From a military standpoint, however, the British response was a good deal more equivocal. Obviously, if the Arab rebels succeeded in tying down large numbers of Turkish troops in the Arabian Peninsula, that would help protect the British army’s right flank in an offensive into Palestine, an operation now in the planning stages in Cairo. On the other hand, by failing to spark a broader Arab uprising—in Syria and elsewhere, the Hejaz revolt had been met with a resounding silence—Hussein’s forces were left extremely vulnerable to a Turkish counterattack and, given their spotty conduct thus far, unlikely to prosper in such a contest. In that case, troops and matériel from the British expeditionary army in Egypt might have to be siphoned off to aid the rebels at the very moment that the commander of that army, General Archibald Murray, was jealous to hold every available resource for his prospective push into Palestine.
And that scenario was to invite a much greater risk, one that might swiftly turn the Arab Revolt applauded by Britain’s more politically minded war planners into the stuff of their worst nightmares. That’s because it was not just the holy cities of Mecca and Medina that, by Koranic dictate, were off-limits to non-Islamic “infidels”; to only a slightly lesser degree this held true for the entire Hejaz. A hint of this had attended Ronald Storrs’s first voyage to Arabia in June, when Zeid had refused to allow Storrs’s two military intelligence colleagues to accompany him ashore; instead, the Oriental secretary had been compelled to come alone. In the following months, Hussein had concocted a bit of scriptural wiggle room to permit a very small group of British logistics officers to man a supply operation in the coastal town of Rabegh, but strictly restricted their presence to the shoreline. To allow them to venture farther inland, let alone to bring in whole units of rescuing British Christian soldiers in the event of a major rebel setback, would be to play directly into the hands of Turkish propagandists and risk the immolation of all concerned: Hussein no longer regarded as merely a traitor to the Ottoman Empire but to Islam as well; Britain’s imperialist, Crusader intentions laid bare before an enraged Muslim world.
In the face of this dilemma, Britain had tried to work at the margins, bringing weaponry and gold to the Hejaz rebels through Rabegh, while ferrying over whatever Muslim troops could readily be spared—primarily Egyptians, along with a few Syrian and Iraqi defectors—to provide training and a small on-the-ground presence. That clearly wasn’t enough, though, and as the summer of 1916 wore on, with the rebels’ disorganization becoming more apparent and the signs of a Turkish counteroffensive more imminent, the debate in Cairo and London between those seeking a broader involvement and those urging continued caution took on a deepening urgency. Matters were not at all helped by Emir Hussein. Indeed, well into the autumn he had carried on a version of this debate all by himself depending on the latest news from the battlefront, alternately rejecting plans to bring in non-Muslim troops and pleading that any available troops be sent immediately, periodically shifting to the middle ground of asking Cairo to keep such troops on standby for possible intervention down the road.
By October, however, the time for such dithering had come to an end. The Turkish garrison in Medina was now stronger than at the revolt’s outset, having been reinforced by rail, and had recently pummeled a rebel attack force led by Faisal, Hussein’s third son. With Faisal’s warriors now withdrawn into the mountains, there were clear signs that the Turks were preparing to march out of Medina with the goal of both splitting the rebel armies in two and wresting back control of Mecca. In response to the crisis, and to the increasingly anxious appeals of his sons from their various battlefronts, Hussein had finally acceded to the deployment of British troops to the Hejaz.
It was this development that was bringing Ronald Storrs to Jeddah for the third time. In answer to Hussein’s request, and over the grumblings of General Murray in Cairo, the British War Committee in London had just agreed to send a brigade of British troops to the Hejaz—anywhere between three and five thousand soldiers—along with a fleet of airplanes. For the Oriental secretary, the opportunity to be the bearer of good news, together with the companionship of T. E. Lawrence, at least partially compensated for the growing distaste he felt for these tedious voyages and for the town of Jeddah itself.
