Enemy on the Euphrates (16 page)

T. E. Lawrence posing in Arab clothing for Lowell Thomas’ book
With Lawrence in Arabia
, 1918

The Bedouin tribes who had rallied to Husayn and his sons – mainly the Juhayna, Harb and ‘Utayba – were not jihadi warriors against an alien invasion like the Arabs of Iraq. Many of them heartily disliked the Turks and their railway to Medina; but they were essentially mercenaries, fighting for British-supplied gold and modern rifles. As for their martial qualities, individually they could be courageous, but up against regular troops – especially when these were equipped with modern weaponry – they had a tendency to become disorganised and panic. Moreover, each tribe was reluctant to move outside its own
dira
– its traditional zone of pasturage, water-rights and oasis gardens.

Worse still, some tribal leaders soon showed that their loyalty could not be relied upon when the Turks made them offers of cash which exceeded those of Husayn. For example, within a few weeks of Rabigh’s capture, its captor, Husayn bin Mubarak, had accepted a Turkish subsidy and the Ottoman flag was once again flying over the town.
Bin Mubarak later abandoned the town and moved his forces inland but the situation at Rabigh remained precarious because of the Arabs’ failure to capture Medina, the second of Arabia’s holy cities and the one with a railway link to Damascus. At Medina, Husayn’s tribesmen faced a determined enemy commander, Fakhr ed-Din Pasha, who had quickly concentrated 12,000 well-trained Turkish and Arab regulars in the city, from where he was in a strong position to threaten both Rabigh and Yanbu‘ on the coast and even Mecca itself.

In November 1916, the Emir Faysal’s Bedouins were joined by the twenty-eight-year-old intelligence officer, Captain T. E. Lawrence, whose role was to act as liaison officer between the Hejaz Arabs and the British military HQ in Cairo. Lawrence soon became enamoured of the wild tribesmen. Like Sykes, he had a romantic attachment to the country-dwelling ‘native’ untouched by modern civilisation. (The town-and city-dwelling Syrians he denigrated as ‘an ape-like people.’)
²
In spite of the fact that his knowledge of Arabic was minimal – a fact which makes his subsequent accounts of delivering lengthy Arabic orations in
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
highly suspect – he soon won the confidence of the Emir Faysal and his men.
³

For a while the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz continued in a desultory way, punctuated by a near disaster in December 1916 when Fakhr ed-Din moved against Yanbu‘ and was only held back by heavy shelling from the 6-inch guns of the Royal Navy’s shallow-draught monitor
M31
. But thereafter, the Turks returned to the defensive, concentrating their forces at Medina. This gave Faysal’s troops the opportunity to move up the coast to Wajh, from where they could threaten the northern stretches of the Damascus–Medina railway. Even so, it was entirely due to an attack from the sea led by two Indian Army officers, Captain N.N.E. Bray and Captain C.E. Vickery, supported by Royal Navy shelling, that Wajh was captured on 23 January 1917, as the 8,000 strong Bedouin column under Faysal and Lawrence failed to arrive on the day scheduled for the attack. (‘A sad lack of initiative,’ commented Captain Bray.)
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Sykes was now becoming increasingly influential in the new coalition government of David Lloyd George which had replaced Asquith’s
floundering Liberal administration in December 1916. His friend Hankey had recommended Sykes for the position of chief political assistant to the new War Cabinet of which Hankey remained secretary. In the event, Sykes had to share the new post with Leopold Amery, a former Conservative back-bench MP and a virulent imperialist; nevertheless, Sykes wasted no time in trying to impress his own, frequently idiosyncratic ideas upon the men now running Britain’s world-wide war.

Now that the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz had overcome its initial crises, and with Faysal and Lawrence consolidating their position around Wajh, Sykes decided it was time to bring someone over from Iraq to whom he could demonstrate the success of the revolt. He was particularly keen to impress Sir Percy Cox, who remained sceptical about the whole enterprise. However, Cox was in no mood to receive lectures from Sykes, especially since the military situation in Iraq had recently improved considerably. The appointment of a new, energetic C-in-C, Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, supported by major reinforcements and a much improved logistics system, had enabled the British to recapture Kut on 22 February 1917, and with an army now substantially outnumbering Khalil Pasha’s they had marched on to capture Baghdad itself on 11 March. So Cox decided that he would send to Cairo one of his best, most battle-hardened POs, moreover one whose experience in dealing with ‘the Arab’ was second to none. The officer in question was Lieutenant Colonel (formerly Captain) Gerard Leachman. Let Sykes or Lawrence try to upstage Leachman if they dared!

