Major al-Masri, strongly recommended by the British authorities, was appointed Chief of Staff of the forces nominally commanded by the Emir’s son Ali. He took up his position in late 1916, and within a month was removed from command as a result of a murky intrigue. He was replaced by the able Jaafar al-Askari, an Arab general in the Ottoman army whom the British had taken prisoner.
According to one account, al-Masri was plotting to take over control from Hussein in order to negotiate to change sides. He spoke of coming to an arrangement whereby the Hejaz forces would return to the Ottoman fold in return for an agreement by the Porte to grant local autonomy to Arabic-speaking areas.6
It was not merely that al-Masri and his colleagues believed that Germany would win the war. Two years later, when it had become clear that it was the Allies who were going to win, the one-time Arab secret society commander in Damascus (whom al-Faruqi had purported to represent when he duped Clayton and the others in Cairo), General Yasin al-Hashimi, still refused to change sides. Gilbert Clayton had misread the politics of the Arab secret societies: they were profoundly opposed to British designs in the Middle East. At the beginning of the war they had resolved to support the Ottoman Empire against the threat of European conquest.7 They remained faithful to their resolve. They preferred autonomy or independence if they could get it; but if they could not, they preferred to be ruled by Turkish Moslems rather than by Christians.
Hussein himself, from the opening days of his revolt, continued to communicate with the Young Turks with a view to changing back to the Ottoman side of the war. The Arab Bulletin (no. 25, 7 October 1916) quoted the Arabian warlord Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud as charging that “Sherif’s original intention was to play off the British against the Turks, and thus get the Turks to grant him independence guaranteed by Germany.”
Hussein’s basic program remained constant: he wanted more power and autonomy as Emir within the Ottoman Empire, and he wanted his position to be made hereditary. Although the British were not yet aware of his correspondence with the enemy, they rapidly became disenchanted with the Emir for other reasons. As they came to see it, Hussein, far from being the leader of a newly created Arab nationalism, was a ruler who took little interest in nationalism and whose only concern was for the acquisition of new powers and territories for himself. David Hogarth, the intelligence officer who headed the Arab Bureau, drily commented that, “It is obvious that the King regards Arab Unity as synonymous with his own Kingship…”8
The Emir insisted on proclaiming himself king of the Arabs, although Ronald Storrs on behalf of Cairo had warned him not to do so. Storrs later wrote that “he knew better than we that he could lay no kind of genuine claim” to be the king of all the Arabs.9 In this respect, Storrs found that “his pretensions bordered on the tragicomic,” yet felt that Britain was now obliged to support him as far as possible.10 The Arab Bureau was deeply disappointed by the failure of Hussein’s leadership to take hold.
II
It is due to T. E. Lawrence, a junior member of the Arab Bureau, that its real views were recorded in convenient form, providing an account of the contemporary observations and private thoughts of the small band of Kitchener’s followers who had organized Hussein’s revolt and who had placed so much hope in it. It was Lawrence who suggested that the Arab Bureau publish an information bulletin. Originally issued under the title Arab Bureau Summaries, it then became the Arab Bulletin. It appeared at irregular intervals, commencing 6 June 1916, and continuing until the end of 1918. The first issue was edited by Lawrence. For most of the next three months, issues were edited by Lieutenant-Commander David Hogarth, the Oxford archaeologist who served as Director of the Arab Bureau. At the end of the summer, Captain Kinahan Cornwallis, Hogarth’s deputy, took over as the regular editor.
Issued from the Arab Bureau offices in the Savoy Hotel, Cairo, the Arab Bulletin was labeled “Secret.” Only twenty-six copies were printed of each issue. The restricted distribution list included the Viceroy of India and the British commanders-in-chief in Egypt and the Sudan. A copy each also went to the War Office and to the Admiralty in London. The issues provided a wide range of confidential current and background information about the Arab and Moslem worlds.
Lawrence, in the first issue (6 June 1916), which appeared just as the revolt in the Hejaz began, indicated that there were problems in holding Arabs together even for the purposes of revolt. He wrote that whenever there were large tribal gatherings, dissensions soon arose; and, knowing this, the Turks held back and did nothing. They delayed “in the sure expectation that tribal dissension would soon dismember their opponents.”
