Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  Lawrence was not so fastidious during his first visit to Hejaz in October 1916 when he reported to Clayton, ‘The money question is going to be decisive; the Turks have been trying to circulate paper money lately which will be the end of them.’19 He was absolutely right; like so many backward people, the Hejaz and Syrian Beduin mistrusted banknotes and instinctively preferred silver and gold currency. Even so, many had been retained by the Turkish government before the war to guard the Hejaz railway, a service which they undertook up to the moment of Turkey’s defeat. Some, probably Bani Sakhr, encountered by a Gurkha unit attached to Faisal’s army on 14 September 1918, were clearly willing to earn their wages. ‘We came across a party of hostile Arabs, hostile in the sense that if we attacked the Turkish line, they would fight on behalf of the enemy. If we did not attack the line, these tribesmen numbering 2,000 were our friends.’20 21 It would be interesting to know whether this contingent had ever taken British gold or whether they discarded their loyalty to their former masters and joined in the general pillage of the remnants of the Turkish Fourth Army at the end of September.

  They probably did. Between 1916 and 1918 the war presented the tribal sheiks of Arabia and Syria with an opportunity to supplement their thin incomes and enhance their status. Over the past fifty years the Ottoman government had become less and less willing to purchase Beduin obedience with subsidies and had instead attempted coercion. Now, the Turks, their German allies and Britain were all anxious to pay for Beduin goodwill and co-operation. ‘The Germans poured gold upon us,’ remembered one sheik from northern Syria, and in October 1918, when the Turks evacuated Aleppo, they distributed 30,000 gold lira to local tribesmen in return for a safe passage.

  This flow of gold came at a time of severe regional economic crisis created by the Syrian famine of 1915–16, the breakdown of the food distribution system, hyperinflation and the widespread commandeering of camel and other pack animals by the Turkish army. As the shortages worsened, more and more entrepreneurs accepted payment only in gold. The nomadic Beduin were among those hardest hit, since their survival depended upon grain purchased from the settled districts of central Syria and Palestine. One of the chief concerns of the Rwallah Sheik, Nuri Shalaan, was his tribe’s inability to secure grain from the Hawran and his overtures to the British included demands for alternative corn supplies from Iraq. Lawrence’s sovereigns were welcome to him and others like him, since the Hawran corn dealers were insisting on payment in gold.22 Whatever their political loyalties, the Syrian Beduin needed British gold to survive.

  Other Arabs exploited the war for personal gain. In 1917 British intelligence became aware that rifles originally sent to Hussain were being traded in southern Persia and the Gulf.23 At least one shipment of arms was hijacked by a Hejazi sheik for his own use, even though he claimed to be Hussain’s ally.

  As Lawrence discovered on his first visit to Hejaz, Hussain coveted his subsidy and kept his sons and their tribal forces short. His allowance was raised in May 1917 to £200,000 monthly, and by August, fourteen months after the start of the rebellion, he had received £2.2 million. By this time Faisal was independent of his father and, as commander of the northern section of the Arab armies, was receiving through Lawrence £75,000 a month, which was raised to £80,000 in October 1918. These remittances were his main source of income even after the fall of Damascus and were intended to cover his private expenses, the wages of his regular troops and allowances paid to tribal sheiks for the hire of their followers. The distribution of these funds was haphazard. On 10 May 1918 there was ‘slight trouble’ when regular Arab soldiers protested that they had not been paid for four months. Faisal calmed them, but the next day two companies mutinied and refused to march out of Aqaba for an attack on Abu el Jurdhan.24 Those who went were in a sour mood, which explained why the assault was so half-heartedly pressed.

