In the early afternoon of October 23, Lawrence’s party rounded a wall of high stone cliffs to suddenly find themselves in the verdant valley of Wadi Safra, the refuge for Faisal’s rebel army that had so recently been humbled outside Medina. As they ascended toward the headwaters, Lawrence began to see small encampments of armed men scattered among the hillside villages, camps that steadily grew in size and proliferation until they seemed to fill most every level stretch of land.
At last the party entered Hamra, a village of about one hundred homes, and drew up before a long, low house where a sword-wielding slave stood guard. Dismounting from his camel, Lawrence was admitted into the inner courtyard to see the profile of a man standing in the far doorway. “[He] looked very tall and pillar-like,” he wrote, “very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were drooped, and his black beard and colorless face were like a mask against the strange, still watchfulness of his body.”
It was Faisal ibn Hussein. As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek, the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory.”
MAYBE, BUT IN actual fact, their initial meeting did not go well. Ushered into the home, Lawrence joined Faisal and a dozen or so other men, chieftains of various tribes that had joined the revolt, in a dimly lit room covered with carpets. As did his brothers, Faisal possessed a courtly graciousness, and he thanked Lawrence for making the long and difficult journey to visit him. This preamble soon gave way, though, to a more somber discussion of his recent string of military setbacks at the hands of the Turks.
Of Hussein’s sons, Faisal and his followers had borne the greatest amount of fighting since the start of the revolt, and had done so while receiving the least in the way of supplies and funds. Most recently, he explained to his visitor, his men had been on the verge of a great victory at Bir Abbas, on Medina’s outskirts. Instead, for lack of artillery to counteract that brought to bear by the Turks, his army had foundered and then been scattered. The remnants of that army—many had peeled away and returned to their homes—were now encamped there with him in the mountain safeness of Hamra, awaiting the Turks’ next move. That was how things stood. Properly supplied and armed, Faisal contended, his men were capable of anything, but if the current situation persisted, where they had to beg the British for every ounce of matériel—most of which never reached the front lines anyway—then the future course of the uprising was already written. When the Turks came out of their stronghold in Medina and marched for the coast, a march that now seemed imminent, it would leave Faisal with the choice of either being stranded in the mountains or beating a retreat back toward Mecca. The first option would mean slow annihilation, the second rapid disintegration, for just as had occurred after Bir Abbas, many of his followers would refuse to flee so far away from their tribal areas—they would just go home.
Even as he listened, Lawrence intently studied Faisal, looking for clues to both his personality and the nature of the hold he had over the other men crowded into the room. “He was a man of moods,” he noted, “flickering between glory and despair, and just now dead tired. He looked years older than thirty-one, and his dark, appealing eyes, set a little sloping in his face, were bloodshot, and his hollow cheeks deeply lined and puckered with reflection.… In appearance he was tall, graceful and vigorous, with the most beautiful gait, and a royal dignity of head and shoulders. Of course he knew it, and a great part of his public expression was by sign and gesture.”
Maybe it was also Faisal’s exhaustion that caused him to speak far more bluntly than his brothers had of the element of distrust that lay at the core of the Arabs’ relationship with Britain, a distrust reflected in everything from Hussein’s tortuous two-year negotiation with Storrs and McMahon to the restricting of British advisors to the coast. Since history clearly showed the British didn’t help others out of the goodness of their heart, Faisal asked, just what was it they wanted of the Hejaz?
As many other British officers had done with other members of Hussein’s Hashemite clan, in the dimly lit home in Hamra, Lawrence patiently reassured Faisal that the British had absolutely no territorial interests in the Hejaz. That assurance lost some of its luster, Faisal pointed out, when it was recalled that the British had said precisely the same thing about the Sudan before grabbing it.
Their somewhat prickly conversation extended through dinner, then started up again at 6:30 the next morning when Faisal showed up at Lawrence’s tent. In these talks, Lawrence found Hussein’s third son to be “most unreasonable,” and yet there was something about the passion with which he spoke, the hard determination behind it, that Lawrence found profoundly compelling. It was a passion he’d found lacking in both Abdullah or Ali, and it fueled his conviction that in Faisal he had found his leader.
That conviction was strengthened when Lawrence spent several hours that day wandering among the rebel encampments, falling into conversation with whoever crossed his path. One of the first things that struck him was the range of tribes they represented. In the ever-fractious world of Arabia, rare was the man who could unite even the various tribes and clans in his immediate area, but here in Wadi Safra were thousands of men representing nearly every tribal group across the breadth of the western Hejaz, some a full two weeks’ journey away from their homelands. Even more remarkable, this was an army that had been put to flight by the Turks just a week earlier, and yet their morale and confidence in ultimate victory seemed utterly unshaken. The man who had molded that unity and spurred that confidence was Faisal.