The Arab Bulletin, no. 5 (18 June 1916), reported the beginning of Hussein’s proclaimed revolt a week or two earlier. This issue and issue no. 6 (23 June 1916) indicate that Hussein’s military operations had achieved only modest success, and that even this had been due to British forces. According to issue no. 6, the Turks on the coast were caught between British ships and seaplanes, and the Arabs. Seeking cover behind walls, the Turks were driven to surrender for lack of food and water, for their wells were outside the walls. Turkish prisoners taken at Jeddah were quoted in the Arab Bulletin, no. 7 (30 June 1916), as saying that English “shells and bombs it was that really took the town.”
Hussein’s troops were belittled as soldiers. According to issue no. 6, “They are presumably tribesmen only” and “They are all untrained, and have no artillery or machine guns. Their preference is for the showy side of warfare, and it will be difficult to hold them together for any length of time, unless the pay and rations are attractive.” A detailed analysis and description written by T. E. Lawrence, which appeared in issue no. 32 (26 November 1916), was in the same vein: “I think one company of Turks, properly entrenched in open country, would defeat the Sherif’s armies. The value of the tribes is defensive only, and their real sphere is guerilla warfare.” He wrote that they were “too individualistic to endure commands, or fight in line, or help each other. It would, I think, be impossible to make an organized force out of them.”
Hussein’s call to revolt fell on deaf ears throughout the Arab and Moslem worlds, according to the Arab Bulletin. Soundings of opinion around the globe, as reported in issues throughout 1916, elicited responses ranging from indifference to hostility. Issue no. 29 (8 November 1916), which reported Hussein’s proclamation that he was assuming the title of King of the Arabs, commented icily that “the prince, claiming such recognition, is very far from being in a position to substantiate his pretension,” and that His Majesty’s Government was not going to sign a blank check on the future political organization of the Arab peoples. In issue no. 41 (6 February 1917), Hogarth wrote that “the prospect of Arabia united under either the King of the Hejaz or anyone else seems very remote. The ‘Arab Cause’ is evidently a very weak cement in the peninsula; dislike of the Turk is stronger; and a desire to stand well with us is perhaps stronger still.”
Nearly a year after Hussein proclaimed the Arab Revolt, Hogarth was prepared to write it off as a failure. In reviewing what he called “A Year of Revolt” in the Hejaz for the Arab Bulletin, no. 52 (31 May 1917), he concluded that it had not fulfilled the hopes placed in it nor did it justify further expectations: “That the Hejaz Bedouins were simply guerillas, and not of good quality at that, had been amply demonstrated, even in the early sieges; and it was never in doubt that they would not attack nor withstand Turkish regulars.” The best that could be hoped for in the future from Hussein’s Arab Movement, he wrote, was that it would “just hold its own in place.”
It was not much of a return on the British investment. According to a later account by Ronald Storrs, Britain spent, in all, 11 million pounds sterling to subsidize Hussein’s revolt.11 At the time this was about 44 million dollars; in today’s currency it would be closer to 400 million dollars. Britain’s military and political investment in Hussein’s revolt was also considerable. On 21 September 1918 Reginald Wingate, who by then had succeeded Kitchener and McMahon as Bri
tish proconsul in Egypt, wrote that “Moslems in general have hitherto regarded the Hejaz revolt, and our share in it, with suspicion or dislike” and that it was important to make Hussein look as though he had not been a failure in order to keep Britain from looking bad.12
III
Three weeks after Hussein announced his rebellion, the British War Office told the Cabinet in London that the Arab world was not following his lead. In a secret memorandum prepared for the War Committee of the Cabinet on 1 July 1916, the General Staff of the War Office reported that Hussein “has always represented himself, in his correspondence with the High Commissioner, as being the spokesman of the Arab nation, but so far as is known, he is not supported by any organization of Arabs nearly general enough to secure…automatic acceptance of the terms agreed to by him.”13 As a result, according to the memorandum, the British government ought not to assume that agreements reached with him would be honored by other Arab leaders.
