In the run‑up to World War I, Brémond had been recalled to France and rushed to the front. As with so many of the French officer class in that horrific first month of the war, Brémond’s tenure there was pitifully brief, ending when he was shot through the chest while leading his men into battle on the Belgian frontier. After recuperating from his wounds, he was given command of an infantry regiment, the 64th, where for the next two years he watched his military comrades, as well as his male relatives, fall one by one to the Western Front slaughter. A release of sorts presented itself in the summer of 1916 with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. In deciding to send a small military mission to the region, the French Defense Ministry had looked to Brémond—“a practicing light in native warfare, a success in French Africa”—and seen the perfect man to lead it.
In fact, the colonel was the ideal candidate for reasons that went beyond his long experience in the Muslim world. As with so many of its actions in the Middle Eastern theater of the war, there was a hidden agenda to the French mission to the Hejaz, one that required both cunning and deviousness to execute. By good luck, these traits were very well honed in Édouard Brémond.
Encouraging the Arabs to revolt had of course been a British operation from the outset, and one that had made the French leadership, with their imperial designs on Syria and Lebanon, very nervous when they’d caught wind of it. Their concerns had been eased by the signing of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, codifying their Middle Eastern claims, but had come rushing back when the Arab Revolt became a reality. All talk of the Entente Cordiale aside, the French simply didn’t trust their British allies to stand by their promises in the region, and with the revolt in the Hejaz, they had now unleashed a revolutionary force that might not be containable even if the British so desired. French anxiety had only deepened when their proposal to send a token military force to the region, a way to protect their future claim and monitor events on the ground, was politely but firmly rebuffed by the British; the situation in the Hejaz was so fluid and delicate, London had argued, that the introduction of another foreign military presence just then could only complicate matters.
So the French pursued a Trojan horse approach instead. The two-hundred-man military unit that sailed out of Marseilles harbor under Colonel Brémond’s command in August 1916 was officially titled the French military mission to Egypt. The British couldn’t very well bar such a mission from its closest ally, even if it begged the question of just what the French soldiers intended to do in Egypt. To this, Colonel Brémond had a ready answer: to facilitate the passage of Muslim pilgrims from French territories, primarily Morocco and Algeria, seeking to make the hajj to Mecca. The British couldn’t very well object to this either, since their army and navy were already providing escort for thousands of Egyptians and Indian Muslims making their own pilgrimage to Mecca.
It had been the last step in this little scheme that even the British had to grudgingly admire for its audacity. Accompanying a group of Moroccan pilgrims to Jeddah in mid-September, Brémond had disembarked, seen to the rental of a suitably impressive building, and announced the arrival of the French military mission to the Hejaz. In short order, he fired off a cable to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, urging the establishment of a permanent diplomatic mission to Hussein’s administration. When that request was approved, the French military and diplomatic presence in Arabia was technically equal to that of the British, a fait accompli that London found quite impossible to counteract; after all, Paris could argue, here was the opportunity for the two great allies to jointly plan for the region’s future on a basis of equality, a course sure to only broaden their eternal bonds of friendship. This was the situation facing Storrs and Lawrence when they arrived in Jeddah in mid-October.
But Brémond’s cunning was not limited to the shell game he had executed in establishing his Hejaz mission; it extended to the goal of the mission itself. As he expounded during that dinner at the French consulate on October 16, his overt role in the Hejaz was to show French support for the Arab Revolt, and to ascertain how France might be able to assist it. His covert role, however, was to try to limit the scope of that revolt, to keep it and its aspirations for an Arab nation well away from those Arab lands that France coveted in the postwar era. As for how that might be done, Brémond had a neat, if supremely cynical, plan.
Above all else, he explained to his British guests that night, the Arabs must not be allowed to take Medina. So long as the Turkish garrison there held out, and so long as the Arabs concentrated their blood and treasure on seizing it, the rebellion would remain safely bottled up in the Hejaz. Should Medina fall, he warned, then the Arabs would naturally turn their attention to the north, to liberating from the Turkish yoke their Arab brethren in Palestine and Syria and Iraq, a campaign that would inevitably conflict with British and French imperial designs in the region.