Aged thirty-seven, Leachman was a tall, gangly, big-boned man with a long face and thinning hair, physically very strong, but a rather unprepossessing figure. Lawrence described him as ‘a thin jumpy nervous long fellow, with a plucked face and neck’.
⁵
The son of a country doctor of modest means and the only surviving boy in a family of six children, Gerard was sent to a private boarding school where his teachers regarded him as an indifferent, indeed below-average pupil who showed little interest in either academic or sporting attainments. Eventually, and after a sudden burst of interest in imperial history, he decided to pursue a
military career and aided by an intensive burst of ‘cramming’ he gained entry to Sandhurst, from where he graduated in 1899.

Leachman arrived in Cairo on 24 April and took a room at Shepheard Hotel, which seemed to him ‘a great gathering place for M.P.s and sprigs of nobility, for if you go to war from Shepherd’s Hotel there is no particular hardship. They are great sticklers for dress and that one should wear a pair of spurs is of much the same importance as beating the Turks.’
⁶
Leachman had every reason to be contemptuous. He had spent the last two years living a very dangerous life in Iraq as an Indian Army PO, organising and leading small bands of ‘loyal’ Arabs, often behind enemy lines, scouting and fighting, rarely out of the saddle, and only very occasionally able to enjoy the fairly spartan comforts of Basra, let alone the fleshpots of Cairo.

After a few days sightseeing and a meeting with the new high commissioner, General Wingate, on 30 April, Leachman sailed for Wajh in order to make a first-hand evaluation of the Arab Revolt’s progress. There he was met by Captain Bray, one of the Indian Army officers who had taken a leading part in the capture of Wajh and who told Leachman in no uncertain terms that the operation had been a complete shambles, redeemed only by some accurate shelling by the navy. However, Emir Faysal had now made Wajh his temporary headquarters and both Bray and Leachman were invited to dine with him the following day. They were also informed that Captain T.E. Lawrence, Faysal’s liaison officer, would be present.

In the early evening they arrived at Faysal’s tent at the rear of which, facing the entrance, stood tall, stately Faysal, ‘simple and charming’ according to Bray; and to his right a diminutive figure with a pale, smooth, absolutely beardless face, dressed entirely in richly embroidered white Arab robes, a gold dagger at his waist. Lawrence was obviously enjoying himself in his new persona.

Faysal invited his guests to be seated on the Persian carpets covering the floor of the tent while the customary interchange of compliments and courtesies took place. Faysal then asked questions about the progress of the Mesopotamian campaign, but to Bray and Leachman it
seemed that he was doing this ‘more out of courtesy to his guests than with a real desire to know more than that the Turks were being well beaten’. As for Lawrence, according to Bray, his appearance conveyed an aura of ‘unreality’ and his behaviour seemed ‘servile to Faysal’. However, if Faysal appeared polite, if somewhat cool and distant, during this encounter with the representatives of his powerful new ally, he had his reasons. Because three months previously, Lawrence had privately told the emir what he had discovered about the Sykes–Picot Agreement and both Faysal and Lawrence himself were now deeply worried about the manner in which Britain and France were manoeuvring behind the back of their ‘Arab movement’.

After the meal in Faysal’s tent was over and Bray and Leachman returned to their billets in Wajh, Leachman recorded nothing of the event. Indeed, he was, generally, a man of few words. Bray, however, writing many years later, gave his own impression of the encounter, noting in particular ‘the patent contrast between the two Englishmen’ – Leachman and Lawrence. In Bray’s opinion, Lawrence had been ‘acting the Arab’ and ‘maintaining his prestige through the medium of his magnificent clothes’. Leachman, on the other hand, ‘was so obviously and unashamedly the Englishman, and a masterful one. His sufferings and hardships were mapped on his lean visage and pride showed behind the curtain of his eyes. He had endured five years of toil and danger, and three more still harsher years were in store for him.’
⁷