That evening, having been in Wadi Safra for only slightly more than twenty-four hours, Lawrence stopped by Faisal’s headquarters to say goodbye. Their parting conversation was more relaxed than those of earlier, with Faisal thanking Lawrence for coming and Lawrence holding out the vague hope that perhaps his trip would prove of some benefit. With that, he mounted a new camel and, with a squad of fourteen warriors as bodyguards, made for the nearest rebel-held Red Sea port, the town of Yenbo, where a British ship might collect him for his return to Egypt. He was anxious to get there, for he was now firmly convinced that in Faisal ibn Hussein the revolt had found its prophet. “It was all and more than we had hoped for,” he wrote, “much more than our halting course deserved. The aim of my trip was fulfilled.”
Chapter 9
The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker
[Faisal] is hot tempered, proud and impatient, sometimes unreasonable and runs off easily at tangents. Possesses far more personal magnetism and life than his brothers, but less prudence. Obviously very clever, perhaps not over scrupulous … Had he been brought up the wrong way might have become a barrack yard officer. A popular idol, and ambitious; full of dreams, and the capacity to realize them.
T. E. LAWRENCE ON FAISAL IBN HUSSEIN, OCTOBER 30, 1916
Doggedness and good luck had made Lawrence’s visit to the Hejaz an extraordinarily successful one. In a mere ten days, he had met all four of Emir Hussein’s sons, as well as the principal Allied envoys in Jeddah. He had also seen firsthand the British efforts at establishing a supply line for the rebels at Rabegh, and been the first outsider to journey inland for a look at the actual battlefront. Now, as he rode into Yenbo on the morning of October 26, 1916, he was anxious to get back to Cairo to report on his findings.
In that dusty little port town, however, his fortunes suddenly flagged. A British warship had been scheduled to make a Yenbo port of call, but the appointed day came and went with no sign of it. With no choice but to wait—for a total of five days, it would turn out—Lawrence took up quarters in a modest three-story house overlooking the tiny waterfront, the home of Faisal’s local liaison officer, and there set to work writing up the impressions of his journey. In his usual crabbed hand, and with only a blue fountain pen and some scrap paper by way of supplies, over the next five days he would put some seventeen thousand words to paper.
It was also in that house in Yenbo where the dueling legends of T. E. Lawrence were to be born. To his lionizers, Lawrence’s acute grasp of the situation on the ground in Arabia, combined with his brilliance at conveying that understanding into words, was about to make him a man born to the hour, a prime example of the phenomenon in which a particular kind of genius is finally joined to the circumstances he has spent his entire life working toward. To his detractors, what was about to happen could be largely, even wholly, attributed to random chance, that the myriad small events which were to transpire over the next three weeks and so improbably turn to Lawrence’s advantage—the strange coincidences, the timing and mistiming of messages, the byzantine maneuverings by generals and statesmen—were beyond any prediction. If all these factors were tossed into some giant cosmic hopper, so this narrative goes, it never would have played out in quite the same sequence again.
The specifics of Lawrence’s résumé that October would actually appear to provide fodder for the latter version of the legend. At Yenbo, he was a twenty-eight-year-old army captain without a single day of military training; at that time, policy in Arabia was being debated at the highest levels of the British military and political leadership. True, he was the first British officer to glimpse the rebel fighters in the field, but that glimpse had lasted all of twenty-six hours and essentially consisted of watching them lounge about a valley encampment, hardly the basis for an authoritative analysis. Nor were most of his observations truly unique; among the handful of British military officers who had preceded him to the Hejaz, nearly all had noted the completely ad hoc nature of the Arab “army,” its lack of anything approaching conventional military discipline, even its abject terror of enemy artillery and airplanes.
But of course, Lawrence hadn’t merely his brief sojourn to Faisal’s camp to draw on, but the years he had spent immersing himself in Arab culture in Carchemish. From this he’d gained a profound appreciation for how clan and tribal alliances worked, how that structure might play out on the battlefield, and how unusual it was to find a leader capable of forging a coalition of tribes for anything more than a very short-term goal. In addition, starting as a young boy and continuing through his years at Oxford, Lawrence had obsessively focused on one very particular field of scholarship—medieval military history—and warfare in early-twentieth-century Arabia bore striking similarities to that in fourteenth-century Europe. These similarities extended from how a fighting force was recruited, to its leadership structure—trade out sheikhs and emirs for lords and thanes and princes—to how that fighting force maneuvered in the field. In 1916 Hejaz, much like 1356 France, an army on the move was wholly dependent on satisfying its most elemental needs—water, the availability of draft animals, forage—and this dictated where it went, whom it fought, and when. Lawrence, with a knowledge of medieval military strategies surpassed by but a small handful of people alive, found many of the features of the Arabian battlefield instantly recognizable, and certainly far more familiar than to a professionally trained officer steeped in Napoleonic or even current Western Front precepts.
With this cultural and scholarly grounding, Lawrence immediately saw the utter futility of trying to transform the Arab rebel fighting force into something it was not, and never would be—namely, a conventional European-style army. The only way forward, he argued in the reports he penned in Yenbo, was for the British to accept the Arab way of war, and to adapt their strategies and expectations accordingly.
But even this was not terribly controversial or original as far as it went—after all, even the most hidebound military officer recognizes the need to adjust to the men and matériel at his disposal—but from his brief time in the Hejaz, Lawrence had come to two specific conclusions that were much more so.