It was cold-blooded perhaps, but a strategy quite brilliant in its simplicity: while trying to help a foreign rebellion succeed was always an iffy proposition, arranging for it to not succeed was infinitely easier.
Yet at that dinner at the French consulate, Colonel Brémond was laboring under at least two great misconceptions. The first was that this element of connivance—of lending support to the Arab Revolt as a means to hobble it—was actually necessary. If Brémond had known of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, with its promise of a French Syria and Lebanon, he might have been far more sanguine over the future course of the Arab Revolt. But Sykes-Picot was known to only a very small handful of French government officials, and this group did not include those midlevel military and foreign ministry bureaucrats tasked to defend France’s claims in the Middle East. Incredibly, this information had also been withheld from the man sent to Arabia to serve as the frontline guardian of those claims.
Brémond’s second misconception was in assuming that, as he held forth to his British guests that evening, he was among friends—or at least, like-minded imperialists. He was not, and he most especially was not of the young British captain who sat at the dining table and barely spoke. As Brémond was soon to discover, in T. E. Lawrence he had a very formidable opponent. What’s more, advantage had just passed to Lawrence. At the French consulate, Brémond had laid his hand bare; Lawrence had revealed nothing.
PRECEDED BY A phalanx of slaves, Abdullah rode on a white mare into the courtyard of the British consulate at about ten o’clock the following morning. He was more somber than the day before, and once settled into the consulate reception room, he explained why. He had just received a cable from his brother Faisal at his mountain encampment north of Rabegh reporting that two Turkish warplanes had bombed his camp the previous afternoon; while inflicting little damage, they had sown terror among the tribesmen, most of whom had never seen such machines before. The news was especially pointed, considering the attack came on the same day the British had canceled plans to send their own fleet of airplanes to Arabia.
This drew a response from Lawrence, who suggested that this Turkish show of force shouldn’t be cause for much alarm. “Very few Turkish airplanes last more than four or five days,” he breezily explained.
It was probably with this comment that Abdullah truly took notice of Lawrence—a mere background presence the previous day—for the first time. He soon had reason to take even greater notice when the conversation turned to a discussion on the location of various Turkish forces around the Middle East. “As Syrian, Circassian, Anatolian, Mesopotamian names came up,” Ronald Storrs recalled, “Lawrence at once stated exactly which [Turkish] unit was in each position, until Abdullah turned to me in amazement: ‘Is this man God, to know everything?’ ”
In his memoirs, Storrs attributed his friend’s remarkable performance that morning to happy coincidence stemming from Lawrence’s labors in the Cairo mapmaking room. Perhaps, or perhaps Lawrence was merely bluffing. Either way, the effect was the same, and it provided Lawrence with the platform to roll out his scheme.
The chief difficulty the Briti
sh faced in assisting the Arab Revolt, he explained to Abdullah, was a lack of reliable information on what was actually taking place on the ground. What was needed was an objective observer, one who could gain the ear of senior British war planners, to provide a comprehensive report on the situation, both on the problems that seemed to be plaguing the supply pipeline in the port town of Rabegh and on the logistical needs of Faisal’s forces in the mountains to the north. Since time was clearly of the essence, Lawrence put himself forth as the man who might carry out this mission.
It was an innocuous enough proposal, and one Abdullah immediately agreed to, suggesting that once Lawrence was in Rabegh, he would arrange for Faisal to come down from the mountains to meet with him. To this, Lawrence politely demurred. He needed to appraise the situation inland for himself, which meant he needed to go to Faisal, not the other way around. Given the stricture against non-Muslims traveling to the interior, it was a bold request. Even Cyril Wilson, who had met Faisal twice and whom Emir Hussein greatly respected, had only been permitted to step down at port towns and wait for Faisal’s appearance.