Lawrence had been quite aware of the intense debate that the Arab Revolt had spawned in the upper reaches of the British war machine over the previous months. That awareness came both from his perch within the Cairo intelligence apparatus—the revolt had begun less than two weeks after his return from Iraq—and from his friendship with Storrs. Still, with his area of expertise centered squarely on Syria, he’d remained very much on the outside of these deliberations. In fact, by the time he joined Storrs on the Lama that October, his chief contribution to the Hejaz effort could hardly have been more prosaic: postage stamps.
In thinking of how to counteract Turkey’s blanket silence on the Arab Revolt in its early days, Storrs had struck upon the idea of issuing “Republic of Hejaz” postage stamps, a cheap and effective way to prove to the outside world that a break had occurred. When he’d asked Emir Hussein for a suitably Islamic design, however, the resulting sketch bore an eerie resemblance to an English lighthouse. Storrs had then enlisted the help of his most learned Arabist friend, Lawrence, and the two spent a leisurely afternoon wandering the Arab Museum in Cairo selecting suitable motifs. Since, as Storrs related, “it was quickly apparent that Lawrence already possessed or had immediately assimilated a complete working technique of philatelic and three-colour reproduction,” the Oriental secretary placed his friend in charge of getting the stamps made.
The postage stamp project coincided with a particularly trying time for Lawrence. Ever since coming to Cairo, he and the other eccentrics in Stewart Newcombe’s tiny political intelligence unit at the Savoy had been officially attached to the resident Egyptian army, an arrangement Lawrence was quite happy with since the alternative was to fall under the umbrella of the ponderous and fiercely hierarchical structure of General Murray’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), the “regular” army tasked to take the war to the Turks. However, as part of a bureaucratic reorganization that summer—one of a half dozen wartime reorganizations of the British administration in Cairo that sowed chaos each time—Lawrence had been transferred into an intelligence unit wholly under EEF control. Worse, the reassignment placed Lawrence under the direction of a commanding officer he had little respect for, and required he leave Cairo for the sleepy Suez Canal port town of Ismailia. Lawrence had swiftly requested a transfer back to “the Intrusives” (the name the Savoy Hotel unit had chosen for itself in recognition of their repute within the military bureaucracy), but been just as swiftly denied. “I interpreted this,” Lawrence wrote, “not without some friendly evidence, as a method of keeping me away from the Arab affair.”
But Lawrence was nothing if not resourceful, and he had next thought to put one of his more pronounced personality traits to good use: the ability to annoy. With his new colleagues in Ismailia, he noted, “I took every opportunity to run into them their comparative ignorance and inefficiency in the department of intelligence (not difficult!) and irritated them yet further by literary airs, correcting Shavian split infinitives and tautologies in their reports.”
The strategy worked. In late September 1916, upon learning of Ronald Storrs’s upcoming voyage to Jeddah, Lawrence requested a ten-day leave from his new post, which his aggravated superiors were only too happy to grant. In just this way, and in no official capacity save entourage to Ronald Storrs, Lawrence set sail for Arabia for the first time.
Shortly after dawn on October 16, the Lama entered the wide bay of Jeddah harbor and made for the port on its sheltered far shore. In the early sun, Lawrence observed only light and shadow among the buildings of that town, while beyond it was “the dazzle of league after league of featureless sand.” As the steamer approached its berth, he was to experience that phenomenon common to most who approach Arabia from the water, that moment when the sea-cooled
air abruptly collides with that blowing off the land. As Lawrence would write, it was at that instant when “the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless.”
IT WAS AN awkward meeting papered over with British politeness. Coming off the Lama in midmorning, Storrs and Lawrence made the short walk through Jeddah’s narrow streets to the handsome three-story building that housed the British consulate, there to be greeted by the resident British agent, Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Wilson. Wilson led his visitors into a cool and pleasingly shuttered reception room—it was not yet ten o’clock, but the whitewashed buildings of Jeddah already radiated a blinding glare—and ordered up refreshments.