In light of the woeful lack of military success since the early days of the Arab Revolt, there was a growing consensus in both London and Cairo that a sizable British force would have to be dispatched to the Hejaz to bolster the rebel forces; the most common figure bandied about was a brigade, or at least three thousand soldiers. In October, Emir Hussein continued to vacillate about this idea, worried that such an “infidel” presence in the Muslim holy land would undermine his standing with the tribes currently joined to him. From his own travels, and especially from the wariness he had encountered in Faisal’s camp, Lawrence concluded that Hussein’s apprehensions were absolutely valid; while a small group of European advisors and trainers setting up shop on the coastline would be “joyously welcomed,” he wrote, any larger force was likely to be resented and play into Turkish propaganda about Christian Crusaders. By arguing for this minimal presence, Lawrence was placing himself against the majority opinion of the British military command staff, including that held by the two British officers who’d spent the most time in the Hejaz, Lt. Colonel Cyril Wilson and his deputy, Alfred Parker.
Even more potentially contentious was Lawrence’s notion that the true “prophet” of the revolt was the soft-spoken and austere Faisal. Going back to even before the war, British officials had regarded the gregarious and dynamic Abdullah as their chief ally in the Hejaz, the son in closest counsel to the mercurial Hussein, and nothing since the revolt’s outbreak had changed that view. To the contrary, it was to Abdullah that those officials continued to turn in hopes of divining what the old man might be thinking, and in charting the next stage in the fighting. By contrast, prior to Lawrence, the only British officials to have met Faisal were Wilson and Parker, and then to rather thin conclusion; if liking Faisal on a personal level, Wilson had sensed in the emir’s third son “a man who can’t stand the racket” of combat—essentially, a coward—an estimation he had conveyed to the British leadership. When it came to promoting Faisal as the revolt’s real leader, Lawrence constituted a minority of precisely one.
And so, against the very long odds on both these points, just how did Lawrence eventually win out? A case of genius not to be denied, or sheer dumb luck?
What the purveyors of both dueling legends tend to overlook is that, already at Yenbo, Lawrence had a formidable, if rather unglamorous, weapon in his arsenal. From his position at the inner circle of the military intelligence apparatus in Cairo, he possessed an intimate grasp of the British military and political power structure deciding policy in Arabia. But “structure” is far too charitable a word. In fact, it was a bureaucratic quagmire, a maze of overlapping ministries and competing agendas and feuding personalities. From his reading at the Savoy Hotel—and virtually nothing was so classified as to be beyond his purview—Lawrence knew who all the principal players were in this morass, the opinions they held, and, perhaps most important, who their rivals were. Along with writing up his reports, the five-day wait in Yenbo gave him time to contemplate the mind-numbingly complex political chessboard that lay before him, and to devise a strategy whereby he might play off the competing factions and see his ideas win out.
He would be assisted in this by something else often overlooked: the nature of communications at the time. In some spheres, this was fantastically advanced from just decades earlier, in others still quite primitive. In 1916, the mimeograph machine could make hundreds, even thousands of copies of an important document; for most everything else, there was the century-old technology of carbon paper. Via the wireless telegraph, a message could be sent from London to Buenos Aires in a matter of minutes, while delivering that same message to someone just ten miles away in a place like Arabia required the dispatch of a courier on foot or horseback. Lawrence would prove very adept at using both the advances and deficiencies in communications to his advantage, repeatedly breaching protocol to get messages to his allies quickly, conveniently failing to receive undesired orders—“garbled transmission” was a favorite excuse—until it was too late and the matter decided. Joined to a certain ruthless streak, it all enabled T. E. Lawrence to emerge as a kind of exemplar of the bureaucratic infighter, with a prowess that even the most devious palace intriguer or tenure-track college professor might envy
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Over the next three weeks, Lawrence would be employed as point man—hatchet man might be a more apt term—by a variety of British officials seeking to promote their agendas over those of their rivals. In that role, the twenty-eight-year-old captain would adroitly work all sides of the street, allowing him to administer a brutal blow to French designs in the region, undermine an immensely powerful British official, and help catalyze a fundamental shift in British policy in Arabia. In the process, he would also alter the course of the Arab Revolt, and his own role within it.
It was an ascendancy that got off to a shaky start, however. On October 31, HMS Suva, under the command of a career naval officer named William “Ginger” Boyle, so nicknamed for his red hair, put in to Yenbo to finally free Lawrence from his enforced Arabian interlude.
“I had heard of a Captain Lawrence being on the coast,” Boyle would recall in his memoirs. “I had assumed he was one of the military officers sent over and was a little astonished when a small, untidily dressed and most unmilitary figure strolled up to me on board … hands in pockets and so without a salute.” Noticing that Lawrence had three captain stars on one shoulder strap but inexplicably none on the other, the no-nonsense Boyle refused even to acknowledge his passenger and instead pointed him over to his first lieutenant; the ship captain was gratified when the lieutenant roundly upbraided Lawrence for his lack of manners.
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