  Arab forces, tribal or regular, would not fight without payment. This was understood by Wingate and Allenby, who in July 1918 faced a crisis when Egyptian gold reserves had dwindled to £30,000 with just over £4,000 available in sovereigns. Hussain agreed to take some payment in silver, but Allenby had to have £400,000 in sovereigns hurriedly shipped from the Melbourne mint to avert a complete halt to all Arab activity.25 The Hejaz Arabs were so heavily dependent on their monthly allowance that in January 1919 Wingate feared that Hussain would face widespread tribal restlessness unless his full wartime subsidy were extended.26 Reporting on conditions in Aqaba during the bitterly cold weather in January 1918, the French Attaché St Quentin felt certain that British cash was the chief prop to Arab morale.27 His countrymen knew this from experience, for a party of Algerian soldiers had been robbed by tribesmen near Yanbu al Bahr in October 1917. The excuse offered by the Arab Bureau was that ‘the sharif Ali has not been paying his Arabs lately and some of the discontented are out to loot anything,’ which must have been a comfort to their victims.28

  Lawrence acted as direct paymaster to the tribal sheiks of Syria and the desert region east of the Jordan with whom he had first established dealings during May and June 1917. After he had taken Aqaba and his reports had been examined in Cairo and London, the Foreign Office allocated £200,000 in gold which he was free to distribute among the sheiks whose lands lay close to the Hejaz railway between Dera and Maan. On 12 August he was given a further, secret service allowance of £200 a month, also in gold.29 A month later, he asked for £20,000 for a party of Syrian sheiks who were due to visit Faisal, no doubt to help sway their future allegiance.30 By 18 October, he had disposed of £97,000 and was asking Clayton to release the remaining £103,000 of his allowance for future special operations which already had Allenby’s approval. This proved inadequate for what he had in mind, so on 18 November Robertson sanctioned an additional £20,000 to be sent to Lawrence at Aqaba. Three weeks later, Faisal allocated his entire monthly allowance of £80,000 to subsidies for tribal forces at Lawrence’s insistence, which may explain why Arab regular troops were starved of wages for the next six months. A further £30,000 was delivered to Gedua el Sufi at Beersheba in January 1918 on Lawrence’s instructions.31

  Between August 1917 and January 1918, £320,000 had been handed over to tribal sheiks in Syria and east of the River Jordan at Lawrence’s instigation in return for attacks on the Hejaz railway and future adherence to Faisal. Lawrence clearly recognised that there was a price for Arab co-operation in Syria; his ‘ideal’ was not enough to sustain the momentum of a national movement. During operations alongside tribal forces in 1918, Captain Peake of the Imperial Camel Corps noticed that there was ‘no trouble about a satisfactory muster when it was a question of pay or food’.32

  For Lawrence, the money was a means to an end and he was careless in handling it. In October 1917 he forgot to sign a receipt for £10,000 delivered to him at Aqaba, and during his post-war service in Jordan his accounts included the entry ‘£10,000 — lost, I forget how or where’. Harry St John Philby later found the missing cash in a buried safe near Aqaba. On campaign, Lawrence carried his sovereigns in bags of 1,000 or else had them conveyed by armoured car. The residue was held in a safe aboard the Aqaba guardship, HMS Humber, for fear of theft. This was a needless precaution, since throughout all the time he spent in remote country behind enemy lines Lawrence was never robbed, which says much for the awe and respect felt for him by the Beduin. Captain Hubert Young, his comrade-in-arms and most honest critic, remarked after the war that ‘Lawrence could not have done what he did without the gold, but no one else could have done it with ten times the amount.’33

  Tribal loyalty had its price and Lawrence could pay it. In effect he had taken over and exploited the old Ottoman system which had created a network of more or less dependable clients among the Beduin sheiks. Furthermore, his gold reached the sheiks at a time of extreme need and provided them with the only currency with which they could purchase the basic foodstuffs their people needed for survival. The prospect of starvation more than attachment to a national idea drove the Beduin to
him, as well as the prospects he offered for looting Turkish trains and stations. Yet this policy of buying support proved self–defeating, at least as far as the promotion of Faisal’s interests was concerned. Through Lawrence’s liberal disbursement of British gold, Faisal had assembled a formidable tribal following in Syria by October 1918, but its strength was illusory. By July 1920, when it was clear that Britain was no longer underwriting him, Faisal’s authority evaporated. When his gold ran out, his sometime retainers turned elsewhere and soon discovered that the French colonial administration was willing to continue the custom of tribal subsidies. Nuri Shalaan preferred French gold to nationalist slogans and, in 1925, when the Druze rebelled against the French and were joined by the Damascus nationalists, the Beduin readily accepted French bribes and stayed neutral.34

