Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (44 page)

In the early summer of 1916, it seemed, in fact, that the British effort in the Middle East was an abject failure. Despite the prevailing contempt for the Turks, and the many glaring deficiencies of their army and government, de Robeck’s attempt to attack Constantinople by sea had failed, the British landing at Gallipoli had failed, and the British attack on Baghdad had ended in a humiliating debacle, as had every attempt to break through the Turkish lines at Gaza. Ramshackle though the Ottoman Empire might be, it had successfully resisted every British attempt to defeat it—only the Russians, whose empire was hardly less ramshackle than that of the Turks, had put a dent in it so far.

Lawrence returned from Basra raging against the inefficiencies of the Anglo-Indian army and administration in Basra, and spent his time on the ship writing a long report criticizing everything from the quality of the lithograph stones used in printing maps to the method of unloading supplies on the docks at Basra. Indeed, the missive was so vitriolic that General Murray’s staff insisted on toning it down before it was shown to him, which was probably just as well for Lawrence. The reorganization of the intelligence departments in Cairo was in full swing, and Lawrence found himself answering to three different departments again, neither in the Arab Bureau nor altogether out of it, and at odds with the staff and the demands of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force intelligence department, toward whom he took an increasingly haughty and insulting tone.

On June 5, two events of great importance occurred. One, which was front-page news all over the world, was the death of Field Marshal the Earl Kitchener, who was traveling to Russia on board the armored cruiser HMS Hampshire when it struck a German mine and went down in the North Sea, drowning Kitchener, his staff, and most of the crew. The other was the outbreak, at long last, of the Arab Revolt. Informed that a force of nearly 4,000 Turkish soldiers accompanied by “a German field mission led by Baron Othmar von Stotzingen” was going to march through the Hejaz to reinforce the Turkish force in Yemen, and shocked by the execution in Beirut and Damascus of twenty-one Arab nationalists, many of them known to Hussein and his sons, Sharif Hussein drew the conclusion that the Ottoman government intended to overthrow and replace him. The sharif himself fired the opening shot of the revolt, with a rifle, through a window in his palace, aimed at the nearby Turkish headquarters.

Thwarted on every other front in the war against Turkey, the British moved quickly. Abdulla had already warned the British on May 23 that the revolt was imminent, and as a result Hogarth and Storrs were already on their way to Hejaz, carrying £10,000 in gold sovereigns, as requested. After innumerable delays and adventures, Storrs finally met with Zeid, rather than Abdulla, and was told that the revolt had already begun—or was about to begin, Zeid was not sure—and that his father required an immediate payment of £70,000 in gold, delivery of a long list of military supplies and equipment, and assurance that the annual pilgrimage of Indian Muslims to Mecca—on which much of Mecca’s prosperity depended—would not be impeded by the British. Storrs noted that Zeid brought his entourage on board HMS Dufferin, including a pet gazelle “pronging playfully at strangers and eating cigarettes off the mess table.”

The sharif’s arrangements produced an overwhelming initial success—the Turkish garrison in Mecca surrendered; the Turkish force in Taif, where well-to-do Meccans went to escape the summer heat, was besieged (it did not surrender until September); and the Turkish garrison of Jidda, Mecca’s port, surrendered after being bombarded from the sea by HMS Fox. Medina, it was optimistically forecast, would fall at any moment to the forces lead by the emirs Feisal and Abdulla. After nearly two years of promises, extravagant demands, and delays, the Arab uprising seemed at last to be under way.

Lawrence, though still deskbound, was delighted. “This revolt,” he wrote home, “will be the biggest thing in the Near East since 1550.” All the same, he was limited to such roles as overseeing the printing of maps, and designing stamps for the sharif of Mecca at the request of Storrs. The stamps were a political necessity. It was obviously impossible for Hejaz to continue using Ottoman stamps, and it was important to portray the Hejaz as an actual independent Arab state, rather than a former Ottoman province. Lawrence expended considerable energy and imagination on the project, hunting up Arabic designs in mosques, overseeing the engraving and the printing, and making plans “to have flavored gum on the back, so that one may lick without unpleasantness.” The flavored gum turned out to be a mistake—Lawrence produced a flavor so tasty to the Arabs that they licked all the gum off and then couldn’t stick the stamp to the envelope—but he was able to send a few samples home for his youngest brother, Arnie, noting that they might bevaluable one day, and that “things are not going too well” in Arabia, despite the initial successes.