With Storrs joining in the lobbying effort, Abdullah was gradually won over to the idea—no doubt the current tenuousness of the Arab position had a loosening effect—but the ultimate decision rested with the more formidable Hussein. As Abdullah expected, his father was extremely ambivalent to the plan when he was called on the Mecca trunk line, spurring Storrs to take command of the telephone receiver.
“Storrs in full blast was a delight to listen to in the mere matter of Arabic speech,” Lawrence would recall, “and also a lesson to every Englishman alive of how to deal with suspicious or unwilling Orientals. It was nearly impossible to resist him for more than a few minutes, and in this case [he] also had his way.”
But it was a qualified victory. The most Hussein would allow was for Lawrence to put in at Rabegh, and there to meet with his eldest son, Ali; if Ali “thought fit,” he would then arrange Lawrence’s onward journey to meet Faisal. It was not at all hard to see how this was going to end up. Ali had a reputation for caution, and for the cautious, the default answer is always no. Storrs and Lawrence resolved to push the matter when Abdullah returned to the British consulate for dinner that evening.
At that dinner, Storrs and Lawrence urged Abdullah to write formal letters of introduction to Ali and Faisal, figuring this would greatly enhance the odds of Lawrence being given permission to travel inland. This Abdullah was initially very reluctant to do, but, gaining his father’s approval over the telephone line, Lawrence recounted, Abdullah finally penned “direct written instructions to Ali to mount me as well and as quickly as possible, and convey me, by sure hand, to Faisal’s camp.”
Early on the morning of October 19, HMS Lama put into Rabegh harbor. For the rest of his life, an image would stick in Ronald Storrs’s mind of Lawrence standing on the pier and waving goodbye as Storrs’s ship turned and made for Egypt. Lawrence’s Arabian adventure had begun.
LAWRENCE’S HUNCH ABOUT Ali proved absolutely correct; the eldest Hussein son was staggered when he was handed the letter from Abdullah dictating their father’s permission for the young British army captain to travel inland. However, with the fealty with which all the Hussein sons showed their father, Ali saw no choice but to acquiesce, and he set about arranging Lawrence’s journey.
Situated at the edge of a broad desert plain, the nondescript little port of Rabegh seemed an unlikely spot to hold anyone’s attention for very long, let alone to be the strategic linchpin in the war for control of the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, situated midway between Mecca and Medina, Rabegh was a crucial way station on the “pilgrims’ road”—little more than a camel track marked by stone cairns—that linked those two holy cities, which meant it stood squarely in the path of any Turkish army moving south to retake Mecca. Rabegh was also the chief transshipment point for British supplies and weaponry coming down from Egypt to be distributed to the rebels fighting inland—or not distributed, merely vanishing somewhere en route, as more often seemed to be the case.
If Rabegh was not the most appealing place, the two and a half days Lawrence spent there did provide him with the chance to meet two more of Emir Hussein’s sons, and to submit them to the same sort of character study he had performed on Abdullah in Jeddah.
By coincidence, Zeid, the youngest, had recently arrived to help Ali sort out the supply-line problems. A half brother to Hussein’s other three sons, Zeid was a handsome youth of twenty, who had inherited the pale complexion and softer features of his Turkish mother. Although he was clearly quite intelligent, both his youth and non-Arab appearance would have made him an unlikely rebel commander even if he possessed leadership traits, which he did not. “Is fond of riding about and playing tricks,” Lawrence noted. “Humorous in outlook, and perhaps a little better balanced, because less intense, than his brothers. Shy.”
Despite the strained circumstances of their first meeting, Lawrence took a quick liking to Ali. “His manner was dignified and admirable, but direct,” he wrote, “and he struck me as a pleasant gentleman, conscientious.” But there was a forlorn, tired air to Hussein’s eldest son, his skin sallow, his mouth “sad and drooping,” that made him seem far older than his thirty-seven years. Without apparent ambition for himself, Lawrence observed, Ali also seemed to fall under the sway of whatever more dynamic personality happened to be nearby, hardly the hallmark of a natural leader. Still, Lawrence much preferred Ali to Abdullah, noting that “if Faisal should turn out to be no prophet, the revolt would make shift well enough with Ali for its head.” Perhaps, but it was a make-do assessment that considerably raised the stakes for Lawrence’s meeting with Faisal.
