I remarked again how much the comfortable circumstance that we still had a King made for the reputation of England in this world of Asia. Ancient and artificial societies like this of the Sharifs and feudal chieftains of Arabia found a sense of honourable security when dealing with us in such proof that the highest place in our state was not a prize for merit or ambition.
The ambitious and meritocratic ruled in Constantinople (Enver had been a junior officer and Talaat a postal clerk) and they seemed bent on uprooting the ordered, layered society of the Beduin.
This was to Hussain’s advantage, as it brought into his camp Syrian tribal sheiks whose authority and way of life were endangered. Two powerful tribal groups, the Anazah and the Bani Sakhr, were making tentative approaches to Hussain and Faisal during the winter and spring of 1916—17. The Anazah, of whom the Rwallah were the most numerous, were scattered across eastern Syria and the Bani Sakhr were spread to the south of Amman. Both were pushed into Hussain’s camp, not out of a sense of national identity but because, for the past fifty years, they had been under pressure from the Ottoman government. Administrative centralisation, greater efficiency, permanent garrisons, dwindling subsidies and the enforcement of taxation and conscription were eroding tribal independence and livelihoods.
The Bani Sakhr were particularly vulnerable. The completion of the Hejaz railway in 1908 deprived them of income earned from escorting parties of pilgrims, which explains their enthusiastic participation in raids aimed at its destruction. They were also suffering economically from the new colonies of Circassian settlers planted by the Turkish government in southern Jordan. Like the Anazah tribes, the Bani Sakhr had a long history of armed resistance to Ottoman government which made them natural allies of Hussain. So too were such freebooters as Awda Abu Tayi of the Huweitat, a brigand and tax-avoider for whom adherence to Hussain was a continuation of a long struggle against Ottoman officialdom.
The final group in Hussain’s coalition was drawn from the remnants of pre-war Syrian and Iraqi Arab nationalist parties. Most were exiles and all were from the educated professional classes. Their talents, in particular those of former Turkish officers, were essential for the creation of an Arab state. The most pressing need was for a trained, regular Arab army which could undertake conventional operations alongside Allied forces.
The backgrounds and sympathies of the regular officers were varied. Their European tastes and habits, which included a common liking for whisky and, in the cases of al Mizri and al Faruqi, European mistresses, made them unwelcome in orthodox Hejaz. Politically many were liberal and republican. Jafar al Askari, an extremely able Iraqi who commanded Arab regular units at Aqaba, had been a member of al Ahd before the war. Another Iraqi, Nuri es Said, had been described by Sir Percy Cox as a ‘highly Europeanised delicate Arab, aloof, about 25, apparently a visionary socialist’. Not surprisingly, neither felt comfortable in the service of Hussain, although both were happy under the more tolerant Faisal. Others shared their distaste for Hussain’s ultra-conservatism. In August 1917 an Iraqi nationalist wrote from Zurich to the Labour MP Arthur Henderson (the letter was intercepted by Military Intelligence) with their complaints.40 ‘The rascally and hypocritical’ Hussain was an autocrat in the mould of the former Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid, who would back Allies ‘so long as the money lasts’.
Mistrust was mutual. Hussain and his sons feared that the cadre of radical officers might be tempted to follow the example of the Young Turks and manage a coup. The behaviour of the rank and file of the Arab regular army gave cause for misgivings, mostly among British and French officers. Nationalists like al Faruqi and the Syrian Dr Abd al Rahman Shahbandah encountered indifference and hostility when they toured POW camps in Egypt in search of recruits. One party of volunteers marched away from the camp followed by a barrage of catcalls — ‘You are going to fight for England and France! We will have none of it and we are going back behind barbed wire.’ A contingent shipped from Indian prison camps mutinied at Aden in protest against having to undergo training in Egypt, and there was another mutiny at Ismailia in October 1918 against the employment of British and French instructors. At Aqaba there was ceaseless bickering between Syrian regulars and tribesmen. Once brawlers were brought to order when an officer threatened to open fire on them with a machine-gun. An attempt to form a mixed Christian, Jewish and Arab battalion ended in disorder when the Christians and Jews refused to soldier and demanded civilian occupations. Listening to their grumbling, Colonel Brémond thought he heard ‘echoes of the soviets’.41
The problems of the Arab regular army were a symptom of the deeper malaise which infected the Arab movement. It possessed no common purpose beyond a general desire to be rid of Turkish rule. This bond was itself a collection of contradictory ambitions. Hussain and his family hoped that the Turkish twilight would be followed by a Hashemite dawn; tribesmen like the Bani Sakhr wished to reverse the flow of Ottoman reforms which disrupted their way of life, while Syrian and Iraqi nationalists wanted regeneration and modernisation, but on Arab terms. Palestinian Arabs who joined Faisal’s forces during 1918 later claimed they had been told that they would become liberators of their homeland. The tribesmen who rode with Lawrence were fighting for gold and loot. In terms of political conviction the nationalists were deeply divided. There were those, held in contempt by Lawrence, steeped in the ideas of Western enlightenment and liberalism who looked to the French Revolution for inspiration. By contrast, Hashemite political thought was firmly rooted in the ancien régime.