What was not going well was the attempt to take Medina, where the Turks had 14,000 troops, well provided with artillery and supplied by rail from Damascus, against whom the Arab tribesmen, mostly carrying antiquated rifles, could make no headway. The sharif, Lawrence noted in his letter home of October 10, “has a sense of humor,” an opinion which he would soon change, but noted “his weakness is in military operations.” Lawrence complained about the volume of his work, and the amount of interruptions he had to endure in answering telephone calls from the staff, with whom he was fighting a kind of bureaucratic guerrilla war in order to get himself transferred once and for all to the more congenial Arab Bureau. He does not mention the fact that within forty-eight hours he would be on his way to Jidda in the company of Storrs. Storrs wrote in his diary, “12. X. 16. On the train from Cairo little Lawrence my super-cerebral companion.”

Just nine days later, Storrs waved good-bye to Lawrence at Rabegh, from where Lawrence was to ride into the desert for his first meeting with Feisal. “Long before we met again,” Storrs wrote later, “he had already begun to write his page, brilliant as a Persian miniature, in the History of England.”

*
The Sultan Osman I had originally been ordered from Armstrong by Brazil, which found itself unable to meet the payments for construction. turkey then took over the contract. The Reshadiye was built from scratch for turkey, and included such special features as turkish-style “squat” toilets. A third battleship was also on order.

*
Before declaring war an ambassador asked the foreign minister of the government to which he was accredited for the passports of his embassy staff and their families, signaling their imminent departure.

*
This is odd, since later, in writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence deliberately abandoned any attempt at systematic or consistent spelling of Arabic names, informing the copy editor, “i spell my names anyhow, to show what rot systems are” (Jonathan Cape edition of 1935, p. 25). But then, as ralph Waldo emerson pointed out, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

*
The famous line of Professor John Seeley, in The Expansion of England (1883).

*
The book’s subtitle, “a triumph,” is bitterly sarcastic, though seldom recognized as such.

*
This applied to many other agreements, including the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration.

*
Both the British and the French understood that russia’s ambitions would also have to be satisfied, and would at least include sizable gains in the Caucasus, equal representation in control of the Christian holy places in Jerusalem, and the biggest prize of all: Constantinople and russian control over the exit from and entrance to the Black Sea–the supreme goal of russian foreign policy since Catherine the Great.

†
Sir Mark Sykes would reemerge as front-page news in 2008. he had died of the Spanish flu in Paris, in 1919, and been buried in a sealed, lead-lined coffin. With the permission of his family, his remains were exhumed in the hope of finding viral traces of the flu that could be used as a vaccine against newer forms of flu, such as avian flu H1N1.

*
This was a fairly common delusion among the British at the time, right up to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. it was based on the assumption that–the Arabs and Jews both being Semitic peoples–the Jews would contribute to an Arab state their knowledge of international finance, science, and medicine, as well as the growing agricultural expertise of the Zionists. This was, and has since proved to be, overoptimistic.

*
The future Lord Carnock, father of the author Sir harold Nicolson, diplomat, politician, prolific author, and husband of Vita Sackville-West.

*
The British had a touching faith in the value of royalty–hence their support of the princely states in india until 1947, and their eagerness to place emir Feisal on the throne of iraq and his brother Abdulla on the throne of Jordan; both of these “monarchies” were invented overnight on the British model. ibn Saud, at least, turned himself into a king without British help.

*
Kress von Kressenstein shared his command for form’s sake with a turkish general, tala Bey, and both were overseen from Damascus by Jemal Pasha, who was both the political and the military chief of the Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian portions of the ottoman empire.

†
The key to building roads in the desert was to lay down wire netting, so that vehicles did not get bogged down in the sand–a huge job of physical labor that was performed for the most part by egyptians.

*
£3 million would be about $240,000,000 today. if it was to have been paid in gold, the current value would be in the billions!