In a secret memorandum entitled “The Problem of the Near East,” prepared at about the same time, Sir Mark Sykes predicted that if British aid were not forthcoming, the Sherif Hussein’s movement would be crushed by early 1917. Gloomily, Sykes foresaw that by the close of the war, Turkey would be the most exhausted of the belligerent countries and, as a result, would be taken over by her partner, Germany. The Ottoman Empire, wrote Sykes, would become little more than a German colony.14 His analysis in this respect foreshadowed the new views about the Middle East that were to become current in British official circles the following year under the influence of Leo Amery and his colleagues.
Sykes had become an assistant to his friend Maurice Hankey, Secretary of Asquith’s War Cabinet. In his new position Sykes continued to concern himself with the East. He had published an Arabian Report, a London forerunner of Cairo’s Arab Bulletin. When his friend Gilbert Clayton arrived from Egypt in the latter half of 1916, the two men went before the War Committee to urge support for Hussein’s revolt in the Hejaz. They also urged that Sir Henry McMahon should be replaced as High Commissioner in Egypt; for McMahon had been appointed only to keep the position available for Kitchener, and when the field marshal died, Kitchener’s followers wanted the job for Reginald Wingate, one of their own.*
During the summer of 1916, Sykes spent a good deal of time making public speeches. In his speeches he gave currency to the new descriptive phrase, “the Middle East,” which the American naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan had invented in 1902 to designate the area between Arabia and India;15 and he added to his public reputation as an expert on that area of the world.
In September, as intelligence reports from Cairo indicated that the revolt in the Hejaz was collapsing even more rapidly than he had anticipated, Sykes advocated sending out military support to Hussein immediately—a plan vigorously advanced by McMahon and Wingate. His urgings were in vain: Robertson, the all-powerful new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, refused to divert troops or efforts from the western front.
The late summer and autumn of 1916 appeared to be desperate times for Hussein’s cause, though in retrospect Britain’s naval control of the Red Sea coastline probably ensured the survival of the Emir’s supporters. The British hit on the idea of sending a few hundred Arab prisoners-of-war from India’s Mesopotamian front to join Hussein. When Sir Archibald Murray, commanding general (since January 1916) of the British army in Egypt, reiterated that he could spare no troops to send to Hussein’s defense, the High Commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon, suggested asking for help from France. He also sent Ronald Storrs, his aide at the Residency, on a mission to Arabia to inquire as to what else could be done.
IV
At the end of the summer of 1916, the French government sent a mission to the Hejaz to attempt to stop the Sherif Hussein’s revolt from collapsing. Lieutenant-Colonel Edouard Brémond, heading the French mission, arrived in Alexandria 1 September 1916, and from there took ship for Arabia, arriving at the Hejazi port of Jeddah on 20 September.16
Brémond’s opposite number in Jeddah was Colonel C. E. Wilson, the senior British officer in the Hejaz and representative of the Government of the Sudan—which is to say of Wingate, who was soon to assume operational control of the British side of the Hejaz revolt. His assistant, Captain Hubert Young, was at the British consulate in Jeddah (which called itself the Pilgrimage Office, as it dealt with the affairs of Moslem pilgrims from British India and elsewhere) to greet Brémond when he arrived. Brémond also met Vice-Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, whose British fleet controlled the Red Sea passage between Egypt and the Sudan and Arabia, and who ferried officers and men across it.
Brémond’s assignment was to shore up the Hejaz revolt by supplying a cadre of professional military advisers from among the Mohammedan population of the French Empire who, as Moslems, would be acceptable to the Sherif. The French mission led by Brémond comprised 42 officers and 983 men. The size of the French mission prompted the rival British to send out a further complement of officers of their own to serve under Wilson. Brémond, in turn, contemplated increasing the size of his forces in order to strengthen the forces of the Sherif, which were dangerously weak. Indeed, Abdullah, the son closest to the Sherif’s thinking, was fearful that the Ottoman forces based in Medina might attack and overrun the rebel positions on the road to Mecca.
In the middle of October, Ronald Storrs, of the British Residency in Cairo, took ship from Egypt to the Hejaz with an alternative approach. He came in support of Major Aziz al-Masri, the nationalist secret society leader, whom Cairo had nominated to take in hand the training and reorganization of the Hejaz forces, and whose brief tenure in command was described earlier (see page 220). Al-Masri was of the opinion that it would be a political disaster to allow Allied troops, even though Moslem, to become too visibly involved in the Sherif’s campaign. His view was that the forces of Mecca could fight effectively on their own if trained in the techniques of guerrilla warfare.