Lawrence favoured Hashemite patriarchalism, which he sincerely believed offered the best future for the Arabs. The liberation of Syria would be achieved by an alliance between Faisal the aristocrat and the Beduin, supported by the settled peasantry. By harnessing these essentially conservative forces, Lawrence imagined that he could preserve the traditional Arab way of life from dislocation. He explained his creed in a letter written to Clayton early in September 1917.42
You say they [the Syrians] will need French help in the development of Syria–but do you really imagine anyone in Syria (bar Christians) wants to develop Syria? Why this craze for change? A slow progress, utilising only the resources of Syria itself, seems to me more desirable than foreign borrowing and a forcing bed of public enterprises.
Lawrence appreciated that his romantic Toryism applied to Syria would not be welcomed in many quarters. Defending Faisal in February 1918, he wrote, ‘The sacred words Progress and Nationality are to be ranged against him’ by those who challenged his right to the throne of Syria and regarded him as ‘a Meccan obscurantist’.43
By guiding Faisal towards Damascus, Lawrence was fulfilling his private dream to liberate Syria and his self-imposed obligation to give ‘freedom’ to his beloved Dahoum. The overlordship of Syria was obviously attractive to an Arab prince and, long before Lawrence’s arrival in Hejaz, the Hashemites had been cherishing ambitions in that direction. Damascus brought with it a rich province whose possession would enhance their power and status within the Arab world. For Lawrence, the city represented a positive goal after which the largely negative and friable Arab movement could strive. Its capture in October 1918 marked the symbolic climax of the Arab Revolt and of Lawrence’s version of it as set out in the Seven Pillars.
Lawrence never offered a convincing moral or political justification for the replacement of an Ottoman governor in Damascus by a Hejazi prince, beyond conquest and Faisal’s tenuous links with some Syrian nationalists. Even the argument of conquest does not bear close scrutiny since the city was first entered by Australian cavalry and the Arab units which followed them were a fragment of a larger Allied army which had borne the brunt of the fighting. Nevertheless, in the light of the quest he had set himself at the beginning of the Seven Pillars Lawrence’s version of the fall of Damascus to Faisal’s Arabs forms a fitting outcome to his struggles.
These had first been undertaken for motives as mixed as those which agitated the Arabs. Lawrence was the historian who had found
a chance to make history, the intellectual able to use his ideas to control others and the romantic visionary who turned the dreams of his childhood and youth into reality. He felt a kinship with nomadic Beduin and was flattered by their affection; he satisfied his curiosity, did his bit for his country and served a cause which be believed could bring happiness to the Arabs. He also won fame for himself, which he relished or despised as the mood took him. No single urge impelled Lawrence on his course, instead he followed a sequence of often contradictory reactions to ideas, people and circumstances which in retrospect he found hard to explain or rationalise.