He set out for that meeting on the night of October 21. Indicative of Ali’s abiding concern over the journey—part of the hundred-mile trek would be through areas controlled by tribes hostile to the revolt—were the elaborate precautions he’d taken, keeping news of Lawrence’s departure and destination secret from even his closest household slaves. To serve as Lawrence’s guides, he had chosen two of his most trusted lieutenants, a father and son who, by the unwritten law of the Arabian tribes, were expected to lay down their lives to protect their charge. Ali further directed the three men to avoid all settlements along the route and to travel at night as much as possible, even that Lawrence wear a headdress over his army uniform so as to cast a sufficiently Arab-looking silhouette in the moonlight.
The potential for danger notwithstanding, very soon after setting out Lawrence’s preoccupation turned to the more mundane, the grinding physical discomfort of riding a camel again after two years sitting behind a desk at the Savoy Hotel. Since its pronounced and narrow spine lies just below the skin, riding a camel is a wholly different experience from riding a horse, more akin to sitting atop a swaying metal rod. Even the best Bedouin saddle—little more than a wood-and-leather frame covered in blankets—can only slightly dull the pain for the green rider. Most such riders can rarely withstand the suffering for more than two or three hours without a break, but Lawrence was to have no such luxury on this journey; instead, what lay before him was an ordeal of some thirty hours in the saddle broken only by two short breaks. He spurred himself on by summoning the extraordinary endurance he had shown in the past—on his bicycle tours of France, on his twelve-hundred-mile hike through Syria—and by holding the thought that at the other end awaited the last of the Hussein brothers, the man who might prove to be his “prophet” of war.
Despite his discomfort—or maybe as a way to distract from it—Lawrence made a careful study of the terrain they were crossing, jotting down notes in his small army-issue notebook as he rode. He was traversing a land only a handful of outsiders had ever glimpsed, one steeped in a desert culture little changed in millennia, but with just enough similarities to the Syria he knew so well as to be thoroughly disorienting. In Syria he had made a hobby of sorting out the complicated clan and tribal structures, the complex rules that governed their interaction, but in Arab
ia all those rules were far more layered, far more rigidly upheld.
“Each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner,” he wrote, “and [who] would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account.… The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.”
In Syria, the price for transgression was most often ostracism, perhaps the handing over of a sheep in fine; in the sere and harsh landscape of Arabia, it was death.
But if still the amateur anthropologist, Lawrence was also taking note of the topography of the Hejaz through the eyes of a military man: where sources of water might be found, the trails an army might navigate to best advantage. In this way, he happened upon a glaring hole in his own army’s contingency plans.
In preparing for the defense of Rabegh—which by definition also meant the defense of Mecca—British officers advising the rebels had mapped out the Turks’ most likely approaches, ones predicated on the existence of trails and the supply of water, and overseen the building of outlying guardposts accordingly. Yet on his journey to Faisal’s camp, Lawrence came upon two seasonal watercourses that didn’t appear on any British maps, and that would allow an attacking army to either fall on Rabegh from an unforeseen direction or to sidestep the port town completely on its way to Mecca. How had the British advisors, who had now been in Rabegh for three months, remained ignorant of these watercourses, and why had the local Arabs, who surely knew of them, not raised the alarm? Quite simply, because quarantined as they were on the shoreline, the British hadn’t been aware enough of their surroundings to formulate the question, and without the question, the Arabs hadn’t been aware enough of British concerns to offer the information. To Lawrence, it underscored both the difficulty in trying to marry two such very different cultures for the purpose of making war, and the potential for disaster in Hussein’s stricture against nonbelievers traveling inland; no matter how many British troops were brought over, so long as they were isolated on the coast, in their ability to gauge danger they might as well be in blindfolds.
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