  Lawrence played down the money as a factor in deciding Arab allegiance. To have revealed how essential it had been would have invited the question of how far he was the commander of a mercenary army He found the concept abhorrent and in 1928 wrote scathingly of the Indian army, ‘No native troops are loyal to their foreign masters: or rather, only those who had no self respect would be loyal, and men without self respect aren’t capable of loyalty. The better the Indian, the less happy he could be as an agent of repression.’ It was an unthinking piece of dogmatism which indicated that either Lawrence understood nothing about the Indian army or else he could not forgive it and its officers for wartime slights during the final Damascus campaign. As for the Arabs, he went to elaborate lengths to convince his contemporaries that they were fighting for national sentiment and not for cash. From his first visit to Faisal in October 1916 he continually repeated the contention that the Arabs represented a truly national movement, motivated by the highest sentiments. In his official report on the march to al Wajh in January 1917, he repeated a conversation which supported this conviction. Sheik Awda Abu Tayi, sometime brigand and chief of the Huweitat, amazed by the numbers around him, remarked, ‘It is not an army but a world which is moving on al Wajh.’ His neighbour agreed and added, ‘Yes, we are no longer Arabs, but a nation.’35 If the rank and file were animated by such feelings, and Lawrence believed they were, he was the midwife at the birth of a new nation which, in time, he would guide through its infancy.

  He may have flattered himself, but everything he wrote during and after the Arab campaign was based on the assumption that the Arab uprising was a popular movement which embodied the historic aspirations of all Arab peoples. His interpretation of events suited Allied propaganda and carried weight in London and Cairo, since his first-hand experiences had given what was seen as an unequalled insight into the Arab mind. ‘Major Lawrence’s opinions demand the most serious consideration,’ insisted William Yale, the US Consul in Cairo, when he forwarded an account of them to the State Department in March 1918.36 ‘No other westerner’ was in a position to offer a more accurate evaluation of Arab attitudes and aspirations. This was so, yet as Harry St John Philby noticed, Lawrence, like other partisans of the Hashemites, was prone to mould his evidence to fit his opinions. As with his own and Military Intelligence’s prognoses about the mutinies in the Turkish army, there was a strong element of wishful thinking in Lawrence’s assessments of the Arab movement.

  From the first the Arab movement, which had Hussain as its figurehead, had been an uneasy alliance. Its adherents were united only by a common wish to break free from Ottoman rule. They had been thrown into partnership by peculiar wartime conditions and even before these had disappeared differences broke surface. At the root of these disagreements lay divergent opinions about the kind of Arab state which would emerge once Turkey had been defeated. This was unavoidable since Hussain’s movement had attracted supporters and prospered because it could call upon substantial Allied resources. For nationalists of all political complexions it offered the only means by which Turkish rule could be overthrown. For this reason Hussain’s adherents included Syrian and Iraqi nationalists who had no truck whatsoever with his reactionary political ideas.

  The final success of the Arab movement rested with an Allied victor. This was understood by Faisal and Abdullah, Hussain’s most politically sophisticated sons, who closely followed newspaper reports of the campaigns on the Western Front, which they knew were the key to Allied victory and, with it, Arab release from Turkish government. Lawrence found Abdullah well informed about the course of the Somme offensive and Faisal told Brémond that ‘The Arabs were helping to secure for France the coveted provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, just as France at Verdun was confirming Arabia for the Arabs.’37 The news of Russia’s armistices with Germany and Turkey in December 1917 and the German advance in the following spring shook Arab confidence in their allies and for a time made Faisal seriously consider Turkish peace overtures. In what was an alliance of convenience rather than conviction, one of Lawrence’s regular duties was to convince Faisal that his allies would eventually win.

  When they joined the rebellion against Turkey, Arabs in both Hejaz and Syria were embarking on a dangerous course. There were widespread fears that, in the event of a Turco-German victory, the Turkish government would exact a terrible retribution on those who had defected to the Allies. The systematic massacres of Armenians, which had begun in January 1915 on the ground that they were secretly pro-Russian, were evidence of how far the Turks would go to coerce and punish resistance. Incidentally, this barbarism convinced many devout Arabs that the Young Turks had finally discarded Islamic principles and were deliberately inviting the vengeance of Allah.