III
Triumph at Aqaba
‘This show is splendid: you cannot imagine greater fun for us, greater vexation and fury for the Turks,’ was Lawrence’s summary of his first seven weeks of active service with Faisal’s army. It was an exciting and invigorating life which he felt certain Newcombe would enjoy–‘you’ll find it as good as I say and better.‘1 Lawrence’s exuberance stayed at the same high pitch even after the novelty of active service had worn off. ‘It is all such sport,’ he would often remark during operations around Aqaba, and as Colonel Joyce remembered, ‘his enthusiasm must have been infectious for the hours of sport were few and the days and months of dust and sun were long and weary.‘2 One mainspring of Lawrence’s jaunty resolve was his dedication to a cause in which he had confident faith. After a conversation in Cairo in August 1917, the French Military Attaché St Quentin was forcibly struck by Lawrence’s ‘almost mystical zeal for the Arab cause, an unwavering faith in its success so long as European help was neither too obvious or hasty, and a sincere attachment to the fortunes of Faisal’.3
As a leader who had to enthuse and encourage those around him, Lawrence could not afford the indulgence of public moods of self-doubt or depression. But the mask did slip and, at least once, he confidentially admitted that the strain of command and action was almost unbearable. During their ride from Aqaba at the end of October 1917, he talked about his secret fears to George Lloyd, who reported the conversation to Clayton:
Lawrence is quite fit but much oppressed by the risk and magnitude of the job before him. He opened his heart to me last night and told me that he felt there was so much for him to do in the world, places to dig, peoples to help that it seemed horrible to have it all cut off as he feels it will be, for he feels that while he may do the job, he sees little or no chance of getting away himself.... He is really a very remarkable fellow—not the least fearless like some who do brave things, but as he told me last night, each time he starts out on these stunts he simply hates it for two or three days before until movement, action and the glory of scenery and nature catch hold of him and make him well again.4
This reliance on his surroundings as a distraction may explain the abundance of long descriptive passages of closely observed landscape in the Seven Pillars. Taking account of his surroundings was a luxury, since Lawrence’s mind was almost exclusively given over to his duties:
On a show so narrow and voracious as this, one loses one’s past and one’s balance, and becomes hopelessly self-centred. I don’t think I ever think except about shop, and I’m quite certain I never do anything else.5
Lawrence’s normal human reactions were suspended in battle. ‘This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them, and know that you have done hundreds in the same way before and must do hundreds more if you can.’6
One way in which he justified the awfulness of what he had done was by depriving his victims of their humanity. So in the Seven Pillars the Turkish soldiers are depicted as amoral and wantonly brutal creatures who slavishly obeyed their ‘showy–vicious Levantine officers’. ‘Ordered to be kind, and without haste they were as good friends and generous enemies as might be found. Ordered to outrage their fathers or disembowel their mothers, they did it as calmly as they did nothing, or did well.’ Lawrence would press the point further when he described his own torture and depraved abuse at the hands of a Turkish officer and his men at Dera.
From the moment he returned to Hejaz at the very end of November 1916, Lawrence had needed all his reserves of energy and dedication. In his first weeks with Faisal’s army he had acted as a field intelligence officer who collected and reported evidence of the enemy’s movements, co-ordinated naval and aerial support for Faisal’s army and maintained a constant flow of up–to–date information about the situation at the front to Wilson at Jiddah and the Arab Bureau in Cairo.
This was a hectic period for Lawrence since the long-expected Turkish offensive was in full swing and Arab resistance was crumbling. At the beginning of December a small Turkish advance guard pierced Faisal’s lines, created panic and occupied his bases at al Hamra and Bir Said unopposed. Lawrence’s report of the débâcle confirmed the axiom that tribal forces were no match for trained regulars. During an engagement at Nakhl Mubarraq, Faisal’s ‘centre and right wing held and repulsed the enemy, the left wing (Juheina) retired suddenly behind the centre without hostile pressure’. As Lawrence explained, the deserters had run off ‘to find opportunity for brewing a cup of coffee undisturbed’.7
Hemmed in at Yanbu al Bahr and separated from his brother Ali’s army which had been badly mauled and was retreating to Rabigh, Faisal’s nerve broke. On 12 December he pleaded with Lawrence for British troops.8 Wilson passed on the request to Wingate, who on 15 December got permission from Arthur Balfour, the new Foreign Secretary, for a British brigade to be sent to Hejaz if the situation deteriorated further. Meanwhile Wilson was laying plans for the evacuation of Arab forces from Rabigh and Yanbu al Bahr.9
No British troops were needed. Sea and air power were sufficient to save the day and, for that matter, the Arab Revolt. The long-range guns of the monitor M31 kept the Turks away from the approaches to Yanbu al Bahr, and aircraft summoned by Lawrence from the flight at Rabigh and the Suva spotted and bombed Turkish formations inland. These attacks tipped the balance for, as Lawrence knew from an Arab Bureau decrypt, Fahreddin’s aircraft were grounded for lack of spares. Subsequent intelligence gained by Lawrence from his field agents and interviews with POWs revealed that the cautious Fahreddin dared not risk pressing on with his attack without air cover and that he was anxious about the lack of fodder for his vast train of transport camels.10 By the last week of December he prudently withdrew his forces to defensive positions around Medina. British sea power, a small but decisive advantage in the air and Turkish logistical problems had saved the Arab movement.