CHAPTER SEVEN
1917: “The Uncrowned King of Arabia”

A
fter Aqaba Lawrence appeared to some a different person. He was no longer an intelligence officer observing the war from a distance; he had become a warrior, already famous and much admired. He had not only fought and won a significant victory against the Turks—in contrast to the British defeat at Gallipoli and the shame of General Townshend’s surrender at Kut—but also ridden far behind the enemy lines with a price on his head. He had discovered that his name, his impatience with routine, his unorthodox opinions about war, and even his appearance were weapons more powerful than guns, swords, and high explosives. When he thought that humility and modesty were called for, Lawrence could give an excellent performance of both. He had an Englishman’s understanding of the value of those qualities and the degree to which they mattered to other Englishmen of his class, but there was not in fact anything remotely humble or modest about him, as Allenby had instantly perceived. Allenby possessed to the full that most important of skills in a good general, handling men; and throughout the next two years he handled Lawrence brilliantly. In a metaphor that is entirely appropriate to apply to a cavalryman, Allenby rode Lawrence on the loosest of reins, giving him his head, and allowing him to pick his own way forward over difficult ground. With a few notable exceptions, he gave Lawrence goals and directives, and allowed him to reach them in his own way.

Neither Lawrence nor the men he led and served would have been useful if handled in any other way. The Bedouin could be inspired by the right leader, and they could be bribed or shamed into doing great things, but they did not obey orders or submit to threats, so the discipline of a conventional army was beyond them: Lawrence relied instead on the strength of his own personality, and on his seemingly endless supply of British gold sovereigns.

Different as they were—Allenby was huge, overbearing, and notoriously abrupt and outspoken; Lawrence was, by comparison, tiny, soft-spoken, and inclined to be tactful, enigmatic, and often indirect—the two men became, at any rate in public and in their correspondence with each other, a kind of mutual admiration society. Their relationship survived the war, the publication of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, and even the fact that Allenby, perhaps the most successful and competent British general of World War I, found himself living in Lawrence’s shadow, a supporting player in an epic where “Lawrence of Arabia” was the star.

Allenby was astute enough, from the beginning, to allow Lawrence direct access, an immense concession for a busy army commander, whom even major-generals approached warily through his chief of staff. To put this in perspective, it is as if an acting major commanding a small force of French guerrillas behind enemy lines had direct access to Eisenhower whenever he pleased in the second half of 1944. It was shrewd of Allenby to see that Lawrence would never be able to go through the normal chain of command, and also to understand, perhaps better than Lawrence himself, that Lawrence’s curiously inverted vanity and sense of being “special” could be satisfied only by going directly to the top. For a long time Lawrence was accused of not taking his own rank seriously, and that is certainly true. In later years he always talked about “Colonel Lawrence"as if that were a separate person, whose legend kept on growing, marching on indestructibly while the real Lawrence sought to hide. But the truth was that Lawrence considered himself, from the first, above such commonplace things as rank. Once, he had expressed an ambition to be a general and knighted before he was thirty; now, neither of those ambitions, though both were within his grasp, was enough to satisfy him. He had become, instead, something much more: a hero on a grand, unconventional, and glamorous scale.

On his arrival in Cairo on July 10, 1917, after the capture of Aqaba, Lawrence told Clayton, his nominal superior officer, that there was much more he could do, if Clayton “thought I had earned the right to be my own master,” a telling phrase, and produced a sketch map of his plans—ambitious enough to startle Allenby when he saw it. Lawrence proposed to use seven separate Arab “forces” to disrupt the Turkish railway system, from Homs and Hama, north of Damascus, to Maan in the south, and to threaten vital railway lines and junctions deep inside Lebanon and Palestine, throwing Turkish communications into confusion, and perhaps even seizing Damascus.