Storrs arranged for his young friend, the junior intelligence officer T. E. Lawrence, to come along on the ship to Jeddah. Lawrence had accumulated a few weeks of leave time, and wanted to spend them in Arabia, which he had never visited. Storrs obtained permission for Lawrence to come along with him; so they arrived in Jeddah together.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was twenty-eight years old, though he looked closer to nineteen or twenty. He had been turned down for army service as too small; he stood only a few inches above five feet in height. Hubert Young called him “a quiet little man.”17 Ronald Storrs, like most others, called him “little Lawrence,” though Storrs also called him “super-cerebral.”18
His personal circumstances seemed undistinguished. He was apparently of a poor family and of modest background, in an Arab Bureau group that included Members of Parliament, millionaires, and aristocrats. He had attended the City School at home in Oxford rather than a public school (in the British sense): Eton, Harrow, Winchester, or the like. In Arab Bureau circles he ranked low, and had no military accomplishments to his credit.
Lawrence had worked for the archaeologist David Hogarth at the Ashmolean Museum, and Hogarth—who later became head of the Arab Bureau—had gotten him into the geographical section of the War Office in the autumn of 1914 as a temporary second lieutenant-translator.19 From there he went out to the Middle East to do survey maps. He stayed on in Cairo to do other jobs.
When Storrs and Lawrence arrived in Jeddah, the Emir Hussein’s son Abdullah met them. Abdullah proved an immediate disappointment to Lawrence, but Lawrence so impressed Abdullah that he won coveted permission to go into the field to meet the Emir of Mecca’s other sons. For Lawrence this was a major coup. Colonel Alfred Parker, who had been the first head of the Arab Bureau and who served as head of Military Intelligence in the Hejaz revolt, wrote to Clayton on 24 October 1916, that “Before Lawrence arrived I had been pushing the idea of going up country and had hoped to go up. Don’t think I grudge him, especially as he will do it as well or better than anyone. Since he has been gone” the Hejaz
government “is not inclined to agree to other trips.”20
In the field, Lawrence visited Feisal and the other leaders and found Feisal enchanting: “an absolute ripper,” he later wrote to a colleague.21 Lawrence decided that Feisal should become the field commander of the Hejaz revolt. Among his other qualities, Feisal looked the part.
On his own initiative, Lawrence sent a written report to Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Sudan, who was soon to be sent to Egypt to replace McMahon as High Commissioner. When Lawrence left the Hejaz in November, instead of returning directly to Cairo, he embarked for the Sudan to introduce himself to Wingate.
Lawrence—through his friendship with Gilbert Clayton, the Sudan’s representative in Cairo—must have been familiar with Wingate’s outlook on the future of Middle Eastern politics. He would have known that Wingate aimed at securing British domination of the postwar Arab Middle East and (like himself) at preventing France from establishing a position in the region. Although Wingate wanted Hussein’s forces to be saved from defeat and possible destruction, he could not have wanted the rescue to be undertaken by Frenchmen—for that would risk bringing Hussein’s Arab Movement under long-term French influence.
Lawrence proposed to Wingate an alternative to Brémond’s project of employing French and other Allied regular army units to do the bulk of Hussein’s fighting for him: Hussein’s tribesmen should be used as irregulars in a British-led guerrilla warfare campaign. Aziz al-Masri had originally suggested the guerrilla warfare idea to Lawrence, intending to exclude France and Britain from Arabia; Lawrence modified the plan so as to exclude only France. Lawrence added that Feisal should be appointed to command the Sherifian striking forces, and claimed that he himself was the only liaison officer with whom Feisal would work.
Wingate tended to agree. Back in 1914 he had been the first to urge that the Arabian tribes should be stirred up to make trouble for Turkey. In a sense it was Wingate’s own plan that Lawrence was advocating. Indeed, writing to a fellow general some two decades later, Wingate claimed that it was he—and not “poor little Lawrence”—who had launched, supported, and made possible the Arab Movement.22
A Peace to End all Peace Page 26