Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (10 page)

For a western army this would have been a disgrace, and would have been followed by severe disciplinary measures and perhaps courts-martial for the senior officers; but when Lawrence reached Feisal’s house in Yenbo, he found the emir and his commanders in a jolly mood, trading insults, and taunting Zeid in a good-natured way for the speed with which he and his men had run away from the battle. Zeid and his men were “quiet, but in no other way mortified by their shame,” Lawrence remarked; nor did Feisal seem dismayed by the collapse of his army in the face of only three battalions of Turks—in numbers, less than half the fighting men Feisal had. This incident fully justified Colonel Callwell’s firmly expressed opinion in Small Wars: “While all goes well, irregular forces hold together and obey their chiefs, but in the hour of trial the bonds which keep the mass intact are apt to snap, and then the whole dissolves and disappears.”

Feisal’s only concern was that the Juheina tribesmen on his left, who had fled from the battlefield when the fragile bonds that tied them to him snapped, might have gone over to the enemy. But when this turned out not to be the case—they were guilty of cowardice, but not betrayal—the Juheina were given a chance to make up for their ignominious flight by going forward to harass the Turks’ line of communications with sniper fire, a logical decision, since this was their country and they knew the best places to shoot from.

Hoping that this might at least slow the Turks, Feisal and Lawrence went out to see how the town might be saved. Yenbo, fortunately, lent itself to defense—the town was built on a coral reef that rose some twenty feet above sea level, surrounded on two sides by water, and on the other two sides by wide, flat stretches of glistening sand and salt, with no drinkable water to be had on them. The Arabs’ dislike of manual labor did not need to be confronted, since the ground was coral, and far too hard to dig in—instead Lawrence and Garland reinforced the existing walls, and placed the Egyptian gunners and naval machine gun parties at the crucial points. Boyle had managed to produce five naval ships and anchored them close inshore; they included the modern, powerful shallow-draft monitor M 31, whose six-inch guns would surely stop any Turkish attempt to rush the town across the salt flats. Navy signalers were placed in the minaret of the mosque, with Feisal’s blessing on this intrusion by infidels, to direct the fire of the ships’ guns.

At dusk, silence fell on the town as Feisal’s men waited for the attack—by that time the Turks were only three miles away—but none came. After darkness had fallen, the ships turned on their searchlights and aimed them at the wide salt flats, illuminating the flats harshly in a careful crisscross pattern through the night. The commander of the Turkish advance hesitated at the sight of the brightly lit landscape, and lost heart at the prospect of advancing across brilliantly lit open ground as flat as a billiard table, toward an enemy holding the high ground. The night passed without a Turkish attack, or a gun’s being fired.

Lawrence was sufficiently confident of the outcome—and exhausted—that he went aboard the Suva and fell asleep. He would later conclude that the Turks’ failure to rush Yenbo that night “and stamp out Feisal’s army once and for all” had cost them the war.

For the moment, however, the Turks still held Gaza on their right and Medina on their left, and threatened Mecca. The Arab army had been saved, but the Arab cause was in as precarious a situation as ever. Feisal—with the help of lavish supplies of British gold—had kept his army together, but only under the protection of British warships; what it needed was a strategy, and Lawrence was about to provide one.

Until now, Lawrence’s role had been that of an observer and a liaison officer, but those limits were about to be changed rapidly. At home, the energetic David Lloyd George had replaced the exhausted Asquith asprime minister. Lloyd George was by instinct an “easterner”: he deeply distrusted the idea that the war could be won only by breaking through the German lines on the western front whatever the cost in British and French lives, and his notoriously devious mind was attracted to the notion of knocking Germany’s weakest ally out of the war and rearranging the Middle East. In London, Cairo, and Khartoum the decision was finally made that the Arabs simply could not be allowed to fail. In Mecca Sharif Hussein still vacillated, alternately calling Colonel Wilson in Jidda to request British troops and then changing his mind and refusing permission for them to land, while Colonel Brémond schemed to get his French North African troops into the Hejaz. With the sharifian forces more or less bottled up on the coast in Rabegh and Yenbo under the protection of the Royal Navy there seemed nothing much they could do to keep the tribes from deserting, one by one.