However, Leachman did make known his views as to the effectiveness of the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz – at least to Bray, who recorded that Leachman ‘dismissed the whole Arab venture in the west as of little worth’. And back in Cairo on 9 May Leachman had few good words to say about the Hejaz or its inhabitants in a letter to his mother: ‘Commend me to the Arabian coast of the Red Sea for absolute hopelessness. Not a blade of grass or bush but miles of volcanic desert and stones. Most vile form of Arab, worse than the worst Mesopotamian specimen.’
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As for Leachman’s impression of Lawrence, we can only surmise that he was darkly amused by the latter’s dressing up as a Bedouin noble. In fact, Leachman would have had every justification in regarding
Lawrence with scorn. In 1910 and again in 1912 he himself had made two daring journeys into the heart of the Arabian peninsula: the first, to the encampment of the great Shammar tribe, whose fratricidal ruling clan, the al-Rashid, were to be loyal supporters of the Turks, and the second to Riyadh, the mud-walled capital of Emir ‘Abdul ‘Aziz ibn Sa‘ud, whose followers were of the puritanical Wahhabi sect. During these journeys Leachman dressed, ate and lived entirely as an Arab – not in the robes of a noble sharif like Lawrence but as a simple Bedouin. On his return from the second journey an officer colleague described him as looking like a ‘long, cadaverous and altogether filthy-looking Bedu’.

Later, Leachman would put this earlier experience to good use. As the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force advanced up the Tigris in the second attempt to capture Baghdad it was Leachman who met with the leading sheikhs and, using his competent Arabic and knowledge of tribal customs, cajoled – and, where necessary, bullied – them into abandoning their allegiance to the Turks. It was he who ventured into the territory of the Bani Lam and with the aid of a ‘present’ of Rs 10,000, persuaded the redoubtable Sheikh Ghadhban ibn Bunayya to change sides.
⁹

While the British under General Maude were advancing towards Baghdad, Sykes had obtained the agreement of the War Cabinet that, on entering the city, Maude should issue a proclamation – in Arabic and English – which, on the face of it, gave a remarkably explicit British commitment to establishing Arab self-rule in Iraq. Sykes had personally composed the proclamation in the flowery language he considered appropriate to the occasion and translation into Arabic had even further enhanced the grandiloquence of the announcement. After much argument among the different branches of government and the civil and military authorities in Iraq, the proclamation was finally published in Baghdad on 19 March, among much hilarity on the part of the British occupying forces.
¹⁰

Britain, the proclamation declaimed, had come as ‘Liberator’, freeing the Arabs from ‘the ancient tyranny of strangers’, who had descended upon them since the days of the Mongols. Since those times, ‘your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunken into desolation
and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage’. ‘Many Noble Arabs’, the proclamation went on, ‘have perished in the cause of freedom at the hands of those alien rulers, the Turks who oppressed them.’ But, the people of Baghdad were assured, ‘these Noble Arabs shall not have suffered in vain’, and it concluded, under the signature of a reluctant General Maude:

Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your nobles and elders and representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain who accompany the British Army, so that in due time you may unite with your kinsmen in North, East, South and West in realising the aspirations of your race.
¹¹

And who were these ‘Noble Arabs’, it was asked by one British officer. ‘It’s officialese for Beastly
Budoos
,’ another British officer is said to have replied. It wasn’t Leachman – but it might well have been, given his sardonic wit and generally low opinion of those he also referred to sarcastically as his ‘gentle parishioners’. Arnold Wilson, in Basra, took an equally dim view of the proclamation and its intentions and, knowing full well who was behind it, he later described it as being ‘drafted in London by a romantically-minded traveller’.
¹²

However, educated Arabs in the city of Baghdad had no reason to be cynical about the proclamation, whatever men like Wilson were later to claim (arguing that therefore no one
really
felt betrayed when the British reneged on it). Baghdadis may have had doubts about how permanent the British presence would be, or whether Iraq might revert to the Ottoman Empire when the war was eventually concluded, but in the meantime it seemed clear that the British government was offering – indeed promising – some form of independence if the Turks were decisively defeated. Moreover, this was no private letter; no secret correspondence like that between McMahon and Sharif Husayn. It was an open public declaration and there were many among the merchants, government officials, school teachers and students of Baghdad who took it absolutely seriously.