  The Armenian atrocities were referred to in Hussain’s second proclamation of independence issued in November 1916. In this and its predecessor of June, he accused the Committee of Union and Progress of rejecting Muslim traditions and ideals and of inhuman treatment of the empire’s subjects. Measures to advance the status of women were singled out for special censure. ‘Arab matrons were conscripted and trained in barracks,’ and in Damascus Jamal Pasha had patronised a women’s society and permitted women to speak publicly in front of men. Hussain was a reactionary alarmed by the policies of modernisation and reform which threatened the traditional, hierarchical society of Hejaz. He favoured the countryside, from where his Beduin followers were drawn, over the town. On his first visit to Jiddah, Lawrence heard how Hussain had replaced Turkish civil law by the Muslim sharia, a move which benefited the Beduin and hurt the townsmen. As well as putting the clock back, Hussain actively discouraged any spread of the democratic ideal among his subjects. His newspaper, al Qibla, in a report on the opening of a military academy in September 1917, noted approvingly that its students would be ‘educated in moral qualities and reverence for Arab virtues, more especially in the display of obedience and submission to their Gracious Sovereign’.

  Hussain had declared himself King of the Arabs in November 1917 and he boasted that his overlordship extended right across Arabia. This claim was stoutly. contested by Ibn Rashid of Hail, who remained a Turkish client until the end of the war, and by Ibn Saud of Riyadh, who loathed Hussain more than he did the Turks. Before the war Ibn Saud had been courted by the Indian government, whose agent, Captain Shakespeare, had hoped to create an anti-Turkish Arabian alliance which would bring together Hussain, Nuri Shalaan, the Imam Yahya and Sayyid el Idrisi of the Yemen. The private ambitions and mutual suspicions of the parties ruled out any cohesion and, after Shakespeare’s death at the beginning of 1915, the plan languished. In the meantime Cairo pressed forward with its scheme for an alliance with Hussain.

  Ibn Saud refused any co-operation with Hussain despite appeals from Sir Percy Cox and his agent St John Philby. He had good reasons, for in November 1916 Hussain revealed to Colonel Wilson that his long-term ambition was to make himself sole ruler of all Arabia. Ibn Saud repudiated his pretensions and, by July 1918, felt confident enough to challenge Hussain openly. His forces invaded Hussain’s territory and in a skirmish at Khurma defeated his British-armed tribesmen, inflicting over 200 casualties. Hussain’s British advisers
naturally discouraged this private war, which deflected Arab energies away from the main war effort. The Turks were delighted; Fahreddin Pasha congratulated Ibn Saud and French intelligence sources heard that he was supplying him with arms. Abdullah, anxious to draw Britain into his family’s war, spread disinformation to the effect that Ibn Saud had entered into a secret agreement with Fahreddin. Hussain’s other rival, Ibn Rashid, victualled the Medina garrison and in February 1918 supplied Fahreddin with tribal irregulars for an offensive against Abdullah.38

  In his narrative of the Arab Revolt, Lawrence ignored Hussain’s tribal adversaries. Their existence and activities were an uncomfortable reminder that the Beduin were disunited and in many cases deeply suspicious of Hussain’s dynastic ambitions. From the beginning, Hussain and his sons believed that they could use the Arab movement to propel their family, the Hashemites, into a position of pre-eminence in the Middle East. Hussain imagined that with British backing he could make himself supreme in Arabia, and Abdullah was haunted by dreams of founding his own kingdom. Before the revolt Abdullah had considered making himself King of Hejaz and, once it was successfully under way, his ambition increased. In June 1916 he was considering a kingdom in Iraq and in October he told Brémond that, after he had captured Medina, he intended to conquer Syria. Eight months later, sitting in his tent, Lawrence and an Algerian officer, Lieutenant Raho, heard that he had in mind conquests in the Yemen, Syria and even Anatolia.39

  Lawrence never mentioned his host’s dynastic daydreams, although he did record in the Seven Pillars his own comments on monarchy which must have pleased Abdullah greatly.