Lawrence was among those who saw that it was necessary to go on the offensive, rather than sit and defend coastal enclaves. As long ago as October 1916 Feisal had considered moving the Arab base of operations to Wejh, 180 miles north of Yenbo, but he had hesitated, reluctant to put too much distance between his army and Mecca. In addition, moving the Arab army out of one tribal area to another produced endless difficulties, and exposed it to attacks from the Turkish garrison in Medina. Lawrence dismissed such doubts; he was determined to launch the Arab army out into the desert and cut it free from its own bases on the Red Sea. He came up with a strategy, leading Liddell Hart to declare that “the military art was one in which [Lawrence] attained creativeness” and to compare Lawrence to Marlborough, Napoleon, Sherman, and Stonewall Jackson. Lawrence wanted Abdulla to take his army of 5,000 men deep into the desert fifty miles north of Medina, and base it there around the wells of the fertile Wadi Ais, from which position he could threaten the railway line to Medina and at the same time cut off caravans arriving from central Arabia. This would deflect the attention of the Turkish commander Fakhri Pasha from any attempt to take Rabegh or Mecca, and also screen from him Feisal’s line of march as Feisal took his army north to Wejh. Insteadof being spread out south of Medina but unable to take it, the Arabs would then be well to the north of Medina, able to cut off its supply line at any time. If they could take Aqaba as well, they would be free to move farther north across the empty desert toward Amman and Damascus, and the huge political prize that Syria represented.

Given Lawrence’s ambitions for the Arabs—and his own carefully concealed desire for leadership and military glory—it is perhaps fitting, as Liddell Hart points out, that he and Feisal set out on the 200-mile flank march up the Red Sea coast exactly 121 years after an audacious young general named Napoleon Bonaparte, at the age of twenty-six, began the flank march along the Riviera, which would make him famous. Lawrence was only two years older than Bonaparte (but five steps inferior to him in rank); he took his own first step toward fame on January 2, when, to conceal Feisal’s departure with 10,000 men into the desert from Yenbo, he personally led a raiding party of thirty-five tribesmen in the opposite direction, climbed over steep “knife-sharp” rocks in the dark and then down into the crevices of a precipice to attack an encampment of Turks at first light, shooting up their tents and taking two prisoners. This was a far cry from making maps or writing intelligence reports at a desk in Cairo, or even acting as a liaison officer to Feisal. It was the first raid that Lawrence personally commanded, and marks his sudden emergence not only as a strategist but as a guerrilla leader whom the Arabs would respect and follow.

The next day he rode north with Feisal and the bodyguards; he was already considered one of Feisal’s own household, with a place close enough to Feisal to take several snapshots of him leading the bodyguard, followed by a camel rider bearing his standards, wrapped around long poles topped with a gilded orb and spear point—iconic photographs of hundreds of armed camel riders advancing in line across the rock-strewn, featureless desert, the vanguard of an army that, as Lawrence had predicted, grew while it moved north. For it was above all action that legitimized the Arab Revolt—the sense of being part of a great historical event was a vital factor in persuading Arabs to join, and this requiredstagecraft, and a gift for propaganda as well as gold and weapons. Lawrence’s photographs
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are like those of a skilled director; they have the purposeful look of the films of early Soviet directors such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin, a sense of vast numbers irresistibly on the move, which prompted one tribal leader to remark to Lawrence, “We are no longer Arabs, but a people.”

Feisal’s dignity and his gift for showmanship were powerful factors in securing the adherence of the tribes—almost as important as the British gold he paid out to them. At the beginning of the march he and his bodyguard, now numbering more than 1,000 dashing, colorful tribesmen mounted on splendid camels, rode in silence through the massed contingents of his army, which formed up to provide a broad alley lined by Arabs on foot, each beside his camel. To each contingent, as he passed it, Feisal gave a grave greeting, bowing his head and murmuring in his “rich, melodic voice,” “Salaam aleikum,” “Peace upon you"; then, when he had passed through the whole army, the men mounted to the sound of drummers, and burst into songs in praise of Feisal and his family.

