amount to much.6 Robertson disagreed and reminded him that he had a duty to succour ‘our enthusiastic and somewhat uncivilized allies’, for ‘it is better that they should be on our side than partners of the Huns.’7 His view was shared by Lawrence’s former chief, Clayton, who now combined the posts of Murray’s adviser on Muslim affairs and Wingate’s Chief of Staff for the Hejaz Force. Trapped between the contending sides, Clayton privately endorsed Murray’s stand against direct British intervention in Hejaz.8

  Both factions agreed that the intelligence available from Hejaz was unsatisfactory. Wemyss was exasperated by ‘The usual streams of contradictory telegrams ... from political and military officers in Jiddah and Rabigh’ which confused rather than enlightened. The principal sources were Colonels Wilson and A.C.Parker, both keen Arabists whose judgements were mistrusted by Murray. Clayton did not trust Wilson, whom he suspected of doctoring the evidence in his reports in order to give weight to his own opinions.9 One answer to the problem of flawed and partial intelligence was to send a reliable officer to Hejaz who could reveal the exact military position of both the Arab and Turkish forces there. On 9 October Clayton suggested that Lawrence should be assigned to this task and Murray agreed.10

  Lawrence’s single-minded and passionate zeal for the Arab cause must have been well known in Cairo. Yet Murray and Clayton considered him sufficiently professional in his approach to observe impartially and draw up a balanced and authoritative report. Furthermore, Lawrence was an excellent choice in so far as his own inclinations made it likely that his report would uphold their own views. Throughout his involvement with the Arab movement, Lawrence always maintained that its ultimate success would depend upon the Arabs’ ability to help themselves rather than relying on foreign troops. These were no doubt his views when he set off for Jiddah on 13 October and, on his return to Cairo, he did unreservedly condemn the proposal to land a British brigade at Rabigh.

  Whether or not his mind was filled with dreams of finding the hidden leader of the Arab people, Lawrence was pleased with his assignment and full of optimism. Just before he left Cairo, he told Captain Doynal St Quentin, the French military attaché, ‘Abdullah is coming to talk with us about his future Arab kingdom which will embrace Palestine and Syria. We will advise him first how to take Medina.’11 This was an impudent challenge, since both officers knew that Syria was already pledged to France. Lawrence, his mind running far beyond the immediate problems of Hejaz, was already laying plans for the extension of the Arab movement to Syria, where its ultimate success would check French territorial ambitions.

  Lawrence’s official brief was to accompany Storrs and Major al Mizi, now Hussain’s Chief of Staff, who had recently been recruiting Arab POWs in Egypt, to Jiddah. There they would discuss the military situation with Wilson and the Amir Abdullah and afterwards confer with Parker at Rabigh. If permission to travel inland had been wrung from Hussain, Lawrence was to make contact with the Amir Faisal, whose army was about to take the brunt of the Turkish offensive. Once with Faisal, Lawrence would assess the numbers and quality of his men and the strengths and positions of their Turkish adversaries. He would also set up a network of trustworthy native agents who would replace Faisal’s unreliable spies and guarantee the Arab Bureau a flow of accurate information from the Medina region. To judge from his reports, Lawrence was also asked to prepare a profile of Wilson, who was believed to be on the verge of a breakdown, and to find out al Mizri’s ambitions and future operational plans.

  Lawrence’s military and civilian colleagues were pessimistic about the future of the Arab movement. Even the most sincere and dedicated adherents of the Arab alliance had been disappointed by their military performance since June. Once the serious fighting had begun, it was obvious that Hussain and his tribal forces had bitten off more than they could chew. According to the captain of HMS Fox, which was giving close support to the Arabs besieging Jiddah, their leaders were ‘discouraged at not having a walkover’. The port fell on 10 June after a naval bombardment of the Turkish trenches which the Arabs had been most unwilling to storm. Five days later, Arab morale rallied when the sea-plane carrier Ben-my-Chree hove to off the Hejaz coast; for the next few weeks, its machines carried out vital reconnaissance and bombing missions without which the Arabs would have suffered serious reverses. This heavy dependence on British men-of-war and aircraft was officially kept secret, since Allied propaganda demanded that the re
volt be advertised to the world as a purely Arab affair.12 Although Lawrence did much to perpetuate this myth, he did acknowledge the crucial assistance rendered the Arabs by Wemyss and his ships during the first months of the uprising.13 Arab historians have been less generous.

  The summer campaign in Hejaz set the pattern for the future. Arab irregulars could never hope to engage, let alone overcome, Turkish troops in open battle without substantial assistance. Until the end of the war the Arabs would depend upon endless transfusions of Allied arms and ammunition as well as British gold to keep their forces in the field. In combat they were sustained by British, French, Egyptian and Indian specialists such as engineers, gunners, signallers and supply officers as well as artillery, armoured cars and aircraft. Their bases at Jiddah, Rabigh, Yanbu al Bahr and later al Wajh and Aqaba would be protected by British and French men-of-war.

  With the aid they had received between June and October, the Hejaz Arabs had made some gains, although their position remained precarious. During June tribal forces supported by aircraft and warships had secured Jiddah, Rabigh and Yanbu al Bahr, and on 9 July Mecca was taken. Subsequent fighting was desultory and the initiative passed to the Turkish commander, Fahreddin Pasha, who concentrated his forces around Medina in readiness to recover the ground lost during the summer. Enver Pasha had not been unduly troubled by the Arabs’ gains and, contrary to British intelligence predictions, thought it unnecessary to divert troops from Syria or the Caucasus for a counter-attack.14 Fahreddin appeared able to cope without reinforcements. Assured of the benevolent neutrality of Ibn Rashid on his eastern flank, Fahreddin’s army could be supplied from Damascus by the Hejaz railway, which the Arabs had been unable to sever because of their ignorance of explosives.