With his usual quick mind, Lawrence had guessed that Allenby’s intention was to advance from El Arish to Jerusalem, though he could not have known that David Lloyd George, on sending Allenby out to replace General Murray, had said “that he wanted Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people.” Allenby was determined to give Lloyd George what he wanted, and instantly saw the advantages of using the Arabs to disrupt Turkish communications and supply lines, rather than have them try once more to take Medina, and probably fail again. He had also been concerned, not unnaturally, about advancing on Gaza and Beersheba with his right flank “in the air,” a position no competent general wants to find himself in. Despite the forbidding terrain and the lack of roads between the coastline of Palestine and the Dead Sea, an enterprising Turkish or German commander could still assemble a force large enough to strike westward against Allenby; and Lawrence was proposing to fill this vacuum with Arab irregulars, advancing north from Aqaba parallelto Allenby’s line of march. Feisal’s forces, whatever they might be—both Feisal and Lawrence were often wildly optimistic about numbers—would become Allenby’s extended right flank, freeing him to feint at Gaza, then use all his strength to advance on Beersheba and outflank the Turkish lines.

Allenby did not necessarily expect Lawrence to succeed with these ambitious plans, but so long as Lawrence and the Arabs were active on his right and cut Turkish telegraph wires, he would be content. The Turks who were engaged in patrolling or repairing the single-line railway to Medina, defending Medina and Maan against Arab raiders from the desert, would be pinned down, unable to be moved quickly to threaten his right flank. For all practical purposes in the battle to come, they might as well not exist.

Lawrence moved fast to capitalize on his newfound position. He secured Allenby’s permission to transfer his base from faraway Wejh to Aqaba—no easy task, because it involved securing Hussein’s agreement to place Feisal and his Arab forces under Allenby’s command, as well as squaring General Wingate in Khartoum, and drawing on the stores at Rabegh that had been intended for Abdulla’s use. The shifting relationships between Sharif Hussein’s sons, consistent only in their obedience to their stern father’s authority, required a constant, careful study of the Hashemite family and its moods, a subject on which Lawrence was already an expert. It also involved something he did not regret: further friction with the French, who wanted to see the Arab army tied up trying to take Medina, as opposed to seeing it in a position to advance into Syria. Indeed Colonel Brémond and the French military mission were in Jidda for the main purpose of preventing this.

One by one, these difficulties were sorted out. Clayton wisely chose, with Lawrence’s agreement, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Charles Joyce to take command at Aqaba, and turn it into a secure base for the Arab army, leaving Lawrence free to go inland without worrying about supplies and support. Joyce, who had been offended by Lawrence’s unmilitary appearance and flippant manner when they had met briefly at Port Sudan in1916, had become a convert, and would be a lifelong friend and admirer. On paper, Joyce was Lawrence’s commander, but in fact he was the firmly planted anchor to Lawrence’s ambitious schemes, a broad, six-foot-tall pillar of strength, common sense, and knowledge of how to get things done by the book and—more important—
despite the book
, in the army.

Lawrence was sent off at once to explain matters to King Hussein. The sharif had announced his newly assumed title as king of the Hejaz late in 1916, over the repeated objections of the British, who feared the effect this would have on ibn Saud as well as on the presumably more democratically-minded Arab nationalists in Syria. Lawrence boarded HMS
Dufferin
, which had been placed at his disposal, and stopped for one day in Wejh. There the RFC provided an airplane to fly him 100 miles inland to Jeida, “a little palm garden,” where Feisal and Joyce were encamped. It is a mark of Lawrence’s new status that naval ships and aircraft were now his for the asking. At Jeida, comfortable under the palms, he discussed with Feisal the best way of approaching his father, and also a new factor in the Arab army. Jaafar Pasha, a Baghdadi who was a former Turkish officer, had become Feisal’s chief of staff and had also organized a number of Arab prisoners of war from the Turkish army into a uniformed group, quite separate from the Bedouin tribesmen who made up the bulk of Feisal’s forces. Jaafar’s regulars were professional soldiers, not irregulars, and while their number was still small, they would play an increasingly important role in the Arab army.

In Jidda, Lawrence met King Hussein, whom he described as “an obstinate, narrow-minded, suspicious character, little likely to sacrifice his vanity to forward a unity of control.” This was putting it mildly—almost all the British, while they admired him as a “splendid old gentleman,” found Hussein difficult to deal with, unreasonable, intolerably long-winded, and vain. The only exception was Ronald Storrs, who had been negotiating with the old man since 1914, and described him more generously as a “gracious and venerable patriarch … of unparalleled dignity and deportment,” and whom the king in turn addressed familiarly as
ya ibni
(“my son”) or
ya azizi
(“my dear”).