Ronald Storrs had long acquaintance with the slender, mustachioed Wilson, a career army officer previously attached to the British administration in the Sudan, but time had done nothing to improve his opinion of the man. He found Wilson dull and irritable, with a hint of the hysteric—“totally unsuited for anything beyond provincial administration,” he’d once written—and thus completely out of his depth in the important position he’d assumed in July, that of British representative to Emir Hussein’s Hejaz “government.” In fact, the chief reason Storrs hadn’t raised his objections to Wilson more forcefully back in Cairo was out of mortal fear that should the man be sacked, Storrs himself might be sent to Jeddah as his replacement.
For his part, Wilson seemed to resent these visits by the Oriental secretary, the automatic deference shown him by Emir Hussein and his emissaries while he, the officer on the ground, saw to all the frustrating and thankless spadework of British policy.
There was also a bit of history between Wilson and Lawrence. Some months earlier in Cairo, the lieutenant colonel had spotted Lawrence wearing an Arab headdress while in uniform, and soundly rebuked him for the offense. There was little indication the intelligence officer had taken the criticisms of his appearance to heart in the interim, however, judging by the sweat-stained uniform with which Lawrence had arrived at the consulate door.
Still, all those in the reception room being British, none of this friction was voiced or even acknowledged. Instead, Storrs and Wilson feigned collegiality as they discussed the current situation in the Hejaz and that day’s schedule. In adherence to Arab custom, the first order of business was for them to pay a courtesy call on Sheikh Abdullah, encamped some four miles out of town, as prelude to a more substantive meeting to be held that evening at the consulate. Leaving Lawrence to his own devices, the two senior men set out on horseback for Abdullah’s camp in late morning.
When the trio reconvened at the mission building in early afternoon, however, it was to unpleasant news. A cable had arrived from Cairo announcing that, upon further reflection, the War Committee had chosen to recall both the brigade of British troops and the fleet of airplanes slated for imminent arrival in Rabegh. To add insult to injury, the £10,000 of gold that Storrs had brought with him on the Lama for disbursement to Abdullah was to be at least temporarily withheld. After their morning visit to Abdullah, during which Storrs and Wilson were the recipients of lavish Arab hospitality, they quite dreaded the sheikh’s impending visit to the consulate.
Accompanied by his elaborately costumed court retainers and slaves, Abdullah arrived shortly after five o’clock. Lawrence’s first impression was of a particularly jolly man—perhaps heightened just then by Abdullah’s recent success in the city of Taif, where the long-resistant Turkish garrison had at last surrendered—with a touch of the voluptuary; though he was not yet thirty-five, the sheikh’s face was already taking on the rounded form of one who enjoyed his pleasures and indulged his appetites. His jollity didn’t last long. Dispensing with the elaborate pleasantries that normally accompanied such meetings, no sooner had Abdullah and his chief lieutenants settled in the consulate reception room than Wilson began reading aloud from the Cairo cable as Storrs translated into Arabic. Abdullah listened with a hard-to-read stoicism.
Once the reading was finished, Abdullah began to plead his case to Storrs, a turn in the conversation the Oriental secretary tried to forestall by explaining he had absolutely no authority in military matters. It was more than a little disingenuous coming from the man who had penned the secret overture to Hussein back in 1914, and for the first time, the Britons in the room were witness to a flash of Abdullah’s temper. “Pardon me,” he interrupted, “it was your letter and your messages that began this thing with us, and you know it from the beginning, and from before the beginning.”
Duly chastened, Storrs and his two countrymen mutely listened as their visitor delivered a long soliloquy on the current grim state of affairs in the Hejaz and the signal role Great Britain had played in bringing it about. “He gave a fairly accurate historical summary of the negotiations,” Storrs ruefully noted in his diary, “quoting several times [His Majesty’s Government’s] promise that we would do everything possible to help the Arabs.”
The conversation lasted for a couple of hours, Abdullah outlining all his current difficulties, Storrs and Wilson promising to do all in their limited power to get this latest decision reversed. Toward the meeting’s conclusion, the sheikh turned to the task he clearly wished to avoid: calling his father to break the news. The consulate telephone was brought out and a call put through to Emir Hussein’s private line, Mecca 1.