Once the column was on its way—"It looked like a river of camels,” Lawrence wrote later, “for we filled up the Wadi to the tops of its banks, and poured along in a quarter of a mile long stream"—he rode back to Yenbo to supervise the loading of the stores there on board one of the British ships (these stores included 8,000 rifles, 3 million rounds of small arms ammunition, two tons of high explosive, and many tons of foodstuff), for there was a real danger that the Turks might take the opportunity to seize the now almost undefended port. Feisal’s brother Ali, prodded into action by his father, Sharif Hussein, and by Colonel Wilson, made a feint attack on Medina, while Abdulla, also set in motion by numerous threats and entreaties, successfully surprised and defeated a Turkish battalion camped south of Medina, then attacked and captureda Turkish supply column. This happy outcome had unfortunate results, however, since the Turks were carrying a large quantity of gold—like the British, the Turks understood that tribal loyalty required payment in advance—and once the tribesmen had looted it, many of them rode straight for home with as much of it as they could carry. Still, Abdulla’s successful march brought him new followers to replace the old, and by January 19 he had reached the wells at Wadi Ais, having dominated Fakhri Pasha’s attention for nearly three crucial weeks.

March by march, Feisal led his army northward, staying close to the sea, and using the hills and mountains to screen his movement from the Turks for as long as possible, so that they would suppose he was still within easy reach of Yenbo, and able to fall back and defend it. In the meantime, Lawrence proceeded up the coast by sea to Um Lejj, a small port halfway between Yenbo and Wejh, and arrived on January 15 to meet Feisal. He was joined the next day by Major Charles Vickery; this was the first appearance of the “official” British military mission to Emir Feisal and the Arab army. Vickery was a professional soldier, a gunner, who had served many years in the Sudan, and spoke Arabic fluently. He was one of the two staff officers of Colonel Stewart Newcombe, who had been designated to command British military support, and one of the first of those British regular officers who would be, to use a slightly later term, upstaged by T. E. Lawrence in Arabia.

Newcombe himself was an old friend of Lawrence’s—he had been in command when Lawrence, then a scholar-archaeologist, with a companion, had been assigned by Kitchener before the war to complete a mapmaking survey of the Sinai—a military mission, since it involved tracing the routes by which the Turkish army might attack the Suez Canal. This daring desert adventure was concealed under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, dedicated to retracing the exact route of Moses and the Jews. Lawrence had actually reached Aqaba and swum in the shark-infested gulf to an island offshore where he had been forbidden to go—infuriating the Turkish governor, who assumed, not unreasonably, that what was going on was espionage, not scholarship.

Newcombe, though he was a professional soldier to the core, knew Lawrence well, and liked him. Vickery, almost instantly, did not; he and Lawrence got off on the wrong foot from the very beginning. He was offended by Lawrence’s unmilitary ways and, more important, by Lawrence’s easy assumption that Feisal and Feisal’s Arab army would reach Damascus, when, so far as Vickery could see, they were hard pressed to reach Wejh on time and in good order. Matters were not helped when Vickery stubbornly insisted on wearing his Arab head cloth over his pith helmet, prompting one of the Arabs to exclaim, “Mashallah, the head of an ox!” This set all the Arabs laughing, and Lawrence joined in. Vickery was both offended and humiliated, and did not forgive Lawrence. Good as Vickery’s Arabic was, he was of the pukka sahib type, believing strongly that Englishmen should stick together and maintain their distance and their dignity when dealing with “natives.” This was just the kind of attitude Lawrence was determined to eliminate in dealing with the Arabs.

Lawrence, Vickery, and Boyle journeyed inland a few miles to Owais, where Feisal and his army were encamped. They were greeted by Feisal with a lavish meal, which Boyle described as “a greasy stew” poured over rice and topped with ladles of boiling mutton fat, into which each guest reached with the fingers of his right hand to select chunks of innards and diced fat. Both Vickery and Boyle had been shocked and disgusted by “the absence of any sanitary precautions around the camp,” and by the sight and smell everywhere of both human and camel feces drying in the blazing sun, which did nothing to improve their appetite. Vickery—one can sympathize with him—took a long swig from a large pocket flask full of whiskey, then offered it around; Lawrence and Boyle thought this was disrespectful to their Muslim host, though Feisal seems to have been more amused than not.

Plans were made for taking Wejh and its garrison. Boyle would take 500 of Feisal’s Arabs aboard one of his ships and land them on the north side of the town, to prevent the Turks from escaping, while Feisal’s army would simultaneously attack the south side of the town. Fortunately for Lawrence, Vickery wisely chose to proceed to Wejh by ship.