Toward Lawrence, King Hussein seems to have been more than usually suspicious, perhaps because of Lawrence’s youth, perhaps because he feared Lawrence’s growing influence over Feisal, perhaps because the shrewd old man guessed that Lawrence’s passion for the Arab cause was deeply conflicted, that he did not so much want to give the Arabs what they wanted as what the British wanted them to have. In any case Colonel Wilson, General Wingate’s patient and long-suffering representative in Jidda, managed to talk Hussein around to the advantages of putting Feisal under Allenby’s command instead of his own; and with that the king lapsed into a long and “discursive” description, “as usual without obvious coherence,” of his religious beliefs, a tactic he seems to have used with British visitors to prevent them from asking questions he did not want to answer. For their part, both Wilson and Lawrence were embarrassed by the supposition that they knew more about the Sykes-Picot agreement than the king did and by trying to put the best light on it they could—wasted efforts, since the king by now surely knew more about the treaty than he let on, and was better at dissembling than either of them.

Lawrence seems to have made a quick, unauthorized visit to Mecca, a city closed to unbelievers, certainly without the knowledge of the king or Feisal, to shop for a gold dagger to replace one that he had given to a Howeitat chief. For an Arab of Lawrence’s rank to go without a curved gold dagger in his belt was the equivalent of being “half-naked,” and he was determined to have the best and the lightest dagger that could be made, one that would establish his sharifian status at a glance. Though in general Lawrence disliked being tied down by possessions, there were certain areas in which he was unapologetically extravagant, and in which only the best would do: pistols, fine bookbindings, motorcycles, the art he commissioned for
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
and the famous dagger were all examples of this. He would later write in detail about ordering the dagger from a goldsmith named Gasein, “in the third little turning to the left off the main bazaar,” and once it was delivered, he would wear it through the rest of the war, whenever he was in Arab dress. It wouldbecome something of a trademark, and was often wrongly described as being the symbol of “a prince of Mecca,” a title which did not exist, and which he never claimed.

The pleasure Lawrence felt at the king’s rapid assent was marred by news from Cairo that Auda Abu Tayi and his Howeitat were in secret negotiations with the Turks, which, if they succeeded, would have meant the loss of Aqaba, and everything that Lawrence had planned. Lawrence’s naval friend Captain Boyle provided him with a fast armed steamship, HMS
Hardinge
, to take him at flank speed north to Aqaba, where Nasir told him that the Turks had indeed already retaken several outposts and gave him a “swift camel” and a guide to take him to Auda’s camp in the desert. Lawrence intended to surprise Auda, and did—he “dropped in on them,” walking unarmed into Auda’s tent, where the old warrior was in conversation with his confederates, just in time to join in their meal. After the ritual fulsome greetings of desert courtesy, Lawrence revealed that he knew about Auda’s correspondence with the Turks, and was even able to quote phrases from the letters that had passed between Auda and the governor of Maan. Auda dismissed it all with a laugh—unbeknownst to him, he explained, one of his men who could read and write had sent a letter to the Turkish governor under Auda’s seal, seeking out terms for his switching sides. The governor had agreed on a price, and to a demand for a down payment. When Auda found out about it, he caught the messenger with the gold in the desert and robbed him “to the skin,” for his own benefit. It was a mere matter of business—brigandage being the main business of the Bedouin.

Behind this farce, however, Lawrence correctly divined that Auda had grievances strong enough to tempt him to seek out better terms from the Turks, one of them being that Lawrence was receiving more attention than Auda for the capture of Aqaba, and the other that the gold Auda had been promised was slow in coming. Lawrence explained in detail what was on the way—more gold, rifles, ammunition, food—and made “a down payment” on the gold that would be coming to Auda when Feisal arrived in Aqaba with the rest of the army. Like two old friends, they laughedover the incident, but it served as a lesson to Lawrence that even the best of the Bedouin were cold and crafty, and that it was foolhardy to make them wait for their money. Henceforth, sacks of gold sovereigns would always be the most urgent of his supplies, more important by far than high explosives, ammunition, or fuse wire.