To Storrs’s surprise, the emir seemed to take the disappointment rather in stride, stating once again his full confidence in his British partners and his faith that all would work out in the end. When at last Abdullah departed from the mission building that evening, with plans made for his return the next morning, he left his British hosts, as Storrs would relate, “in a state of admiration for him and disgust with ourselves.”
One person who had spoken very little through that long, tense meeting—indeed, he may not have spoken at all—was T. E. Lawrence. Part of the reason was obvious: he had no official capacity in being there, and for him to offer an unsolicited opinion at such a delicate encounter would have been a shocking breach of protocol. At the same time, this remove allowed Lawrence to spend the time closely studying Abdullah—or as he himself described it, “playing for effect, watching, criticizing him.”
If Emir Hussein was the undisputed spiritual leader of the Arab Revolt, Abdullah was its undisputed field marshal; so manifest was this point that among the British military officers and diplomats involved in the Hejaz affair, it had barely even come up for discussion. Abdullah was his father’s most trusted son, the emissary he had sent to Cairo in 1914 to sound out the British over his secessionist plans, the military commander who had seen to the capture of Taif, the family representative who sat down and negotiated with their British advisors.
Yet even at this first meeting, Lawrence had his doubts. Despite the somberness of the conversation at the consulate, he suspected in Abdullah “a constant cheerfulness,” the mien of an astute politician but not necessarily a sincere one, a man of overwhelming ambition. But there was more to it than that. In poring over the intelligence reports coming out of the Hejaz over the previous four months, Lawrence had tried to analyze why the revolt had settled into dismal stasis after such a promising start. He had concluded that, at its core, what the rebellion lacked was true leadership, “not intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but the flame of enthusiasm that would set the desert on fire.” What it needed was a prophet, and as that meeting at the consulate had extended, “I became more and more sure that Abdullah was too balanced, too cool, too humourous to be a prophet—especially the armed prophet who, if history be true, succeeded in revolutions.”
All of which, had Lawrence voiced these thoughts to his senior colleagues, might have drawn an obvious response: who cares what you think? But Lawrence didn’t voice them. Instead, it seems clear that already by the evening of October 16, not yet in Arabia a half day, he had taken it upon himself to calculate a new course for the Arab Revolt, one that would cast him in a central role. That role, as he described it in a moment of profound self-certainty�
��or breath-catching arrogance, depending on one’s perspective—was “to find the yet unknown master-spirit of the affair, and measure his capacity to carry the revolt to the goal I had conceived for it.” For any of that to happen, though, would require stealth on Lawrence’s part, an ability to keep his own counsel and to quietly look for those openings that might allow him to pursue his agenda. Over the course of that meeting with Abdullah, Lawrence had found his first opening, one he would try to exploit as early as the following morning.
But that long day of October 16, 1916, was not yet over. Before it was, Lawrence was to encounter another personality whose presence loomed large over the Hejaz, one who, by negative example, would soon further clarify the mission Lawrence was creating for himself.
TOWARD THE END of the dinner at the French mission house in Jeddah, Colonel Édouard Brémond raised his champagne glass in toast to his British guests. “I have just heard,” he announced, “that my only male relation up till now not killed or wounded in the war has been seriously injured. It is thus my duty and my pride to drink to the Alliance, and to say how much pleasure it gives me to be associated with Englishmen.”
That poignant moment on the night of October 16 left a deep impression on Ronald Storrs. “The un-French absence of panache in his delivery was very striking. I drank to his cousin’s recovery and the success of the French Mission.”
Now settled into a somewhat portly middle age, the forty-seven-year- old Brémond was the exemplar of the French imperial soldier, guided by an unwavering belief in both his nation’s greatness and the righteousness of its mission civilisatrice, or “civilizing mission,” to spread Gallic enlightenment and culture to the world’s disadvantaged. For most of his military career, he had served in France’s North African possessions, Algeria and then Morocco, and from his experiences battling rebellious tribes had gained the reputation of being an expert in irregular warfare. Promotion came steadily if unspectacularly: supervisor of the Moroccan ports police, deputy head of the French military mission to Morocco, administrator of the city of Rabat.
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