Fahreddin’s retreat provided a breathing space for the Arab forces and a chance for them to implement plans for an offensive which, if successful, would pen the Turks inside Medina and sever their rail links with Damascus. Having survived six months and, with British assistance, frustrated all efforts by local Turkish forces to break them, the Arab armies were now free to play a part in the wider Allied war effort. The question how they could most effectively be deployed was decided in London and Cairo by General Staff planners who were largely dependent on the advice of men on the spot like Lawrence. It also fell to Lawrence to explain to Faisal and his staff what was expected of their forces and make them understand that close co-operation with the Allies was in the best political interests of the Arabs.
In London the Arab movement was now seen as a vital factor in the Middle East war. The Lloyd George coalition had come to power in December 1916 with a cabinet which included Lords Curzon and Milner and later Churchill, all imperialists keen to use the war as a means of extending British power in the Middle East. For advice on Arab affairs, the Cabinet looked to Sir Mark Sykes, who was given the rank of Under–Secretary and controlled the flow of intelligence from the Middle East. One of the first acts of the new ministry was to approve, on 29 December 1916, a major offensive against Turkey which would involve a large-scale invasion of Palestine and Syria in conjunction with renewed Russian pressure in the Caucasus. Together these hammer blows would weake
n Turkey and force her to sue for terms. This represented a significant shift in government policy which, after Gallipoli, had restricted operations on the Palestine front to cautious, small–scale advances across Sinai. Concentration of men and material for a knock–out blow against Turkey naturally aroused opposition from the Westerners, who repeated their old argument that the war would be won only when the German army was beaten in France. This had not been achieved by the Somme offensive and some, like Milner, doubted whether the Germans could ever be defeated, so that in the end a peace would have to be negotiated. Turkey was a different matter and her defeat would open the way for annexations. Nevertheless Robertson and the Westerners prevailed; the Syrian offensive was officially postponed until the autumn so that reserves could be drafted to France to back up General Nivelle’s offensive at Verdun. Schemes for a grand assault on Turkey received a further setback in March 1917 with the overthrow of Nicholas II and the subsequent dissolution of the Russian army.
The new emphasis on an all–out attack on Turkey forced GHQ in Cairo to find ways in which the Arabs could be used on the projected Syrian front. The options were limited. There could be no question of using irregular Arab forces in conventional front-line actions since they lacked the necessary training, discipline and nerve for that kind of fighting. This would be the province of the Arab regular army formations, which would not be ready for this type of warfare for at least a year, probably longer. There remained the tribal forces which at the beginning of 1917 mustered three armies, respectively commanded by Abdullah, Faisal and Ali.
Since the first days of the revolt, Wingate, Clayton and Murray’s staff had wanted these forces to be deployed in a sustained campaign against the Hejaz railway. This railway exerted a peculiar fascination for GHQ Cairo and the War Office staff planners, all of whom regarded its destruction as essential for the success of the Hejaz campaign and the Syrian offensive. Two methods were possible. The first involved bombing from the air, but a long-range sortie against the line near Maan on 24 November 1916 by two Martinsyde bombers, armed with hundred-pounders, had disappointing results. The alternative was an unremitting guerrilla campaign in which British engineers, supported by Arab irregulars, demolished bridges, culverts and sections of track to render the railway unusable. By November a small nucleus of sapper officers, including Newcombe, Hornby and Garland, had been ordered to Hejaz to prepare the Arabs for this work.
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